Hail Kotaku Readers! My name is Peter Tieryas and I’ll be your guest editor today. That means lots of retrogames, existential musings, and a list of the strangest football games I could find.
I’ve heard people rhetorically ask, can a game make you cry? While that’s a great aim, I want games that make me scream, laugh, jump from my seat, swear revenge, reconcile with sworn enemies, bond with digitized friends over drinks, have me totally, completely immersed, and maybe, just maybe after that, bawl my eyes out.
A little about me? I’m the author of a book called United States of Japan which began with my desire to explore the tragedies that took place in Asia during WWII. I’ve written for places like Tor.com, Electric Literature, Hobart, Kotaku and TAY, with some of my proudest articles being co-written with the wonderful Narelle Ho Sang.
I’ve also worked in the games industry at EA and LucasArts. I wrote some of the LucasArts manuals like Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast for Xbox and Jedi Starfighter Special Edition. More recently, I was a VFX artist at Sony Pictures Imageworks, helping to create characters on films such as Alice in Wonderland, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, Men in Black 3, and Guardians of the Galaxy.
I’ve been rekindling my passion for old games by buying complete versions of them on Ebay, some of which I’ll talk about today. I’ve come to learn there’s an art to scoring them at a reasonable price via auction. But almost every time I think I have something I’ve long sought at a value, some bidder somewhere scoops in at the very last second and snatches it away. Guess I just have to keep on hunting.
P.S. The wonderful Giant Boy Detective, Ben Bertoli, will take over tomorrow. I got an early preview of his articles and they’re great!