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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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You’ll never be able to afford these top gaming battlestations MOM! BATHROOM!
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.
The worst (best) ads in early video game history We remember some horrific advertising campaigns in gaming.
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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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The artists and paintings that bleed through Bloodborne The aesthetic roots of a masterpiece.
15 completely awesome old school video game commercials Blast to the past.
What do you do after you’ve made one of the world’s most successful games? King was bought for $5.9 billion by Activision last year. It has two of the most successful games in the world right now. Where can it go from here?
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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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“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?
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.
10 great adventure games everyone must try From the games we grew up with to the best modern examples of this wonderful genre.
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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 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 11 most ridiculous Pokémon ever captured Not every pocket monster is a classic. Once you’ve run through the good ideas, you have to start looking a little deeper for inspiration.
Top 10 missions in the Grand Theft Auto classics Ten of the best crimes you'll ever commit in Liberty City, Vice City, and the state of San Andreas.
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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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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.
Youtuber banned after hilarious murder—of female video game character Viral RDR2 video of feminist pixels being fed to alligator pixels was too much for YouTube in latest fiasco.
The making of Firewatch The story behind one of 2016's most unusual, human and thought-provoking games.
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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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10 fighting game characters that are definitely furries There are some hardcore furries out there in fighting game rosters, and I've put them on a list.
It’s time to admit that Ocarina of Time sucks Ocarina of Time is responsible for many awful trends that, like a bad cold, games have been unable to shake. Here's the case against Ocarina of Time.
Rise of the oversensitive gamer Easily offensive? Or easily offended?
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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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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?
The making of Firewatch The story behind one of 2016's most unusual, human and thought-provoking games.
We are producing way too many (good) video games There more good games out there than ever before, and they're getting longer. Let's look at the numbers.
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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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You can now play 10,000 Amiga games in your browser for free, on archive.org Take a nostalgia trip with some real retro classics.
The world of video game vinyl Down the video game record collection hole.
Turn your Excel spreadsheet into an RPG with Arena.Xlsm Just because you’re stuck in Excel all day doesn’t mean you can’t do some questing.
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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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How 007: Everything or Nothing left other third-person games shaken and stirred "Everybody knows who he is and — like him or not — everyone has an idea of what he should be. Your Bond and my Bond — not the same Bond."
A Call of Duty youtuber is livestreaming his legs literally rotting away 2020 UPDATE: THEY'RE MELTING!—Diabetic drunkard ONLYUSEmeBLADE refuses to seek treatment for the rapidly expanding sores, which are being cheered on by "leg hole" fans as they gradually consume his discolored limbs in daily livestreamed updates.
5 plot twists that would have made great games even better When done right, a twist can be truly spectacular. Here's what they should have done...
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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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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.
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.
The secret to the success of the greatest MMO of them all Vanilla World of Warcraft fed on the blood, toil, tears and sweat of its players, testing their patience and resolve - but that was part of its magic.
