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.

A Teenager “Beat” Tetris for the NES After Clearing 1,511 Lines

I’ll bet you thought it was impossible to “beat” Tetris on the NES… but that’s because your name isn’t Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson.

Last month, the Tetris prodigy quite literally broke the game, clearing 1,511 lines before reaching the game’s never-before-seen kill screen. Blue Scuti is just 13 years old, and he’s part of a growing group of young players who have taken over the ranks of pro Tetris.

Blue Scuti and his peers are able to rack up such impressive line totals thanks to a strategy known as rolling. In rolling, the controller is pressed flat against your leg with your thumb hovering over the D-Pad. By tapping the back of the controller with your other hand, you can apply just enough pressure to the D-Pad to make pieces move across the screen (and where you want them to go to clear lines) at even the fastest levels.

While my own personal best of 214 lines is pretty decent for an amateur, Ars Technica explained how the pros are able to use rolling to push beyond the human limits found in a normal game of Tetris:

What makes Blue Scuti’s achievement even more incredible (as noted in some excellent YouTube summaries of the scene) is that, until just a few years ago, the Tetris community at large assumed it was functionally impossible for a human to get much past 290 lines. The road to the first NES Tetris kill screen highlights the surprisingly robust competitive scene that still surrounds the classic game and just how much that competitive community has been able to collectively improve in a relatively short time.

The whole world has come together to congratulate Blue Scuti, including Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, and Henk Rogers, the developer who brought the game to the rest of the world in 1988. A surprise appearance from both men during Blue Scuti’s interview with NBC News gave the young player quite a shock.

Shortly after the new year, two other Tetris players also managed to reach the kill screen: Justin “Fractal161” Yu and Andy “P1xelAndy” Artiaga. Both regularly compete with Blue Scuti in tournaments around the country.

Blue Scuti’s record-setting playthrough was recently shared by Classic Tetris World Championship, and it’s been embedded above. He dedicated this accomplishment to his father, Adam Gibson, who passed away on December 14.

David Craddock Will Explore the Many Ports of Doom for Boss Fight Books in “But Does It Run Doom?”

John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack, and Sandy Petersen changed everything when they released Doom in 1993. It wasn’t the first first person shooter (nor was id Software’s earlier game, Wolfenstein 3D), but it defined what the genre would look like for years to come and led to a stampede of “Doom Clones” that continue to be produced to this very day.

Even after writing all that out, it’s still hard to believe… Doom is 30 years old.

David Craddock, the author behind Stairway to Badass: The Making and Remaking of Doom 2016 and Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters, recently moderated a discussion between Romero and Carmack that has been embedded above. The two developers touched on a lot of interesting topics as part of the anniversary celebration, and at the end, Craddock revealed that he’s cooking up another Doom-adjacent project for release in the not-too-distant future.

The author will work with Boss Fight Books to publish But Does It Run Doom?, an exploration of the many ports (both official and unofficial) that have been based on the seminal shooter. Here’s what he had to say about the new book, including a promise that it’ll also delve into some of the very weird machines Doom has appeared on…

These guys have graciously allowed me to insert a quick plug for a project I have coming out and it’s in the vein of what we’ve been talking about.

I’m partnering with Boss Fight Books to release a book called But Does It Run Doom? I’ll be writing about some of the conventional ports such as the Super Nintendo [and] PlayStation, but also some of the more out-of-leftfield ports such as on pregnancy tests, on the sheep in Minecraft…

So look for that on @BossFightBooks on Twitter [and] BossFightBooks.com. [They’ll] have information coming out.

This is somewhat of a departure for Book Fight Books, but hopefully that means they’ll have more to say about But Does It Run Doom? soon.

1998’s Half-Life and Zelda: Ocarina of Time Lead the Way in the Shacknews Hall of Fame’s Class of 2023

It’s December, and that means the editors at Shacknews are back with yet another batch of inductees for the Shacknews Hall of Fame.

