Depending on how old you are, if you’re a flight sim fan you probably cut your teeth on a series like Microsoft Flight Simulator, Falcon or Flight Unlimited. But did you know the world’s very first flight simulator was built all the way back in 1929? It was built by a man named Edwin Link,…
You think you’ve been waiting a long time for a new Half-Life game? You haven’t, really. It’s “only” been three and a half years. Now, Team Fortress 2, that was a game long in the making. The staggered development of Valve’s iconic shooter took so long, and went through so many twists and turns, that…
The Sony PlayStation was the first ever console to truly pitch itself at an adult market. This meant that the machine’s advertisements set a more mature, often strange tone that continues through to this day. The PS1, PS2, PSP and PS3, all have had their share of kooky advertisements, and all have had their share…
Boy, Capcom really went to town today on the news and media, didn’t they? It’s a damn shame, then, that none of it involved the company’s original mascot – and my all-time favourite Capcom hero – Captain Commando. Just like Sega, in the 1980s Capcom felt the need to create a mascot for itself, to…
Today’s video game news was tinged with sadness, as the world learned of the death of Jerry Lawson, the man who led the team behind the creation of the video game cartridge. Those cartridges were used in the Fairchild Channel F, the console Lawson helped develop along with Ron Smith and Nick Talesfore. While it…
Some game machines are killed long before they enter production. Others at least make it to market before dying, whether of old age or lack of demand. And then there’s the Konix Multisystem. The history of console video gaming is one dominated by American (Atari, Microsoft) and Japanese (Sony, Nintendo, Sega) companies. When you think…
Since Brian’s story earlier about the tragic death of former Nintendo great Gunpei Yokoi, I figured today would be a good time to take a look at the last thing he ever worked on: the WonderSwan handheld gaming device. While Yokoi will always be remembered as the man who created the Game & Watch, the…
Aside from perhaps Nintendo, there are few video game studios that have ever been home to so many of the industry’s best and brightest as Looking Glass managed. Founded in 1990, Looking Glass was not only responsible for some of that decade’s most innovative and memorable games, but was also a place where people like…
Nintendo has Mario. Microsoft has Master Chief. And Sega, well, for a long time Sega has had Sonic the Hedgehog as its mascot. Thing is, Sonic is an usurper Before the blue, spiky hero with the red shoes burst onto the scene in 1991, Sega already had a mascot: Alex Kidd. A character we have…
Continuing on from recent looks at the unlikely beginnings of companies like Nintendo and Sega, let’s today see where Namco – now part of Namco Bandai – got its start. Here’s a hint: it certainly wasn’t making video games. No, like Nintendo and Sega, Namco began long before the commercial electronic video game had been…
Nintendo and Sega. Hardware rivals for decades, and even today they remain the archetype Japanese video game companies. Only, Sega isn’t entirely Japanese. It was founded by some American guys. While Nintendo, with its history in trading cards and love hotels, is as Japanese as they come, Sega’s history can actually be traced back to…
I don’t know what it is about old Nintendo hardware that makes it so interesting. Maybe it’s because, outside of Nintendo’s home run successes, there are a lot of straight-up strange devices in the company’s history as well. Not weird in a bad way, mind you. Just in a “well, it’s awesome somebody thought this…
Not Street Fighter II , that was...the second Street Fighter
Know what I tend to remember consoles by? Not their games, or controllers, or even hardware casings. I usually remember them for their boot-up jingles. As silly as that sounds, those first few seconds of animation and music really set the tone for what the platform holder hopes is to come, and more than any…
Video games have made their home on any number of storage mediums over the years, from compact discs to cassette tapes to plastic cartridges. Someone even, in the 1980s, thought it was a good idea to put them on video tapes. It wasn’t. In the mid-to-late-80’s, three companies began working on consoles designed to use…
So Nintendo’s first home console was the Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom, right? Nope. The company’s first foray into home video gaming actually dates back to 1977, six whole years before the Famicom was released in Japan. That “home console” was actually a series of machines called “Color TV”, which were living room versions of popular arcade…
No, we’re not talking about Sonic The Hedgehog, in which an animal makes out with a human. We’re talking about Night Trap, a Sega CD game released in 1992 that may have been the stormiest tea cup in video game history. Developed by Digital Pictures, a studio that specialised in the full-motion-video-laden games of the…
The very last model of the Game Boy was the Game Boy Micro. It was tiny. You couldn’t just put it in your pocket, you could lose it in there. Now let’s compare that sleek handheld with something from 1991. It’s easy to remember the original Game Boy existing as a lone entity. You owned…
On March 21, 2001, stores in Japan began selling the first units of the Game Boy Advance. There are few sentences that can better describe how far video games have come in the past decade than that. Ten years ago, the words “Game Boy” were still synonymous with not just Nintendo’s handheld domination, but the…
Whenever the subject of the Fable series or its outspoken creator Peter Molyneux pops up, a lot of people question why the man is given so much airtime. Why people give a hoot about the games he’s making. He seems to be known by many as simply the guy behind Fable. Or that guy who…
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