Free Play – Page 2 – Video Game Canon

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.

Noclip Game History Archive is Digitizing a Decade of Videotapes to Preserve Lost Game History

Danny O’Dwyer has been creating video game documentaries under the Noclip banner since 2016, but he and his team are about to take on their biggest project yet.

Noclip has come into possession of hundreds of videotapes containing over a decade of lost video game history, including trailers, behind-the-scenes featurettes, B-roll footage, news reports, and a whole lot more. The collection likely includes a lot of the same videos that Hit Save! is currently streaming as part of their Always On project.

But as O’Dwyer stressed in the Patreon announcement (which is embedded above), no one knows exactly what’s on these tapes, and some of the ones they’ve viewed contain some really interesting stuff. There’s a previously-unavailable Behind Closed Doors Demo for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic from E3 2001, a tour of Nintendo’s Nintendo of America’s Employee-Only Museum, a newly-remastered Reveal Trailer for Uncharted, and a lot more.

You can see everything Noclip has digitized so far at the dedicated Noclip Game History Archive channel on both YouTube and the Internet Archive.

Good luck to O’Dwyer and his team as they work with all the temperamental video equipment needed to digitize these tapes.

“Hit Save! Always On” Delivers a Neverending Stream of Trailers, Interviews, Behind-The-Scenes Footage, and More

Hit Save! is an organization dedicated to the preservation of video games, and last month they launched Hit Save! Always On, a new initiative to help make their vast archive of trailers, interviews, and behind-the-scenes footage a bit more accessible:

We at Hit Save! are thrilled to announce the launch of our 24/7 stream dedicated to preserving video game history. This initiative will showcase promotional videos, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, and other valuable material from our extensive physical archive. Come join us as we embark on a journey to celebrate the heritage of gaming and ensure its preservation in the digital age.

Our physical archive is a treasure trove of gaming artifacts that spans decades. Through our 24/7 stream, we aim to showcase the information we are preserving, offering viewers an interesting and fun view into the evolution of gaming.

The livestream currently lives on Hit Save!’s YouTube channel and it’s been running continuously since May 30. The selection of videos is very impressive, and having it on in the background while writing this article meant I was also able to hear Mark Hamill, Tom Wilson, and Ginger Allen talk about their involvement in Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger in a vintage behind-the-scenes featurette from the early 1990s.

I can’t wait to see what pops up next.

Koji Kondo’s “Super Mario Bros. Theme” Added to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is still dragging their feet on formally adopting Henry Lowood’s Game Canon proposal, but that didn’t stop the institution from including a piece of music from a video game for the first time as part of the National Recording Registry’s Class of 2023.

While a case could certainly be made for “Korobeiniki” from Tetris, this honor actually belongs to Koji Kondo’s “Super Mario Bros. Theme,” which was selected for the list by the National Recording Preservation Board. Alongside the rest of this year’s inductees, the board believes that the recording (officially known as the “Ground Theme”) is a perfect example of an “audio treasure worthy of preservation for all time based on its cultural, historical or aesthetic importance.”

The tune was originally released in 1985 alongside Super Mario Bros., and the Library of Congress believes that it is “perhaps the most recognizable video game theme in history.” It’s hard to argue with that assessment, or with its description as a “jaunty” piece of music with a “Latin-influenced melody.”

It’s hard to believe that Koji Kondo was just 23 years old when he created this iconic theme, and he seems genuinely touched by its inclusion in the National Recording Registry:

“The amount of data that we could use for music and sound effects was extremely small, so I really had to be very innovative and make full use of the musical and programming ingenuity that we had at the time,” he said through an interpreter in a recent interview. “I used all sorts of genres that matched what was happening on screen. We had jingles to encourage players to try again after getting a ‘game over,’ fanfares to congratulate them for reaching goals, and pieces that sped up when the time remaining grew short.”

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“Having this music preserved alongside so many other classic songs is such a great honor,” he said. “It’s actually a little bit difficult to believe.”

The “Super Mario Bros. Theme” will be inducted into the National Recording Registry this year alongside a lot of other great music, including “Imagine” by John Lennon, “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin, “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver, “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffett, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by Eurythmics, “Like a Virgin” by Madonna, and “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey.

Google Launches Worm Game on Stadia… 5 Days Before Service Shuts Down

Google plans to pull the plug on its game streaming service, Stadia, on January 18. But even though the end is nigh, the team behind the project has given players one last game to play over the final five days.

Worm Game, an impressive adaptation of Snake, was used internally to test some of Stadia’s features, and it’s now free to play for all Stadia users. The game’s surprise release was accompanied by a short note from the development team:

Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world. “Worm Game” is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.

Worm Game features full controller support, a single-player campaign, leaderboards, online multiplayer, and a level editor. Play it now (before it’s gone forever on the 18th) in your browser at Stadia.Google.com.

UPDATE (1/19/23): Worm Game, and the rest of the Google Stadia service, was taken offline during the early morning hours of January 19. An official gameplay video of the title was never uploaded by Google, but multiple players have uploaded full playthroughs to YouTube (including from Watch the Gameplay and Helix Plays Games).

