Insert Quarter – Video Game Canon

New Study by Video Game History Foundation Finds 87% of Games Released Before 2010 Are Out of Print

Thousands of games for the Wii, Wii U, DS, 3DS, and PSP became permanently unavailable after Nintendo and Sony shuttered the digital storefronts on their previous-generation platforms over the last few years. And while they remain available for now, similar closures are on the docket for the Xbox 360 Marketplace and the PlayStation Store for the PS3 and Vita.

These are just the most visible examples of a problem that has always plagued the video game industry, but it’s getting worse. A new study by the Video Game History Foundation has found that 87% of all games released in the United States before 2010 are now unavailable to purchase.

How does something like this even happen? And is there anything we can we do about it?

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Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole With Enter the Matrix, Path of Neo, and The Matrix Online

Even though its fast approaching the silver anniversary of its release, The Matrix still feels like a modern blockbuster to me. Maybe I just don’t want to admit how long its actually been, or maybe the eternal agelessness of Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Hugo Weaving has permanently trapped my brain in 1999 (my apologies to Laurence Fishburne and Joe Pantoliano).

Whatever the reason, it’s still great to go back and experience The Matrix all over again today. The gravity-defying fight scenes and its green-tinged cyberpunk aesthetic have forever etched the movie in our collective consciousness… and cast a long shadow over the game industry thanks to titles like Max Payne, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Control, and Nier: Automata.

But The Matrix also had a more direct inspiration on three incredibly ambitious tie-in games (Enter the Matrix, The Matrix: Path of Neo, and The Matrix Online) that were produced between 2003 and 2005. Let’s see how deep that rabbit hole goes…

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Wata Games, Heritage Auctions, and the Suspected Fraud at the Center of the Graded Games Market

The market for retro games has exploded exponentially in the last few years, with the record for the price paid for a single game rising steadily from just over $30,000 in July 2017 to $114,000 in July 2020, $660,000 in April 2021, and $1,560,000 in July 2021. Earlier this month the record climbed again to $2,000,000.

It would be easy to chalk this phenomenon up to an aging base of collectors ready to spend their hard-earned dollars on something they could never obtain as children. After all, you saw the same thing with comic books and baseball cards in the 1980s and 1990s.

But something else might be going on here…

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The E3 Expo is Changing: What Will it Look Like After 2021?

The future of the E3 Expo is once again on shaky ground.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo split off from the Consumer Electronics Show in 1995 and originally served as a place for the game industry to show retailers what they had in development for the holiday shopping season. But mainstream media attention soon followed, allowing the event to grow in size and spectacle over the next decade.

After a 2007 rebrand as the slimmed down “E3 Media and Business Summit” failed, the event continued to hum along as an important date on the Summer calendar for yet another decade. Even after the introduction of a wide range of digital showcases from the major publishers (including all three consolemakers), as well as the rise of player-focused events such as PAX, E3’s importance as a one-stop-shop for major announcements is only somewhat on the wane.

But that hasn’t stopped game journalists from musing about the future of E3, even before the 2020 event was canceled in the face of the coronavirus pandemic…

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Someone Found a Director’s Cut of 1993’s Super Mario Bros. Movie on an Old VHS Tape

That headline might sound like some kind of bizarre April Fool’s Day hoax, but I promise, every word of it is true. Someone (two someones, actually) found an extended director’s cut of the Super Mario Bros. movie adaptation from 1993 on an old VHS tape.

So who managed to sniff out such an odd piece of cinematic history? That would be Ryan Hoss and Steven Applebaum, the operators of Super Mario Bros.: The Movie Archive and the caretakers of an extensive collection of production material related to the film.

Trust the fungus and read on to learn more about Super Mario Bros.‘s almost-mythic place in the video game movie canon and how this extended cut will give fans a glimpse at a version of the movie that’s even crazier than what we got in 1993…

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Gold-Plated “Royal Wii” Created for Queen Elizabeth II is Being Sold on eBay

Like Acclaim and Sega before it, no marketing stunt was ever considered too outlandish for the original incarnation of THQ.

Before the publisher went bankrupt in 2012, it used its marketing budget to hire expensive Hollywood talent like Guillermo Del Toro (who consulted on the story for the never-released Insane), while also doling out a few bucks to hire an army of porn stars to promote Saints Row 2 and Saints Row: The Third. But THQ’s marketing department had to get extra creative when promoting the company’s more family-oriented titles.

Sticking with the “family” theme, THQ tried to recruit Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of the Royal Family in the marketing effort for 2009’s Big Family Games, a budget title that was similar to Wii Sports. While they were likely hoping for a slew of “Royal Wii” headlines, it was not to be, as Her Royal Highness was obviously not going to just stop off at the studio for a commercial shoot. So THQ went to her…

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Play Ball: Nintendo and the Mariners, Midway’s Lost “MLB Jam,” and Don Daglow’s Baseball Sim

Sony’s MLB: The Show franchise offers an incredible facsimile of America’s Pastime, but with Opening Day upon us, I find myself instead gravitating towards my NES and Super NES shelves to replay old favorites like Jaleco’s Bases Loaded, Konami’s Base Wars, and Nintendo’s Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball.

Nintendo didn’t have to look very far to find a spokesman for the Super NES game… Griffey and the rest of the Mariners were actually already on the payroll. Even though he didn’t care for the sport, CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi purchased the baseball team in 1992 and owned it until his death in 2013.

But Yamauchi’s tenure at the head of the Mariners organization did more than help produce a handful of great Super NES and N64 games, it also upended one of Major League Baseball’s longstanding traditions.

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Searching for the Perfect Trivia Video Game: Jeopardy!, 1 Vs 100, and HQ Trivia

Video game players have been searching for the perfect trivia game since the very beginning… and I mean that literally. Nutting’s Computer Quiz coin-op, which was first released in the 1960s, served as the precursor to both Computer Space and Pong.

After more than 50 years, developers are still trying to figure out what players want from a trivia game. It’s a good question, as the answer has eluded pretty much everyone.

But there are times when everything clicks into place, and though the genre is built on a bevy of game show adaptations, developers have also produced some fun and interesting experiments over the years. Let’s look at a few.

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Microsoft Acquires Bethesda for $7.5 Billion: Here’s What All the Major Players Had to Say

Microsoft continued their next-gen shopping spree yesterday morning with the acquisition of Bethesda Softworks for a whopping $7.5 billion. The purchase includes the rights to all of the publisher’s world-famous franchises (including The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Wolfenstein, and Dishonored), as well as their stable of in-house development studios (including Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, Arkane, and MachineGames).

The Microsoft-Bethesda marriage is the biggest deal ever between two gaming companies, and instantly doubles the number of internal studios operating under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella. Naturally, all of the major players involved in this transaction had a lot to say.

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It’s Time to Ask Again… Are Video Games Too Long?

According to the community at HowLongToBeat, The Last of Us Part II (27 Hours), Ghosts of Tsushima (42 Hours), and Horizon: Zero Dawn – Complete Edition (61.5 Hours) all require a substantial time commitment from players if they want to experience the full story and at least some of the sidequests. Their recent back-to-back-to-back launch over the last six weeks has also reignited the debate about game length.

It’s probably a coincidence that all three games were published by Sony, but the consolemaker’s recent focus on creating bustling single-player adventures has put them in the hot seat for this round of the debate. Ironically, it was a former executive from Sony that fired the first salvo this time around.

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