Category: Free Play

Random bits of news and one-off articles that don’t fit anywhere else can be found in Free Play.

National Videogame Museum Opens “The Animal Crossing Diaries” Online Exhibition

The National Videogame Museum began collecting stories about the public’s lockdown-fueled fascination with Animal Crossing: New Horizons back in August 2020. The museum’s curators and archivists solicited hundreds of diary entries from players all around the world, all of whom were more than happy to share the details of their island adventures with Tom Nook, Isabelle, Blathers, and all the other villagers.

Now, after more than a year of hard work, the NVM is finally ready to open the virtual doors to their Animal Crossing Diaries online exhibition:

While the world was on pause, the island paradises of Animal Crossing: New Horizons thrived, welcoming those in isolation with open arms (and paws). The game became a routine part of everyday life. Cancelled plans were reimagined and reprogrammed to the virtual sandy shores of players’ islands. For many people unable to socialise in real life, the game became a vital creative space for personal connection.

Using Animal Crossing: New Horizons to maintain that personal connection with friends and family quickly became a huge part of the game’s appeal. Players also gravitated towards it’s strong emphasis on creativity and personal style, as well as the importance it placed on maintaining a daily routine. The NVM saw these common threads appear again and again throughout the diaries, ultimately sorting each entry into one of five categories:

Keeping A Routine – Faced with an uncertain day to day life in lockdown, players turned towards the game for an escape. If you couldn’t find a comforting routine in real life, the game could provide. For many players, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was not a comforting distraction. It saved 2020.

Making Your Space – An island can be a place of comfort to create a world that expresses its player’s personality. It can be a social, artistic and cultural space shared with others across the world. For some it is a space in which processing feelings of stress, anxiety and grief can take place. Players making spaces to travel, connect and share experiences opened up new possibilities. For many players, events were accessible for the first time via virtual spaces.

Representing Yourself – Many games, like Animal Crossing, have a main hero you can customize to look like you.

Sharing Creativity – The closure of museums and other cultural events limited access to creativity. And while the island does have its own museum of art, insects, fish and fossils, it also has a range of design options. You can create your own outfits, patterns and even games! Players could recreate cultural and artistic events that couldn’t happen in 2020.

Staying In Touch – For many people, the pandemic means social distancing from friends and family. This creates a sense of isolation many struggle with. In the game, welcoming new neighbours to your island placed a big focus on social connections.

Visitors to the Animal Crossing Diaries exhibition can also explore diary entries through a timeline feature that highlights important days on the New Horizons calendar (like Wedding Season and Toy Day), along with more impromptu in-game events (such as Biden Island and Pride Month) that were created by the players themselves.

The NVM plans to maintain and expand the Animal Crossing Diaries exhibition project going forward, and you can add your story to the collection using their Online Submission Form.

Jeopardy! Guest Hosts Ranked: Who Did the Internet Pick as the Best of the Bunch?

OK, you caught me, ranking the guest hosts who’ve appeared on Jeopardy! this season is slightly outside the purview of Video Game Canon.

But there have been a lot of video game adaptations of the show over the years, and the firestorm surrounding the selection of Mike Richards as the permanent host (and his quick exit from that job just a week-and-change later) makes figuring out who the next host should be a very interesting question.

Plus, I’m a huge Jeopardy! fan, and I’ve been slightly obsessed with this whole process from the beginning.

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Rally, a “Stock Market for Collectibles,” Sells Their Copy of Super Mario Bros. for $2 Million

Rally, a “stock market of collectibles,” made a splashy entrance into the world of high-value game collecting during the Summer of 2020 when they purchased a sealed and graded copy of Super Mario Bros. for $140,000.

After acquiring the game (which received a 9.8 A+ grade from Wata Games), the company sold 3,000 “shares” in the collectible cartridge to investors for $50 apiece

Rally’s $140,000 purchase set a record for a single game sale at the time, but it’s been eclipsed multiple times in the past year, including twice just in the last month. That’s when this merry-go-round of motivated sellers and deep-pocketed buyers culminated in sales of $870,000 (for a copy of The Legend of Zelda) and $1.56 million (for a copy of Super Mario 64).

But now Rally gets to sit on the top of the mountain for a little while, and that’s because the game’s shareholders have decided to sell their copy of Super Mario Bros. for $2 million to a private collector:

According to The New York Times, each shareholder will receive roughly $475 per share after the sale is completed. That’s honestly a pretty great return on their initial investment.

