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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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Repetition as a feature: gaming’s best groundhog days When repetition is used as a narrative technique, it can be super effective.
No Man’s Sky versus the actual universe: a scientific inquiry Time for some mind-blowing space facts.
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.
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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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Legendary Commodore 64 Daffy Duck game finally found, playable for first time It’s a 228KB download, which was huge for the time.
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.
10 Xbox things to remember on Xbox’s 15th anniversary Did you know the console was almost called 'Odyssey of the Mind'? Really.
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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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What’s so scary about the 90s? The best horror games look to the nineties not as a rough draft to be improved upon, but something terrifying in and of itself.
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.
What your MMO says about you We've got you figured out.
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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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Does the C64 Mini’s games library do the Commodore 64 justice? The real reason it trumped the Speccy and Amstrad was breadth and quality of software.
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.
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.
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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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Why Zelda dungeons are so great Let's dig into how the dungeons work so well with Mark Brown's great crash-course.
The magic of video game cartography Video game maps shift and redraw the borders between real and imaginary.
The legacy of Duke Nukem We take you on the full journey, from hope to hopelessness.
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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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Why do Polygon reviewers suck so much at video games? We knew their reviews suffer from political bias, but basic game-playing competence is also a big issue at Polygon.
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!
11 franchises that need to rip off Pokemon Go Already popular video games, movies, and other stuff that could—should—jump into the alternate reality world and make bucketloads of money.
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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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No Man’s Sky versus the actual universe: a scientific inquiry Time for some mind-blowing space facts.
Returning to Runescape, over one decade on We’re going back... back to the browser!
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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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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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?
10 times gamers IRL died on cam F in the chat.
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.
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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 sex is the saddest thing about GTA V (NSFW) Grand Theft Auto V is an incredible, incredible video game. So why is its sex so terrible?
The craziest things people ever did to persuade parents to buy video games Kids can be very creative when they want something.
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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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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Ventrilo Harassment: Arnold ruins a clan meeting Mission objective: Infiltrate and harass.
The games that dare to sail the dark seas The humbling grandeur of the ocean: a place eternally unknowable, and indifferent to the fortunes of the seafarers it both sustains and destroys.
The world of video game vinyl Down the video game record collection hole.
