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It might not be the video game-branded cereal Lisa Foiles craves, but the Atari-classic branded General Mills cereal boxes popping up at Target stores across the country might have you bringing the box back to the breakfast table again. More »
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EA founder Trip Hawkins and Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell both lend their stories to Gamers At Work, a new book that features interviews and anecdotes from a whole bunch of well-known game designers and developers. More »
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Yesterday, we learned that the video game publisher THQ is sitting on 1.4 million unsold copies of uDraw, a hugely unsuccessful game designed around a tablet peripheral. uDraw was such a disastrous investment—it cost the publisher around $100 Million on production and lost revenue—that it is almost singlehandedly responsible for their dire financial straits. More »
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After a couple years of teasing screenshots and videos, En Masse Entertainment is finally ready to unleash its massively multiplayer online action role-playing game Tera on a lovely day in May. More »
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If you can steel yourself for a post-modern jumble of space exploration and robotic sing-song, Upside Down Cake's "Star Strike" offers a neat walk through Atari antiquity. Some of these games certainly deserve the homage. More »
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Vector Tanks was around for at least three years on the iTunes App Store and looked a lot like Battlezone the whole time. It isn't there anymore. Atari recently sent legal papers over to the game's developer, Black Powder Media, which now warns other indie developers that "anything that has even a passing resemblance to an Atari classic," can expect to see a copyright infringement claim. More »
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Alamagordo, New Mexico. Fifty miles southeast of Roswell, the most famous UFO site in the nation. Also the scene of the most infamous landfill in video game history. More »
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The original logo for the original Atari (as in, not the watered-down ghost we know today) is, for the history-conscious, about as close to a religious symbol as old-school arcade and console gamers are going to get. More »
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Maybe you don't quite know what all the Occupy Wall Street fuss is about. May you don't care. The MK12 creative collective does, though, and they've used the Atari classic Pong to illustrate the basic philosophy of the social protest movement. The changes happen slowly at first in the video. Things seem evenly matched, even if one side keeps on winning. Then, you look up and the financial and institutional unfairness that the Occupy movement is protesting is made manifest in the giant size of the right paddle. You can probably figure out the rest. More »
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We live in an age of gaming gorgeousness. Gamers' lives nowadays are filled with fancy normal mapping and illumination engines, powered by slickly encased hardware that outputs onto super-sharp screens. In short, there's a lot of thought given to aesthetics in the present day. But, it hasn't always been this way and an upcoming art show will showcase the uglier—yet vitally important—gaming hardware of yesteryear. More »
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Tomorrow Asteroid 2005 YU 55 will pass the Earth closer than the moon, a 1,312 foot chunk of rock slipping by a mere 201,000 miles away. For scientists it presents an excellent opportunity to study near-Earth objects. For Atari it's an opportunity to market their new free-to-play iOS game, Asteroids Gunner. More »
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It's a scourge of junior high school students everywhere: Mononucleosis. The highly infectious disease is colloquially dubbed the "kissing disease". But that's not how Steve Jobs got it. He got it making a video game. More »
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When do we get the Seinfeld of video games? Why won't there be any major new gaming consoles? And just when will get video game technology implanted in our brains? At GDC Online in Austin, Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell predicted and expounded upon many things. More »
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At his talk at GDC Online in Austin, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell talked about a wide variety of things, among which was Apple founder Steve Jobs, who he hired back in 1974. (For a complete story, see this great article at Gamasutra. "I gave Steve Jobs his first job," Bushnell said, "That's an interesting resume line." More »
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Before the infamous crash of console gaming in the early 1980s, third-party cartridge development was somewhat a wild-west affair. Development costs were negligible compared to present times and, without the need for a presence in online distribution channels, a garage-built game might actually turn a profit on door-to-door sales. Thus Extra-Terrestrials was born. More »
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The city-state of Neverwinter has never been quite as social as it is in Atari's new turn-based tactical Facebook role-playing game, Heroes of Neverwinter. More »
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Wait! Stop. Don't watch the video yet. First read the included bit of fiction sent along with the trailer. More »
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Movie to video game adaptations of the early 1980s were difficult things. Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, and The Empire Strikes Back were as hard to master as they were hard to genuinely enjoy. More »
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Sounds like an email spam subject line, I know, but it's actually a claim made by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. More »
