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.âĻ Read more
Surgeons used Super Monkey Ball 2 as a warm-up before practicing laparoscopic surgery. Yes, the one with the bananas, the transparent balls and the alarming number of places to fall off. Dr. James âButchâ Rosser helped investigate whether playing selected games could get surgeons ready for delicate training tasks. The story reached gaming news in 2013 through reports about Rosser at Florida Hospital Celebration Health. Health News Florida covered it that October,âĻ Read more
Yoshi has a name that sounds as though it should come with a museum plaque: T. Yoshisaur Munchakoopas. That's how a 1993 Nintendo character guide introduces Mario's green friend. Suddenly, keeping it to âYoshiâ seems like a favor he was doing everyone. In Super Mario World, you don't need much of an introduction. An egg cracks open, out pops your new ride, and before long he's swallowing enemies and making an awkwardâĻ Read more
Saturday morning, the controller is free, and you would quite like to finish something before Monday. Scrooge McDuck has treasure to find, the turtles have another appointment with Shredder, and Samus is about to land somewhere that deserves a few uninterrupted hours. There are plenty of excellent games waiting behind familiar titles, with adventures small enough to fit around an actual weekend. Some of these picks make an evening of it. GoldenâĻ Read more
Some heroes are born great. Others have greatness thrust upon them. And then thereâs 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 hadnât actually earned. IâĻ Read more
Some sequels give you more of the same. Others take everything you loved about the original and turn it into something truly special. For me, Fable II was the latter. On 21 October 2008, Lionhead Studios released Fable II for the Xbox 360, returning players to the fantasy world of Albion for another adventure filled with magic, monsters, moral choices, and that wonderfully peculiar British sense of humor. The original Fable wasâĻ Read more
The cabin alarm goes off while you are halfway around Camp Crystal Lake. Children are in trouble, your counselor is already hurt, and another zombie has picked a wonderfully inconvenient moment to climb out of the ground. This is where Friday the 13th becomes interesting. Jason is frightening, but getting to him can be just as stressful. The 1989 NES game has spent decades absorbing jokes about its purple killer, awkward controls,âĻ Read more
Gezine spends a few seconds on the PS5âs version screen, then opens â Debug Settings. Thatâs the video. No game, no lengthy explanation, just a trip through two menus that most owners would scroll past without a thought. But the number on the first screen is 14.10, and that makes the second screen a much more interesting place to end up. This is current PS5 software, the version on Sonyâs official system-software page.âĻ Read more
Barry Leitch was sitting at the edge of a stage in Brazil, waiting for an orchestra to play his music, when someone in the audience shouted for Top Gear. Other people were calling for Super Mario and âOne Winged Angel.â His racing-game tunes belonged in that company to the people in the room. He had written them decades earlier while getting to grips with a SNES sound driver. Leitch got started byâĻ Read more
Grace is behind the counter, the books are not selling, and Gabriel Knight has found something much more interesting to do than improve the situation. There have been murders in New Orleans. He thinks they might make a good novel. Grace has had considerable practice listening to his good ideas. You can understand why Gabriel would rather hang around St. Georgeâs Books than worry about the business. There is coffee, a newspaper,âĻ Read more
Atari had wireless controllers planned in 1981. The Atari 2700 would have let you play your VCS cartridges without a cord running from your hand to the television. There were prototypes, an advertisement and a rather handsome new console. What there wasn't, in the end, was a release. Picture a round of Combat: two tanks, two players and someone trying to land a shot around the edge of a wall. The 2700'sâĻ Read more
Robert Holmes was in line for the Monorail at Disneyland with his daughter when he heard the Gabriel Knight theme as someoneâs ringtone. Music written for a Sierra adventure had turned up in somebody elseâs day, well outside the game. He still sounds a little surprised that people remember it at all. Before Sierra, Holmes had worked in studios, live music, and postproduction in Los Angeles. A lunch with Mark Seibert broughtâĻ Read more
Seventeen years ago, Gearbox introduced us to a planet full of murderous psychopaths, terrifying monsters, more guns than anyone could possibly need, and one of the most annoying robots in video game history. And I couldnât wait to get there. On 20 October 2009, Borderlands arrived in North America for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with the PC version following on 26 October. Developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games,âĻ Read more
