Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.

National Videogame Museum Opens “The Animal Crossing Diaries” Online Exhibition

The National Videogame Museum began collecting stories about the public’s lockdown-fueled fascination with Animal Crossing: New Horizons back in August 2020. The museum’s curators and archivists solicited hundreds of diary entries from players all around the world, all of whom were more than happy to share the details of their island adventures with Tom Nook, Isabelle, Blathers, and all the other villagers.

Now, after more than a year of hard work, the NVM is finally ready to open the virtual doors to their Animal Crossing Diaries online exhibition:

While the world was on pause, the island paradises of Animal Crossing: New Horizons thrived, welcoming those in isolation with open arms (and paws). The game became a routine part of everyday life. Cancelled plans were reimagined and reprogrammed to the virtual sandy shores of players’ islands. For many people unable to socialise in real life, the game became a vital creative space for personal connection.

Using Animal Crossing: New Horizons to maintain that personal connection with friends and family quickly became a huge part of the game’s appeal. Players also gravitated towards it’s strong emphasis on creativity and personal style, as well as the importance it placed on maintaining a daily routine. The NVM saw these common threads appear again and again throughout the diaries, ultimately sorting each entry into one of five categories:

Keeping A Routine – Faced with an uncertain day to day life in lockdown, players turned towards the game for an escape. If you couldn’t find a comforting routine in real life, the game could provide. For many players, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was not a comforting distraction. It saved 2020.

Making Your Space – An island can be a place of comfort to create a world that expresses its player’s personality. It can be a social, artistic and cultural space shared with others across the world. For some it is a space in which processing feelings of stress, anxiety and grief can take place. Players making spaces to travel, connect and share experiences opened up new possibilities. For many players, events were accessible for the first time via virtual spaces.

Representing Yourself – Many games, like Animal Crossing, have a main hero you can customize to look like you.

Sharing Creativity – The closure of museums and other cultural events limited access to creativity. And while the island does have its own museum of art, insects, fish and fossils, it also has a range of design options. You can create your own outfits, patterns and even games! Players could recreate cultural and artistic events that couldn’t happen in 2020.

Staying In Touch – For many people, the pandemic means social distancing from friends and family. This creates a sense of isolation many struggle with. In the game, welcoming new neighbours to your island placed a big focus on social connections.

Visitors to the Animal Crossing Diaries exhibition can also explore diary entries through a timeline feature that highlights important days on the New Horizons calendar (like Wedding Season and Toy Day), along with more impromptu in-game events (such as Biden Island and Pride Month) that were created by the players themselves.

The NVM plans to maintain and expand the Animal Crossing Diaries exhibition project going forward, and you can add your story to the collection using their Online Submission Form.

Bite-Sized Game History: Independence Day Online, Lucasfilm Games’s Founding, and Superman: Blue Steel

LucasArts and Factor 5 were joined at the hip in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But what sorts of games did LucasArts create before their collaboration? And what happened to Factor 5 after the Rogue Squadron series faltered? Oh, and where does the long-forgotten Independence Day Online fit in with both companies?

Find out in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History…

[Continue Reading…]

2020 GOTY Scoreboard: Hades, The Last of Us Part II, and More

Nintendo made last year’s pandemic-related lockdowns more bearable with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Naughty Dog ruled the Summer with The Last of Us Part II. CD Projekt finally showed us their vision of the future with Cyberpunk 2077. And Valve brought virtual reality to a new level with Half-Life: Alyx (the first expansion to the Half-Life franchise in over a decade).

Oh, and Sony and Microsoft each launched brand new consoles in November.

But it was Hades, developed by the small team at Supergiant Games, that walked out of Hell with the most “Game of the Year” accolades in 2020.

You can find the other four, as well as more of last year’s most-acclaimed titles, after the break in the 2020 GOTY Scoreboard.

[Continue Reading…]

Wata Games, Heritage Auctions, and the Suspected Fraud at the Center of the Graded Games Market

The market for retro games has exploded exponentially in the last few years, with the record for the price paid for a single game rising steadily from just over $30,000 in July 2017 to $114,000 in July 2020, $660,000 in April 2021, and $1,560,000 in July 2021. Earlier this month the record climbed again to $2,000,000.

It would be easy to chalk this phenomenon up to an aging base of collectors ready to spend their hard-earned dollars on something they could never obtain as children. After all, you saw the same thing with comic books and baseball cards in the 1980s and 1990s.

But something else might be going on here…

[Continue Reading…]

Jeopardy! Guest Hosts Ranked: Who Did the Internet Pick as the Best of the Bunch?

OK, you caught me, ranking the guest hosts who’ve appeared on Jeopardy! this season is slightly outside the purview of Video Game Canon.

But there have been a lot of video game adaptations of the show over the years, and the firestorm surrounding the selection of Mike Richards as the permanent host (and his quick exit from that job just a week-and-change later) makes figuring out who the next host should be a very interesting question.

Plus, I’m a huge Jeopardy! fan, and I’ve been slightly obsessed with this whole process from the beginning.

