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 Launches Preservation-Focused Videogame Heritage Society in UK

The National Videogame Museum, located in Sheffield in the United Kingdom, has launched the Videogame Heritage Society, a new video game preservation initiative that will bring together a network of libraries, museums, and collectors.

The Videogame Heritage Society is a collaborative project that aims to share knowledge with all members about the best way to preserve and exhibit video games:

The National Videogame Museum is launching a new initiative today at BFI Southbank, leading a network of museums and independent collectors who are engaged in videogame preservation. The Videogame Heritage Society (VHS) includes the Science and Media Museum, Bath Spa University, British Library and Museum of London as well as many independent collectors. It will develop best practice and share knowledge across the museum sector and beyond about preserving and exhibiting videogames.

“This group is for anyone who cares about or works in videogame preservation,” said British Games Institute Chairman Ian Livingstone. “We recognise that in the UK and around the world, the expertise in this field isn’t just locked inside museums and heritage institutions, but also inside a wide range of dedicated and passionate private collectors. The VHS will bring everyone together to preserve the important heritage of videogames in our country.”

More information about the Videogame Heritage Society can be found at The BGI‘s official website.

House House’s Untitled Goose Game Wins “Game of the Year” at 2019-2020 DICE Awards

I guess The Goose can cross “Win a Few Major Awards” off of its To-Do List. And that’s because House House’s Untitled Goose Game won “Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game,” “Outstanding Achievement in Character,” and “Game of the Year” at this year’s DICE Awards.

While the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’s voting body (which is comprised of more than 30,000 members) loves The Goose, it was Remedy’s Control that took home the most statuettes last night. Predictably, the outstanding action game won “Action Game of the Year,” as well as “Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction,” “Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition,” and “Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction.” Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding was the only other game to win multiple awards, with the AIAS honoring it with “Outstanding Technical Achievement” and “Outstanding Achievement in Audio Design.”

A nice array of other games were also big winners at the 2019-2020 DICE Awards, including Sayonara Wild Hearts (“Portable Game of the Year”), Apex Legends (“Online Game of the Year”), Super Mario Maker 2 (“Family Game of the Year”), Mortal Kombat 11 (“Fighting Game of the Year”), Baba Is You (“Outstanding Achievement in Game Design”), and more.

The complete list of winners and nominees for the 2019-2020 DICE Awards can be found after the break, along with a video replay of the ceremony.

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The Only Known Nintendo PlayStation Prototype is Being Sold at Auction

The failed collaboration between Nintendo and Sony to produce a CD-ROM add-on for the Super NES has become the stuff of legend. The details of the falling out have been documented pretty extensively over the years, and war stories from all the major players have appeared in both David Sheff’s Game Over and Blake Harris’s Console Wars.

While we all know the story, what became of the small batch of prototype consoles produced by the two companies has always been a mystery. More than 200 Nintendo PlayStations were reportedly produced, and it’s assumed that most were destroyed, but one managed to escape the trash heap by hiding out in “a box of junk” previously owned by former Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Olaf Olafsson.

After his stint at Sony, Olafsson would take a job with Advanta Corporation, and this “box of junk” went with him, but when the financial company went bankrupt in 2009, the Nintendo PlayStation was left behind. It was found by Terry Diebold, who worked in Advanta’s maintenance department, and eventually made its way into the hands of his son, Dan.

Now, after game historians have examined and repaired the one-of-a-kind artifact, it’s going up for auction. The Diebolds are selling the prototype through Heritage Auctions, and as of this writing, the current bid is sitting at $145,000. And it’s unlikely to stop there, as proxy bids will continue to be taken until the start of the live auction on March 6.

So what will you get for your money? According to Heritage, the console features a fully-functioning Super Famicom cartridge slot:

We at Heritage can attest the prototype is working, as we’ve played a couple of rounds of Mortal Kombat on it using a Super Famicom cartridge.

The CD drive is also functional, but as no software was produced for the Nintendo PlayStation, all it can do is play music CDs:

Though the CD-ROM drive was not currently working when it was found in 2009, it has since been repaired by Benjamin Heckendorn, a YouTube personality known for his console repair videos. It now has the ability to play music CDs like the commercially produced PlayStation, but there is no proprietary software that’s known to have been made during the prototype’s development.

