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.

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.

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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).

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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…

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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.

Supergiant’s Hades Collects Another “Game of the Year” Statuette at the 2020-2021 GDC Awards

This year’s Game Developers Conference is operating slightly out of sync with its normal spot on the calendar, but it was still business as usual (in more ways than one) for the 2020-2021 Game Developers Choice (GDC) Awards.

Ghost of Tsushima, Hades, and The Last of Us Part II tied for the most nominations with six apiece, so competition was stiff for the night’s biggest prize, but it was Hades that took home “Game of the Year” (as well as “Best Audio” and “Best Design”) during last night’s virtual ceremony.

Supergiant’s roguelike just narrowly missed a clean sweep of all the major year-end awards, and the only statuette to elude the veteran developers was the “rising angel” from The Game Awards, which instead went to Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II.

As you may have guessed, Sony’s one-two punch from the PS4’s final Summer didn’t go home empty-handed. The Last of Us Part II was selected as the recipient of the “Best Narrative” award, while Ghost of Tsushima picked up “Best Visual Art” and the “Audience Award.”

Other games that expanded their trophy case last night included Genshin Impact (“Best Mobile Game”), Half-Life: Alyx (“Best VR/AR Game”), Microsoft Flight Simulator (“Best Technology”), Dreams (“Innovation Award”), and Phasmophobia (“Best Debut”)

You can find a full list of all the winners, nominees, and Honorable Mentions from the 2020-2021 Game Developers Choice Awards, as well as a video replay of the show (which was hosted by writer Sam Maggs), after the break.

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Former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime is Writing a Memoir

Thanks to his penchant for saying the right thing at the right time, Reggie Fils-Aime completely transformed Nintendo of America’s public image during his tenure as President and Chief Operating Officer from 2006 through 2019. For more than a decade, he played host and ringmaster during Nintendo’s public presentations and his irreverent attitude and larger-than-life persona encouraged fans to look at the company in a new light.

After his retirement in 2019, Fils-Aime put pen to paper and began to write a memoir about his early life, his time in the game industry, and his thoughts about succeeding in business. Over the weekend we learned that the book will be known as Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo, and that it’ll be published on May 22, 2022 by HarperCollins Leadership:

Although he’s best known as Nintendo’s iconic President of the Americas-immortalized for opening Nintendo’s 2004 E3 presentation with, “My name is Reggie, I’m about kicking ass, I’m about taking names, and we’re about making games”-Reggie Fils-Aime’s story is the ultimate gameplan for anyone looking to beat the odds and achieve success.

Learn from Reggie how to leverage disruptive thinking to pinpoint the life choices that will make you truly happy, conquer negative perceptions from those who underestimate or outright dismiss you, and master the grit, perseverance, and resilience it takes to dominate in the business world and to reach your professional dreams.

Disrupting the Game will also touch on Fils-Aime’s “humble childhood as the son of Haitian immigrants,” as well as how to “maintain relentless curiosity and know when to ask questions to shatter the status quo.”

As Fils-Aime famously said when introducing the Wii Balance Board and Wii Fit in 2007… my body is ready.

UPDATE (2/2/22): HarperCollins Leadership has announced that Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo will be published on May 3, 2022.

UPDATE (5/3/22): Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo is now available in stores, and Reggie was kind enough to share an excerpt from the book, all about his quest to convince Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto to bundle every Wii with a copy of Wii Sports, with The Washington Post.

A Copy of id Software’s PC Port of Super Mario Bros. 3 Has Been Donated to the Strong Museum

David Kushner meticulously detailed the story of id Software’s founding in 2003’s Masters of Doom, tracking the legendary development team’s history back through the creation of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. But before all that, John Carmack and John Romero approached Nintendo with the idea of releasing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the PC.

Nintendo’s signature brand of platforming wasn’t possible on the underpowered PCs of the time, but Carmack cracked the code in 1990 with the creation of his “smooth scrolling” engine. Sensing that this was a very big deal, the team (then known as IFD: Ideas from the Deep) got to work producing a prototype to show Nintendo:

Over those seventy-two hours, they fell into crunch mode. […] They got the game down to a T: Mario’s squat little walk, the way he bopped the animated tiles, sending out the coins, the way he leapt on the turtles and kicked their shells, the clouds, the Venus’s-flytraps, the pipes, the smooth scrolling. By the time they finished, the game was virtually identical to the bestselling hit in the world. The only noticeable difference was the title screem, which, under the Nintendo copyright, credited the makers, a company name the guys borrowed from Romero and Lane, Ideas from the Deep.

Unsurprisingly, Nintendo rejected the demo, but the new technology inspired IFD to create their own game, Commander Keen, and adopt the more familiar id Software moniker a year later.

According to Kushner, the developers eagerly shared their adaptation of Super Mario Bros. 3 with friends and collaborators as they worked on Commander Keen, and in 2015, Romero gave us a peek at what could have been when he uploaded a short playthrough of the prototype to his Vimeo channel:

Even though it was apparently distributed far and wide, this important piece of PC gaming history stayed hidden for more than 30 years. But a new report on Ars Technica has revealed that a floppy disk containing id’s Super Mario Bros. 3 prototype was recently donated to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY.

The Strong Museum, which also operates the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) and the World Video Game Hall of Fame, said they will make the prototype available to historians and researchers upon request. There’s also the possibility that it could find its way into a public exhibit in the future.

My only question is, what happens when you type in “IDDQD”?

Explore the Music of “Final Fantasy VI” in Boss Fight Books #28

Boss Fight Books is closing the door on their fifth “Season” of titles with today’s release of Final Fantasy VI from Sebastian Deken.

With its novel fusion of magic and technology, Square’s Final Fantasy VI (which was originally released in the US in 1994 as Final Fantasy III) helped usher in a new era for the RPG genre and turned Terra, Locke, and Kefka into household names. The epic grandeur of the story was further enhanced by the rousing character themes and operatic flourishes found in Nobuo Uematsu’s score.

Deken, who is also a musician by trade, looked at how the RPG’s world intertwined with its soundtrack, as well as how Uematsu inspired other game composers to dream a bit bigger:

Terra the magical half-human. Shadow the mysterious assassin. Celes the tough, tender general. Kefka the fool who would be god. Each of the many unforgettable characters in Final Fantasy VI has made a huge impression on a generation of players, but why do we feel such affection for these 16-bit heroes and villains as so many others fade? The credit goes to the game’s score, composed by the legendary Nobuo Uematsu.

Armed with newly translated interviews and an expert ear for sound, writer and musician Sebastian Deken conducts a critical analysis of the musical structures of FF6, the game that pushed the Super Nintendo’s sound capabilities to their absolute limits and launched Uematsu’s reputation as the “Beethoven of video game music.”

Deken ventures deep into the game’s lush soundscape—from its expertly crafted leitmotifs to its unforgettable opera sequence—exploring the soundtrack’s lasting influence and how it helped clear space for game music on classical stages around the world.

Final Fantasy VI is now available in print and as an ebook through your favorite online bookseller.