Just days after a sealed and graded copy of The Legend of Zelda sold at auction for $870,000, a similarly-preserved copy of Super Mario 64 sold for nearly twice that amount… $1.56 million to be exact.
This is the first time a single game has sold for more than a million dollars, but surprisingly, there’s not much that’s particularly noteworthy about this copy of Mario’s first 3D adventure.
I guess Mario isn’t the only classic video game character who can bring in the big bucks from collectors.
On Friday, Heritage Auctions held their first standalone “Video Game Signature Auction” and auctioneers brought the hammer down on a sealed and graded copy of The Legend of Zelda for $870,000. This eye-popping price isn’t just impressively high, it also set a new record for a single game transaction.
There’s usually not much entertainment value to be found in the dollars and cents of a corporate financial call, but the Q&A during Nintendo’s Annual General Meeting of Shareholders is usually an exception.
The dialogue between the consolemaker’s executive team and shareholders is oftentimes bizarre, and the questions are never what you’d expect. In one infamous exchange from a few years ago, a shareholder used their time to say “I do not understand video games” and then scolded the executives for talking too much about “childish topics.”
This year’s Q&A (the company’s 81st overall) was no exception, but one shareholder was able to ask the executives, including legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto, about their favorite games.
There’s a lot that can link two video games together. Sometimes it can be as simple as a few developers in common, but other times it can be an influential game mechanic or even a subtle in-game reference that hints at a connection between two universes.
What do Blizzard’s StarCraft, BioWare’s Mass Effect, and Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog have in common? Not much actually, but all three are featured in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.
The future of the E3 Expo is once again on shaky ground.
The Electronic Entertainment Expo split off from the Consumer Electronics Show in 1995 and originally served as a place for the game industry to show retailers what they had in development for the holiday shopping season. But mainstream media attention soon followed, allowing the event to grow in size and spectacle over the next decade.
After a 2007 rebrand as the slimmed down “E3 Media and Business Summit” failed, the event continued to hum along as an important date on the Summer calendar for yet another decade. Even after the introduction of a wide range of digital showcases from the major publishers (including all three consolemakers), as well as the rise of player-focused events such as PAX, E3’s importance as a one-stop-shop for major announcements is only somewhat on the wane.
But that hasn’t stopped game journalists from musing about the future of E3, even before the 2020 event was canceled in the face of the coronavirus pandemic…
You’ve probably heard it before, but did you know that Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card manufacturer? Nintendo was known as The Nintendo Playing Card Company for much of its early history, and though they’ve spent the last 40 years as one the best video game developers in the world, they still produce playing cards and hanafuda cards to this day.
All this history will soon be on display for the public as Nintendo has announced plans to repurpose one of their shuttered manufacturing plants in Kyoto to construct the Nintendo Gallery, a museum dedicated to all their wonderful toys and games.
Scheduled for completion during Nintendo’s 2023 fiscal year (which runs from April 1, 2023 through March 31, 2024), the Nintendo Gallery will feature “exhibits and experiences” that highlight the company’s “product development history and philosophy.”
Nintendo doesn’t have any specific plans for the museum as of yet, but an artist’s rendering of what the facility might look like is pictured above.
That headline might sound like some kind of bizarre April Fool’s Day hoax, but I promise, every word of it is true. Someone (two someones, actually) found an extended director’s cut of the Super Mario Bros. movie adaptation from 1993 on an old VHS tape.
So who managed to sniff out such an odd piece of cinematic history? That would be Ryan Hoss and Steven Applebaum, the operators of Super Mario Bros.: The Movie Archive and the caretakers of an extensive collection of production material related to the film.
Trust the fungus and read on to learn more about Super Mario Bros.‘s almost-mythic place in the video game movie canon and how this extended cut will give fans a glimpse at a version of the movie that’s even crazier than what we got in 1993…
Sonic the Hedgehog spin dashed his way into our hearts nearly 30 years ago, and Sega is celebrating in style with a hefty range of new projects featuring their “Blue Blur,” all of which will launch throughout the year and into 2022.
One of those new projects, which is being produced in conjunction with Dark Horse, is a history book punningly titled Sonic the Hedgehog Encyclo-Speed-ia:
Dive deep into the extensive lore and exhaustive detail of each game in Sonic’s ever-expanding universe–from the beloved Sega Genesis to the most bleeding-edge video game consoles. This tome leaves no stone unturned, showcasing in-depth looks at the characters, settings, and stories from each exciting installment!
This encyclopedic retelling of Sonic’s adventures will be written by Ian Flynn, who has plenty of previous experience with the character. His career began at Archie Comics, where he penned more than 130 issues of their Sonic the Hedgehog series from 2006 until 2016. Flynn is currently the Head Writer for IDW’s Sonic the Hedgehog comic series, a job he’s held since they picked up the license in 2017.
Dark Horse will publish the Sonic the Hedgehog Encyclo-Speed-ia in hardcover and as an ebook on November 24.
Embracer Group, the many-tentacled parent company of THQ Nordic, Deep Silver, Gearbox, and a half-dozen other publishing labels, has announced plans to open a video game archive in Karlstad, Sweden.
While lots of publishers are extremely thorough about preserving production assets, prototypes, and source code for the games they create, what Embracer is doing with their archive is fairly unique.
Using CEO Lars Wingefors’s personal game library as a starting point, Embracer has built a collection containing over 50,000 different games, consoles, and accessories. You can see the “secret” underground vault that houses the collection (and a portion of the games) in this new video featuring the archive’s Game Historian, Martin Lindell:
The archive’s collection currently stretches all the way back to the launch games for the Magnavox Odyssey, and Embracer’s goal is to obtain the European, American, and Japanese editions of every game ever made:
For us, games are more than just games. It is culture. It is something created by great people with creative ideas. By building a large games archive, we want to preserve and tribute the gaming culture for a long period of time.
The journey has already begun and it is time to take the next step. Our goal is clear – We want to archive and display as much of the video game industry as possible. Hopefully you will join us on our journey.
The Embracer Group Games Archive isn’t open to the public yet, but they hope to welcome researchers in the near future as the archive becomes more accessible.
There usually isn’t a theme associated with the World Video Game Hall of Fame‘s annual induction ceremony, but a desire to explore new destinations seems to be at the core of each of this year’s selections. We’ll probably never know if this is just a coincidence or a reaction to last year’s pandemic-related lockdowns, but it’s certainly something to think about it.
On that note, fresh off the success of last year’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the first member of the Class of 2021 is Nintendo’s Animal Crossing, a game where players move to a new town and meet a wide variety of colorful characters as they build their home. Likewise, the 2020 launch of the newest edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator probably helped the original 1982 release succeed in its bid for Hall of Fame immortality.
The Class of 2021 also includes Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, an “edutainment” classic where players follow the clues and chase a master thief across the globe. And finally, Blizzard’s StarCraft was inducted this year after it sent players hurtling across the galaxy for an RTS space opera that also rewrote the rules for esports.
Historians and curators from the World Video Game Hall of Fame shared their own thoughts about what made each of these games special in a short video, which can be found after the break.
