Free Play – Page 5 – Video Game Canon

20th Century Fox Created a Feature-Length Movie Using Cutscenes and New Animations from Alien: Isolation

Eschewing the whiz bang pyrotechnics that the Colonial Marines usually bring to game adaptations of the Alien franchise, 2014’s Alien: Isolation took its cues from the quieter (but no less terrifying) original film.

The game was a big hit with critics and fans, though it struggled on the sales charts and a planned sequel never got off the ground. But Sega and The Creative Assembly recently teamed up with 20th Century Fox to give the game, which took place between Alien and Aliens, a second lease on life… as a movie.

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The Queer History of Video Games is Now on Display at Schwules Museum’s “Rainbow Arcade”

The Schwules Museum in Berlin has opened the Rainbow Arcade, an exhibit which will explore the “queer history of video games”:

For the first time in the world, the queer history of video games will be explored in a major exhibition: RAINBOW ARCADE at Schwules Museum features a wide variety of exhibits spanning over 30 years of media history, including 12 playable titles, concept drawings, modifications written by fans themselves and documentations of online communities. RAINBOW ARCADE will be taking stock of contemporary pop cultural questions of representation, stereotypical and discriminatory narratives in entertainment media, and our cultural memory. For the first time, research by the LGBTQ Game Archive will be presented in a museum.

Visitors to the museum will be able to play several examples of gaming’s queer history, including GameGrumps’s Dream Daddy, Midboss’s 2064: Read Only Memories, Anna Anthropy’s Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars, and more.

The Rainbow Arcade exhibit is curated by Sarah Rudolph (herzteile.org), Jan Schnorrenberg (Schwules Museum), and Dr. Adrienne Shaw (Temple University, LGBTQ Video Game Archive), and it’ll be open to the public through May 13, 2019.

A Brief History of Video Games – Half-Life

It’s just another day at work for Gordon Freeman. The well-groomed scientist is running late for an important meeting and he’s forced to board the tram alone as he travels to the secure wing of the Black Mesa Research Facility.

The latest VGC Essay looks at how Half-Life’s opening tram ride changed first person shooters (and may even have created an entirely new genre). Here’s a teaser…

“Good morning and welcome to the Black Mesa Transit System. This automated train is provided for the security and convenience of the Black Mesa Research Facility personnel.”

It’s a rather lowkey introduction to one of the most ambitious games ever created, but easing the player into the game’s world was a big part of what made Valve’s Half-Life so ambitious. You’re free to move about the train car as you’re ferried from the facility’s living quarters to the research levels belowground, but for those five minutes, you’re also at the mercy of the developers and how they want you to interact with their game.

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Library of Congress Has Ruled Libraries and Museums Can Break DRM to Preserve Older Games

The US Copyright Office and the Library of Congress have ruled that museums and libraries may now disable digital rights management (DRM) software when attempting to preserve video games available for defunct platforms.

The rule is officially known as the “Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies,” and a very quick summary is available at Polygon:

This week the Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office revised its list of specific exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, also known as the DMCA. Their guidance reaffirms the rights of software preservationists to circumvent digital rights management (DRM) software, in some cases expanding their ability to revive older games. It also opens the door, legally speaking, to do-it-yourselfers and electronics repair outlets to break DRM in pursuit of fixing hardware.

A more thorough analysis of the ruling, specifically detailing how it’ll effect preservationists looking to bring back early versions of MMOs like EverQuest and World of Warcraft, is available at Motherboard:

Today’s news should be good for archivists and museums, who’ve long struggled with the best way to preserve video games such as Everquest or World of Warcraft. Multiplayer games like these require both software that players run on their computers locally, and software running on a company’s server—software that is much harder for historians to get their hands on and run. And when they do manage to get an independent server running, big game companies like Blizzard have taken legal action against people running unauthorized servers.

This is a great day for anyone interested in the history of games, and for all the historians and librarians working to preserve the classics for the next generation.

Speedruner Completes Nearly Perfect Run of Super Mario Bros. in 4 Minutes and 55.96 Seconds

The speedrunners competing to complete a perfect run in Super Mario Bros. got a little closer this week when KosmicD12 set a new world record of four minutes and 55.96 seconds on Monday.

Thanks to pixel-perfect platforming and a series of glitches (including running through the wall to find the Warp Zone in World 1-2), this “Any Percentage” run is nearly identical to the “Tool Assisted Run” of four minutes and 54.03 seconds.

In a “Tool Assisted Run,” a computer calculates the optimal path through the game using all known glitches, so to see an actual human person nearly match it is rather astounding.

KosmicD12 was rather tongue-tied after his record-setting feat, but he did manage to croak out, “I don’t know what to say.”

A nearly perfect run definitely speaks for itself, so I’m not sure anything else needs to be said. Though I guess congratulations are definitely in order.

A Brief History of Video Games – Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

The latest VGC Essay looks at the creation of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and the massive growth of the Call of Duty franchise. Here’s a teaser…

General William Tecumseh Sherman famously declared that “War is Hell” in a speech in 1880, though I think it’s safe to assume that more people are familiar with the anti-war protestations of a certain green Muppet from 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. While this sentiment has existed in the public consciousness for hundreds of years, the basic structure of a game as a confrontation that pits the player against the CPU (or another player) makes armed conflict an ideal setting.