After a day of climbing on Everest, there could still be hours to fill before morning. Neal Mueller and Chris Grubb packed an answer to that problem in 2005: Nintendo DS systems. They could play against each other wirelessly, draw pictures and send messages while waiting for the next day's work. The little handhelds turned out to be rather better expedition companions than their plastic shells might suggest. A contemporary report inâĻ 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 launchâĻ Read more
Fallout: New Vegas â Sixteen Years Later, Iâm Still Wandering the Mojave Getting shot in the head and buried in the desert was merely character creation. On 19 October 2010, Fallout: New Vegas arrived in North America for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, bringing another massive post-apocalyptic adventure to the Fallout universe. After Fallout 3, New Vegas was an automatic pre-order for me. There wasnât much debate about it. I tookâĻ Read more
Falloutâs Vault Boy was directly inspired by Mr. Monopoly, the smiling board-game mascot also known as Rich Uncle Pennybags. Once you put Mr. Monopoly beside Vault Boy, the family resemblance is hard to miss. One wants you buying property. The other seems perfectly relaxed about what happened to the property after the bombs fell. But Leonard Boyarsky wasn't simply looking for a mascot. He was trying to make Fallout's skills easier toâĻ Read more
The wave curls over your surfer, and for a moment the little screen seems much too small for what is happening on it. There is blue water, a moving board and just enough time to make a spectacularly bad landing. The television is somewhere else. You are holding California Games in your hands. In 1989, that was a persuasive reason to stop and look at an Atari Lynx. Its screen lit upâĻ Read more
In 1994, Carl Forhan found out on Usenet that Atari had made a color handheld and a new console. He had grown up playing his dadâs 2600, but the Lynx and Jaguar had arrived without him noticing. A cheap Lynx bundle and a used Jaguar gave him a way back in. Then another Usenet post mentioned a cartridge that could load programs into Lynx RAM. Soon he had a cartridge from Germany,âĻ Read more
Tony Dickinson remembers leaving Sonic standing at the end of a boss fight so he could keep listening. The animal capsule could wait. Later, he recorded Sonic Adventureâs âOpen Your Heartâ onto a cassette and carried it around on a Walkman. Command & Conquer soundtracks went onto burned CDs for middle school listening. Eventually, he sent Frank Klepacki an arrangement of âHell March.â That arrangement grew into something considerably bigger than aâĻ Read more
Some games are great. Some games are terrible. And then there are games like Stubbs the Zombie, which are justâĻ interesting. The premise is interesting. Both good and bad. The gameplay is interesting. Also good and bad. But just because a game is interesting doesnât necessarily mean itâs a good game, right? On 18 October 2005, Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse arrived on the original Xbox, offering players aâĻ Read more
Mega Man is on the Genesis. You spot his name in the menu and stop scrolling. Here is the little blue fellow you associate with a Nintendo controller, ready to take on Dr. Wily on Segaâs machine. Call somebody over, choose the game, and wait for the download. A minute is a long time when you want to see whether this is really going to work. For North American players at theâĻ Read more
Scott Adams told his coworkers he was going to write an adventure game for his TRS-80. They laughed. He had spent the previous week coming into work early and staying late to play Colossal Cave Adventure, and now he wanted something like it on the computer at home. Sixteen kilobytes would have to do. Long before âindie developerâ became a familiar label, Adams was making games at home and trying to sellâĻ Read more
The house is locked. Knocking does not help. Neither does asking the computer to open the door again, although you give that a try. Beside the path is a mailbox. Well, you might as well look. That is how an evening disappears in Zork. You go looking for a way into a house and end up underground, carrying a sword, worrying about your lamp and wondering where the thief has put somethingâĻ Read more
Before Solid Snake was sneaking around Shadow Moses, Kurt Russell had already given the movies a Snake of their own. In 1981's Escape from New York, Snake Plissken walks into a nightmare wearing an eyepatch and looking thoroughly unimpressed. Hideo Kojima was watching. That influence eventually reached Metal Gear. And years later, John Carpenter said the people who shared ownership of his film wanted to go after Metal Gear Solid. He discouragedâĻ Read more
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