Nintendo Japan have today given fans a brief glimpse at what must be one of the most sought-after areas of the entire company: one of their storage rooms, where old consoles and peripherals are kept. Part of a series of posts celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of The Legend of Zelda in 1986,…
Video games and football have long gone hand-in-hand
Of all the weird and wonderful characters in Nintendo’s pantheon of talking animals/plumbers/fungi, I think I like Animal Crossing’s Resetti the best. Even if he is a big ol’ meanie. If you haven’t played the series, Resetti is a mole that you sometimes encounter. Not in your regular daily activities of walking around, fishing and…
Mario 64 is one of the best games of all time. You probably know that, but have you ever wondered about the specifics of why that is? Here, let the game’s creators explain to you that it’s stuff like the momentum of Mario’s movement, the placement of the camera and the feel of Mario’s jumps.…
Let’s all go back in time. Before Sonic Boom, before the Dreamcast, before the Saturn. To a time when Sega was awesome, and as famous for their killer arcade games as their console efforts. This piece originally appeared 9/3/15. Specifically, we’re going to 1989, and the release of Sega Super Circuit, a game that you…
Thanks to Frank Cifaldi for pointing this out: there’s an archive online of a series of videos made for Gametap (ask your parents), in which Adult Swim’s Space Ghost interviews a bunch of people at E3, like Peter Molyneux, Bethesda’s Todd Howard and Peter Moore. Howard’s “we make power fantasies for adolescent males” might be…
On September 8, Star Trek turned 45 years old. Happy Birthday, Star Trek! Even though I hate you and your cheap-ass sets and lame vision of the future and hammy plots and silly aliens and… Originally published 9/9/2011. Ahem. Anyway. THAT SAID, even I can find room to love a Star Trek game. Not like…
This week twenty-nine years ago, the first Street Fighter was released in arcades. There was Ken, Ryu, and some very different buttons. As pointed out on Event Hubs, the first cabinets had giant pressure-sensitive pads that you were supposed to POUND WITH YOUR FIST. Which is nuts. Problems arose from players punching the buttons, such…
Infocom, founded in 1979, were one of the great studios of the early days of PC gaming, responsible for classics like the Zork series. They may be long gone (Infocom were shut down in 1989), but their history lives on in this incredible collection of old documents This piece originally appeared 11/23/15. Uploaded to Archive.org…
These days, if you want to record direct video footage of a video game, all you need to do is press a button. But back in the 1980s, this was a complex and expensive process! This piece originally appeared 10/28/15. Magazines and video producers often needed custom, elaborate equipment to get images of games, which…
In a 21st century world of free software, powerful computers, tablets and mice, making pixel art is fairly easy! In the 1980s, though, your favourite games had to be made on expensive and highly specialised equipment. Video Games Densetsu have gone through some old Japanese magazines and put together a collection of interviews and images…
In 1991, Nintendo published an adventure game (developed by Pax Softnica) in Japan for the Famicom Disk System called Time Twist. It is not the kind of game Nintendo would publish in 2016. Hardcore Gaming played through it the other day, and say “it seems like they took a look at Nintendo of America’s censorship…
In the US, Nintendo Power magazine had a monthly comic called Howard & Nester. It was, with one exception, totally kid-friendly. Cotton candy and rainbows. In Germany, however, they had their own comics in the official magazine Club Nintendo One comic in particular – called Die Nacht des Grauens (The Night of Horror), from 1996…
There’s a reportfrom Eurogamer today that the Nintendo NX will be a handheld featuring “detachable” controllers. It’s a neat idea, but it’s also one that Nintendo have a bit of experience with. When I was a little kid, I would always bug my parents for a video game console like a Master System or NES,…
Collector F. M. da Costa has an amazing Flickr page where he opens up his games, showing everything that came in the box. It’s very pretty just to look at, but it’s also a timelapse, showing the slow and steady decline in the number of pieces of paper that shipped alongside a video game. This…
Seamus Blackley, one of the key people involved in the creation of the original Xbox, has shared some concept images for Microsoft’s debut control pad, which date all the way back in November 1999 (the Xbox wouldn’t launch until 2001). Obviously the final design looked remarkably different; the “Duke” controller (below, left) was a massive,…
Pinball. The great American (mechanical) pastime. It’s about as innocent as gaming gets, especially compared to the blood, drugs and sex you find in video games. Yet bizarrely, for decades, pinball was actually declared illegal in some of America’s biggest cities, including New York and Los Angeles. This piece originally appeared 4/4/12. It had nothing…
This is how history was made. David Brevik was one of the co-founders of Blizzard North. He was there are the very beginning of the Diablo series, and as part of a GDC talk he made last week has uploaded a copy of the classic game’s original pitch document. It’s not long (at least by…
On December 16, 1997, an episode of the then-unstoppable Pokémon animated series was broadcast in Japan. Barely thirty minutes later, nearly 700 children were on their way to hospital. Total Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends. The episode, called “Electric Soldier Porygon”, is…
One of the rarest Sonic games of all time is Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car, an arcade game for kids that was released in 1991. If you weren’t in Japan that year (so…pretty much all of us), you’ve probably never played it, as it has never been released again, ever, in any format. Until now!…
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