It’s easy to assume that a comedian wouldn’t be the best source to go to for some random bit of game history, but in some cases, they’re actually pretty pretty good.
So come along as a few funny folks tell us what’s the deal with advergames, video game violence, and why some people think games are just for boys…
It’s been 50 years since Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabny formed Atari and ushered in the beginning of the game industry’s commercial era. But thanks to an almost neverending series of buyouts and acquisitions, the Atari that still exists today is not the same company that ruled the arcade in the 1970s and the living room in the 1980s.
And in the beginning, even Atari wasn’t known as Atari.
Despondent over poor working conditions, a group of developers left Atari in 1979 and formed Activision, the first fully-independent third-party console developer.
Here we are 43 years later, and executives at Activision stand accused by employees (and government regulators) of creating a hostile workplace of their own. But while a number of employees have struck out on their own over the years, Activision’s fate will soon lie with Microsoft, as CEO Bobby Kotick has decided to sell his company to the consolemaker, effectively putting Activision on the path to becoming a first-party developer.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision is a seismic shift for the game industry, and there are a lot of moving parts involved (including those abuse allegations and an FTC approval process that could take up to two years). You’ll find the first steps in that journey in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as a pop-up museum devoted to Pac-Man, and the infamous (and fictional) Nude Code from Tomb Raider.
Atari released more than 100 games for the Atari 2600 between 1977 and 1990, but the publisher also produced dozens of prototypes that never made their way onto store shelves. Aquaventure is one such game… though it did eventually manage to escape from the briny deep.
Every so often, a game comes along with a certain something that just completely captures the public’s fascination. It happened in 2006 with Wii Sports and its introduction of motion controls. It happened in 2007-2008 with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, a pair of games that seeded plastic instruments in living rooms across the world like some kind of Johnny B. Rockstar. It happened in 2016 with Pokemon Go, a game that encouraged players to go outside and explore the real world.
And for the last few months, it’s been happening with Wordle.
The Hugo Awards are arguably the most prestigious prize in the science fiction and fantasy community, but it took until 2021 for the members of Worldcon (AKA the World Science Fiction Society) to finally recognize video games with an award of their own.
In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, we’ll look at the Hugo’s first foray into video games, as well as another example of gaming’s lax recognition of copyright law, and say goodbye to the man who defined how football was meant to be played as a video game.
Warren Davis spent two decades in the game industry and he is ready to talk some @!#?@!.
The game developer got his start at Gottlieb in the early 1980s and is best known as the creator of Q*bert. Believe it or not, in a nod to the nonsensical “swearing” uttered by the main character, that oddball arcade game was originally known as @!#?@!.
The story of that name change, and more interesting episodes from Davis’s career, can be found in his new memoir, Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Video Arcade Games, which was published late last year by Santa Monica Press:
Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Video Games takes you inside the video arcade game industry during the pivotal decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Warren Davis, the creator of the groundbreaking Q*bert, worked as a member of the creative teams who developed some of the most popular video games of all time, including Joust 2, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, and Revolution X.
In a witty and entertaining narrative, Davis shares insightful stories that offer a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to work as a designer and programmer at the most influential and dominant video arcade game manufacturers of the era, including Gottlieb, Williams/Bally/Midway, and Premiere.
Whether you’re looking for insights into the Golden Age of Arcades, would like to learn how Davis first discovered his design and programming skills as a teenager working with a 1960s computer called a Monrobot XI, or want to get the inside scoop on what it was like to film the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band Aerosmith for Revolution X, Davis’s memoir provides a backstage tour of the arcade and video game industry during its most definitive and influential period.
After Gottlieb, Davis spent most of his career at Midway, providing assistance on groundbreaking arcade classics such as Mortal Kombat, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and NBA Jam. Not only did he help make “digitized graphics” a household phrase, but he even got one of his former co-workers, Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon, to pen the Foreward for Creating Q*bert.
Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Video Games was released in November and should be available wherever you get your books.
With the right circumstances, it’s possible for a logo to break free from the company it represents and become an iconic piece of history in its own right. It’s easy to point to Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox as some of the most prominent examples in gaming, but they’re not the only ones.
Bite-Sized Game History is back with the working designs of one such logo, as well a former wrestler’s previously-unknown connection to one of the most infamous games of the 1990s, and a farewell to an influential engineer you might not know.
Just a few months after hosting a “Best Video Game of All Time Bracket” for their readers, IGN is back with the latest update to their staff-curated “Top 100 Games of All Time” list.
Games in our top 100 have to measure up to a few key metrics: how great a game it was when it launched, how fun it is to still play today, and how much the game reflects the best in its class. While past versions of this list have put a big emphasis on a game’s impact and influence, we’ve essentially taken that out of the equation. Many games that left a mark and inspired future developers may not stand the test of time and be all that fun to play right now. Or, quite simply, they may have been surpassed by other games.
With all of that said, IGN’s list reflects the current staff’s 100 best games of all time – a collection of games that continue to captivate us with their stories, wow us with their revelatory approach to game design, and set the standards for the rest of the industry.
This year’s update is the seventh iteration of the list, which was first published all the way back in 2003. That group of editors and staff writers chose Super Mario Bros. for as the greatest game of all time. Mario’s first super-sized adventure is still hanging around the upper reaches of IGN’s list (it’s at #21), but a different Nintendo-published title claimed the top spot in 2021.
It’s something of a rare occurrence for journalists in Japan to produce a list of the best games of all time. Typically, this process is turned over to the public, with the results hinging on huge write-in campaigns from passionate fans across the country. Such was the case earlier this week, when TV Asahi aired “50,000 People Vote! The Video Game General Election” just after Christmas.
As you might have guessed from the name of the special, TV Asahi polled more than 50,000 viewers to create their list. You’ll probably also be unsurprised to find out that games from Japanese developers dominated the Top 100. Nintendo-published titles accounted for nearly half the list (42 in all) and Square Enix (with 25 entries) wasn’t too far behind.
Stepping beyond those two powerhouses, you’ll find a smattering of games from Atlus (including Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal), as well as a handful from Capcom (most notably, a quartet of games from the Monster Hunter series). In the end, just six titles from the list were developed outside of Japan (Respawn’s Apex Legends, Behavior’s Dead By Daylight, Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima, Mojang’s Minecraft, Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris, and Toby Fox’s Undertale).
The full list was helpfully transcribed by Famitsu, and you can find it below (North American translations are used when available).
