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The ultimate history of fighting games Fighting games have always been around. The first one on this list landed in arcades in 1976!
The Street Fighter games are arguably the best-known fighting titles ever released (only Mortal Kombat comes close), and the series has sold a staggering 37 million copies. Fighting games, though, have been around since the very beginning of the medium. The first one we hit on this list landed in arcades in 1976 – a full 40 years ago! Lace up your gloves, charge up your ki, and let’s write the book on the history of fighting games. I tried to play, either on original machines or through emulation, every single game that could be considered a “fighting game” in the history of video games. I’m going to try and talk…
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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.
Destiny 2 is practically impossible to play if you’re a parent Bungie can do hunters, titans and warlocks alright, but it really struggles with the parent class.
10 hilariously offensive Steam games you aren’t allowed to buy any more In memoriam the best of the worst banned games in Steam's storied history.
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The 11 craziest video game feats ever captured on video These 11 videos show people taking ordinary video games and making them truly extraordinary.
Video games: how much do we love them? Enough to inspire us to devote a good chunk of our lives to them, at the very least. The incredible world of electronic gaming has something for everybody, from the base casual to the most hardcore multi-monitor Eve Online sock-pooper. We’re going to be talking about the upper echelon of gamers in this piece: the men and women who don’t stop at mere enjoyment and instead fight for utter mastery. These are people who squeeze every last byte out of their games, twisting them under their mental strength until they crack. These 11 videos show people taking ordinary video games and making them truly extraordinary.…
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17 years ago today, a wild Pikachu virus appeared! W32.Pokey.Worm was not very effective...
The video games about nothing Seinfeld is famously a show about nothing, but indie developers continue to find plenty of something to work with.
The World of Warcraft legacy server that is no more In closing Nostalrius, Blizzard finds itself the bad guy despite having the law on its side.
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They really did that?! Little known games from big developers Before Naughty Dog made Uncharted, it made the wacky comedy game Keef the Thief.
Whether it had to start somewhere, ran low on cash or had a crazy one-off idea, almost every big games studio has worked on some surprising games. A football JRPG, a Shrek tie-in, various kinds of licenses, these largely forgotten titles often reflect periods of uncertainty, when talented studios needed a project to keep the lights on and would work on whatever was going. Some of these games are, of course, terrible. Others, like Irrational’s Tribes Vengeances, are cult classics that have come to be regarded as highpoints for their series. Whatever the story though, they’re all surprising. Wayne Gretzky Hockey (Bethesda) Watch this video on YouTube These days the idea…
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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.
Catacombs: the inside story of Square Enix’ canceled shooter It’s always a great shame when a game is cancelled, but much more so when a genuine original is lost.
Love in a time of Warcraft Sarah found herself cast as the Yoko Ono of WoW, being blamed for the dissolution of what has been a successful raiding guild.
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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 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.
How a group of Polish devs turned war into a deeply personal and groundbreaking game A look at what went into the making of This War Of Mine.
The making of WipEout Forget Lara. There was only one true herald of the Playstation generation. Real 3D, real music, real gaming. The future, after years of waiting, was finally now.
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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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Mario and Sonic: a tale of two mascots Super Mario Odyssey and Sonic Mania reflect the histories of their star characters almost too well.
“Taiwan #1!” AngryPug hilariously trolls Chinese H1Z1 cheater "Japan number two, China number four!"
5 pixel art games you need to play right now Who doesn't love breezing through a colorful, simplified world that resembles something from their childhood?
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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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Eleven years on, Resident Evil 4 is still a masterpiece What makes a game that’s as campy as Rocky Horror shine.
One person’s long, arduous quest to restore the first color arcade game Ed Fries, a former Microsoft executive, has restored part of gaming's history in his garage.
Why you pay what you pay for video games We can often feel short-changed when it comes to buying video games, especially in the UK. So what exactly determines what you pay?
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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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The making of WipEout Forget Lara. There was only one true herald of the Playstation generation. Real 3D, real music, real gaming. The future, after years of waiting, was finally now.
The Lost Arcade: a rose-colored look at the last arcade in NYC, the legendary Chinatown Fair From Times Square to Coney Island you could find people playing arcade games all day and all night, but it wasn’t meant to last.
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.
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Woo-Hoo! The making of Stranglehold "There were definitely moments that made you feel like you're in a John Woo movie."
Brian Eddy had set his sights on making games early. “I started when I was about 12 years old on Commodore VIC-20,” he says. “I wrote some games and some applications and sold them to magazines and things like that.” Years later, a 21 year old Eddy on holiday in Chicago saw a newspaper ad that read “GAMES, GAMES, GAMES!”. He remembers thinking: “‘Well, that sounds great. That’s exactly what I want to do.” Chance met preparation. Eddy answered the ad and landed a dream job at a pinball powerhouse Williams (today operating as WMS Industries), which had recently acquired a video game subsidiary in Midway Games. But it would…
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The magic of video game cartography Video game maps shift and redraw the borders between real and imaginary.
“You will suffer beyond imagination!” WoW Classic player fights girlfriend while streaming Annoy this WoW nerd and you will suffer beyond imagination, you will see the punishment.
The making of Firewatch The story behind one of 2016's most unusual, human and thought-provoking games.
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25 years later, how Super Metroid came to define a genre It drastically reimagined how people would think about action games, and still shows up on “best game of all time” lists to this day.
On March 19, 1994, Japanese audiences got a chance to play one of the most influential video games of all time: Super Metroid, developed by Gunpei Yokoi’s Nintendo R&D team along with Intelligent Systems. The game saw bounty hunter Samus Aran once again contend with the machinations of Mother Brain as she once again tries to exploit the titular energy-draining creatures for conquest. Although not a hit in Japan, it sold over a million copies worldwide and still shows up on “best game of all time” lists well into the 21st century. Obviously the existence of Super Metroid implies a regular Metroid, but the effects of the original NES game…
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The people obsessed with uncovering gaming’s deepest, darkest secrets For some, playing a video game to completion isn’t enough. They want to reveal the secrets behind its creation.
The making of WipEout Forget Lara. There was only one true herald of the Playstation generation. Real 3D, real music, real gaming. The future, after years of waiting, was finally now.
Eleven years on, Resident Evil 4 is still a masterpiece What makes a game that’s as campy as Rocky Horror shine.
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Forking hell: a decade of Devolver Digital "There was and is no ‘exit strategy' for us, nor for the vast majority of the developers we work with."
Devolver Digital is many things: a voice of the counterculture in video games, an outlet for independent creators with visions that rarely align with those of traditional publishers, a champion of the people that’s not afraid to mercilessly mock the games industry. But most of all, Devolver is a principled, well-run company that helped reshape indie publishing in less than a decade. Mike Wilson is Devolver’s ‘Funslinger-in-chief’ (hey, I didn’t come up with it), and was already an industry veteran when he co-founded the company in 2009 with Harry Miller, Rick Stults, Nigel Lowrie, and Graeme Struthers. Wilson’s career up to that point was an illustrious one: he’d helped launch Quake at id…
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10 biggest influences on video game history Marquee moments that have helped gaming get to where it is today, and laid the groundwork for what we'll hear about in the future.
Returning to Runescape, over one decade on We’re going back... back to the browser!
Rise of the oversensitive gamer Easily offensive? Or easily offended?
