Insert Quarter – Page 2 – Video Game Canon

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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Game History Secrets Uncovers the WorkBoy, The Simpsons: Hit & Run 2, and This Is Vegas

Liam Robertson was very busy this past year. The journalist produced multiple new videos for his Game History Secrets series, uncovering the facts about unreleased passion projects such as the fabled WorkBoy peripheral, Midway’s This Is Vegas, and Radical Entertainment’s The Simpsons: Hit & Run 2.

While the latter two games share a common lineage with Rockstar’s explosive Grand Theft Auto franchise, the discovery of the WorkBoy is no less exciting. So let’s travel back in time and learn more about two massive open-world adventures and an organizer for your Game Boy.

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Video Game History Foundation Launches Video Game History Podcast

“Did You Know?”

Podcast hosts love to ask this simple question before diving headfirst into some unexpected nugget of history. If you love these sorts of microhistories, then you should definitely pull up a chair for the new podcast from the Video Game History Foundation.

The Video Game History Hour is hosted by the nonprofit’s Directors, Frank Cifaldi and Kelsey Lewin, and each week they’ll peer into gaming’s weird and wacky corners alongside a rotating band of “content creators, game developers, video game historians, and storytellers.”

Best of all, they’ve already produced four episodes, and you can find them after the break.

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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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A Brief Recap of the Wild Drama Surrounding the Launch of Cooking Mama: Cookstar

Fans have been drawn to the colorful flavor of the Cooking Mama franchise ever since the first game was released for the DS in 2006. Dishing out meals alongside Mama has never been a particularly meaty experience, but the behind-the-scenes drama surrounding her latest entree, Cooking Mama: Cookstar for the Nintendo Switch, is definitely getting a little spicy.

I’d apologize for all those food puns, but trust me, you’re going to be hungry for more by the end of this.

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Halo 2, Half-Life 2, and the Month That Changed Gaming Forever

Halo 2 burst onto the scene exactly 15 years ago and changed the way we look at online multiplayer, but it might be just as well known for the weird and wild “I Love Bees” ARG (alternate reality game) that preceded its launch. While Master Chief has faded a bit from the forefront of gaming’s most popular characters (along with the Halo franchise as a whole), this milestone anniversary still gives us a great excuse to talk more about another one of the most influential games of all time.

And believe it or not, it wasn’t even the biggest blockbuster to emerge from amongst the new releases of 2004’s penultimate month.

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Celebrate the 35th Anniversary of Tetris With A Look Back at its History

I think it’s fair to say that most video game fans are at least a little familiar with the basic beats behind the creation of Tetris. Alexey Pajitnov, a technician with the USSR’s Computer Centre, programmed the puzzle game in his spare time using only the text display of an Electronika 60. After porting the game to IBM-Compatible PCs with the assistance of his co-workers, Pajitnov’s supervisors would go on to sell the international rights to the game to multiple companies, creating a legal mess that would drag on for years.

In time, Pajitnov would move to the United States and regain the rights to Tetris after partnering with Henk Rogers to form The Tetris Company in 1996. Since then, dozens of developers have put their own stamp on Tetris, including the eye-popping VR effects of Tetris Effect in 2018 and the hyper-competitive multiplayer of Tetris 99 in 2019.

Today is Tetris‘s 35th Anniversary, and if you’re unfamiliar with the story behind the game’s creation (or just want to hear it again), there’s no better time than now to dive back into this fascinating story.

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Behind-the-Scenes With A Few PlayStation Classics

Sony’s film division has been attempting to adapt the Uncharted franchise for the big screen for quite a few years now. In that time, a large number of writers and directors have cycled through the production, and several very different actors have signed on to play Drake at one time or another (Spider-Man‘s Tom Holland is currently slated to play a younger version of the character in a film that’ll serve as a prequel to the game franchise).

That protracted process is likely part of the reason why Sony Interactive Entertainment decided to bring their next set of game adaptations in-house under the new PlayStation Productions banner. The studio was formed earlier this week, and its inaugural task will be to create a television show based on the Twisted Metal series, but that won’t be the first bit of filmmaking to bear the PlayStation logo.

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