VGC | John – Page 20 – Video Game Canon

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.

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.

[Continue Reading…]

“Best Game” Bestowed Upon Hades at the 2020-2021 BAFTA Games Awards

The critical community bestowed yet another boon on Hades at the 2020-2021 BAFTA Games Awards. The voters from the esteemed British Academy have awarded Supergiant’s roguelike adventure with “Best Game” (and a truckload of additional trophies).

After receiving eight nominations, the developers from Supergiant would ultimately climb the virtual stage five times throughout the night. In addition to the “Best Game” award, Hades was also selected as the winner in the “Artistic Achievement,” “Game Design,” and “Narrative” categories. Voice actor Logan Cunningham completed the hot streak by winning the “Performer in a Supporting Role” award for pulling sextuple duty as Hades, Achilles, Poseidon, Asterius, Charon, and The Storyteller.

Looking back, it’s astonishing that Hades wasn’t a heavy favorite heading into this year’s BAFTA Games Awards. And that’s because Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II received 13 total nominations before the ceremony, more than any other game in the nearly 20-year history of the BAFTAs. In the end, the game would emerge victorious in just two categories: “Animation” and “Performer in a Leading Role” (for Laura Bailey’s portrayal of Abby).

Other big winners at this year’s BAFTA Games Awards included Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons (“Game Beyond Entertainment” and “Multiplayer”) and Sumo Digital’s Sackboy: A Big Adventure (“Best British Game” and “Family”). Phobia’s Carrion (“Debut Game”), Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima (“Audio Achievement”), Insomniac’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (“Music”), Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero (“Original Property”), and Rare’s Sea of Thieves (“Evolving Game”) all won a single award.

A complete list of the winners and nominees at the 2020-2021 BAFTA Games Awards, as well as an embedded replay of the ceremony, can be found after the break.

[Continue Reading…]

Hades is “Video Game of the Year” at the 2020-2021 SXSW Gaming Awards

The God of the Underworld has added South By Southwest to his expansive domain as Supergiant’s Hades was named “Video Game of the Year” during last night’s ceremony for the 2020-2021 SXSW Gaming Awards. The roguelike also collected a second trophy for “Excellence in Game Design.”

Festival organizers decided to drastically slim down the category slate, presenting just a dozen awards this year (down from 17 in 2019-2020), though 43 different games received at least one nomination. Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima and Moon Studios’s Ori and the Will of the Wisps led the way with four nominations apiece and both managed to score one win (“Excellence in Animation, Art, and Visual Achievement” for Sucker Punch and “Excellence in Score” for Moon Studios).

But it was another indie that managed to outshine the rest of the lineup at this year’s ceremony, as Ghost Ship Games’s Deep Rock Galactic was the only other two-time winner for “Indie Game of the Year” and “Excellence in Multiplayer.” Other winners at the 2020-2021 SXSW Gaming Awards included Half-Life: Alyx (“VR Game of the Year”), Dreams (“Matthew Crump Cultural Innovation Award”), The Last of Us Part II (“Excellence in Narrative”), Microsoft Flight Simulator (“Excellence in Technical Achievement”), and Doom Eternal (“Excellence in Audio Design”).

The SXSW Gaming Awards also selects a “Tabletop Game of the Year” every year as well, and this year the award went to The Search for Planet X.

A complete list of winners and nominees from the 2020-2021 SXSW Gaming Awards can be found after the break.

[Continue Reading…]

World Video Game Hall of Fame’s 2021 Finalists Include Animal Crossing, Portal, StarCraft, and More

The Strong Museum’s World Video Game Hall of Fame has announced they will enshrine this year’s inductees on May 6th. We’ll know which games comprise the Class of 2021 in just 47 days, but it’s safe to say that one of the clear frontrunners was identified exactly 365 days ago.

It was on March 20th of 2020 that Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and in the year that followed, it transformed the way a lot of people think about video games. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that the franchise’s GameCube debut, Animal Crossing, was chosen as a finalist in 2021.

It’ll be joined by six other first-time finalists vying for a spot in the Hall of Fame this year. That lists includes 1977’s Mattel Football, which introduced the world to handheld gaming, as well as 2009’s FarmVille, a game that minted an entirely new generation of “gamers” on Facebook. There’s also Blizzard’s StarCraft, which further popularized the RTS genre in 1998 and helped birth the esports scene. Finally, three games from 1982 (Microsoft Flight Simulator, Namco’s Pole Position, and Midway’s Tron) impressed the Hall of Fame’s internal committee, which chose to highlight the variety found in some of the industry’s earliest efforts.

