This article is part of our lead-up to Kill Screen Festival where Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture artist Alex Grahame will be speaking. /// “These are the dark November days when the English hang themselves!” – Voltaire /// The English are known for a number of bred-in-the-bone traits but chief amon
In his recent book Spelunky, Derek Yu writes about the process of designing his 2008 (and 2012 remake) game of the same name, and often refers to the difficulties introduced by the decision to generate levels randomly. He describes trying to make sure that every time a level is generated, it is new,
No videogame is perfect. Somewhere lurking in the seams of polygonal landscapes lives the glitch —a graphical hiccup that could lead to characters not loading properly, items malfunctioning, or walls losing their solid form. However, in recent years the glitch has transcended its status as a technic
Punk music. Chains. Leather, drugs, mohawks, and spikes. The revolution, at least as far as it’s depicted in films like The Warriors (1979) and comics like The Dark Knight Returns, is often offputting and grotesque. These stereotypical trappings are hardly an accurate representation of real punk cul
Hugo Arcier’s FPS is about last year’s attacks in Paris, though it is not immediately clear in precisely what way. We know this because the artist says as much on his website: “FPS is a post November 2015 Paris attacks art piece. The artist deals with blindness hijacking video game codes, in particu
Inventory management is a tedious part of videogames. I’ve never found myself daydreaming of the minuscule inventory in Resident Evil (1996) (though I do remember that opting for playing as Jill netted you two more slots). Nor have I ever found myself enjoying the meticulous disposal of items over-e
The screen blinks. Instructions arrive. “Plug in your headphones, put away your device, and listen up…if you hear static, you’ve gone too far.” HATFinder (2015) is a mobile-based spy game that’s not played on the screen. The initial instruction screen is the one and only time you’ll see anything on
Mooneye Studios looked to narrative-heavy titles like Journey (2012) and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006) for its upcoming game Lost Ember. And like those titles, it began as a third-person exploration game with puzzle elements, but much of the development process has so far involved pa
“When, for instance, a man had fallen into one of the rendering tanks and had been made into pure leaf lard and peerless fertilizer, there was no use letting the fact out and making his family unhappy.” —The Jungle, Upton Sinclair We are familiar with Aztec myth only insofar as it is a byword for cr
While we at Kill Screen love to bring you our own crop of game critique and perspective, there are many articles on games, technology, and art around the web that are worth reading and sharing. So that is why this weekly reading list exists, bringing light to some of the articles that have captured
There’s a reason The Lord of the Rings film franchise took home the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects three years in a row. While many films fall flat in a matter of years, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and it’s approach to CGI still stand firm more than a decade letter. While there were many br
There’s a special brand of nostalgia for the Family Computer, colloquially called the Famicom. The game console was released by Nintendo in 1986 but never outside of Japan, and was home to many, many cult games. It jump-started a multitude of classic Nintendo franchises, like Mother (1989) (also kno
This is a preview of an article you can read on our new website dedicated to virtual reality, Versions. /// Here’s a fair question: How can a bomb from 1982 continue to impact the way we imagine cyberspace? It’s always grids and neon—synths and geometric shapes. When Homer Simpson found himself in t
As most of your teenage or 20-something friends can probably tell you, working in food service isn’t exactly the most rewarding way to spend your time. Customers will yell at you for mistakes you didn’t make, your manager will ask you to work overtime just as you’re heading out the door, your cowork
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. A premier first-person shooter, Doom (1993) still inspires programmers, modders and digital artists to adapt the game in unexpected ways. Excitement over the release of Doom 2016 is proof the beloved 24-year-old game series is a pop-culture m
The idea of innovation is often much cooler than innovation itself. Jetpacks, for instance, still capture the imagination in ways that a Boeing 737 does not. The former still looks like the future, even if that is a qualification it only holds because such a future has always failed to materialize.
The first time I saw the Barbican Estate in London I was entranced. The layered terraces of pitted concrete, the crisscrossing walkways, those monolithic towers that seemed—as with Petra or Al-Hijr—like they might have been carved out of natural stone. It is rare, especially in a city like London, a
Though many people might think that board games are a relatively modern phenomenon, the likes of Trouble (1965) and The Game of Life (1960) were actually preceded by years and years of table-based entertainment, flung as far and wide as Egypt, India, and ancient China. A brief glimpse into this long
First, there was the talkie. Then, the amazing technicolor. Soon, cineplexes started handing out paper red-and-blue glasses to show their movies IN THREE-DEEEE! Once revolutionary in their time, all of these features now come standard on even the cheapest of smartphones (well, so long as you still h
The mindfulness group meets every Wednesday in a room with obscenely grimy chairs and an even more obscenely good view. This week’s subject was emotions. There they were, laid out in a circle: six basic emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—each sprouting a few sub-emotions
Experimental pop musician Claire “Grimes” Boucher is a one-lady machine. Not only does the pop songstress compose and write all her own music, she also directs her own music videos and has a steady hand in producing. The fully-realized vision of Grimes is wholly Boucher’s own. Grimes is Grimes, beca
In the Legend of Zelda series, the roles of hero and villain are fairly consistent. Link, using the resolve of courage, overcomes Ganon, whose lust for power represents the ultimate in evil. This is the reliable dichotomy that surges throughout each game. However, the 2006 Wii title (and now re-rele
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. INKS (iOS) BY STATE OF PLAY GAMES Pinball is something of a lost art. With the glory days of arcades and The Who’s rock opera Tommy (1969) behind us, the Pinball Wizard may appear to have lost
Borne onto Steam by a zephyr of Nipponese weirdness, Ace of Seafood is the fish-‘em-up I never knew I was missing. An unsolicited sequel to Neo-Aquarium: The King of Crustaceans (2012), the progenitor and sole occupant of the “armed-lobster-conflict-simulator” genre, Ace of Seafood takes the freneti
If a cancelled game adaptation of the cult classic Akira (1988) is displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in an era before live-tweeting, does it even make an impact? Apparently so, as rare footage of the Sega Genesis and SNES title recently emerged in the form of a shaky camera on the sho
