Retro Blog 🕰️

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 discouraged… Read more

Twenty years ago, Rockstar proved you didn’t need carjackings and organized crime to create an entire world of trouble. Sometimes a boarding school was enough. On 17 October 2006, Rockstar Games released Bully for the PlayStation 2, trading the criminal underworld of Grand Theft Auto for the equally treacherous hallways of Bullworth Academy. I’ll admit, I wasn’t sold on Bully at first. I’d enjoyed Rockstar’s previous open-world games, particularly Grand Theft Auto,… Read more

Dave Warhol needed thirty seconds of music for ice-skating penguins. Two voices. George Sanger got out his guitar and four-track recorder, tried bass lines until one sounded like penguins, then worked on a melody that sounded like skating. He wrote the result out by hand and passed it to Warhol to put into Thin Ice. That was 1983. Sanger, known to game-music fans as The Fat Man, would go on to work… Read more

Change characters in the NES version of Maniac Mansion and you change the music. The mansion is still a terrible place to spend an evening, but now the teenager you have sent into it has brought a different record collection. Bernard gets twitchy electronic energy. Razor gets something with teeth. A few rooms, a few verbs and a handful of little sprites become a house full of personalities. You can spend an… Read more

Samus could handle space pirates, lava and a planet about to explode. Nintendo's three-pronged controller was apparently a different sort of problem. Yoshio Sakamoto, the director of Super Metroid, said he couldn't picture how to move her with it. Nintendo 64 went through its life without a new Metroid adventure. Anyone who remembers picking up that pad for the first time will understand the pause. Three grips. Two hands. A thumbstick in… Read more

Crash washes up on the beach, gets his bearings, and finds his first crates waiting a few steps away. That's the opening most players know. But the original Crash Bandicoot could have greeted you with something much closer to a Saturday-morning cartoon. Universal had hand-drawn animation made during development, with an introduction and ending intended for the game. The footage exists. It just never made it onto the adventure players bought. Universal’s… Read more

The world is turning beneath you, the sun is coming up over its edge, and a choir is singing before you have founded a single city. You could click through to the game. For a little while, though, Civilization IV makes waiting at the menu feel like a perfectly good use of your evening. The song is Christopher Tin’s Baba Yetu. Its words are a Swahili setting of the Lord’s Prayer, the… Read more

You have remembered the pirates, the music and at least three jokes. You have not remembered what to do with the thing in your inventory. Twenty minutes into Monkey Island, the old routine is coming back nicely: walk into a room, annoy everybody in it, leave with something that probably belongs to somebody else. For a while, getting the game to start could be the hardest puzzle of the evening. The disc… Read more

Mario walks across Peach’s checkerboard floor, heads outside and wanders into Bob-omb Battlefield. Familiar enough, until you remember this is supposed to be an Atari Jaguar. Developer Budfolk has rebuilt parts of Super Mario 64 for Atari’s console, using what he describes as a new engine written from scratch in assembly. It looks rough in places, but seeing that castle on a Jaguar is a fine reason to stop scrolling. Four areas… Read more

A broken font in Full Throttle brought Eugene Sandulenko to ScummVM. Fixing it revealed a larger problem: the bike-fighting sequences were not implemented. Someone needed to work out how they worked. Sandulenko already had years of reverse-engineering experience, so he took a look. It was quite a look. For the wider story, read The Complete History of ScummVM: 25 Years of Adventure, from the project’s early days to the games and engines… Read more

Crash Bandicoot has a fossil named after him. And the name isn't some lab nickname that stuck: the extinct animal is officially Crash bandicoot. Somewhere between the crates and the boss fights, our orange idiot made it into scientific classification. The animal lived about 15 million years ago in what is now Australia. The PlayStation obviously arrived a little later. When researchers named the species in 2014, they borrowed Crash's name for… Read more

Wild Arms 3: Where the Wild West Meets the JRPG I’ve been a fan of Westerns and cowboy culture since I was a kid, and I’ve loved Japanese RPGs since the NES days. So when somebody decided to smash those two things together, I took to the Wild Arms games on the original PlayStation like horseshoes to hooves! On 15 October 2002, Wild Arms 3 rode into North America for the PlayStation… Read more

