Sonic’s Original Backstory Took Place In World War II

The backstory of Sonic the Hedgehog used to involve a fighter pilot with Sonic painted on the nose of his plane, the game’s designers said today. Game designer Hirokazu Yasuhara and character designer Naoto Oshima were on hand Wednesday at Game Developers Conference to present a “post-mortem” of the design of Sega’s classic 1991 mascot…

There Must Always Be Two Starks In Winterfell

This is Ginny Di and Going Postale with a very convincing Game of Thrones sister act. Once you’re done admiring the overall likeness, check out the detail on those costumes. Sansa’s dress looks like it walked straight off the set. Photos by Ratio Photography

Tomb Raider LEGO Has Some Cool Moving Parts

This fan-made Tomb Raider piece is of course not an official LEGO product. There’s a bit too much going on for that. Less of a playset and more a mechanical diorama, it’s got a collapsing plane wing and, more impressively, a moving river/waterfall for Lara to navigate. It was made by Kevin Wanner, and you…

Former BioWare Studio Head Talks About Life Under EA

At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Jason Schreier and I sat down with Aaryn Flynn, formerly of BioWare, to talk about his time working under EA on games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Anthem Among other things we discussed the cultural shift when EA bought BioWare, leaving a studio after spending most of…

Wave Race 64 Player Spends Nine Years Shaving Less Than Two Seconds Off Record

Speedrunner Illudude has been playing Wave Race 64 since it was released in 1996 on the Nintendo 64. Yesterday, be set a new world record on the game’s Drake Lake level, breaking the 1:11 barrier he first introduced in 2010 and which speedrunners have been trapped ever since. Shaving five hundredths of a second off…

Harold Halibut is an adventure game where everything is handmade. “Almost every object you see in the game exists in real life,” one of the game’s developers told me during an Xbox event at GDC yesterday. The demo I played felt like a streamlined take on standard point-and-click adventuring (with some worrisomely clunky dialogue), but…

GTA Online’s Free New Update Is Like Nascar On Steroids

Rockstar’s latest free update for GTA Online, The Southern San Andreas Supersport Series, adds a racing mode that feels like NASCAR on steroids. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had in GTA Online in a long while. The new “Hotring Sabre” vehicle available in this update is inspired by the stock cars seen in…

Runescape’s 13-Year Pirate Quest Is Coming To An End

With the recent release of “Pieces of Hate,” the long-running MMO Runescape finishes up a quest line that’s lasted for 13 years. In 2005, Runescape started the Pirates series of quests with “Rum Deal.” Pirates is the story of the villainous, tentacle-armed Rabid Jack laying siege to the pirate base of Mos Le’Harmless, whose rum…

What’s Really Going On With All Those Hacked Fortnite Accounts

In small fits and spurts, a Fortnite hacker recently typed out some sentence fragments over Discord: “maybe tomorrow / i get a letter / from epic games / holy fuck / paying 25k for fraud.” What if, after a month of lucrative work, Epic Games shut him down with a firm letter from their lawyers?…

EA Finally Unlocks Every Hero In Star Wars Battlefront II

Star Wars Battlefront II’s new update overhauls the game’s loot box laden progression system. One of players’ biggest complaints since before the game was even officially out was how hard it was to unlock iconic characters like Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader. A new patch finally unlocks every hero character in the game. Prior to…

Sea of Thieves is made to play with friends, sailing the high seas in search of treasure and frantic ship-to-ship battles. But what if you want to play solo? Well, it turns out it can either be a calm journey of self reflection or just straight up boring. Here’s a look at what it’s like…

One Of The NES’s Weirdest Controllers Gets A Modern Update 

Remember the NES Max? It was a weird boomerang-shaped controller from 1988 that was, like so many things, ahead of its time. Decades later, a retro modder has given the peripheral a more modern feel—specifically, the feel of an Xbox One analog stick. Modder Nick Neitzel recently shared his creation on Reddit and YouTube, which…

Riot, Blizzard, And Twitch Are Teaming Up To Fight Toxic Gaming Behavior

For years now, gaming companies like Riot, Blizzard, and Twitch have been fighting online abuse and harassment in their own ways, to mixed results. Now they’re trying something different: Working together. The Fair Play Alliance is a coalition made up of over 30 different companies, including Riot, Blizzard, Twitch, CCP, and Epic, that aims to…

Splatoon Was Originally A Game About Rabbits

“You’re a rabbit now; you’re a kid now” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but Splatoon almost went there. Nintendo’s stylish shooter once starred bunnies, and before that, tofu blocks. During a panel at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today, Splatoon producer Hisashi Nogami gave a presentation on how he and…

I Fed A Neural Network 1200 Video Game Names

A lot of the time, video game names sound like they were generated by a machine. So, I decided to see if I could teach a neural network to name a game. Sometimes it’s hard not to groan at some video game names. There was a period of time when I kept confusing Absolver for…

Microsoft Executive Is Open To Putting Banjo In The New Smash Bros

Banjo and his partner Kazooie haven’t been in a Nintendo game since 2005’s Banjo-Pilot thanks to complicated intellectual property rigamarole that cropped up when Microsoft acquired Rare in 2002. With a new Smash Bros. coming to the Switch, there’s plenty of speculation about new fighters. Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Gaming seems completely fine with…