Retro Culture 🕹️

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

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 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

  Released in North America on 09 October 1988, Super Mario Bros. 2 took everything we thought we knew about Mario and threw it out the window. No more stomping enemies. Now we were pulling vegetables out of the ground, throwing bad guys around, and choosing between Mario, Luigi, Toad and Princess Peach, each with their own abilities.   And I loved it.   Super Mario Bros. 2 will always have a… Read more

The harvester is miles from home. Your money is almost gone. Somewhere beyond the black edge of the map, an army is getting ready to ruin your evening. Then a voice announces “Unit ready,” the music kicks in, and you decide you can probably afford one more tank. Command & Conquer understood that particular kind of optimism. It let you build a little military empire, made you feel clever for keeping it… Read more

Five years ago today, Samus Aran returned to remind us why Metroid is still one of Nintendo's greatest franchises. Released on 08 October 2021, Metroid Dread brought the series back to its side-scrolling roots, combining classic exploration with modern visuals, slick combat, and the relentless pursuit of the E.M.M.I. robots. I was lucky enough to get the special edition with the game, a limited steelbook, artbook, and game cards from a friend… Read more

Sometimes the best yard sale finds are the ones you didn’t know you were looking for. I recently picked up this complete 1963 copy of The Money Game of Junior Executive by Whitman. It’s basically a kid-friendly business simulator: choose a company selling candy, ice cream, toys, or soda pop, then spend the year buying, selling, filling orders, dealing with nd trying to finish with the most money. It’s over 60 years… Read more

The worst sound in Top Gear was not a crash. A crash could be recovered from. The real disaster was watching your car slow down while the other half of the screen kept moving. You had squeezed one more lap out of the fuel tank, missed the pit lane, and handed your friend a story they were going to tell for the rest of the afternoon. The music, rather unfairly, still sounded… Read more

Before walkthroughs were a click away, Nintendo had people you could call. Meet the game counselors, explore their secret maps, and follow the hotline from its NES beginnings to its last recorded tips—with a small memory of my dad, Dark Link and a call around 1989–1990. Read more

Some consoles leave behind a favorite game, a battered controller and an argument about which version was better. The Phantom and Indrema left behind something stranger: people who still remember waiting for them. You could picture the empty spot beneath the television. Perhaps you had already decided which games would go there. Indrema offered a silver machine that would welcome small developers into the console business. The Phantom offered a white box… Read more

If you grew up reading game magazines, you probably had a shopping list that never quite existed. A screenshot caught your eye. You read the preview twice. You worked out whether you could afford it, or whether this was going to require a birthday. Then the game vanished. For a while, you kept looking. Maybe next month’s issue would explain the delay. Maybe the shop would know. Eventually, another game took its… Read more

You beat the boss. The credits roll. You start thinking about the next game. For a kid with a Genesis, a Super Nintendo, or an Amiga, that was a perfectly reasonable habit. Another cartridge would turn up in a magazine. Another impossibly large enemy would fill a screenshot. Your favorite character would get new moves, a new sidekick, perhaps a skateboard. Everybody seemed to be getting a skateboard. Then, somewhere between the… Read more

Before the first bullet, before the jungle, before anybody could blame the other player for scrolling the screen too far, there was a little ceremony. Someone picked up the Nintendo controller and pressed Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A. Then Start. If they had done it properly, Contra became a considerably more generous host. The guns still killed you. The pits still killed you. The alien infestation was… Read more

A green lizard walks into a graveyard and immediately starts reviewing the television. He can climb the walls, hang from the ceiling, and knock a monster sideways with his tail. What he cannot do is keep his mouth shut. Somewhere between the jump button and the next bad joke, Gex makes his pitch: you are going to spend a lot of time with this mascot, so he might as well have something… Read more

A gold seal on the box. A lock inside the console. Five games a year, and a contract that could keep those games away from the competition. Nintendo’s happiest era had a remarkably ugly business side. In 1989, two very different versions of Tetris became part of Nintendo Entertainment System history. One came from Nintendo. The other came from Tengen, in a black cartridge that looked slightly wrong beside the familiar gray… Read more

Lucas Barton opens the case as though he is about to show everybody a weapon. Inside is a gray glove, a black wrist console, and the sort of plastic armor a kid in 1989 would happily have worn to school. He puts it on, plays Rad Racer, and delivers the line that outlived almost everything else in The Wizard: “I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.” He means bad in the… Read more

Before Aero the Acro-Bat saves a single circus performer, the game asks him to jump through a hoop. Then another. Then to find the exit that those hoops have opened, while clowns, spikes, and a timer make his first day at work feel like a hostile audition. He can fly a little, drill through enemies, and throw stars. He cannot simply run to the right and call it a level. That is… Read more

The first thing Dragon’s Lair asked you to do was watch. That was strange for an arcade game in 1983. Most machines made their case with a few seconds of sprites racing across a screen. This one had a knight charging through a castle drawn by professional animators. People gathered behind the player to see what came next. Then the player died. Dirk the Daring’s death could be quick, elaborate, and expensive.… Read more

In 1991, Philips put a disc player beneath the television and asked families to buy a piece of the future. It played music. It could show pictures, video, and encyclopedias. It even played games. The machine looked as if it belonged in a hi-fi cabinet, and its pointing controller seemed perfectly happy with a menu. Then someone asked it to be a Nintendo rival. The first American CD-i player cost $899, according… Read more

The rainbow was small enough to miss on a video-store shelf. Marty McFly's face was not. Neither was Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, or Spider-Man. You went in with five dollars and a weekend to fill; the box supplied a movie you already loved. By Sunday night, you might be wondering why Marty spent so much time collecting clocks in the street. For millions of players, that was the LJN experience: a famous… Read more

The television shows a woman trapped in a house. You switch camera feeds, wait for intruders to enter a room, and spring a trap. Then you miss one. On the box, Night Trap looks like the movie games were finally going to become. In your hands, it is an awkward game about watching several grainy screens at once. A few months later, politicians would discuss it as though the machine under the… Read more

Sega Channel was delivering downloadable Genesis games through cable television decades before modern subscription services. We dig into every verified Sega Channel exclusive, the games that were only available through the service in North America, lost software, prototypes, special builds and the massive preservation effort that finally recovered Sega’s forgotten digital library. Read more

Acclaim Entertainment became one of the loudest and most successful publishers of the 1990s, riding Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Turok, wrestling games, comic licenses and aggressive marketing to enormous visibility. This is the complete story of how Acclaim rose from a small Long Island publisher to a gaming powerhouse — and how overexpansion, costly licenses, bad bets and financial trouble brought it crashing down. Read more

You are in first place when the rider to your left swings a chain. You lean away, drift toward the yellow line, and see the sedan coming over the hill a second too late. The bike skids down the road without you. Your racer gets up and runs after it while everyone else disappears into the distance. In Road Rash, losing can be funnier than winning, provided you have the nerve to… Read more