Chris Kohler

Sonic’s Original Backstory Took Place In World War II

The backstory of Sonic the Hedgehog used to involve a fighter pilot with Sonic painted on the nose of his plane, the game’s designers said today. Game designer Hirokazu Yasuhara and character designer Naoto Oshima were on hand Wednesday at Game Developers Conference to present a “post-mortem” of the design of Sega’s classic 1991 mascot…

Why is Sonic blue? Because Sega’s logo is blue. A simple answer to one of life’s great mysteries. From the Sonic panel currently ongoing at GDC.

Nintendo Reveals The 10 Best-Selling Indie Games On Switch

Players of indie games on Switch are driven in great part by “nostalgia,” Nintendo said today at a Game Developers Conference event at which it revealed the top 10 best-selling Switch indie games, a list that includes Celeste, Stardew Valley, and Shovel Knight. “Nintendo fans really tap into those games that share inspiration, or have…

“Call me when you’re on Switch.” I think this sign at the Double Fine “Day of the Devs” booth may have single-handedly captured the indie game mood at GDC.

GDC 2018 Is In The Middle Of A Construction Zone

The Moscone Center, the sprawling downtown San Francisco convention hall where Game Developers Conference takes place, is currently undergoing a massive renovation and expansion—but GDC is going on as usual. Well… not quite as usual. Moscone is split into three halls, each on different sides of the city streets: North, South, and West. Currently, half…

Secret Of Mana: The Kotaku Review

Secret of Mana is a broken game that I will always love. Playing through the recent remake forced me to reckon with why that is. Originally released by Square in 1993 on the Super Nintendo, Secret of Mana is the textbook example of the “action role-playing game.” Like any RPG, the damage you do to…

Japan Is Getting Some Switch Games We’re Not (Yet?)

We just got a whole bunch of awesome Nintendo Switch game announcements in today’s Nintendo Direct, but as usual, Japan got a little bit extra. Here are the announcements you didn’t see if you only watched the U.S. Direct. SaGa Scarlet Grace, the latest in Square Enix’s long-running series of really complicated RPGs originally released…

The Original Luigi’s Mansion Is Coming To 3DS In 2018

GameCube launch game Luigi’s Mansion is coming to 3DS in 2018, Nintendo said during a Nintendo Direct today. Nintendo says the game will have “an updated look and new features, like a map that displays on the bottom screen and a boss rush mode.” Luigi’s Mansion got a long-awaited 3DS sequel in 2013 called Dark…

Top Game Creators Remember Their Earliest Gaming Memories

What’s your first gaming memory? Is it your dad’s Atari 2600? Struggling to figure out how to use the controller on your older sister’s Nintendo 64? Or just staring and watching your grandma play Windows Solitaire? We can all remember an early experience with seeing a video game, maybe the very first time we ever…

That Time The Final Fantasy Team Made An Aliens Game

The name Square is closely associated with RPGs, and for good reason. But in the days before it had its first huge hit with Final Fantasy, Square tried all kinds of different things, including licensing the rights to the 1986 film Aliens and producing an action game with some now-familiar names in the credits. There’s…

You Can Finally Play A Long-Lost Donkey Kong Game

An extremely rare, officially-licensed Donkey Kong game has finally been released to the Internet, and now the entire world can experience the bizarre journey of Donkey Kong 3: The Great Counterattack In the early 1980s, Nintendo licensed some of its properties to developer Hudson Soft, which released versions of Nintendo’s arcade and NES games for…

Shadow Of The Colossus: The Kotaku Review

It’s strange to think about it now, 12 years later, but there was a time when I wondered if Shadow of the Colossus was going to be any good. I was a big fan of its predecessor, Ico, and when the doors opened at E3 2005 I beelined for the Sony booth to get a…

Collector Offers To Pay $100,000 For Original Contra Box Art

While video game collecting is a popular hobby, video game art collecting is a more rarefied avocation. That’s probably because there are so few pieces to go around. There are thousands of copies of Battletoads In Battlemaniacs for the Super Nintendo, but only one original painting of its box artwork—and that’s owned by Dan, a…

Konami Is Still Releasing TurboGrafx-16 Games On Wii U

This morning, Konami released the TurboGrafx-16 games Battle Chopper and Necromancer for Wii U. That’s right: It’s the year 2018, and Konami is still releasing Virtual Console games on Wii U for an audience of almost nobody. It was already kind of weird that they were still releasing games six months ago, but now it’s…

Nintendo has sold 4 million SNES Classics worldwide, it said today. Its president confirmed that it will bring back NES Classic this year and sell it alongside SNES Classic “as an opportunity to garner interest in Nintendo Switch from those who have not interacted with video games in a long time, or ever.”

Nintendo’s Hardware Wizard Will Get Lifetime Achievement Honors

Genyo Takeda might not be a familiar name to Nintendo fans, but he’s been the driving force behind the company’s iconic game console hardware and revolutionary controllers, and a few classic games besides. And now, he’s getting a well-deserved lifetime achievement award. The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences has told Kotaku that it will…

Here’s What Nintendo’s HQ Looked Like In 1889

It’s well-known that Nintendo was originally founded in Kyoto, Japan as a maker of playing cards in 1889. But a recent historical project by the city of Kyoto has turned up, for the first time, a photograph of what the company’s headquarters looked like in that year. The photo, and an accompanying blog post, were…

That Nintendo Labo Robot Game Looks Awfully Familiar

Those who watch Nintendo closely probably got a whiff of déjà vu from today’s announcement of Nintendo Labo, its new line of Switch games with DIY papercraft controllers. And for good reason. Two Nintendo Labo sets, which include the game cartridge and the materials to put together the mechanical controllers, will release on April 20.…

Xbox One’s Backward Compatibility Is Fantastic

We often criticize gaming platform makers for their missteps, so let us also praise them when they do something great: Xbox One’s backward compatibility feature is nothing short of perfection. Setting up my Xbox One X over the holiday reminded me that I had been meaning to get around to playing Lost Odyssey, an Xbox…

Saving Japan’s Games

A Tokyo non-profit organization is dedicated to preserving Japan’s earliest video games before they die. On a Sunday morning in September, Typhoon Talim was flooding the western part of Japan with a torrential downpour, but at Todoroki Station in Tokyo on the other end of the country, its effects were limited to a light rain.…