Heritage refers to the Nintendo PlayStation as “one of the most notorious, mysterious, and controversial artifacts of the video game industry” and it’s hard to argue with that.

Bite-Sized Game History: Diablo’s Satanic Panic, Background Weirdos in The Simpsons, and the World’s First Glimpse at The Sims

Sometimes, a game’s secrets are buried so deep that they take decades to find. But as long as you know where to look, other secrets are sitting out for all the world to see and just waiting for an eager player to discover them.

Let’s examine three games from the latter group in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

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The “Spider-Man Script Book” is Now Available in Book Stores

Insomniac’s Jon Paquette wants the world to know what a game script looks like. Paquette was the head writer on Spider-Man, which was released for the PS4 to near-universal acclaim in 2018. Since then, he’s been hard at work trying to get the game’s script published by meeting regularly with his bosses at Insomniac, Sony, and Marvel.

According to Paquette, there isn’t a lot of publicly-available information on how to develop a game script, and he wanted to pull back the curtain a bit on the process. So after a lot of back-and-forth, the three companies are finally ready to share a written version of the game’s story with fans, and will jointly publish the Spider-Man Script Book later this week:

Go behind the scenes of the smash hit video game sensation with the complete script to Marvel’s Spider-Man… together with a stunning gallery of artwork from the production process! The life of Peter Parker and that of his ever-amazing alter ego are about to collide in major fashion in this all-new take on the world of the wall-crawler, filled with fan-favorite characters… including Mary Jane, Aunt May, Norman Osborn, Otto Octavius and Miles Morales… spun into an unexpected web of drama, spectacle and classic action in the Mighty Marvel Manner!

When Spidey finally removes the Kingpin of Crime from the mean streets of the Big Apple, how will the mysterious Mister Negative’s ascent to power bring Peter’s two worlds crashing together? Learn how the words and the world of a blockbuster hit video game are crafted, and feast your eyes on a wealth of bonus content, via text and art from the team at Insomniac Games and fan-favorite Marvel writers such as Christos Gage!

The 240-page hardcover will include concept art and screenshots paired with text from all the game’s cutscenes. Earlier this week, Paquette shared part of the process with Vice and said that the entire script for Spider-Man runs much closer to 400,000 words and over 2,000 pages):

Insomniac’s take on the popular Marvel character was celebrated not just for how joyous it was to swing around the city of New York, but for telling a damn good Spider-Man story, too. It punted straight past the origin story, starting eight years into superhero-ing, and grounded Peter Parker’s reality with some fresh twists, such as Mary Jane working at the Daily Bugle.

Paquette was not the only writer who contributed to the game, either. It was a group effort involving several other writers, and Paquette actually includes the “designers” as writers, too.

“The other part is writing the [game] experience,” he said. “This is the part that not a lot of people really understand. It’s very collaborative. We work for the designers in this capacity, because the designers come up with the gameplay and we help them structure the experience.”

The Spider-Man Script Book will be available on store shelves on February 11, but you can get an early peak at a few of the interior pages at Marvel.com right now.

The Washington Post Picks Ten Titles as “The Most Influential Games of the Decade”

The calendar is nearing the end of January, but here I am sifting through yet another “Best Games of the Decade” list. This time around, the Launcher team at The Washington Post gets their time in the sun, as they chose ten games to stand tall as “The Most Influential Games of the Decade“:

Gaming is now humanity’s favorite form of entertainment, and the medium’s legacy was cemented this past decade. While the early 2000s saw video games honing their ability to tell stories and build worlds in 3-D, this last decade built off those nuts and bolts of game making and propelled the medium toward bigger ambitions like open-world design, virtual and augmented reality and an influx of new genres such as battle-royale multiplayer.

The chronological list begins with 2010’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent, continues through the middle of the decade with 2014’s Destiny, and ends with 2017’s Fortnite. In between, you’ll find a few other familiar titles, as well as a more unusual choice in King’s Candy Crush Saga:

The Washington Post’s Launcher – The Most Influential Games of the Decade

  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent
  • Candy Crush Saga
  • Dark Souls
  • Destiny
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Fortnite
  • Minecraft
  • Pokemon Go
  • The Walking Dead
  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Apologies to all the games from 2018 and 2019 that didn’t make the cut for The Washington Post’s list.

