Retro Blog 🕰️

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

The Cole Train has survived plenty of trouble in Gears of War. Add a likeness lawsuit to the list. In 2017, former football player and wrestler Lenwood “Hard Rock” Hamilton sued Epic Games and others, claiming Augustus Cole borrowed his appearance, voice and persona without permission. Hamilton thought the resemblance was obvious. The courts weren’t persuaded that it entitled him to stop the character. Cole kept his armour, his attitude and his… Read more

That stack of PS2 cases beside the television has a new reason to come off the shelf. Swordpdf’s PS5SX2, a homebrew port of PCSX2, now offers a way to insert a supported PS2 DVD into a jailbroken PlayStation 5, copy the game to storage and launch it through the emulator. The disc supplies the game data, while the PS5 runs the resulting copy. This is a community project for modified consoles, not… Read more

October 5–12, 2026. The week’s clearest emulator releases were a Dolphin hotfix, a substantial SameBoy update, and a new FCEUX version. Igir also expanded the way collections can be named and sorted. Across the four monitored categories, we found 166 notices; most of the console entries were successive development snapshots. The full dated log groups them below.Console and handheld releasesDolphin 2609a fixes the first 2609 releaseDolphin labels 2609a a hotfix for its… Read more

You remember the mascots, the blockbuster sequels, and the games every friend seemed to own. But the nineties also left behind toxic-slime scientists, clay adventurers, transforming police machines, and a tiny hero from the world of Lemmings. This countdown revisits twenty games that deserve another look. “No one remembers” is our affectionate exaggeration: these games still have fans, and some have devoted followings. Our picks favor distinctive ideas, memorable presentation, and adventures… Read more

Before Epona carried Link across Hyrule, Nintendo had talked about giving Mario a horse in Super Mario 64. Picture that for a moment: the plumber, the cap, the overalls, and a horse waiting outside Peach’s castle. Yoshi would have had questions. It never happened. But Yoshiaki Koizumi hadn’t lost interest in the idea, and when he worked on Ocarina of Time, he was determined to make horse riding happen there. Mario went… Read more

Sometimes I don't want a deep story, complicated mechanics, elaborate character progression, or moral choices that will come back to haunt me twenty hours later. Sometimes I just want to grab the biggest gun I can find and start blastin'! And that's exactly why I've always had a soft spot for Serious Sam. On 11 October 2005, Serious Sam II arrived on PC and Xbox, delivering another ridiculous helping of oversized weapons,… Read more

Interview by David, Retro-Replay. Before there was Tiberium, before Kane stepped in front of a camera, and before players began building bases on Arrakis, there were two friends in Las Vegas finding out what they could make together. Louis Castle was working at a computer store when he met Brett Sperry. An invitation to use a printer led to a conversation about computer art, then to a creative partnership. In 1985, that… Read more

Mario’s first job had nothing to do with pipes. When he appeared in Donkey Kong in 1981, he was a carpenter. The game took place on a construction site, so Shigeru Miyamoto gave its little hero a job that fitted the surroundings. The plumber everyone knows came later. There’s a nice reminder in an old Donkey Kong sticker card: underneath Mario, it says “The Brave Carpenter.” He’s got the cap, moustache and… Read more

Some people do their best thinking in the bath. While working on the original Donkey Kong in the early 1980s, Shigeru Miyamoto had a particularly convenient one: Nintendo’s company bath. Its hot water came from the boiler used by the playing-card factory. That’s quite a long way from an arcade cabinet, but apparently a good place to get your thoughts in order. He was staying in Nintendo’s company housing and bathing at… Read more

Snake Eater asks you to worry about camouflage, stamina and whatever might be hiding in the grass. Apparently, somebody also had to worry about how Snake looked walking away. Even his backside got some attention during development. Snake got that cake! WIRED’s November 2004 profile described Kojima making sure Snake had a “nice butt” for the rear view. Kojima quickly added: “I’m married, with a son.” Then came the instruction: “Put that… Read more