The Shacknews Hall of Fame operates on a 25-year eligibility window, so any game released before or during 1998 is eligible to be enshrined in the outlet’s pantheon of play. The Class of 2023 is the third group of games selected by the site’s editors, and with most of the obvious titles from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s already accounted for, the majority of this year’s inductees were originally released between January 1, 1998 and December 31, 1998 (though one selection, Mario Party, didn’t make it to the US until February 1999).

Among the 38 new additions to the Shacknews Hall of Fame are Half-Life and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the twin titans of 1998 that are perennially at the top of Best Games lists from across the decades. A lot of people have gone to bat for 2023 as one of the best years ever for games, but that sentiment was also in the air during 1998, and those two games are far from alone in the Class of 2023.

Heavy hitters such as Metal Gear Solid, Pokemon Red and Blue, Resident Evil 2, and StarCraft are well represented, as are fan favorites like Banjo-Kazooie, Final Fantasy Tactics, The House of the Dead, and Thief: The Dark Project.

Aside from all this flash and substance, the editors also found some well-deserved space for Nokia’s Snake in the Shacknews Hall of Fame.

All of the titles included in the Shacknews Hall of Fame’s Class of 2023 will be added to the Video Game Canon as part of next year’s update.

Get A Sneak Peek at the Video Game History Foundation’s Digital Library

The Video Game History Foundation has been collecting and digitizing game magazines, press kits, development materials, and the personal papers of several major figures in the games industry since their founding in 2017.

But recently, they took a major step towards making the items on their shelves available to the public with a sneak peek at their long-in-the-works Digital Library. In the video, which is embedded above, Library Director Phil Salvador walks us through how the database will work, using Nintendo Power, Game Players, and the Mark Flitman Papers as examples. There’s also a blog post, Introducing the VGHF Digital Library, explaining a bit more about their progress:

One of the most frequent questions we get is how you can access our collections of rare video game history research materials. Well, wonder no more! For the past two years, we’ve been building a digital platform where you can explore our archives, without having to visit in person. And we think it’s ready to show off.

We’ve put together an 18-minute demo of what our work-in-progress digital library looks like. This is our first look at how you’ll access the resources in our collection—plus an advance preview of the Mark Flitman papers, one of the exciting collections we’ll be rolling out when the library soft-launches next year.

Remember: This is a preview, and some things are a little unfinished! But if we’re all cool with that, we think it’s about time to show you what we’ve been up to.

This is extremely exciting news for researchers and anyone else who wants to dive into gaming’s often mysterious past. If all goes well, the Video Game History Foundation’s Digital Library should be up and running next year.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Wins “Game of the Year” and “Player’s Voice” at the 2023 Game Awards

Geoff Keighley’s Trailer-Palooza took place at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles last night… oh, and he also found the time to hand out The Game Awards too! If it felt like there were even more “World Premiere” trailers than ever before, that was by design. Keighley shortened up the already-pretty-short awards portion of the ceremony this year, limiting acceptance speeches from winners to just 30 seconds.

The Game Awards has jumped from controversy to controversy over the past few weeks, and this latest misstep is just the latest in a long line of mistakes made by Keighley.

Even before the nominees were announced, there were calls for the Game Awards host to open the show with a statement about the thousands of layoffs that have ravaged the game industry this year. More recently, he has been criticized by most of the members of the Game Awards Future Class, who asked him to make some kind of public plea for a “long term ceasefire” in Israel’s war on Gaza. Keighley failed to acknowledge either request during last night’s show, and it’s possible the new rules about acceptance speeches were a way to keep the show on-brand.

So the 2023-2024 awards season began on something of a sour note, but a lot of great games received recognition from the judging panel and the public, even if they didn’t have enough time to thank anyone after receiving their statuette.

Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 was the big winner of the night, and the team climbed the steps to the stage a total of six times, including for “Game of the Year” and “Player’s Voice” (it was also the first time a single game had won both awards). Unsurprisingly, the RPG also won “Best Role Playing Game,” as well as “Best Multiplayer” and “Best Community Support.” Neil Newbon rounded out the game’s haul with a “Best Performance” win for his role as Astarion.

