Updated October 27, 2026: Originally published October 22, 2025, this article has been extensively expanded with new content covering the wider Doom series, its modding community, and firsthand recollections from Sandy Petersen. The door opens, and the room on the other side has a shotgun. Unfortunately, it also has someone who already owns one. A few seconds later, you are looking at the floor while your friend is looking for somebody else… Read more
The horror genre is experiencing a renaissance. Games that gave us nightmares have had the remake treatment, with Silent Hill and Resident Evil leading the charge. But underneath the flashiness of Unreal Engine graphics and spine-chilling voice acting, it's easy to forget our roots. As kids growing up in the 90s, we saw the rise of some of the first full-motion video games, which integrated live action to add realism. This realistic vantage… Read more
You have landed on a Los Angeles rooftop, your ride is burning, and somebody below has a shotgun. Within minutes, you can be in a movie theater, checking a bathroom, poking around behind the screen, and discovering that the city has rather more entrances than its architect probably intended. There is an alien invasion to deal with. First, though, this light switch appears to work. Duke Nukem 3D arrived in 1996 with… Read more
When Ken Silverman was tuning Build, a failed experiment could disappear with the contents of a RAM drive. He would copy his working directory there before trying small optimizations. If the code crashed, he figured the changes probably were not worth keeping anyway. That is the sort of detail Silverman brings to this interview about the engine behind Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and Shadow Warrior. We get into the maps that broke… Read more
Interview by David Becker, Retro Replay. Roberta Williams couldn't leave Colossal Cave alone. A puzzle would follow her to bed, and she couldn't rest until she'd worked it out. She had loved stories since childhood, but here was one she could move through, question, and get hopelessly stuck inside. After finishing it, she bought large sheets of white poster paper and began working out a mystery of her own. That became Mystery… Read more
The house is enormous, the view is lovely, and Adrienne has room to write. Her husband can work on his photography. There is even a little town nearby when they need something. For a few minutes, Phantasmagoria looks like a particularly ambitious property purchase. Then you begin opening doors. Sierra had been putting suspicious houses on computer screens for fifteen years when Phantasmagoria arrived in 1995. This one was different. A filmed… Read more
The original Final Fantasy credited one person for its programming: Nasir Gebelli. One programmer, helping bring an entire RPG to the Famicom, while still needing its towns and battle screens explained to him. When Square was building the original Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi had to walk its programmer through conventions that RPG players barely think about. There was an overworld. There were towns. And when a fight started, the game would cut… Read more
Apparently, Rockstar decided that one city just wasn’t enough anymore. On 26 October 2004, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas arrived in North America for the PlayStation 2, taking everything we’d come to expect from the series and expanding it to a scale that was almost ridiculous for its time. Three cities. Miles of countryside. Mountains, deserts, forests, and highways. More vehicles, more weapons, more activities, and more opportunities to get into trouble… Read more
When Ken Silverman was tuning Build, a failed experiment could disappear with the contents of a RAM drive. He would copy his working directory there before trying small optimizations. If the code crashed, he figured the changes probably were not worth keeping anyway. That is the sort of detail Silverman brings to this interview about the engine behind Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and Shadow Warrior. We get into the maps that broke… Read more
Interview by David Becker, Retro Replay. Roberta Williams couldn't leave Colossal Cave alone. A puzzle would follow her to bed, and she couldn't rest until she'd worked it out. She had loved stories since childhood, but here was one she could move through, question, and get hopelessly stuck inside. After finishing it, she bought large sheets of white poster paper and began working out a mystery of her own. That became Mystery… Read more
Michael Pavone paid around $2,000 for a copy of Outback Joey while trying to emulate its exercise peripheral. The first copy was a fake. After getting a refund and finding a genuine one, he still had to work backward from the game’s code because the bicycle sensor and heart-rate hardware were beyond his budget. That is one of the more expensive detours in a conversation that also gets into disappearing sprites, frozen… Read more
The first hand on Bernd Schmidt’s emulated Amiga screen was badly misshapen. It was supposed to be holding a Workbench disk, but his early blitter code still had bugs. Fixing those brought the picture closer to the familiar startup screen, and the next job was getting the rest of the machine to behave. Schmidt wanted to keep using Amiga software as he moved toward PCs, including the music from Turrican. Some Usenet… Read more