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Okay, it might not be one of the best-selling PC franchises that immediately comes to mind, the RollerCoaster Tycoon series has sold more than a million units worldwide, and next year it's coming to the 3DS. More »
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There's something to be said about attempting to replicate the old school arcade experience, as Ion attempted to do with the iCade, but sometimes you need something a little sexier. This is the Atari Arcade for the iPad. More »
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The most terrifying all animal band in history is finally getting the recognition it deserves. The Registry of Historic Gaming locations is adding the site of the original Chuck E. Cheese's to it's list of historic sites. First built in San Jose, California in 1977, Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre was the first family restaraunt to combine food, animatronics and an indoor arcade. More »
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Xbox Live Arcade is credited with popularising the notion of downloading console video games. Other consoles, like the Genesis, offered them a lot earlier, albeit with limited success. More »
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Dicks. Cocks. Penes. Half the population has them, and they've been the object of fascination for centuries—whether that be the physical organ itself or the phallus. You know what the Washington Monument is, right? More »
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The Forgotten Realms depicted in this new trailer and screenshots for Cryptic Studios' online co-op role-playing game Neverwinter could have been torn from the scribble pad I kept next to my character sheet back in my Dungeons & Dragons days. More »
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Speaking via live broadcast from the CDP Summer Days event, CD Projekt has confirmed the appearance of The Witcher 2 on the Xbox 360 this year, with "no quality compromise" made for Geralt's first journey to console land. More »
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The stench hits me first. Before the gurgle and hiss, the skittering of twisted claws against bare stone, the stale air of the abandoned mine delivers a stomach-churning whiff of the creatures' breath, the miasmal scent of spoiled flesh between rotting teeth. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5805842&view=rss&microfeed=true Developer CD Projekt has teased console versions of The Witcher games before, but it looks like it might actually happen for The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. The game's producer talked around it to Eurogamer and the ESRB now has a rating for an Xbox 360 version. Maybe at E3, then? More »
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In a dreary encampment outside the small town of Flotsam the inhabitants gather nightly to listen to legendary tales of heroism. You don't need to visit, but if you're passing through you'd do well to stop and sit awhile. More »
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I could tell there was a sex scene brewing in The Witcher 2 when Geralt of Rivia and his comely redheaded sorceress companion Triss stumbled upon this ancient Elven bathhouse, and I wasn't planning on sharing the resulting NSFW video. Then Triss tapped into the vast mystical forces of the universe to remove her clothing. More »
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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is a dark and gritty sword and sorcery game, so removed from Tolkien's legendary high fantasy epic that it takes a moment to swipe at it from afar. More »
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Amidst all of the nudity and subtle gags lurking in CD Projekt Red's latest PC role-playing adventure, the aspect of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings that has impressed me the most so far is how blurry it is. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5803155&view=rss&microfeed=true Publisher Atari is "divesting" itself of MMO specialists Cryptic Studios, which it snapped up in 2008. It's trying to sell the creators of Star Trek Online and Champions Online after losing Atari millions. [Atari Results (PDF)] More »
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All great sword and sorcery epics have an element of romance to them. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings gets the romancing underway within the first ten minutes of starting a new game. Be warned: I've misplaced my censor bars. More »
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While we normally associate multimedia cash-ins as a recent phenomenon, the practice of spinning games off into other mediums dates back decades. One of the earliest examples of this is the Atari Force line of comic books. More »
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Atari's plans to lay off more than 50 percent of Eden Games' workforce, plus alleged "mismanagement," were the catalysts for a one-day symbolic strike today by the developer of Test Drive Unlimited 2. More »
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Playing the Revolution is an upcoming documentary series by Italian outfit Junk Food, which chronicles "the Spacewar! milestone to the rise of the 16-bit era". More »
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After playing several hours of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, I can confidently say the game improves on the original in every way. After seeing this combat video for the game, I realize I've only scratched the surface of what the game has to offer. More »
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Atari, after reviving (or attempting to revive) classic games like Warlords and Yars' Revenge, is turning its attention to 1980 arcade classic Centipede for its next project. This is Centipede: Infestation, a twin-stick-style shoot 'em up for the Wii and Nintendo 3DS. More »
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The Atari 400's keyboard sucked. It wasn't so much the brown and orange color scheme, but those pressure sensitive keys. More »
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