In the 1990s, Joe Rogan got so hooked on Quake that a computer upgrade wasn’t enough. He had a T1 line installed at home to improve his connection. Recalling it with Kevin Rose in April 2016, Rogan said it had been worth the expense. Rose remembered those lines costing around $10,000 a month. That’s a lot of money to put between yourself and a bad ping. But if you played online back… Read more

Arnold Schwarzenegger could have been Mario’s movie villain. He was approached to play King Koopa in the 1993 Super Mario Bros. film, but passed. Dennis Hopper got the part instead, leaving us with a casting what-if that’s almost as strange as the finished movie. Try picturing Arnold in Dinohattan for a moment. This was already a Mario adaptation with a human-looking reptilian ruler, so a different leading villain could have taken it… Read more

Link never needed a fedora, but Indiana Jones helped get his adventure started. Shigeru Miyamoto wanted some of that excitement in a game: the ruins, the danger and the feeling that something worth finding was waiting inside. Years later, he named the films when Nintendo asked him about the beginnings of The Legend of Zelda. Once you know that, it’s hard not to think about it when you enter a dungeon. There’s… Read more

David Hayter says a joke about Snake’s “Shriveled Snake” almost slipped into Metal Gear Solid 4. The cast had been messing around during recording. Someone caught the take before release, sparing players a very unexpected moment with Naomi Hunter. It’s an easy blooper to remember. Naomi is supposed to be worried about Snake’s health. In this take, she was apparently worried about something rather more specific. “So… shriveled…” In a 2012 interview,… Read more

Before there was a plumber clearing pipes, there was a young designer trying to get someone to pay him to make interesting things. Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to create toys. Nintendo looked like a place where that ambition might fit, except for an inconvenient detail: it was not hiring designers. The familiar internet version turns this into a neat rejection story. Nintendo supposedly passed on the man who would create Mario, then somehow… Read more

You have found a snorkel. You have found a coin. You have found a perfectly innocent reason to press the fire button. A moment later, you have found the title screen. For an egg with such a cheerful face, Dizzy could be a menace. His adventures offered enchanted forests, pirate ships and neighbours who always needed a favour. They also offered the possibility of losing an evening's work because you put down… Read more

A creak in the next room, a pursuer you cannot fight, a town that seems to know your secrets: the best retro horror games found very different ways to make us afraid. This countdown follows fifteen that still unsettle us, from the Famicom to the PlayStation 2 and PC. Our ranking is subjective. We weighed atmosphere, vulnerability, sound, unforgettable scenes, and the way each game keeps its fear alive after the controller… Read more

Some games take a while to explain. Crazy Taxi is not one of them. You drive a taxi. You pick up passengers. You drive as fast and as recklessly as humanly possible. And somehow, more than twenty-five years later, it's still ridiculously fun. Originally released in arcades before making its way to the Sega Dreamcast, Crazy Taxi is one of those games that perfectly represents Sega during that era. Fast. Loud. Colorful.… Read more

A broken water chip, a world full of mutants, and absolutely no guarantee you'd survive long enough to save anybody. Welcome to Fallout. On 10 October 1997, Interplay released Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game, introducing PC gamers to a radioactive wasteland unlike anything most of us had experienced before. Set in the year 2161, nearly a century after a devastating nuclear war, Fallout put players in the boots of a… Read more

George Stobbart went to Paris for a holiday. A clown, a bomb, and a dead man had other plans. George is an American tourist whose afternoon outside a Paris café ends in an explosion. He survives, but a man inside does not. Most people would give the police a statement and book an earlier flight home. George starts investigating. He has no special training for this sort of thing, just a quick… Read more

Interview by David, Retro-Replay. An adventure game can begin with a painted cityscape, a conversation, or a mystery the player cannot leave alone. Steve Ince has helped shape all three. Across his career, he moved from creating artwork to organising production and then writing and designing the stories players would uncover for themselves. Ince spent eleven years at Revolution Software, moving from artist to producer to writer and designer. His work on… Read more