Kosmic Shaves Less Than Half a Second Off His Super Mario Bros. “Any%” World Record (and Then Retires)

KosmicD12 has completed his last “Any Percentage” speedrun of Super Mario Bros..

The Mario maestro has set multiple world records over the years (including a blistering time of 4:55.96 in 2018), but his most recent feat of crackerjack platforming might just be unbeatable. Using a combination of Warp Zones, glitches, and his own tip-top thumbs, KosmicD12 shaved a little less than half a second off his previous record, and finished the game in an astonishing four minutes and 55.646 seconds.

He then promptly delivered a short retirement speech and walked away from any future “Any Percentage” attempts:

“This is everything I have ever wanted to accomplish in this speedrun, and even a little bit more. It is still improvable but I am not interested in the ridiculous things required to beat this, so that’s history for someone else to write!”

KosmicD12 still plans to keep playing Super Mario Bros., but he’s looking for a new challenge today. He said he’d like to tackle some of the game’s other speedrunning categories, which he’ll continue to chronicle on his Twitch channel.

Listology 3.0: North American Critics Choose the Best Video Games of All Time

A few weeks ago, I reordered the Video Game Canon to focus solely on the picks made by UK publications. That Listology article, Critics from the UK Choose the Best Video Games of All Time, was an interesting look at how our friends across the pond feel about some of the “universally-acclaimed” classics. They weren’t too fond of games like Contra and Tecmo Bowl and Ninja Gaiden, but they had a lot of praise for homegrown heroes like Sensible Soccer and Elite and Lemmings.

But what would Version 3.0 of the Video Game Canon look like if I flipped the switch the other way? What if North American publications had all the power? Let’s find out…

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Slant Magazine Highlights the Games That Point the Way Forward in “The 100 Best Video Games of the 2010s”

Slant Magazine has published a list of the “100 Greatest Video Games of All Time” twice in recent years, and both times they’ve included 2010’s Red Dead Redemption as the highest-ranked game from the previous decade (#4 in 2014 and #2 in 2018). But the publication’s editors went in a different direction for “The 100 Best Video Games of the 2010s,” awarding the #1 spot to Yoko Taro’s Nier: Automata instead.

Rockstar’s western would have to settle for the #8 spot in Slant’s reevaluation of the decade.

For the remainder of the list, Slant’s staff looked to “the games that point the way forward” as they chose to focus on how much the game industry has changed in the last ten years:

This was the decade that saw tiny studios, lone creators, and crazy concepts reign supreme. This was the decade that saw every platform become a viable place for ideas to sprout and bloom. The limits of the medium are seemingly bound only by the human imagination, and at every level, regardless of the horsepower needed, it now feels like anything is possible.

So which other games from the past does Slant think can give us a glimpse at the future? The Top Ten includes a few obvious picks (Mass Effect 2 at #4 and God of War at #5) while also veering off the road less traveled (Outer Wilds at #7 and Superhot at #9).

Further down the list, which is available below, you’ll find titles as varied as PT (#41), Tales From the Borderlands (#51), Gorogoa (#90), and 91 others.

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Wired Goes Their Own Way With “The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames”

“The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.”

Whether you attribute this quote to George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde, it turned out to be fairly accurate when comparing “The Best Games of the Decade” lists created by Wired and Wired UK. The publications could only agree on three games… Mojang’s Minecraft, From Software’s Dark Souls, and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Instead, Wired’s “The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames” hit upon some rather obscure indies in the bottom half of their Top Ten (including Thirty Flights of Loving, Pathologic 2, and Cibele), before locking on to some more mainstream titles (including the aforementioned trio) in the Top Five:

Wired – The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames

  • 1. Fortnite
  • 2. Minecraft
  • 3. Dark Souls
  • 4. Gone Home
  • 5. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  • 6. PT
  • 7. Nier
  • 8. Cibele
  • 9. Pathologic 2
  • 10. Thirty Flights of Loving

In between, the outlet delivered a nice little note about Hideo Kojima’s PT, the legendary Silent Hills demo that never got the chance to become a full game, as well as Fulbright’s Gone Home, and Square Enix’s Nier.

But it was Epic’s Fortnite that landed at #1 on Wired’s list, with Julie Muncy praising the battle royale as “one of the only games of the decade to truly infiltrate broader pop culture.”