Warning: If you haven’t played Deus Ex, but have maybe bought it in a Steam Sale as something you’re absolutely going to play one day, this article will drive a twelve-car train of spoilers through that dream like you’re Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception.

The same game can be different things to different people, with gender, history, age, cultural background and political beliefs working to influence and funnel its messages and meanings for every unique player.

For some, a game’s end credits are a time to put the controller down, sit back and appreciate the efforts of the people that brought you the experience you’ve (hopefully) just enjoyed.

Video games are amazing, because you can be anyone or anything in the universe: a blue hedgehog! A ghost! A unicorn with rocket launchers! About 80% of the time, though, you get to be a brooding white guy. There are so many of them that it’s hard to keep track. And they all seem to have dead wives.

I remember the first time I went shoplifting. The sun was shining, Marin was singing, and I needed a shovel.

Whether it’s an RPG that tells a story over dozens of hours, or a strategy game that takes months to master, games are often a considerable time investment. For many people this is central to gaming’s appeal: nowhere else in art can you find such complete worlds to lose yourself in or such stern challenges to overcome.

Once a work enters the public domain, it is no longer subject to copyright laws. A publisher can print their own edition of the Beatrix Potter books, a filmmaker can make a film of any of Shakespeare’s plays, and a game developer can adapt any of the characters, scenes, or even whole stories from public domain works.

Whether it’s a good old-fashioned expansion pack or modern DLC, spinning additional content for already-released games has been a standard practice in the industry for decades. But the best expansions do more than simply add a few extra hours of the same game for you to play.

In Japan, 1986 was a momentous year for role-playing games.

It’s frankly ridiculous how close some games are to finished when they are cancelled - or, conversely, how vaporous they can be when they’re first shown.

I have a rule for my house: no more than a third of the artwork on my walls is allowed to be gaming-related. This rule fell apart pretty quickly when it became clear just how much beautiful video game artwork there is out there.

It’s astonishing to think how much of the world has changed thanks to the internet. It’s difficult to think of another recent technology that has so totally changed how people experience the world - the invention of the telephone well over 100 years ago is probably the only thing that comes close.

Back in the early 2000s one company ruled when it came to getting attention. From pigeons trained to ruin Wimbledon to people paid to change their names to Turok, Acclaim was the king of press-baiting PR.