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The Legend of Zelda was an explicitly Christian game—until Nintendo of America desecrated it Link, a devout Christian warrior? Believe it.
Before The Legend of Zelda became known for its somewhat complicated lore and disconnected story lines, the popular Nintendo series had real-world religious influences with Link originally written as a devout Christian warrior. I wouldn’t blame you if you missed the references to Christianity in the first three Zelda games because the hints were always subtle (especially for children) and it was never explicitly stated by characters in-game. One of the biggest in-game hints of religious imagery was found in the Japanese version of The Legend of Zelda. If you played the English version of the game, you’re probably familiar with the Book of Magic, which had a cross on…
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The legacy of Duke Nukem We take you on the full journey, from hope to hopelessness.
How great puzzle games deconstruct our world The Witness, Gorogoa and Baba Is You reflect the societies they come from.
80 years before X-COM, H.G. Wells designed ‘Little Wars’ H.G. Wells' contributions to modern pop culture can hardly be overestimated, and even video games haven't escaped it.
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Under the thumb: the evolution of buttons How the buttons we press daily were formed over many decades.
I’ve been delighted with Nintendo Switch, not just because Breath of the Wild is probably now my favorite game ever, but because the Joy-Cons really make the hardware feel special. Even more so if you were fortunate to get hold of the neon red and blue version. It may be because no other controller has ever had so much versatility, either for a single player or for the instant sideways turn into two stand-alone controllers. It shakes up a lot of other controller preconceptions, too, and in doing so made me think about all the controllers I have used. How over time that knowledge of where to move your thumb is accumulated,…
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10 Xbox things to remember on Xbox’s 15th anniversary Did you know the console was almost called 'Odyssey of the Mind'? Really.
Woke at the GDC The Game Developers Conference is now about how games are to blame for every social ill — real or imagined.
How great puzzle games deconstruct our world The Witness, Gorogoa and Baba Is You reflect the societies they come from.
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80 years before X-COM, H.G. Wells designed ‘Little Wars’ H.G. Wells' contributions to modern pop culture can hardly be overestimated, and even video games haven't escaped it.
Having popularized concepts such as time travel and invaders from Mars, the contributions of English author H.G. Wells to modern pop culture can hardly be overestimated. Often described as ‘the father of science fiction’ thanks to seminal, genre-defining works such as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and When the Sleeper Wakes (all three published between 1895 and 1899, a testament to his unerring productivity) Wells’ influence is everywhere, even if you’ve never picked up one of his books. Video games are no exception. In fact, when designing one of gaming’s earliest and most recognizable icons, Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado plumbed Wells’ imagination to stoke his own. “The…
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Teen secretly spent $20k of mom’s savings on Twitch celebs, and the streaming giant thinks that’s just fine Twitch ignored the distraught mother and then silently deleted the evidence—or so they thought.
15 underrated N64 games the world forgot about Celebrating the weirder side of the N64.
The secret history of G.I. Joe and Transformers We’re going to look at the many times in the past the two franchises have collided.
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The making of Virtual Springfield: a journey through the Simpsons at its peak Remember when The Simpsons was good and VR was futuristic?
Here’s a pitch for you: an interactive experience in which players are free to explore Springfield, the bustling hometown of The Simpsons, in virtual reality. In spite of the series’ steady decline over the past 15 years or so, I’d wager that more than a few of you would be queuing up to buy such a game were it launched tomorrow. Just imagine, then, how tantalizing a prospect this would have been back in the series’ mid-90s peak – with classic episodes such as Homer Badman, Who Shot Mr. Burns?, and The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show still fresh in the memory. This was effectively what Fox Interactive served…
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The psychology behind your backlog of unplayed games As games become ever cheaper and ever longer, we must necessarily accrue ever bigger piles of unplayed titles. Feel bad about it? Psychology can explain.
Who are the Star Citizen superbackers? Ever spent hundreds on a game? How about thousands? Tens of thousands? These people have. How do they feel about it?
Development hell: 12 funny tales from game dev history There was a time when lax employment legislation meant development teams could be locked in the office overnight.
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‘Adventure Mario’: the making of The Legend of Zelda We’re going back to the mid-80s to look at the creation of one of gaming's longest-running and most-loved series.
The Legend of Zelda is one of those games, of course, that is so garlanded it’s sometimes hard to see clearly – pioneering in many respects, an instant classic, and the instigator of one of gaming’s longest-running and most-loved series. So to get some idea of what the game actually was, we’re going to go right back to the mid-80s and look at the original development. It was the morning of February 1, 1985, and Nintendo needed a hit. Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, and Toshihiko Nakago were working on the first Mario game for the Famicom, and Super Mario Bros. would be finished and released by September of that year.…
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The 24-year feud that has dogged Star Citizen The story of two men, several ambitious space games, and an ongoing feud that has rocked a community of over a million fans.
The rise and fall of video gaming’s most vocal enemy Over the course of 10 years, lawyer Jack Thompson aggressively pursued video games in the courtroom. This is a history of his career.
