-
CultureTotal Recall1994 Story On Video Game Crunch Is Brutal Reading
Widescale reporting of terrible working conditions at video game studiosis a relatively recent thing, but crunch has always been with us, and as we can see in this rare story about the practice from the 1990s, when it’s bad it can be life-threatening. Sega historian John Harrison has shared a translated version of a story…
By Luke Plunkett Published May 25, 2021 -
CultureTotal RecallLet’s Go Back In Time And Visit A Japanese Arcade In 1992
The early 90s was a magical time for arcade gaming, especially in Japan, so what better way to take a trip back in time than watching this excerpt from a 1992 documentary all about the Game Fantasy arcade in Nerima, Tokyo. Clipped from a longer video about arcade gaming, the excerpt doesn’t have properly translated…
By Luke Plunkett Published May 17, 2021 -
CultureTotal RecallLet’s Remember Gran Turismo 5’s Intro, Which Was A Masterpiece
We tend to associate video game intros with lavish, pre-rendered cinematic sequences. Something to help kickstart the story, set the tone. Which is fine, but there’s been a video game intro stuck in my head for over a decade now, and it wasn’t trying to tell me a story. It was trying to teach me…
By Luke Plunkett Published May 11, 2021 -
CultureTotal RecallNintendo Superfan Recreates Company’s 19th Century Office To Store His Collection [Update]
Fabrice Heilig, a Nintendo collector from France, has been amassing stuff for so long that his house was running out of space to store it all. So he decided to expand, and when he did, he had one hell of an idea. As this wonderful story on Before Mario explains, having built an enormous collection…
By Luke Plunkett Published May 2, 2021 -
CultureTotal RecallHappy 35th Birthday, The Legend Of Zelda
On February 21, 1986, the original Legend of Zelda was released on the Famicom in Japan. It did OK, Nintendo made some more Zelda games, and we’ve all been having some good times ever since. It’s easy to turn these kind of posts into general retrospectives, a checklist look back at some of the biggest…
By Luke Plunkett Published February 21, 2021 -
CultureTotal RecallLost Video Takes Us Inside Nintendo In 1990, Shows NES Consoles Being Made
This 20-minute collection of B-roll footage, shot as part of a news report and only uploaded to YouTube this week, gives us a fascinating look behind the scenes at Nintendo of America in 1990, showing everything from manufacturing to R&D to the Nintendo Power Line. While some of it is narrated or is part of…
By Luke Plunkett Published January 20, 2021 -
CultureTotal RecallHappy 20th Birthday, Jet Set Radio!
Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of Jet Set Radio’s release on the Sega Dreamcast in the United States. This may interest you, make you feel incredibly old or, in some cases, both. While it was released in Japan in June 2000, the Dreamcast skating/graffiti classic wasn’t out in the US until October 31. There had…
By Luke Plunkett Published November 1, 2020 -
CultureTotal RecallJapanese Farm Hides One Hell Of A Video Game Collection
I have seen some impressive game collections in my time, but few that can match either the scale or presentation of this one, which is basically sitting in the middle of some farm fields in Japan. In this episode of Collector’s Quest (via former Kotaku editor Chris Kohler), Nintendo super-fan and author of the incredible…
By Luke Plunkett Published October 15, 2020 -
CultureTotal RecallHalo 3: ODST Is Back, So Let’s Remember One Of The Greatest Video Game Trailers Of All Time
Halo 3: ODST is out on Steam today, a fresh addition to the Master Chief Collection, letting a whole new generation of players take part in one of the defining games of the series’ golden age. But today, I don’t want to look forwards, I want to look back, to the game’s 2009 release. When…
By Luke Plunkett Published September 22, 2020 -
CultureTotal RecallThis 1990 TV News Report Is For The Monkey Island Fans In The House
Amateur games historian Eon Fafnir posted a clip of this 1990 local news story about LucasArts (then still known as LucasFilm Games) yesterday, and while it’s fascinating getting a look behind the scenes of the studio during some its golden years, Monkey Island fans can squint and see some stuff that never made the finished…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 3, 2020 -
CultureTotal RecallLet’s Talk Fields Of Glory, A Forgotten RTS Pioneer
When people hail the pioneering classics of the RTS genre, they go through a list of usual suspects. Games like Cytron Masters, Dune II, Command & Conquer, Sega’s Herzog Zwei…but there’s one I don’t think ever gets its due, and that’s Spectrum Holobyte’s Fields of Glory Released on the PC in 1993, and designed by…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 3, 2020 -
CultureTotal RecallLet’s Celebrate Vince Carter, The Last Active NBA Player To Appear On The Nintendo 64
The NBA’s decision to resume inside a “bubble” in Orlandomeans that the season is now officially over for some of the league’s worst teams, who weren’t invited to take part. That includes the Atlanta Hawks, bringing a bizarre end to the career of veteran star Vince Carter, who was the last active player to have…
By Luke Plunkett Published June 25, 2020
