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 pencil used to be one of the most relied-upon parts of a game developer’s toolkit. But thanks to the rise of computer-generated imagery, the humble pencil has certainly become less important over time.
So for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, we’ll travel back to the days of graph paper and lightboxes, and look at a more modern example of a time when hand-drawn artwork was used in game development.
“You wouldn’t understand. You had to be there.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always felt that that idiom is an absolutely ridiculous turn of phrase. Why would you have to be anywhere specific to understand something?
And yet, there are some things that are so unbelievable they only really make sense if you were there to experience it for yourself.
We’ll look at two such examples for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as a third that is so wild you might not believe it even if you were there (or anywhere for that matter).
Like with any creative endeavor, actually completing development of a video game is only half the battle. The other half involves getting eyeballs in front of your completed game and getting these new fans to (hopefully) tell their friends all about it.
Game publishers have tried lots of different marketing methods over the years, and we look at two of them in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as what happens when you need to pitch your game to the most famous film director in the world.
Ed Boon has nurtured the soul of the Mortal Kombat franchise for more than 30 years now. Development began in 1991 when Boon, alongside co-creator John Tobias, pitched a fighting game starring Jean-Claude Van Damme to their bosses at Midway. That part of the plan quickly fizzled out, but the decisionmakers at the company were still interested in creating an original fighting game to piggyback on the success of Street Fighter II.
A year later, Boon and Tobias (and John Vogel and Dan Forden) were ready to deliver the first cabinets for Mortal Kombat to arcade operators on October 8, 1992. Pre-release reactions to the game, both within Midway and from the public, were trending in the right direction, but the team had no idea just how much of an impact their creation would soon have on the game industry… and the entire world.
To celebrate the fighting franchise’s 30th anniversary, Boon and Tobias have been sharing stories from Mortal Kombat‘s development over the last year on Twitter. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
Game publishers seem to love a little friendly (and not so friendly) competition with each other, and we’re now about 20 years out from a rather silly arms race over which one could produce the most elaborate special edition package.
It wasn’t the first fancier bundle for collectors, but the bonus disc included with Halo 2‘s Limited Collector’s Edition (which was housed in a “luxurious” tin) was one of the first I remember from that era. The practice quickly escalated from those humble beginnings, and prospective players were soon being wooed with promises of night vision goggles (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare), drones (Call of Duty: Black Ops II), a Batarang (Batman: Arkham Asylum), so many wearable helmets (Doom Eternal and Mass Effect, to name just two), and even a statue of a bloodied and bikini-clad torso (Dead Island: Riptide).
This retail trend has mostly run its course these days, but not before Volition tried to sell Saints Row fans on a one-of-a-kind “Million Dollar Pack” for Saints Row IV. The ridiculously over-the-top bundle included multiple cars and trips, as well as admission to a spy training school, and a voucher for plastic surgery. While obviously a parody of all the weird and wild special editions mentioned in the previous paragraph, I’m sure Volition would have tried to mass-produce the “Million Dollar Pack” if anyone had offered to buy it.
Publishers definitely went a little overboard chasing this fad, but it was more or less an extension of the old “Big Box” releases that would often include a world map or a small trinket with a highly-anticipated game. Let’s look at three of those bundles in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History…
Even though Sega launched the Genesis in 1989 (a year after the console debuted in Japan as the Mega Drive), Nintendo spent the early part of the 1990s without a true rival in the “Console Wars.” Their dominance of the living room was so complete, most people just referred to any video game as “a Nintendo.”
This lack of competition (and its sudden appearance after the release of Sonic the Hedgehog) informed almost every move Nintendo made throughout the decade, including the three items in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.
Thanks to its flexible system requirements, id Software’s Doom has become a popular piece of software to use to test the processing power of some rather unorthodox devices. A group of dedicated modders have managed to install the classic shooter on a wide range of hardware over the years, including an ATM, a home pregnancy test, a piano, and a whole lot more. But before all that, not every console platform could contain the awesome power contained within the game’s Martian corridors.
Believe it or not, one consolemaker even tried to inject a little live-action into the franchise long before The Rock starred in 2006’s Doom…
The joyous sights and sounds of San Diego Comic-Con are still in the air, so now’s a great time to reminisce about another round of the secret origins behind some of your favorite games.
In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, we’ll explore the team-up you always suspected from Sonic the Hedgehog 3, as well as a few early sketches from Maximo: Ghosts To Glory, and the animated antics of the very first Naughty Dog.
“Not all who wander are lost.”
You don’t see it much anymore, but this quote, from JRR Tolkien, was a popular sentiment to plaster on your bumper from the 1970s all the way up to the 2000s. While they may not be lost, like any art form, the video game world has its share of wandering artifacts that are certainly hard to find.
We’ll look at some of them (including Sega’s Heavyweight Champ, GoldenEye 007‘s legacy of screencheating, and the Nintendo Seal of Quality) in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.
“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
This well-worn saying is trotted out every single time a major game is delayed and has long been attributed to Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, supposedly said as a response to the protracted development of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. But with the recent delay of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2, fans began to wonder, did Miyamoto ever actually share that famous bit of wisdom with an interviewer?
The answer might surprise you…
