What did you get from your sweetheart for Valentine’s Day? I’m guessing it was some candy or flowers or jewelry. But it should have been a limited edition copy of Shrek 2 for the originally Xbox.
Don’t worry, I’ll explain.
We’ll also talk about the surprising creation of Gyruss and a very special anniversary because love is in the air of this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.
You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.
A lot of genres from the heyday of arcades have made a comeback in recent years, but the humble tube shooter is not one of them. I can’t say you won’t find any of them on the New Releases tab of your favorite digital storefront, but we’re a long way from Gyruss.
But did you ever wonder how game developers pulled off the pseudo-3D graphical tricks found in your average tube shooter? Developer Mike Mika recently shared the secret. For the aforementioned Gyruss, Konami created a single-screen shooter similar to Galaga and literally flipped the image on its side using a polar algorithm:
Did you know? Konami's Gyruss is essentially Galaga, with similar challenge stages (And techniques), but with coordinates transformed through a polar algorithm? Even the double shot powerup is a big hint. Here's Galaga with its graphics transformed into polar coordinates. pic.twitter.com/xVmTA3d8qh
— Mike Mika (@MikeJMika) February 1, 2021
The collector’s market is currently on a bit of a wild (and probably unsustainable) upward swing thanks to things like a sealed and graded copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 recently selling for $156,000 at auction. But here’s a peak at a truly rare game that comes from a less… let’s say revered… franchise.
Xbox Darkroom recently shined its bring red spotlight on a special Valentine’s Day Edition of Shrek 2 for the original Xbox. It was only available in Taiwan and it came bundled with a bottle of Carolina Herrera 212 perfume. It is quite likely one of the rarest Xbox games ever produced.
Here’s an obscure Chinese Valentine’s Day Edition Shrek 2 for Xbox. It’s bundled with a bottle of Carolina Herrera 212 perfume. I’ve checked with the biggest Xbox collectors out there and nobody else has seen or heard of this bundle, so I’m happy to be able to preserve this! pic.twitter.com/Ny6ltbOT4E
— Xbox Darkroom (@XboxDarkRoom) February 15, 2021
Finally, a question, where were you when “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” burst onto the Internet in 2001? The infamous video, which was first uploaded to Newgrounds by a user named Bad_CRC on February 16, is now 20 years old and watching it feels just as wild now as it did then.
“All Your Base Are Belong To Us” (commonly shortened to “All Your Base”) took a few phrases from the nonsensical English translation of Zero Wing (which were already floating around message boards as the height of nerd humor) and layered a techno rendition of the game’s music on top of it. The music was then accompanied by a series of still images edited to include the “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” quote (including road signs, a McDonalds marquee, and mug shots of Bill Gates and OJ Simpson). It instantly became the biggest thing on the Internet, becoming one of the first major memes to “go viral” (as no one said at the time) with people in the real world. As historian Kate Willaert mentions in her thread, it was covered by the normally pretty stodgy (though surprisingly game-friendly) Time Magazine a few weeks after Bad_CRC’s initial upload.
At the time, Zero Wing was a mostly forgotten side-scrolling shooter from Toaplan that had received an arcade release in Japan in 1989 and an international push the following year. After that, Zero Wing got a Genesis conversion in 1991 in Japan and Europe and mostly fell out of the public eye until its resurrection with “All Your Base Are Belong To Us”. Even with all the notoriety it received as being part of one of the first memes, the game hasn’t received a splashy re-release outside of a reissue of the Genesis cartridge in 2020 by boutique publisher Retro-Bit.
Maybe someday the public will get the chance to find out who “set up us the bomb”.
Today is an important anniversary in pop culture history.
It will be overlooked, because it's not the anniversary of an important movie or an important video game. No, it's the anniversary of an important meme. Maybe THE most important meme. The meme that changed everything. pic.twitter.com/7dxYGinhzP
— "Critical Kate" Willært ?? (@katewillaert) February 16, 2021
That’s it for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History. Be sure to follow me on Twitter for more bite-sized history lessons.