A Copy of id Software’s PC Port of Super Mario Bros. 3 Has Been Donated to the Strong Museum

David Kushner meticulously detailed the story of id Software’s founding in 2003’s Masters of Doom, tracking the legendary development team’s history back through the creation of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. But before all that, John Carmack and John Romero approached Nintendo with the idea of releasing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the PC.

Nintendo’s signature brand of platforming wasn’t possible on the underpowered PCs of the time, but Carmack cracked the code in 1990 with the creation of his “smooth scrolling” engine. Sensing that this was a very big deal, the team (then known as IFD: Ideas from the Deep) got to work producing a prototype to show Nintendo:

Over those seventy-two hours, they fell into crunch mode. […] They got the game down to a T: Mario’s squat little walk, the way he bopped the animated tiles, sending out the coins, the way he leapt on the turtles and kicked their shells, the clouds, the Venus’s-flytraps, the pipes, the smooth scrolling. By the time they finished, the game was virtually identical to the bestselling hit in the world. The only noticeable difference was the title screem, which, under the Nintendo copyright, credited the makers, a company name the guys borrowed from Romero and Lane, Ideas from the Deep.

Unsurprisingly, Nintendo rejected the demo, but the new technology inspired IFD to create their own game, Commander Keen, and adopt the more familiar id Software moniker a year later.

According to Kushner, the developers eagerly shared their adaptation of Super Mario Bros. 3 with friends and collaborators as they worked on Commander Keen, and in 2015, Romero gave us a peek at what could have been when he uploaded a short playthrough of the prototype to his Vimeo channel:

Even though it was apparently distributed far and wide, this important piece of PC gaming history stayed hidden for more than 30 years. But a new report on Ars Technica has revealed that a floppy disk containing id’s Super Mario Bros. 3 prototype was recently donated to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY.

The Strong Museum, which also operates the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) and the World Video Game Hall of Fame, said they will make the prototype available to historians and researchers upon request. There’s also the possibility that it could find its way into a public exhibit in the future.

My only question is, what happens when you type in “IDDQD”?

Sealed Copy of Super Mario 64 is First Game to Sell for More Than $1 Million

Just days after a sealed and graded copy of The Legend of Zelda sold at auction for $870,000, a similarly-preserved copy of Super Mario 64 sold for nearly twice that amount… $1.56 million to be exact.

This is the first time a single game has sold for more than a million dollars, but surprisingly, there’s not much that’s particularly noteworthy about this copy of Mario’s first 3D adventure.

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A Sealed and Graded Copy of The Legend of Zelda Sells for $870,000

I guess Mario isn’t the only classic video game character who can bring in the big bucks from collectors.

On Friday, Heritage Auctions held their first standalone “Video Game Signature Auction” and auctioneers brought the hammer down on a sealed and graded copy of The Legend of Zelda for $870,000. This eye-popping price isn’t just impressively high, it also set a new record for a single game transaction.

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Nintendo Will Build and Open a Museum Dedicated to Their History in 2023/2024

You’ve probably heard it before, but did you know that Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card manufacturer? Nintendo was known as The Nintendo Playing Card Company for much of its early history, and though they’ve spent the last 40 years as one the best video game developers in the world, they still produce playing cards and hanafuda cards to this day.

All this history will soon be on display for the public as Nintendo has announced plans to repurpose one of their shuttered manufacturing plants in Kyoto to construct the Nintendo Gallery, a museum dedicated to all their wonderful toys and games.

Scheduled for completion during Nintendo’s 2023 fiscal year (which runs from April 1, 2023 through March 31, 2024), the Nintendo Gallery will feature “exhibits and experiences” that highlight the company’s “product development history and philosophy.”

Nintendo doesn’t have any specific plans for the museum as of yet, but an artist’s rendering of what the facility might look like is pictured above.

Embracer Group is Starting a Games Archive

Embracer Group, the many-tentacled parent company of THQ Nordic, Deep Silver, Gearbox, and a half-dozen other publishing labels, has announced plans to open a video game archive in Karlstad, Sweden.

While lots of publishers are extremely thorough about preserving production assets, prototypes, and source code for the games they create, what Embracer is doing with their archive is fairly unique.

