Imagine: you live in a small town, a sunny place in the woods where some people have summer homes, little vegetable gardens, even a dairy cow or two. No one is rich but no one is hurting for cash, either. It’s such a sweet town that no one even bothers locking their doors. The only real problem in t
How do you emulate an experience? That’s the question that Rantmedia Games is trying to answer with their Vectrex Regeneration, the iCade recreation of the Vectrex, the 1982 vector-graphics system that itself aimed to recreate the arcade experience at home. This piece at Ars Technica is fascinating,
Bobby Kotick, the brash, outspoken, much-maligned New Yawhkah who is the CEO of Activision Blizzard, came in for the New York Times profile treatment over the weekend. It won’t do much to change the gaming community’s perception of him: Even in high school in Roslyn, N.Y., he had a taste for showman
Microsoft’s struggles selling the Xbox in Japan are legendary, and here is the definitive account of its failure, at Eurogamer. The factors at play range from a poorly received introductory speech at the 2001 Tokyo Games Show by Bill Gates, to a lack of understand of and respect for complex Japanese
Major League Gaming CEO Sundance Giovanni revealed the scale of his ambitions to PC Gamer yesterday: “I see eSports rivaling the UFC within 5 years. There’s no reason that we can’t rival even the NFL eventually, we just need to continue to evolve.” That’s quite a claim, and of course businessmen ha
-Double Fine founder Tim Schafer. Psychonauts is more than seven years old. Double Fine regained exclusive publishing rights to their game last year after a revenue-sharing agreement with co-publisher Majesco expired.
The Ideas Channel dude – you know, the gingerbearded Seth Cohen type who talks really fast about culture – had an idea about videogames. It is: Super Mario Brothers is the world’s greatest piece of surrealist art. To summarize, because the visual elements of the Mario universe are as weird and appa
The big studio implosion of 2012 was unquestionably Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios, former employes of which are the defendant in an ugly lawsuit brought by the state of Rhode Island. 38’s failing was so spectacular, however, that you may have missed some of the other studio closings of 2012, which inc
One of the things you learn about books when you study literature in school is that analysis through the lens of authorial intention is generally a fool’s task; analysis is its own act of creation, not some disappasionate accounting of biographical clues. Remember Wilde in The Critic as Artist: To t
-Gears of War creator and ex-Epic Games design director Cliffy B to G4 yesterday. He goes on to compare himself to Spielberg post-ET. What will be B’s Color Purple, his Schindler’s List? The future awaits!
Yes, yes, we know the stereotypes: gamers are young white guys living in various lair-like setups featuring complicated chairs with speakers in them. While the rise of casual gaming and the proliferation of games for many different audiences has revealed this view as the relic it is, there is one se
This dynamite column from John Brindle at Nightmare Mode compares the years of socialziation and knowledge-accumulation necessary to become a serious modern gamer to the tiny subset of people who make it through the most prestigious colleges at Oxford, and analyzes the ingroup-outgroup dynamics that
From Mech Warrior to Xenogears, from Zone of the Enders to Armored Core, gaming has always been a safe space for giant pilotable robots, so often stigmatized elsewhere as “dorky” or “big-boned” (sigh, sizeism). What gamers have known all along is that giant pilotable robots are typically fun-loving
The people have voted, and Double Fine is now developing the four games chosen during the Amnesia Fortnight Festival (sadly, the office fart sim Silent But Deadly was not chosen). The bros and broettes at Tim Schaefer’s studio have set up a live stream around their office to cover the development of
Did you see Moon? It was a little sci-fi thriller directed by Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s kid!) and it starred Sam Rockwell as a guy on a mine on the moon in the near future and Kevin Spacey as his robot frenemy. It paid tender tribute to the greats of heady 70s and 80s scifi, but was very much its
Beating Dark Souls took me a month and a half. The opportunity cost was… high. The personal cost was… high. The emotional cost was… high. Speed Demos Archive has released a video of some person, nay, some champion, defeating From Software’s magnum opus in less time than it takes me to commute to wo
-Greg Richardson, CEO of Rumble Entertainment, at the Game Monetization Summit. It’s a common argument that doomsaying about the state of the game industry fails to take into account digital games, the total sales of which are pretty much unknown. If casual experiences only represent 10 percent of a
Sometimes I want pizza and sometimes I want donuts; the brain is a mystery. Thankfully there are some scientists out there who are tired of our animistic scratchings and Freudian guesswork and are actually trying to figure out how the old brain box does its job. Right now some of the very best are f
Today, Russia makes atmospheric and weird games like Metro 2033, still available for free by liking THQ’s page on Facebook. Back in the wine-stain birthmark days, when playing American games was niche-niche, they played an arcade submarine-battle game called Morskoi Boy, which was not made in a game
This video, from Extra Credits, does a terrific job assembling the case against cutscenes: they’re never as good as real movies, they take the player out of the game, they frequently violate the rules of the game, etc. The author’s point that it’s wrong to tell a designer to never use cutscenes is w
–Gail Tilden, Nintendo Power founding editor, in a wide-ranging conversation with Gamasutra. Power put out its last issue this month. It’s important to remember during the endless video game journalism debates that the defining magazine of early American games journalism was pure service and consume
Yes, the Angry Birds movie will probably be a Pixaresque CGI extravaganza, which will benefit from months if not years of pre-release eyerolling by exceeding extremely low expectations and will end up setting some box office records, if minor ones (say, biggest Tuesday opening featuring terrorist bi
Next Tuesday marks a quarter century since the release of the first Final Fantasy game in Japan. To put this amount of time in perspetive – the Final Fantasy era – if you travel back an equivalent amount of time before Final Fantasy existed, to 1962, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were sti
