I remember the moment gaming became something more to me. Christmas Day, 1991. Age thirteen. Sitting on the floor in front of the TV in my Minneapolis living room. I had opened three gifts that morning, each of which had contained clothes. This fourth one was boxy-shaped, felt like it weighed enough to be a videogame, and rattled like a SNES cartridge when I shook it. Holy shit, I thought, as I tore the paper…
Right, let me tell you something about Donkey Kong that most people get wrong as well. Everyone yells and shouts about how it “introduced Mario to the world”, but they’re missing the real point of Donkey Kong. In fact, Jumpman wasn’t even called Mario at this stage – he was just Jumpman. More importantly, Donkey Kong didn’t just introduce a character – it bloody well created the platformer genre as we know it today. Before…
The smell of a freshly opened N64 cartridge—that slightly chemical tang mixed with possibility—still hits different when I think about WWF No Mercy. My cousin Jamie brought it round one Saturday afternoon in late 2000, grinning like he'd discovered fire. "This one's actually good," he said, which was high praise coming from someone who'd endured WCW vs. nWo World Tour's clunky controls and still complained about them two years later.See, wrestling games had this reputation…
Sports games have always been one of my favourite genres. I accidentally fell into them. Match Day was released during my avid Spectrum playing years – back in 1985 I had saved months of my pocket money to buy International Karate, but my local computer shop had sold out. So buy something else, the computer shop owner said. He was a northern lad, big beard and a permanent smell of cigarette smoke about him —…
You know what's funny about ClayFighter Tournament Edition? I bought it purely because the box art looked mental. There's something about claymation characters punching each other's heads into silly putty shapes that just screams "this is going to be absolutely barmy," and honestly—it delivered on that promise in spades.I remember the day I picked it up from our local Toys"R"Us. Must've been '98 or '99, right in that sweet spot when N64 games were hitting…
The Add-On That Proved CD Gaming Was Coming, But Cost Too Much to Get There I am a history teacher from Phoenix who has been a fan of Sega since I was a kid. I have argued over many years that Sega got the shaft in terms of the timing of the market and that Sega made better business decisions than people are willing to admit. I will never stop saying that “blast processing” is…
In 2011, I went into a barroom brawl that had been going on for twenty years. Now, everybody was arguing about something that happened when they were 12 years old. I had missed this the first time around – I was working construction, and raising a kid – but I’m 41 years old now and I’m trying to figure out which 16-bit system I want to buy first, and everybody wants to give me an…
Look, I will be blunt with you – when the PlayStation came out, and everybody was talking about 3-D polygons being the way of the future, I thought we may lose something wonderful. Thirty years into this hobby, I watch kids dismiss everything that does not have ray-tracing, and it is an experience that reminds me why Metal Slug meant so much to me when it came out in arcades. This was not just another…
Why Four-Player Racing on Cartridge Hardware Changed Gaming Culture As a history teacher from Phoenix, I have been studying for years why certain games become cultural phenomena while others fade into obscurity. Mario Kart 64 is the perfect case study. Mario Kart 64 is Nintendo’s seminal 1996 N64 racer that transitioned the kart series to full 3D, selling nearly 10 million copies worldwide as the platform’s second best-seller. But the sales numbers don’t capture what…
Standing in my mate Dave's bedroom in 1996, watching him fire up Radiant Silvergun for the first time, I knew I was witnessing something special. The Saturn had been sitting there looking a bit sorry for itself next to his PlayStation, but when those opening notes hit and the screen erupted in geometric bullet patterns, suddenly Sony's grey box felt very ordinary indeed.That's the thing about Sega's 32-bit wonder—it always felt like it was hiding…