War might be Hell, but it has also been very good for Activision’s bottom line thanks to the Call of Duty franchise.

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A Brief History of Video Games – Mega Man 2

The latest VGC Essay looks at the the blockbuster success born out of the simple ambitions of Mega Man 2. Here’s a teaser…

The first Mega Man game is a bit of an odd duck, which has become even more pronounced as the years go by. The graphics are simplistic, the sound is tinny, there’s only six Robot Masters instead of the traditional eight, and there’s even a score counter (a feature that was jettisoned from the dozens of sequels that followed). There’s just a smoothness to subsequent games in the franchise that Capcom had yet to master with the first entry.

But like most Mega Man fans, I only learned all this after the fact. At the time, whatever memories I have of the first game were formed by guide writers who described it as an unfairly difficult game, old episodes of Captain N, and the fact that none of the local rental outlets owned a copy (unsurprisingly, Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf was always available).

I finally got the chance to see what all the fuss was about with Mega Man 2, which was also the first game in the Mega Man franchise to be spearheaded by Capcom’s Keiji Inafune. With an expanded role in the sequel’s development, Inafune became known as the “Father” of Mega Man to plenty of fans, and codified many of the traditions and patterns the series is known for.

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A Brief History of Video Games – Super Mario Kart

The latest VGC Essay looks at how Super Mario Kart strengthened and shattered friendships after it debuted in 1992. Here’s a teaser…

Even from its earliest days, the personalities behind the video game industry looked to pro wrestling’s combination of spectacle and soap opera for tips on how to behave. This dedication to competition came to a head in the early 90s when Nintendo and Sega engaged in the first “Console War.”

Beginning with the “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t” campaign in 1990, Sega began mercilessly picking at their rival over a variety of claims, some provable and some not. But that was just a warm-up for the infamous “Blast Processing” campaign and Nintendo’s eventual reply of asking their fans to “Play It Loud.” The Genesis and Super NES used these advertisements to compete in a head-to-head contest for the love and support of gamers everywhere, but the heaviest fighting actually took place on playgrounds and lunch tables between kids that weren’t even old enough to shave.

No game better symbolized this battleground of friend-versus-friend than Super Mario Kart.

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A Brief History of Video Games – Pong

The latest VGC Essay looks at the birth of Pong and asks why early game developers were so obsessed with recreating table tennis on our TVs. Here’s a teaser…

Why were early game developers so fixated on bouncing a ball back and forth?

It’s hard to pinpoint the very first video game, but it most likely belongs to A.S. Douglas and OXO. This electronic version of Tic-Tac-Toe was created by Douglas in 1952 to support his doctoral thesis, Interactions Between Human and Computer. But after that, the only question early gamemakers wanted to ask was, “Tennis, anyone?”

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A Brief History of Video Games – Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

The latest VGC Essay looks at how the real person at the center of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! changed sports games and how Little Mac’s cartoonish opponents did as well. Here’s a teaser…

“They say I can’t lose. I say you can’t win!”
– Mike Tyson, to Little Mac, in 1987’s Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

“There’s no one that can match me. My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, and I’m just ferocious. I want your heart! I want to eat his children!”
– Mike Tyson, about Lennox Lewis, in 2000

In the 13 years between those two quotes, Mike Tyson went from being the face of boxing (and Nintendo’s best-selling Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!) to becoming a punchline for late night comedians. In between, he was convicted of sexual assault in 1992 and bit off a part of Evander Holyfield’s ear in 1997.

From that moment on, Tyson would fit right in with the cartoon characters that made up the undercard to his eponymous game. After his retirement from the ring, Tyson would remake himself as something of a gentle giant, constantly tending to the pigeons he kept on the roof of his apartment building. His later decision to act in absurdist comedies like The Hangover and Mike Tyson Mysteries (an animated Scooby-Doo parody where Tyson is assisted by the ghost of the Marquess of Queensberry) just cemented it.

But the Mike Tyson of 1987 was cartoonish in a different way. The boxing prodigy known to the world as “Iron Mike” and “Kid Dynamite” demolished his opponents in ways that the sport hasn’t seen since. His first professional fight was over in less than two minutes. His next fight lasted a mere 52 seconds, while his fourth required only 39. And in 1986, Tyson knocked out Marvis Frazier in a little over 20 seconds, though an appeal changed the official time of the bout to 30 seconds.

“The Dream Fight” in Punch-Out!! was just as brutal. Tyson deals instant-knockdown uppercuts towards the game’s diminutive hero, Little Mac, for the first minute and a half of this epic boss battle. “Iron Mike” follows that up with a series of hooks that are so fast, it’s hard to keep up. In the second round, a series of ferocious jabs eventually give way to a wild combination of punches that are telegraphed by rapid-fire blinking. With bleary eyes and weary thumbs, hopefully you’ve figured out that the best strategy for fighting the champ is to just survive to the end of the third round and hope for a favorable decision.

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