Remedy’s Alan Wake II wasn’t far behind, as the survival horror sequel won three statuettes (for “Best Game Direction,” “Best Narrative,” and “Best Art Direction”).

Even the hype around 2023 as the best year for gaming ever got a nod, with the rest of the night’s awards going to a wide variety of different titles. Just some of the other winners are The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (“Best Action/Adventure Game”), Super Mario Bros. Wonder (“Best Family Game”), Pikmin 4 (“Best Sim/Strategy Game”), Final Fantasy XVI (“Best Score and Music”), Hi-Fi Rush (“Best Audio Design”), and Sea of Stars (“Best Independent Game”).

A video replay of the 2023 Game Awards can be found after the break, along with a list of all the nominees and winners. Hopefully next year they’ll actually get to speak.

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Tetris, Resident Evil 4, and Breath of the Wild Go 1-2-3 in the 2023 Update to the Video Game Canon’s Top 1000

It’s arriving a little later than usual, but the 2023 Update to the Video Game Canon (Version 7.0) is now available.

Four brand new Best Games lists are now included in the calculation, as well as a handful of older lists (including one from 1985). The four newly-published lists come from British GQ (“The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time, Ranked by Experts“), Digital Trends (“The 50 Best Video Games of All Time“), Sports Illustrated/GLHF (“The Best 100 Games of All Time, Ranked“), and USA Today’s For the Win/GLHF (“The 100 Best Video Games of All Time“). Those last two lists appeared about six months apart, and though they share a similar pool of GLHF contributors, they’re fairly different.

Reaching back to 2016, I also added Gamereactor’s “Top 100 All Time Best Games” to the dataset, as well as “The Greatest Games: The 93 Best Computer Games of All Time,” a guidebook to the best games of all time by Dan Gutman and Shay Addams that was published by Compute! Books in 1985. It is, by far, the oldest list within the Video Game Canon, and a fascinating time capsule into what the conversation around games was like almost four decades ago (more than 60 games are unique to this list).

Finally, the Class of 2022 from the “Shacknews Hall of Fame” was added to the Video Game Canon as the site’s editors and contributors continued to expand their massive exploration of everything that’s great about video games.

So how did all of these additions affect the ranking of the Video Game Canon? As in most years, there were a lot of little changes and some very big swings in the standings.

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Every Season of “The Electric Playground” to be Archived at the University of Toronto Mississauga

Victor Lucas is a name you might not know if you’re on the southern side of the Canadian border, but after launching The Electric Playground during the very early days of the World Wide Web, he’s been shaping how we report on and talk about games for nearly 30 years.

The show first came online as a website (ElecPlay.com) in 1995, and Lucas would later lead a newsmagazine-style spinoff of the site for Canadian television beginning in 1997.

Video game news and reviews on television was a bit of a novelty at the time, but The Electric Playground would go on to create the template for a newsmagazine-style show about games during its initial 18-year run and inspired many game journalists to pick up a camera. In addition to its style, the show was responsible for giving Geoff Keighley, creator of The Game Awards, his first on-screen hosting experience. The Electric Playground would spawn a spinoff of its own in 2002 (Reviews on the Run, which aired as Judgment Day in the US), before coming to an end in 2015.

Lucas brought The Electric Playground (which was rebranded as EP Daily in 2008) to YouTube after its cancellation, and he continues to produce new episodes to this day.

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Hit Save! Launches Press Materials Archive for Video Games

Hit Save!, an organization dedicated to the preservation of video games, is back with another excellent resource for anyone interested in exploring how games were promoted to the public. The newly-launched Hit Save! Press Materials Archive includes hundreds of examples of promotional material for a wide variety of games:

The collection includes press kits, promotional material, concept art, trailers, and more, providing invaluable insights into the development and marketing processes behind many classic, well-known, and sometimes obscure video games. A big thank you goes out to Stephen Keating for donating a large portion of digital press material that he has collected over the years.

