Kill Screen Staff

Cattle die, kinsmen die; the self must also die. I know one thing which never dies: the reputation of each dead man. -Old Norse proverb [via]

It’s a question we’re faced with any time we engage with any bit of art, from a game to an album to a painting-how long are you supposed to spend time with before you’ve digested the thing? This question was raised by the BBC regarding the new Leonardo da Vinci exhibit at the National Gallery in Lon

It’s meant for MMORPG play, but it looks you could fight terrorism with the thing. Buy it for the World of Warcraft head in your life this Christmas: It has a total of 78 definable commands via 13 programmable buttons, a 2-position shift button, a cycling MMO Mode Switch that cycles through three se

This guy can flow. He sort of raps like Wiley, in that he is British and this is insane. Too bad he didn’t mention eating anything. [via]

This time Ico, pereninnal “games as art” go-to example, has managed to snare the New Yorker’s Chris Suellentrop. While the piece is mostly a review of the rerelease of Ico and designer Fumito Ueda’s most recent game Shadow of the Colossus, Suellentrop does touch on the enduring appeal of these games

According to Tom Savini, the O.G. of gore makeup, America’s favorite zombie enthusiast was a proto-gamer: “I had the first Space Invaders game that came out, and that was a miracle back then. When I was making Knightriders with George Romero, we would sit in the hotel room and play Space Invaders an

The notion that monster figures reflect the collective unconscious is not exactly news. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein made a bold statement about inherent alienation symptomatic of modernity while the 1950s Invisible Man addressed racial identity at the onset of the Civil Rights Movement. Even the ove

Check out the entire set, microprocessors and all. -Jason Johnson

With so much time and effort spent making virtual weapons in games like World of Warcraft and Monster Hunter, or cobbling together world monument #122 in Minecraft, it is refreshing to see a person who is actually making something. Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker is a short documentary that focu

First, it was the music industry. Then, newspapers. Now the television business is feeling the pinch as younger generations are turning to the internet to watch TV shows and movies, hanging subscription services out to dry. According to the chairman of Dish Network: Young people who move to an apart

48 Pixeles isn’t just worth checking out because of the gorgeous pixel art taken from classic games. The artist who sometimes goes by “48” has created LGBT pixel fan fiction, and the results are beautiful, warm, and sometimes a bit cheeky. Famed indie developer Anna Anthropy led us to it. “what i pa

Game writer and KS contributor Gus Mastrapa has a new column about standing in line for Modern Warfare 3. You can feel the desert air. The story doesn’t take the turns you might think. I’ll admit that I was made for living in that other, more rare America where people hammer out police procedural te

There aren’t many avenues for indie game artists to showcase their work, and yet another one has closed its doors to developers. Vimeo’s policy prevents creators from uploading videos of gameplay unless they’re willing to cough up $199 a year, which can be a lot of money for a small developer. In an

Nobody asked how the Force works. Yet George Lucas told us anyway. Knowing it came from organisms called midi-chlorians living in the bloodstream kind of ruined it. This is just another case of too much information––something videogames are constantly giving us. In a recent blog post, game critic Sc

Until now, transmedia has been held to the obscenity test. You know it when you see it, but its hard to come up with a definition. When I interviewed Jim Babb for the Public Play issue, even he had trouble summing it up-and he has helped create several successful transmedia projects! Thankfully, a g

Kevin Gifford was collecting gaming magazines while most teens his age were collecting magazines on a very different subject. Now Gifford is donating his extensive collection of over 8000 magazines to the Strong Museum’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) in Rochester,

Love the thrill of being stalked, but not the consequences? PerambuLit lets you duck around the corners and into cafes to avoid imaginary stalkers and suspicious stranger. This alternate-reality game turns a tour of downtown Boston into a suspenseful Choose-Your-Own Adventure. Just think of it as an

If you’re wondering why it looks like that, that’s just the touch-screen capability. This thing’s still in its early stages, so don’t get too excited. Judging from the schematic, here are some other things this could possibly be: Periscope Woodchipper Half an upturned aqueduct Meatgrinder What you’d

Come celebrate New Atari Games: Innovative Leisure with So Percussion, Calder Quartet, Skeletons, Diamond Terrifier and DJ Andrew WK. You’ll be able to play new games for the Atari 2600 by Sonnie Ray Tempest, Ed Fries and Simon Quernhost. Come play with us!

This is a bit older, but worth revisiting. David Kociewski recently wrote a column for the New York Times focusing on how Electronic Arts used savvy accounting practices to reduce the amount they owe the federal government by millions, by combining the various breaks available to companies in differ

There has been a lot of talk about how developers can use game mechanics and game design to be expressive of the human condition. If you need a point of reference, just think of Jonathan Blow’s Braid and Jason Rohrer’s Passage. Recently, Michael Thomsen wrote an article about it for our site. Still,

HTML5HTML5360p MP4Flash Mars is not in black and white. Listen to the sounds of the wind as it pushes the little Mars Rover around and makes you question the totality of existence. Or something. [via]

Your drummer and bassist refuse to speak to one other, and your lead singer has spearheaded a floundering solo-project. So what? It’s time to get the band back together. Kill Screen is co-sponsoring Chicago Loot Drop, a totally rockin’ Rock Band 3 competition at Reggie’s Rock Club on November 20th.

Golf is an inherently simple sport: Hit the ball, see if it goes in the hole. If it doesn’t, repeat until it does. It also comes packaged with a Byzantine set of rules, many of which seem designed to punish you for doing nothing wrong. Now, two of the more insane penalties-namely the player being pe

But they tried! During Practice, the inaugural game design conference put on by New York University, game designers tried to denaturalize the sport of football, and ended up with a simple conclusion: that when you take away all its trappings, football is a set of systems that players must engage wit