Good luck to the development team as they move on to new projects.

Video Game or Videogame? An Answer to the Most Important Question of Our Time

Don’t think of this as a spelling test, but do you like to play video games? Or do you like to play videogames?

I pondered this question in a piece for Warp Zoned back in 2012, and a lightly edited version of that article has been reprinted here.

Walk over to your media shelf and pick up a copy of Wii Sports or Halo 3 or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Odds are at least one of these titles will be in your collection. What do you call the item in your hand? Some people consider these items part of the “interactive entertainment” medium, but most of us just call them something else.

Though they’ve existed for over forty years, no one has ever definitively answered the question… are they video games or videogames?

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Speedrunner Niftski Sets New “Any Percentage” World Record of 4:54.798 for Super Mario Bros.

The speedrunners attempting to bend Super Mario Bros. to their will continue to inch closer to completing a perfect run. Niftski, the current recordholder for an “Any Percentage” completion of the game, bested his own mark yesterday.

The speedrunner shaved a few frames off his previous time to set a new World Record of four minutes and 54.798 seconds. You can watch the entire thing, which includes a variety of nigh-impossible glitches and warps to save time, right here:

Niftski’s main competition for the Super Mario Bros. crown is Miniland, and the two speedrunners have been locked in a back-and-forth battle for the right to claim the World Record for the better part of two years.

Miniland set the initial pace in February 2021 with an “Any Percentage” completion time of four minutes and 55.23 seconds. Niftski answered two months later with his own time of four minutes and 54.948 seconds.

Miniland roared back in November by completing Super Mario Bros. in just four minutes and 54.914 seconds, but Niftski has been in control of the World Record in the months since after posting a time of four minutes and 54.881 seconds in December.

Both speedrunners are chasing the chance to complete a perfect run of Super Mario Bros., which is currently pegged at four minutes and 54.265 seconds. Known within the speedrunning community as a Tool Assisted Speedrun (TAS), this time is generated by a program that stitches together the individual frames that comprise the optimal path through the game.

Niftski and Miniland post updates on their progress to YouTube, so be sure to follow them to see who will improve upon the record (and get closer to perfection) in the future.

343 Industries Will Work With Modding Community to Restore Cut Content to Halo and Halo 2

One of the most interesting chapters from the annals of video game history is the story behind the development of Halo: Combat Evolved. The groundbreaking first person shooter first sprang to life in the late 1990s as an extension of Bungie’s popular Marathon franchise. Over time those connections were severed, and the game was reborn as an RTS similar to the Myth series.

A year later, the development team dropped the strategy elements and the still-untitled game became a third-person shooter starring a mysterious “cyborg” character. It was this version of the title, now known as Halo, that would be introduced on stage by Steve Jobs at Macworld 1999.

However, Halo’s life as a marquee title for the Mac would be short-lived, and the game would jump to Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox console after Bungie was acquired by the tech giant in 2000.

While it had a colorful trip from the drawing board to store shelves, history has been kind to Halo: Combat Evolved. Xbox fans considered it the console’s killer app at launch, and a string of sequels eventually gave way to an ever-growing multimedia empire that now includes comic books, novels, toys, and multiple live-action adaptations. But what happened to all those earlier prototypes?

Enter the Digsite Project.

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GoldenEye 007 Documentary “GoldenEra” is Now Available to Stream in UK (and Worldwide Later in 2022)

It’s a great time to be a fan of GoldenEye 007. The famed first person shooter is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and even after being the subject of interactive retrospectives and the next release from Boss Fight Books, there’s still plenty to discuss about Rare’s brush with Bond.

GoldenEra, a new documentary about the game, is now available to stream throughout the United Kingdom via Google Play, iTunes, Prime Video, Rakuten TV, and Sky. Directed by Drew Roller, GoldenEra features new interviews with the development team (including David Doak, Grant Kirkhope, and Graeme Norgate), as well as Giant Bomb’s Dan Ryckert, IGN’s Peer Schneider, and a host of others:

GoldenEra tells the incredible inside story of the creation and legacy of GoldenEye 007, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.

One of the greatest video games ever made, GoldenEye 007 was released for the Nintendo 64 in the summer of 1997 after two and a half years of grueling hours, missed deadlines, and an unwavering commitment to perfection. Developed in a farmhouse in Warwickshire by a small ragtag team of university graduates, most of whom had never worked on a game before, this iconic first-person shooter surpassed all expectations and went on to change gaming forever.

Told through interviews with the very people who created the revolutionary game, along with leading game journalists and industry professionals, GoldenEra captures an unmissable moment in the history of gaming.

GoldenEra will be available to stream throughout the rest of the world later in 2022. In the meantime, a teaser trailer for the documentary has been embedded above.

UPDATE (8/12/22): Collider is reporting that Cinedigm has acquired the North American distribution rights to GoldenEra. The documentary will be available through Digital and On Demand streaming services on August 23.