Using CEO Lars Wingefors’s personal game library as a starting point, Embracer has built a collection containing over 50,000 different games, consoles, and accessories. You can see the “secret” underground vault that houses the collection (and a portion of the games) in this new video featuring the archive’s Game Historian, Martin Lindell:

The archive’s collection currently stretches all the way back to the launch games for the Magnavox Odyssey, and Embracer’s goal is to obtain the European, American, and Japanese editions of every game ever made:

For us, games are more than just games. It is culture. It is something created by great people with creative ideas. By building a large games archive, we want to preserve and tribute the gaming culture for a long period of time.

The journey has already begun and it is time to take the next step. Our goal is clear – We want to archive and display as much of the video game industry as possible. Hopefully you will join us on our journey.

The Embracer Group Games Archive isn’t open to the public yet, but they hope to welcome researchers in the near future as the archive becomes more accessible.

Super Mario Bros. Speedrunners Inch Closer to Perfect Run With Record Time of 4:54.948 from Niftski

Thanks to the wonders of emulation software, speedrunners have discovered that the optimal path through Super Mario Bros. can be completed in just four minutes and 54.032 seconds. This is known as a “Tool Assisted Speedrun” (TAS), which breaks the gameplay down into individual frames and reassembles them to determine exactly what a perfect run looks like.

Normally, human players can’t get compete with the times posted by a TAS, but the speedrunning community is doing their best to match the machines.

Case in point, Niftski just broke the 4:55 barrier for an “Any Percentage” run by completing Super Mario Bros. in a blistering four minutes and 54.948 seconds. Kyle Orland compared this feat to the four-minute mile on Ars Technica in a great primer on the various tricks and glitches the speedrunner exploited to secure the record.

While Niftski is now the owner of the fastest time for Super Mario Bros., his achievement does come with an asterisk. Instead of using an NES console and controller, he set the record using a keyboard attached to a PC running an emulated version of the game. The speedrunning community as a whole considers that a legal option, but many individual speedrunners prefer to stick with original hardware.

The previous “Any Percentage” record for Super Mario Bros. was four minutes and 55.23 seconds, which was set by Miniland in February.

Congratulations to Niftski, who plans to continue chasing Super Mario Bros. immortality in the future. A perfect run is certainly possible, and you can follow all his subsequent speedrunning efforts on Twitch.

Sealed and Graded Copy of Super Mario Bros. Sells for an Astonishing $660,000

I am endlessly fascinated by the people who spend obscene amounts of money on retro video games. Especially because it wasn’t all that long ago that game shops weren’t even interested in games for “obsolete” consoles like the NES or the Atari 2600.

At the time, my pristine used copy of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! might have fetched a few dollars at a garage sale. However, in today’s market, a CIB (that’s “Complete In Box”) copy of the game can net you more than $1,000. But even that’s chump change compared to a game sale that just closed at Heritage Auctions. According to the auction house, some unnamed person is now the proud owner of a sealed and graded copy of Super Mario Bros.

And all it cost them was… wait for it… $660,000.

That puts it well beyond the previous record-setting price paid for a single game (a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 that sold in November for $156,000), as well an earlier sale of Super Mario’s first NES adventure that went for $140,000. It’s also more than double the $300,000 that Pets.com founder Greg McLemore paid for the Nintendo PlayStation prototype in March 2020.

This copy of Super Mario Bros. was graded 9.4 A+ by Wata Games and comes from the title’s fourth printing, which is notable for its lack of the “Game Pak NES-GP” code. It’s also missing the trademark symbol that would be added to the right of the “Nintendo Entertainment System” branding on later printings:

Not only is this the finest plastic-sealed copy with a perforated cardboard hangtab we’ve ever offered of any black box title, it is also the oldest sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. we’ve ever had the opportunity to offer. This is only the fourth version of Super Mario Bros. ever produced, and its window of production was remarkably short.

Just to paint a better picture of how short this really was — the nationwide release for the console came in mid to late 1986, and black box games distributed for that release did not have the “Game Pak NES-GP” code. It’s worth mentioning that Nintendo managed to add the trademark symbol to the Nintendo Entertainment System on their game boxes by the beginning of 1987. That certainly doesn’t leave much time at all for this variant to be produced in-between the two!

Retro game collecting is certainly going to some wild places, and it’s probably only a matter of time until somebody ponies up more than a million dollars for a single game.