At 2 a.m., Spencer Nilsen, David Young, and the singers of Pastiche were sitting in a circle on the studio floor, working out lyrics and harmonies for “Sonic Boom.” Nobody was complaining about the hour. Good ideas stayed, weaker ones went, and the song that would greet North American Sonic CD players was coming together between jokes. Nilsen arrived at Sega with years of recording experience and very little experience playing games.… Read more
Before 42Bastian Schick and Lars Baumstark had official Lynx documentation, they had a damaged handheld, a dumped copy of Gauntlet, and a homemade SRAM cartridge. Changing the game usually left it frozen. Then one modification worked, and they had a clue: part of each cartridge sector was escaping the checksum. 42Bastian wrote a disassembler, then a small 65C02 simulator, while Lars worked on the hardware. Their experiments grew into a Lynx with… Read more
At two in the morning, Christian Bauer’s new SID filters produced a wall of noise. He had spent a long weekend measuring real chips and rebuilding the sound emulation in Frodo. He went to bed. The next morning, a pair of function parameters turned out to be in the wrong order. After fixing them, he tried the C64 demo Edge of Disgrace again. This time, the music sounded so good that he… Read more
Christian Bauer took his Amiga 4000 to a meetup of Mac users and showed them text scrolling in an editor. It was running inside ShapeShifter. The reaction, he remembers, was considerable. An Amiga running Mac software was not necessarily the slow curiosity people expected. Basilisk II grew out of that earlier work, but by 1999 its job included hosts without a real 68000-family processor. The Mac desktop could move again, this time… Read more
A new BeOS workstation could be exciting and inconvenient at the same time. Christian Bauer had moved from his Amiga 4000 to a BeBox, a machine whose two processors and new operating system appealed to him. That did not make the Mac applications people wanted to use disappear. SheepShaver put a Mac environment inside that other desktop. Its original PowerPC-hosted form could execute guest code on the real processor. After Be’s decline,… Read more
Michael Pavone paid around $2,000 for a copy of Outback Joey while trying to emulate its exercise peripheral. The first copy was a fake. After getting a refund and finding a genuine one, he still had to work backward from the game’s code because the bicycle sensor and heart-rate hardware were beyond his budget. That is one of the more expensive detours in a conversation that also gets into disappearing sprites, frozen… Read more
October 19 to 26, 2026. Helios gave Sega 32X games a closer look at palette changes and DMA, while xemu issued two original Xbox releases in two days. Igir's new version gives people sorting and patching large game collections more formats to work with. The four monitored categories carried 145 notices this week, but many were successive development snapshots of the same emulator. 32X, Mega CD, and original Xbox Helios 26.1023 works… Read more
October 12 to 19, 2026. The Saturn and original Xbox have the biggest news this week. Ymir moved beyond its SDL renderer, then quickly fixed a Windows ARM launch crash. xemu delivered a numbered release with audio and timing repairs that touch several games. The four monitored categories carried 184 notices, although many were daily builds of the same project.Saturn and Xbox releasesYmir 0.4.0 changes the picture, then 0.4.1 fixes a launch… Read more
Apparently, Rockstar decided that one city just wasn’t enough anymore. On 26 October 2004, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas arrived in North America for the PlayStation 2, taking everything we’d come to expect from the series and expanding it to a scale that was almost ridiculous for its time. Three cities. Miles of countryside. Mountains, deserts, forests, and highways. More vehicles, more weapons, more activities, and more opportunities to get into trouble… Read more
There’s nothing like a giant, angry-looking moon threatening to destroy the world to ruin a perfectly good afternoon of exploring. And in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, that moon wasn’t particularly interested in waiting for you. On 26 October 2000, Nintendo released Majora’s Mask in North America for the Nintendo 64, following up one of the most beloved games of its generation, Ocarina of Time. Those were some pretty big shoes… Read more
On 26 October 2000, Sony launched the PlayStation 2 in North America, introducing a new generation of gaming to millions of players. Twenty-six years later, it’s still my absolute favorite console. And that’s saying something. I’ve owned and played a lot of consoles over the years, and there have been plenty of great ones. But there was something special about the PlayStation 2 era. The games, the variety, the excitement of discovering… Read more
Sketch Turner lands a punch, a bright yellow “Pow!!” bursts beside his fist, and the next fight waits on the other side of a comic panel. He has to climb or jump across the page to reach it. Comix Zone takes its premise seriously enough to make the gutters between the pictures part of the adventure. It is still a wonderful thing to watch. Sega's 1995 Genesis brawler has another reputation, though.… Read more
