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CultureTotal RecallThe Game That Really Was Out of This World
It was 1992. I was at my friend Paul’s house, playing games on his mighty 486 PC, and we’d just finished a complete playthrough of Monkey Island for probably the 100th time. Bored, he turns to me and says “Oh yeah, my brother got this new game. Let’s play that.” He fires it up, and…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 27, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallThe Great Half-Life 2 Robbery
Hacking attacks and digital theft have been in the headlines a lot lately, whether it be the loss of user details on the PlayStation Network or a preview build of an upcoming game. So let’s look back today on a crime both more brazen and impressive than any we’ve seen in the past few years:…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 25, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallSegata Sanshiro, the Greatest Video Game Ad Man Of Them All
Sony’s fictional executive Kevin Butler has won himself a legion of fans. Which is great! Kevin Butler, though, ain’t got shit on Segata Sanshiro. In the late 90’s Sanshiro was concocted by Sega to help sell the Sega Saturn. And there’s never been a more entertaining ad mascot for a video game company. For pretty…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 22, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
The Real History of the Triforce
It’s one of the most iconic designs in the history of video games: three golden triangles combined to form a single larger one. The Triforce. The object that lies at the heart of The Legend of Zelda The thing is, Nintendo didn’t come up with the design. It’s been around for almost 1000 years The…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 21, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallYou Could Actually Download Atari 2600 Games (on an Atari 2600!)
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. The CVC GameLine did things even earlier. We’re talking 1983 earlier. And while it all ended in disaster, the ashes of the venture would bizarrely lead to…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 20, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallThe Greatest Mario Rip-Off of Them All
Like any other artistic medium, most video games “borrow” content and ideas from other titles. That’s how inspiration works. There’s a line between inspiration and copyright infringement, though, and in 1987 Time Warp Productions jumped over that line (then into a warp pipe). Their game, The Great Giana Sisters, wasn’t a homage to Nintendo’s Super…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 19, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
A Celebration of Awesome NES Title Screen Art
I know we recently took a look at the “forgotten” art of the video game title screen, but those were contemporary examples, from the time the art had already been forgotten. It’s probably a better idea to look at a time when it was in its prime, featured on the games of the Famicom and…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 18, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallLet’s Watch Old Japanese Nintendo Commercials
July 15, 1983. If that’s your birthday, happy birthday! If it’s not, that’s cool. It’s still a very special date in history. Because it’s the day the Nintendo Famicom first went on sale in Japan. Later released in the West as the Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES), the Famicom is where things really got serious…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 15, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
The Mario Movie Could Have Been so Much Better
The Mario movie we ended up with in 1993 was nothing like the games it was based on. An earlier draft for the film, however, was a lot more faithful. It’s impossible to tell whether it would have been any good, of course, but in sticking to the basics of the Mushroom Kingdom it at…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 14, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallLet’s Pour One Out for Westwood Studios, Creators of the Real-Time Strategy Genre
Of all the studios Electronic Arts has bought over the decades, few were as talented or important to the history of video games as Westwood Studios. Yet despite essentially pioneering the real-time strategy genre as we know it, creating one of the most popular franchises of all time and doing not one, not two, but…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 13, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
The Real Story Behind Sim City’s Arcologies
Despite the fact they only appeared in one game (Sim City 2000), arcologies remain an iconic symbol of the Sim City series. But just what the hell are they? While appearing in the game as projects from the future, arcologies are very much real, the name deriving from “architecture” and “ecology”. An arcology is, in…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 12, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
In 1983, Donkey Kong Nearly Died
As we celebrate what’s (probably? maybe?) Donkey Kong’s 30th birthday, let’s today take a look at the 1983 court case which nearly brought a premature end to Nintendo’s big ape. Our story begins in 1982, with the first of many idiotic decisions made by Universal Studios. The studio’s president at the time, Sid Sheinberg, had…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 11, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallRemembering the Great, Last Ninja
Today, we’re looking at The Last Ninja. The first “badass” game I ever played, and still one of my all-time favourites. The Last Ninja was first released in 1987 on the Commodore 64, and was developed by Hungarian outfit SoftView and legendary 80’s studio System 3. It was, and remains to this day, one of…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 8, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallThe Amazing 1979 Song About Computer Games
There have been plenty of songs written about video games over the years. You have your favourites, I have mine One that lingers in my memory, though, comes from a time before I was even born: 1979’s Computer Games, by the Australasian band Mi-Sex. What’s so memorable about this song isn’t the fact that it’s…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 7, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallWhen South Park Got an EA Sports Game Pulled off the Shelves
Long before golfer Tiger Woods thought it’d be a good idea to go sticking his dick in anything with a hole and a pulse, his video game franchise was embroiled in a scandal of a different kind. The harmless kind. Involving Jesus, Santa Claus and a cartoon. In 1998, a young Tiger Woods was bursting…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 6, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
The Great Games of a Great American Hero
There have been plenty of video games made featuring American heroes. Day of the Tentacle, for example, is full of them. One that doesn’t get enough credit (at least as a gaming “character”), though, is legendary pilot Chuck Yeager. Born in 1923, Yeager enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces just two months prior…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 4, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallIn Memory of the Original Castle Wolfenstein (the one That Wasn’t In 3D)
It’s a slightly sad quirk of video game history that id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D is lauded as a masterpiece of gaming while the title it was heavily inspired by – name and all – is afforded no such honour. Yet id’s comic blaster owes everything to a stealth game released in 1981 called simply Castle…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 1, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
The PlayStation Controller You Never Got to Use
Yesterday, we looked at the PlayStation controllers that Sony has released (or in the Boomerang’s case seriously intended to release) to the public. Today, we’re looking at one that never made it. Before the PlayStation was released in 1994, development kits had to be sent to studios to ensure games would be ready for the…
By Luke Plunkett Published June 29, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
The Evolution of the PlayStation Control Pad
It’s perhaps the most iconic design in the world of game controllers, and definitely the longest-serving. Today in Total Recall, we look back at over 15 years of PlayStation control pads. The primary PlayStation controller’s basic appearance has survived with only minor changes since it accompanied the first console to the marketplace all the way…
By Luke Plunkett Published June 28, 2011