By sharing these materials and providing public access, we aim to enable new research and scholarship in game studies. The materials reveal rarely seen details about both popular franchises and forgotten gems. We hope they will lead to new discoveries that expand our knowledge of your favorite games and franchises 🙂

Hit Save! has said that the archive will be growing quite a bit in the coming weeks and months, and you can share your own discoveries by joining their Discord server.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild is #1 in “The 100 Greatest Games of Edge’s Lifetime”

The magazine racks at your local bookstore (or even your local Barnes & Noble) are mostly empty these days. And that’s doubly-true for game-focused publications like Nintendo Power, GamePro, and Electronic Gaming Monthly, all of which closed down more than a decade ago.

Those three (and many others) might be gone, but Edge endures. The venerable UK-based magazine launched in October of 1993, and it’s come back again and again to deliver thousands of pages of outstanding game journalism to readers in all the months since.

To celebrate its 30th anniversary, the editors at Edge did what they do best… they put together another Best Games list. But rather than reach all the way back to Pong and the beginning of the video game industry, they kept things simpler and tried to determine “The 100 Greatest Games of Edge’s Lifetime” in Edge 390.

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“Doom At 30” is a “Guide to Thirty Years of Ultra-Violence” from Marc Normandin and Trevor Strunk

Between David Kushner’s Masters of Doom, Dan Pinchbeck’s Doom: SCARYDARKFAST, and John Romero’s Doom Guy, a lot of words have been written about the development of Doom and its impact on the rest of the games industry. But you’ll definitely want to make room on your digital shelves for at least one more upcoming book about id Software’s masterpiece.

Doom At 30: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Three Decades of Ultra-Violence is the brainchild of Marc Normandin (Retro XP) and Trevor Strunk (No Cartridge), who have joined forces as No XP Publishing and gathered together more than a dozen writers to explore the franchise from every possible angle:

DOOM at 30: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Three Decades of Ultra-Violence will be a digital book, zine, whatever you want to call it, that takes a deep and complete look at the 30 years of the franchise. It will include reviews and discussions of every DOOM game — including the ones once thought lost to time, as well as modern add-on episodes like John Romero’s Sigil — the DOOM movies, and an array of features diving in from all angles. The tech, the WADs, the mods, the violence, the terror, its place in various genre canons, and, of course, DOOM 3 opinions. Many, many DOOM 3 opinions. DOOM at 30 might be unofficial and unauthorized, but we want it to be the definitive look back at the franchise’s first 30 years all the same, which is why there’s even more than what’s listed above planned.

The duo is currently seeking funding to publish Doom At 30 through Kickstarter. In addition to the various reward tiers, they’ve also shared who’ll be joining them on this project, and the list includes more than a few names that should be familiar to fans of video game history: Demetrius Bell, Madeline ‘Mads’ Blondeau, Kerry Brunskill, LaToya Ferguson, Elijah Gonzalez, Brendan Hesse, Sorrel Kerr-Jung, Cameron Kunzelman, Liz Ryerson, Colin Spacetwinks, Jackson Tyler, and Carli Velocci.

If you want to get am idea of what Doom At 30 will offer, Normandin recently published several bonus articles that look at how John Carmack and John Romero built their groundbreaking 3D tech and the expanded universe of mods that have arrived in Doom‘s wake.

He talked briefly about id Software’s early experiments in the first person shooter genre (including Hovertank 3D, Catacombs 3D, and Wolfenstein 3D) at RetroXP. And over at Astrolabe, he examined some of the fan-made mods that have emerged over the last 30 years, including Romero’s unofficial fifth episode, Sigil.

The Kickstarter campaign for Doom At 30 will end on Wednesday, September 20.

UPDATE (9/21/23): Doom At 30 was unable to reach its funding goal, but Normandin wrote on Bluesky that he’ll “think up something else to make it happen down the road”.