The Mission: the most bizarre soccer game ever made "Once you have acquired the ball it is used as your main weapon against the Ninjas."
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The Mission: the most bizarre soccer game ever made "Once you have acquired the ball it is used as your main weapon against the Ninjas."
Of all the ways a British child could have their Christmas ruined in the late ’90s — sherry-fueled arguments after dinner, a sibling raging because they didn’t get what they wanted, a burned turkey — there is a special place in yuletide hell reserved for crappy soccer games bought by well-meaning family members. For the contemporary gamer, soccer more or less means the slugfest between FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer. But before this heavyweight title card came to dominate, back in the era of the original PlayStation, the soccer games jostling for position more closely resembled a royal rumble. And much like in the WWE’s yearly 30-man brawl, the majority…
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Man builds functional glowing IRL life bar A vertical tube filled with water that lights up different colors and changes its water level based on your in-game health and mana.
How Fable Legends took down Lionhead An in-depth look at the development of a legendary British studio's final, unreleased game.
Mint condition Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge breaks all records—sells for $156k Super Mario Bros is once again the most expensive video game ever sold. It's-a more money than sense!
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How great puzzle games deconstruct our world The Witness, Gorogoa and Baba Is You reflect the societies they come from.
Games often reflect everyday suppositions about how the world works, whether or not they’re set in a version of reality. They are, after all, made by people who live in the reality as everyone else, exposed to the same opinions and language, and their creative expressions are embedded with society’s dominant ideas about success, duty, relationships and countless other subjects. Equally, however, games are well-suited to challenging the ‘common sense’ status of many notions. While they reproduce the operations of daily life, they also provide us with ways to imagine and interact with the world differently. Regardless of any explicit political commentary, games can stimulate us to think more critically about our…
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The game dev who cried wolf Indie developers feel it’s hard to get noticed, but trying to stir up fake scandal sets a terrible precedent.
The increasing irrelevancy of video game journalists Being good at games is now political. Is this a sign of the end times?
The best (worst) Watch Dogs multiplayer trolls Watch Dogs online has been designed to drive you nuts and here's a compilation of some amazing moments.
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Swearing at the screen: a history of rudeness in text adventures Much effort went into providing responses to inputs quite removed from an adventurer's staple activities of bashing heads and examining stuff.
“Don’t be ridiculous” the invisible narrator snapped, dismissing some long-forgotten typed request, and several decades later I still remember it. It was the first computer game I’d ever played, an early 80s text adventure titled Madness and the Minotaur on my swanky new Dragon 32, and my uncle had joined dad and I to marvel at the shiny new toy and help us with the intricacies of English prose. He had to explain what it meant to be ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous? Even at a tender age I could sense some grand unfairness at work, even more so after the line started dumbly repeating itself, our textual flailings going unrecognized…
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Top 10 licensed songs in gaming There are times when the use of a licensed piece of music is so perfect that it elevates the gaming experience to a new level.
Why video game movies fail as adaptations What are movie makers doing wrong?
Video game romance: a lost cause? You can't force love, especially not when it comes to western games.
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The secret history of G.I. Joe and Transformers We’re going to look at the many times in the past the two franchises have collided.
G.I. Joe and Transformers have been two of Hasbro’s biggest names, and they have long and storied histories with absurd amounts of lore in toy, comic, and cartoon form. Their worlds have collided in IDW’s newly unified… well, let’s call it the Hasbroverse (My Little Pony isn’t part of the Joes’ and Transformers’ lives yet, but IDW has books of all three, so it’s only a matter of time until Rarity gives Snake Eyes a makeover). We’re going to look at the many times in the past the two franchises have collided. And before we do that, here’s a very quick primer. Like many dives into geeky esoterica, the relevant fan wikis…
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“You are not a real gamer” The phrase has become a joke and a cliche - but when someone says "you're not a real gamer," what is it they're really saying?
The doomed heroes of Dark Souls Beneath the chivalric castles and lofty cathedrals of Lordran beats the bitter, pagan heart of Beowulf.
These photographs make video game worlds look real The Continuous City is a book that looks at virtual environments through a different lens.
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The world of video game vinyl Down the video game record collection hole.
I don’t understand vinyl. Lots of music nerds swear by vinyl albums for reasons I can’t actually understand. Then I went down the video game record collection hole. Watch this video on YouTube And I still don’t understand. But that hasn’t stopped me from picking up a handful of albums when I don’t even have a turntable. Because, while I can’t imagine casually listening to any of them (and most I’ve gotten include digital download codes, so you don’t have to worry about playing the actual album), they look really cool. The Journey It started at a Protomen show, the premiere of their music video for “Light Up The Night”…
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Five standalone ‘sidequels’ that are far better than their main series The bitesize masterpieces that edge out their main series counterparts.
These are the most controversial games of all time, according to science We’re sitting here with a beautiful big dataset from Metacritic. It's time.
Does ‘role-playing game’ mean what it did a decade ago? We interview veteran RPG designers Chris Avellone and George Ziets about where the RPG is and where it's going.