[Continue Reading…]

Now Available in Stores: Steven L. Kent’s “The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2”

If you want a good overview of the video game industry’s early days, Steven L. Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games is a great place to start. Beginning with a quick primer on the pinball craze of the 1930s, the author quickly introduces readers to touchstones like Spacewar, Ralph Baer’s Brown Box, and Pong. Hitting all the highlights from the next 30 years over the book’s 600 pages, the story culminates with the launch of the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox in 2000-2001.

But a lot has happened since then, and so Steven L. Kent has returned with The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming. As you might have gleaned from the title, he picks up right where he left off with the turn-of-the-millennium’s four-way fight for console supremacy (you can’t forget about the Dreamcast), but the book also delves into the later PS3-Xbox 360-Wii era:

The home console boom of the ’90s turned hobby companies like Nintendo and Sega into Hollywood-studio-sized business titans. But by the end of the decade, they would face new, more powerful competitors. In boardrooms on both sides of the Pacific, engineers and executives began, with enormous budgets and total secrecy, to plan the next evolution of home consoles. The PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Sega Dreamcast all made radically different bets on what gamers would want. And then, to the shock of the world, Bill Gates announced the development of the one console to beat them all—even if Microsoft had to burn a few billion dollars to do it.

A short excerpt touching on Ken Kutaragi’s tenure at Sony’s is available on the official website for the book’s publisher, Crown.

The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming is available to purchase from your favorite bookstore (or digitally as an ebook) beginning today.

Long-Defunct Flux Magazine Picked “The Top 100 Video Games” All the Way Back in 1995

With the 2021 Update to the Video Game Canon just around the corner, I thought it would fun to look at one of the historical lists I plan to add to the calculation in Version 5.0… Flux Magazine’s “The Top 100 Video Games” from 1995.

Proudly featuring the tagline “The most dangerous video game & comic ‘zine” along the top of each issue, Flux Magazine launched in 1994 as a more adult alternative to GamePro and Wizard. The magazine folded a year later after publishing just seven issues, though not before creating one of the first Best Games lists to cover the full spectrum of games available at the time (arcade cabinets, consoles, PC platforms, and handhelds).

[Continue Reading…]

Bite-Sized Game History: Rare Version of Minecraft Found, Ralph Baer’s Dollar Coin, and a Color-Changing Xbox

If you’re someone who plays a lot of video games, odds are you’re also someone who loves to collect things. A lot collectors like to gravitate towards high-priced retro games, but with billions of pieces of game-related ephemera out in the world, there are always other aisles to explore.

For this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at three recent finds that were very exciting for collectors…

[Continue Reading…]

Rally, a “Stock Market for Collectibles,” Sells Their Copy of Super Mario Bros. for $2 Million

Rally, a “stock market of collectibles,” made a splashy entrance into the world of high-value game collecting during the Summer of 2020 when they purchased a sealed and graded copy of Super Mario Bros. for $140,000.

After acquiring the game (which received a 9.8 A+ grade from Wata Games), the company sold 3,000 “shares” in the collectible cartridge to investors for $50 apiece

Rally’s $140,000 purchase set a record for a single game sale at the time, but it’s been eclipsed multiple times in the past year, including twice just in the last month. That’s when this merry-go-round of motivated sellers and deep-pocketed buyers culminated in sales of $870,000 (for a copy of The Legend of Zelda) and $1.56 million (for a copy of Super Mario 64).

But now Rally gets to sit on the top of the mountain for a little while, and that’s because the game’s shareholders have decided to sell their copy of Super Mario Bros. for $2 million to a private collector:

According to The New York Times, each shareholder will receive roughly $475 per share after the sale is completed. That’s honestly a pretty great return on their initial investment.

“The Game Console 2.0” Adds 50 More Consoles to its Photographic Catalog

Evan Amos’s The Game Console dissected the “grisly innards” of more than 80 different platforms when it was first published in 2018. The author explored each machine’s history in a series of short blurbs while also using the “exploded view” photography on each page to dive into the many layers of silicon, plastic, and metal used to build them.

No Starch Press recently announced that this incredible visual study is getting a sequel next month with the release of The Game Console 2.0: A Photographic History from Atari to Xbox, a “Revised and Expanded” edition that’ll add more than 50 consoles, variants, and accessories to the original book:

Revised and updated since the first edition’s celebrated 2018 release, The Game Console 2.0 is an even bigger archival collection of vividly detailed photos of more than 100 video-game consoles. This ultimate archive of gaming history spans five decades and nine distinct generations, chronologically covering everything from market leaders to outright failures, and tracing the gaming industry’s rise, fall, and monumental resurgence.

The book’s 2nd edition features more classic game consoles and computers, a section on retro gaming in the modern era, and dozens of new entries — including super-rare finds, such the Unisonic Champion 2711, and the latest ninth-generation consoles. You’ll find coverage of legendary systems like the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari 2600, NES, and the Commodore 64; systems from the ‘90s and 2000s; modern consoles like the Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5; and consoles you never knew existed.

The Game Console 2.0: A Photographic History from Atari to Xbox will be available in bookstores and as an ebook in August 2021.