The Moon theme from DuckTales already sounds as though it has somewhere wonderful to take you. David Ortiz heard a trumpet carrying that melody, violins chasing the runs, and guitars and bass filling out the rhythm underneath. In 2015, he called in some friends to read the arrangement. That first experiment became Mariachi Entertainment System. The San Antonio ensemble brings familiar game music to a full mariachi lineup: trumpets, violins, flute, guitars… Read more

Saints Row started as a GTA clone. There, I said it. And I liked it anyway. When Saints Row 2 arrived in North America on 14 October 2008 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Volition wasn't exactly trying to hide where the inspiration came from. The original game had borrowed generously from Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto franchise, and the sequel wasn't about to abandon that formula. But here's the thing: Saints Row… Read more

Sonic is a little blue streak in a world of dead forests, burning streets and monsters that look delighted to see him. The momentum is familiar. The enormous scythe coming his way is considerably less familiar. Hellfire Saga takes the feel of Sonic 3 & Knuckles and throws it into a gothic action game. Castlevania and Ghosts ’n Goblins are obvious neighbours, but this is more than Green Hill with red grass.… Read more

A talking fish wants answers. A silver-and-blue superhero is sprinting through traffic because somebody needs a Pepsi. Somewhere else, a cucumber is trying to rescue a tomato from a pumpkin. The controller is ordinary enough; the jobs it has been given are considerably less so. And that is before the zombie outbreak that can only be stopped by typing quickly. Some of these games make their first impression before you have touched… Read more

I recently received a gift that left me with one very serious question: how have I been missing this in my life? The gift was a handful of issues of Old School Gamer Magazine. Actual magazines. Covers you can hold, pages you can turn, and articles that stay put while you read them. I opened one expecting a pleasant little dose of nostalgia. What I found felt like somebody had reopened a… Read more

The coaster looks magnificent. It climbs above the trees, twists through the park and has enough loops to justify the money you borrowed to build it. The test train makes it back to the station. You open the ride, sit back and wait for the queue. Nobody wants to get on. Welcome to RollerCoaster Tycoon. You may own the park, but the little people wandering around it have opinions. Some want a… Read more

Before Jill Valentine had Nemesis chasing her through Raccoon City, Resident Evil 3 was supposed to take place on a luxury cruise ship. HUNK would be the star, trying to bring back a sample of the G-Virus. Capcom was planning to put the next numbered Resident Evil on a boat. It’s a pretty good place for something to go horribly wrong. In a mansion, you can at least dream about reaching the… Read more

Remember the days of yore, when Double Fine made great games instead of blowing budgets on their latest vanity projects? When Jack Black was more interested in entertaining us than lecturing us? These days, Black and Double Fine's Tim Schafer look like twin gray-bearded hobos arguing over which one smells worse. But the 2000s were simpler times. Back when somebody could pitch a video game that looked like an Iron Maiden album… Read more

Interview by David, Retro Replay A boss theme can follow you long after the battle is over. For Console: The VGM Band, those melodies became a reason to pick up instruments, find other musicians, and discover what happens when music written for a game has an audience standing in front of it. A familiar tune is the starting point; the groove, the arrangement, and the energy of a live band are where… Read more

You hear Daytona USA before you see it. Someone is singing the name at full volume. Around the corner, a row of red racing seats is waiting, and your friend is already claiming the one beside you. For years, Sega made the arcade trip worthwhile. You could have a good console at home and still want a go on that enormous motorcycle, the moving flight simulator or the racer linked to seven… Read more

The houses are getting nicer. The treasury is running out. Somebody wants pottery, somebody else wants a temple, and the person carrying the food has taken the wrong turning again. If you played an Impressions city builder, you probably recognise the situation. You arrived with a sensible plan for a Roman settlement or an Egyptian town. A few hours later, you were rearranging roads so a woman with a basket would walk… Read more