Tag Archives: gaming history

To get Pitfall Harry running properly, David Crane tried the movements himself. He would walk around the lab, stop in a pose, and sketch the position of his leg. Then came the awkward part: making that pose look like a person when the figure was only eight pixels wide. Years later, describing those experiments to Game Informer, Crane could trace Harry back through several projects. He would work on the little runner,… Read more

The original Final Fantasy credited one person for its programming: Nasir Gebelli. One programmer, helping bring an entire RPG to the Famicom, while still needing its towns and battle screens explained to him. When Square was building the original Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi had to walk its programmer through conventions that RPG players barely think about. There was an overworld. There were towns. And when a fight started, the game would cut… Read more

The Atari 7800 source code for Asteroids and Centipede ended up in a dumpster in 1996. Actual disks, behind the company's Sunnyvale building, waiting to disappear with the trash. The reason we can still look through some of those files is that someone went in after them at 3 a.m. There are glamorous ways to spend a night in the video-game business. Recovering Atari ST diskettes from a filthy dumpster probably doesn't… Read more

Courteney Cox and David Arquette arrived at Los Angeles Center Studios on October 16, 2008, for the Fallout 3 launch party. The arrival photographs are still in WireImage's archive. Bethesda was celebrating its trip into the Capital Wasteland with a guest list that looked considerably more glamorous than the people you'd meet outside Megaton. There was another connection, too, at least according to Bethesda's own reported trivia: Cox had briefly worked there… 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 “Butch” 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,… 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

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 Sega’s 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 the… 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

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

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

A bad idea in a very good suit Larry Laffer thinks the evening is going beautifully. He has the suit, a practiced line, and what he takes for irresistible confidence. The player can see the disaster coming from the other side of the screen. Larry cannot. That gap is the joke that carried a computer-game character through text parsers, sound cards, CD-ROMs, company upheaval, crowdfunding, and dating apps. His reputation as the… Read more

Is It Illegal to Play Emulated Nintendo Games? If you've ever wanted to relive classic games like Super Mario Bros., Super Metroid, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, or Zelda: Ocarina of Time using an emulator, you're definitely not alone. Emulation has become one of the most popular ways to revisit older games, especially as original hardware becomes more expensive, harder to maintain, and increasingly inconvenient to connect to… Read more

Link Was Christian, and You Cannot Pretend Otherwise Let’s stop dancing around it. Link was Christian. That is not up for debate. And we are going to cover it all. The original Legend of Zelda on the NES flat-out called one of its items the Bible in Japan. The sprite shows a little book with a cross on the cover. The English manual swapped the name out for “Book of Magic,” but… Read more

The Amiga turns 40 this year, and while the original home computer line remains a celebrated success with nearly five million units sold worldwide, its spin-off projects were far less fortunate. Both the CDTV and the CD32 failed to capture mainstream audiences, with the CD32 in particular remembered as Commodore’s final attempt to compete with the likes of Sega’s Mega Drive/Genesis and Nintendo’s SNES. Launched in 1993 as one of the earliest… Read more

The First Console Game with Voice Acting When we think of voice acting in video games, our minds often jump to cinematic RPGs, immersive shooters, or modern story-driven adventures. But believe it or not, one of the first consoles to ever feature spoken dialogue was the Mattel Intellivision all the way back in the early 1980s. The secret weapon? A quirky little add-on called the Intellivoice Voice Synthesis Module. Released in 1982,… Read more