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.
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.
Why?
Why do some game franchises get forgotten by their publishers? Why would a clump of dirt be important enough to be donated to a museum? And why do some publishers decide to play it safe when deciding on a game’s cover?
All of these questions will be pondered in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.
The PlayStation is 25! So let’s take a trip back to 1995 and the console’s debut at the E3 Expo in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.
We’ll also get a chance to talk about another mid-90s mainstay, Adam Sandler, and a funky font choice that popped up a lot in arcade games from the era.
Last year around this time, The NPD Group’s Mat Piscatella shared some historical sales charts of the “Best-Selling Games in the US” from a wide variety of modern and classic platforms (including the Saturn, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, and more).
Perhaps this means it’ll become a regular thing, as Piscatella popped up earlier today with another batch of charts, this time slicing the data from a few “obscure” corners of the industry.
Anyone have an obscure sales ranking chart they'd like to see?
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) November 25, 2019
[Tweet Removed – View at Internet Archive]
Taking requests from his Twitter followers, Piscatella’s research pointed him towards Nokia’s ill-fated N-Gage handheld, as well as popular third-party games on Nintendo platforms, and RPGs on the PlayStation. Finally, one person wanted to see the sales chart from the (sort of) uneventful February 1996.
All four charts offered plenty of surprises, which you can see for yourself in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History…
Diving in to the sometimes subtle (and sometimes major) differences between a prototype and the final product is probably one of the most exciting parts of video game history. In many cases, you’ll be looking at the (literal) building blocks of what came before.
In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at one prototype that served as the foundation of something great and another that was ultimately sent to the scrapyard. And after all that, we’ll have a good laugh at a hoax that recently fooled the Jeopardy! writer’s room.
Bite-Sized Game History has reached way back to talk about a lot of video game firsts, and I’ve got a few more today.
So let’s get right to it and dig into the history of speed boosts, the working title for Final Fight, and Nintendo’s initial collaboration with Hyundai.
If you can believe it, Blizzard is just as well known for franchises like Diablo and Warcraft as it is for the monstrous statues that tower over the desks at its Irvine campus. It’s even become something of a tradition for newly-hired employees to pose in front of The Orc Statue on their first day.
But how do you immortalize an even more epic figure in video game history? How about with a nice park bench in the middle of New Hampshire…
The road to a finished product is long, and inspiration can often come from the weirdest places. But if you follow that muse, you’ll often come up with something amazing. And even if you run out of gas, you’ll always have people wondering what could have been.
For this edition Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at two games that tapped into those odd ideas, and one television adaptation that sadly stayed on the drawing board.
When you look back at video games in the 1970s, there’s really only one name… Atari.
From Pong to Breakout to Asteroids, Atari filled the smoke-filled arcades with a parade of classic cabinets, and charged into the next decade on top of the world. We all know they didn’t stay there, but this edition of Bite-Sized Game History looks back at what the company was doing just before it all came crashing down.
Before GameTrailers made its debut in 2002, it was fairly difficult for publishers to make trailers for upcoming games available over the Internet. Large file sizes and slow download speeds made the entire thing rather impractical (not that we didn’t try).
We’ll be talking about how publishers made game trailers available in the days before widespread broadband adoption in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as uncovering a pair of firsts.
