Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation

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 “Yoshi” 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 awkward… 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. Golden… Read more

Gezine spends a few seconds on the PS5’s version screen, then opens ★Debug Settings. That’s 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 Sony’s official system-software page.… 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. George’s Books than worry about the business. There is coffee, a newspaper,… 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's… Read more

Robert Holmes was in line for the Monorail at Disneyland with his daughter when he heard the Gabriel Knight theme as someone’s ringtone. Music written for a Sierra adventure had turned up in somebody else’s 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 brought… 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 in… Read more

David Crane put his name on a game box because he was willing to stake his reputation on what was inside. Players have since told him they would buy one of his games knowing who made it, much as a reader reaches for a favorite author’s next book. That connection was something he and his fellow Activision founders deliberately built. The programmer, artist, and designer behind a cartridge deserved a credit, and… Read more

Jeff Vogel bought a PowerMac 6100 in 1994, went looking for a role-playing game, and failed to find one. So he started writing his own. There was already a Mac shareware RPG called Realmz, but he did not discover it until Exile: Escape From the Pit was almost ready to launch. Had he found it earlier, he tells us, his whole life might have gone differently. Then the Realmz developers at Fantasoft… Read more

A room full of explosive barrels is a wonderful place to discover that your shotgun has become a liability. Sandy Petersen picks Barrels o’ Fun from Doom II as a map he is particularly proud of, and it is an excellent introduction to his work: a memorable situation, a nasty surprise, and a player suddenly having to reconsider the plan. Ask him about another famous level, Doom’s E2M2, and he starts pulling… Read more

Before Christian Bauer owned a Commodore 64, he wrote programs on paper and tried them on the computers displayed in department stores. A few commands could draw a fractal or play some music. That was enough to get him hooked. Music also supplied the first reason to write Frodo. Bauer wanted to hear SID tunes while working on his Amiga, so he built a card that could hold a real SID chip… 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

October 26 to November 2, 2026. A PlayStation 4 trophy that refuses to unlock is a small but infuriating way to end a game. This week's shadPS4 release addresses that bug alongside changes to video, input, and system libraries. Azahar has a substantial new 3DS alpha for testers, while three Gear emulators refine play on high refresh rate displays. Across the four monitored categories, we found 183 notices across 68 projects. Most… 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

Dave had barely typed “Prolapse” into the group chat before Mark asked whether he knew the developers personally. Not their usernames. Personally. An email address would help. A forwarding address would be tremendous. Sony is offering twelve months of PlayStation Plus to anyone who helps it catch the hackers behind Prolapse, the PS5 kernel-exploit project targeting firmware 14.00 and 14.10. The company wants names, leads, and preferably someone willing to explain the… 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

You know the moment. A game is sitting at its title screen, nobody has touched the controller for a while, and somehow the music has become the main event. The next level can wait. This bit deserves another loop. We have given that habit a much bigger home. Retro Replay's Video Game Music Library is live, with 95,901 tracks across 60 systems at the time of this announcement. Pick a system, find… Read more

A room full of explosive barrels is a wonderful place to discover that your shotgun has become a liability. Sandy Petersen picks Barrels o’ Fun from Doom II as a map he is particularly proud of, and it is an excellent introduction to his work: a memorable situation, a nasty surprise, and a player suddenly having to reconsider the plan. Ask him about another famous level, Doom’s E2M2, and he starts pulling… Read more

Before Christian Bauer owned a Commodore 64, he wrote programs on paper and tried them on the computers displayed in department stores. A few commands could draw a fractal or play some music. That was enough to get him hooked. Music also supplied the first reason to write Frodo. Bauer wanted to hear SID tunes while working on his Amiga, so he built a card that could hold a real SID chip… Read more

If you don’t know the name Shigeru Miyamoto, he’s someone you can thank for the video game industry being what it is. In 1981, Miyamoto created a small arcade game called “Donkey Kong,” which not only saved Nintendo of America from financial ruin but also helped solidify the video game industry at a time when it was in flux. Just four years after his success with “Donkey Kong,” Miyamoto released his next… Read more