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Why Super Mario Bros. 3 is still a masterpiece Before Mario had a World, he had the biggest stage on Earth – and played the part to perfection.
Talking about Super Mario Bros. 3 risks devolving into a numbers game. It sold over eighteen million copies worldwide, another million on its Virtual Console re-release, who knows how many if you include pack-ins/re-releases, and still stands as one of the biggest sellers ever twenty-seven years later. Released in Japan on October 23, 1988, it wouldn’t see America till 1990 or Europe till 1991, but Super Mario Bros. 3 was always white-hot. In Nintendo’s western television advert, thousands of children chant ‘Mario, Mario, Mario’ as the camera pans back, the figures morphing into Mario’s face and then the North American continent. Such was the anticipation and profile for this 8-bit…
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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.
The worst (best) ads in early video game history We remember some horrific advertising campaigns in gaming.
It’s alive! How the last decade of horror cinema is influencing indie games The cinematic genre's margins are violently expanding and contracting, and videogames are learning from the best examples.
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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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Before Old Kratos, there was PSP Kratos How Ready at Dawn humanized Kratos a decade before the recent God of War did.
‘Experiment 12’: the disturbing result of 12 indie devs taking turns to make a game Our look inside the strange chaingame made by 12 different indie developers.
Eight things that just don’t make sense in the Pokemon universe Twenty years of backtracking and flip flopping until there are more contradictions than a M. Night Shyamalan movie about time travel.
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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."
“It was a summer blockbuster,” says Jason VandenBerghe, Everything or Nothing’s lead designer. That is this 2004 title in a nutshell. Like the movies it emulated, this was a game full of explosions, car chases, exotic locales, virtual women and trademark Bond quips. It was a showcase of EA’s deep pockets at the height of the craze surrounding movie-licensed games. But to say it was just a summer blockbuster almost obscures both its creators and the impact it had on the third person shooter genre. Around 20 years ago, VandenBerghe had the opportunity to join an old friend at EA, the current studio head of Sledgehammer Games, Aaron Halon. “I was like ‘sure,…
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Meet the whale who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on the MMO Black Desert Online "I love how we just casually talk about spending almost the entire cost of a full ride at Yale university on a video game."
Making a living in Minecraft We speak to James Delaney, who's trying to turn Blockworks' work into a sustainable business.
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 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.
Wipeout is a central part of The PlayStation Success Story. Its licenced music and in-club promotion are held up as the keys to attracting the post-pub generation. Play it now, however, and you’ll see a contradiction. Often regarded as the originator of gaming’s move towards the cool and the casual, it actually pointed the other way: towards bare-bones gameplay and aggressively clean styling. It was the perfect ambassador for Sony’s understated PlayStation powerhouse – all style, all substance. It is somewhat ironic, then, that the origins of video-gaming’s most famous trendsetter were in the resolutely unfashionable grid-based strategy game Matrix Marauders, which featured vehicle designs uncannily similar to those in Wipeout. The…
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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.
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.
The video games about nothing Seinfeld is famously a show about nothing, but indie developers continue to find plenty of something to work with.
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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.
Patch 1.12, Drums Of War, is the build of choice for the majority of private servers running the original World Of Warcraft. It was just an interim patch between the introduction of Naxxramas, the notoriously vicious 40-man final raid, and WOW’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade. The logic goes that it’s vanilla WOW’s final and best incarnation, for in the two years between World Of Warcraft’s release and version 1.12, myriad fixes and quality-of-life improvements had turned a rickety, spit-and-glue MMO into a real cultural phenomenon that was fast approaching ten million subscribers. By this time, you could have more than one action bar on the screen. The Looking For Group…
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The magic of video game cartography Video game maps shift and redraw the borders between real and imaginary.
10 beautiful 2D games exclusive to the PlayStation (PS1/PSX) The future of gaming was 3D, but the PlayStation had several beautiful 2D exclusives.
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.
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The untold story of PlayStation Home, Sony’s most successful disaster Plagued by problems from the start, PlayStation Home never officially made it out of beta before it was shut down. But it was also very profitable. This is its story.
The world’s introduction to PlayStation Home was technically at the Game Developers Conference in March of 2007, but most of us will remember it from Sony’s E3 conference that same year, where it featured in one of the most legendarily cringeworthy presentations in E3’s long history. The conference opened with a virtual version of Sony America executive Jack Tretton – stiff, weirdly animated, with a strange face and a dour expression – walking slowly towards the screen, showing off the new Home Square, which was sparsely populated with other avatars. “G’morning ladies, looking good,” says the incredibly nervous real Jack Tretton, with palpable awkwardness. Ten minutes later, showing off his…
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Could Watch Dogs’ smart city ever become a reality? A smart city, driven by the Internet of Things. Is Watch Dogs merely a sci-fi vision, or a real glimpse at the future?
Mario and Sonic: a tale of two mascots Super Mario Odyssey and Sonic Mania reflect the histories of their star characters almost too well.
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.