Twenty-five years ago, Rockstar gave us an entire city to explore, a criminal empire to build, and more ways to get into trouble than we knew what to do with. And video games would never be quite the same again. On 22 October 2001, Grand Theft Auto III arrived on the PlayStation 2, taking the franchise out of its familiar top-down perspective and dropping players into a fully realized, three-dimensional Liberty City.… Read more
Some heroes are born great. Others have greatness thrust upon them. And then there’s Sir Daniel Fortesque, who managed to become a legend despite getting killed almost immediately in his first big battle. On 21 October* 1998, MediEvil arrived on the original PlayStation in North America, introducing gamers to one of the most unlikely heroes of the 32-bit era: a one-eyed, jawless, undead knight with a reputation he hadn’t actually earned. I… Read more
Dr. Eggman is a feminist. That's the assessment of the North American Sonic Heroes manual, which introduces him as “a romanticist, a feminist, and a self-professed gentleman.” Quite a character reference for a man whose usual response to a setback is to build a larger robot. The mustache says supervillain. The biography says he would like a moment to discuss how unfairly the mustache has been portrayed. The actual English biography from… Read more
Nintendo has announced the boldest, most innovative move in gaming history: charging you up to two hundred dollars for the privilege of replaying a pair of Wii games you already own. Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 are officially coming to the Switch 2, and the bundle clocks in at a cool $150, edging toward $200 once you factor in collector’s editions, amiibo, and whatever random plastic accessory they force… Read more
An Innocent Gesture with a Dark Twist For more than two decades, fans of Super Mario World believed Mario was simply pointing forward when Yoshi stuck out his tongue. It looked playful and harmless. Mario gave the signal, Yoshi obeyed, and the duo worked together as partners. That illusion shattered in 2017, when Nintendo veteran Shigefumi Hino, the designer who created Yoshi, revealed that the original concept was very different. According to… Read more
Every Controller I Have Smashed In Rage, Ranked By The Quality Of The Meltdown There are difficult games, and then there are the ones that melt your brain until the only solution is to weaponize the nearest controller. We tell ourselves it’s just a game, but anyone who has stared down Alma in Ninja Gaiden Black, crawled across spikes in Celeste, or been betrayed by the blue shell in Mario Kart Wii… Read more
A Consistent Cutoff Leonardo DiCaprio has built a reputation for consistency in his personal life, and it appears that this rule now extends to his gaming habits. According to sources close to the Hollywood actor, he has officially stopped playing Final Fantasy IX after the game reached its 25th anniversary. Released in 2000 for the original PlayStation, Final Fantasy IX is widely regarded as one of the greatest entries in Square Enix’s… Read more
A Garage Sale Becomes a Legal Battlefield What began as a quiet Saturday morning in Saratoga, New York quickly escalated into what some neighbors now refer to as “the day Nintendo declared war on suburbia.” Local resident Robby Thompson held a simple garage sale in his driveway, offering old household items, clothing, and a box of retro video games. One of those games happened to be a sealed copy of Super Mario… Read more
There’s nothing like a giant, angry-looking moon threatening to destroy the world to ruin a perfectly good afternoon of exploring. And in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, that moon wasn’t particularly interested in waiting for you. On 26 October 2000, Nintendo released Majora’s Mask in North America for the Nintendo 64, following up one of the most beloved games of its generation, Ocarina of Time. Those were some pretty big shoes… Read more
On 26 October 2000, Sony launched the PlayStation 2 in North America, introducing a new generation of gaming to millions of players. Twenty-six years later, it’s still my absolute favorite console. And that’s saying something. I’ve owned and played a lot of consoles over the years, and there have been plenty of great ones. But there was something special about the PlayStation 2 era. The games, the variety, the excitement of discovering… Read more
The Atari 7800 source code for Asteroids and Centipede ended up in a dumpster in 1996. Actual disks, behind the company's Sunnyvale building, waiting to disappear with the trash. The reason we can still look through some of those files is that someone went in after them at 3 a.m. There are glamorous ways to spend a night in the video-game business. Recovering Atari ST diskettes from a filthy dumpster probably doesn't… Read more
Sonic CD's first boss has a name that looks as though somebody forgot to replace a part number: EGG-HVC-001. Then you look up Nintendo's original Famicom and find its model number: HVC-001. Oh, Sega. Even the paperwork? That's a wonderfully petty little discovery for anyone who remembers choosing sides in the console wars. You could argue about Mario and Sonic all afternoon, then boot up Sonic CD and unknowingly spend your first… Read more
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