nostalgia - Killscreen

Podcast

A Sea Made of Plastic [Podcast]

We go in on a police station built wrong on purpose, films rebuilt as late-'90s games nobody can play, and why Mario 64's water still felt like water.

A low-polygon recreation of the Rear Window courtyard, with a figure standing in a lit apartment window

machinima

Miles Buckle Makes Games You Can't Play

Miles Buckle rebuilds Rear Window, Amarcord and Hitchcock's Rope as late-'90s games nobody will ever play, and the impossibility is exactly the point.

Podcast

What a Rickshaw Knows That a Car Doesn't [Podcast]

I ask Kalp Studio's Mannat Jain why she built a game around the ride between two places, and set it in a 1990s Goa that never existed.

RAAHI

The Long Way Around

Kalp Studio built Raahi around the thing most games treat as dead time—the ride between two places—and set it in a 1990s Goan town that never existed.

game aesthetics

Why P.T. Anderson Gets Away With "Retro" But Games Don't

Why do filmmakers using vintage VistaVision get praised for aesthetic choice while pixel-art games get labeled "retro"? The difference reveals everything.

News

Artists pay tribute to NES games with a collection of GIFs

Videogame GIFs are one of my favorite things on the internet. Retro game nostalgia less so, but that hasn’t stopped me enjoying the NES game-inspired GIFs that are being showcased on Back to Bits. The website launched today and is a curated animation project created by Washington-based artist Jerry

News

DUSK is the grubby circus act a ’90s-style shooter should be

DUSK is an intentional throwback. It’s a game that deliberately, lovingly evokes the running, gunning, and no-reload bullet-dispensing of ‘90s shooters like Quake (1996), Blood (1997), and DOOM (1993). As with most exercises in nostalgia, it’s also pretty off-putting at first. Why make another Quake

News

Start editing your away messages: Emily Is Away is getting a sequel

Emily Is Away was released just over a year ago, and since then, Emily has amassed a lot of friends—like, 1.5 million of them. Many of which will be excited to hear that early next year Emily Is Away Too, a sequel of sorts, will be released. Perhaps “spiritual successor” is a better word; Emily from

Feature

The 1990s, the decade that never ended

In 2013, the New Museum in New York presented an exhibition titled NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (named after an album by Sonic Youth). It curated art from the year of Bill Clinton’s inauguration. Soon after, New Jersey’s Montclair Art Museum featured Come As You Are: Art of the

News

GLITCHED will break the fourth wall just to be your friend

You’ve lived in the same town all your life, a tiny idyllic village well removed from the world beyond its borders. Life is simple but reassuring in the way of a well-maintained schedule or a checked-off to-do list, and you have very little to want or desire beyond it. You’re content to tread well-w

News

Iconic movie moments turned into gorgeous low-poly scenes

Brazilian artist Bruno Alberto is a man on a mission: take every movie you loved from your childhood, pick a scene from it, and turn it into a gorgeous low-poly animated diorama. So far, Alberto has only shared four on his LowPolyScenes Facebook page, but boy, they are a good four. Let’s start with

Feature

In Defense of the 3D Platformer

Let me say it up front: the new Ratchet and Clank remake is magnificent. It also feels extremely strange, as though it hails from a parallel universe that isn’t quite our own. In this universe, the 3D platformer is ascendant. Good games are defined by everything it has in abundance: by the quality o