These games will be competing against a handful of returning finalists that are getting another crack at the Hall of Fame in 2021, including Activision’s Call of Duty, EA Sports’s FIFA International Soccer, Harmonix’s Guitar Hero, Valve’s Portal, and Broderbund’s Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?

The members of the Hall of Fame’s International Selection Advisory Committee are the final decisionmakers on which of these titles will become part of this year’s induction class, but the public can once again have a voice in the proceedings by visiting WorldVideoGameHallOfFame.org between now and March 25. The three games that receive the most votes in an online poll will be submitted as the “Player’s Choice” ballot when the Committee meets later this Spring.

You can learn more about this year’s finalists after the break, and be sure to tune in to the virtual ceremony celebrating this year’s inductees into the World Video Game Hall of Fame on May 6 at 10:30 AM (Eastern Time).

[Continue Reading…]

David L. Craddock’s “Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense” Will March Into Bookstores in June 2021

David L. Craddock previously delved deeply into the depths of Diablo’s development with 2013’s Stay Awhile and Listen Book I and 2019’s Stay Awhile and Listen Book II. This Summer, he’ll do the same for X-COM: UFO Defense in the upcoming Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense.

Designer Julian Gollop pitched X-COM’s signature blend of tactical gameplay and resource management to MicroProse in the early 1990s, but Monsters in the Dark will travel even further back and revisit some of his earliest projects:

Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense is a narrative-style book that chronicles the early career of Julian Gollop, legendary designer of the original X-COM. You’ll walk alongside Julian during his boyhood, from spicing up the mechanics of chess and creating pen-and-paper games, to cutting his teeth on programming Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum. From there, you will learn how Julian partnered with his father and brother to develop X-COM with MicroProse UK, an off-shoot team eager to prove themselves to U.S.-based parent company and Sid Meier’s Civilization juggernaut developer MicroProse.

Craddock is currently seeking funding for the book’s first print run through Kickstarter. To entice prospective backers, he has partnered with a handful of publications to offer five different excerpts from Monsters in the Dark:

Vice Games – How a Publishing Nightmare Set the Stage for the Original ‘X-COM’

Ars Technica – Developing the distinctive look of the original X-COM: UFO Defense

Polygon – X-COM got its name, in part, because ‘XCON’ sounded like ‘ex-convict’

Kotaku – X-COM: UFO Defense Would Have Been Canned If Its Creators Hadn’t Secretly Revolted

Shacknews – Pro Strats: X-COM (1994) strategy guide author David Ellis on QA and writing guides

Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense will be published in June, but backers could receive the ebook edition as early as April.

“Playing With Power: The Nintendo Story” Debuts on Crackle Today

Jeremy Snead, the director of 2014’s Video Games: The Movie and 2016’s Unlocked: The World of Games, Revealed, has returned with another behind-the-scenes look at one of the industry’s biggest players. Playing With Power: The Nintendo Story was released today on Crackle.

Featuring narration from Sean Astin, Playing With Power also includes commentary from Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime, Microsoft’s’s Phil Spencer, Sega’s Tom Kalinske, and Atari’s Nolan Bushnell, as well as Wil Wheaton, Alison Haislip, Cliff Bleszinski, and more:

How did Nintendo go from niche playing card company to global juggernaut of gaming? This Crackle Original series brings together the creators of Video Games: The Movie and Executive Producer Sean Astin to pull back the curtain on the famously secretive company. The electrifying story is presented by an ensemble of Nintendo personnel, celebrity icons and industry veterans, including Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Alison Haislip (Robot Chicken), Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime, and Xbox’s Phil Spencer.

All five episodes of Playing With Power: The Nintendo Story are now available to stream, and a trailer has been embedded above.

Bite-Sized Game History: The Origin of Gyruss, the Rarity of Shrek 2: Valentine’s Day Edition, and the Birth of All Your Base Are Belong to Us

What did you get from your sweetheart for Valentine’s Day? I’m guessing it was some candy or flowers or jewelry. But it should have been a limited edition copy of Shrek 2 for the originally Xbox.

Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

We’ll also talk about the surprising creation of Gyruss and a very special anniversary because love is in the air of this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

[Continue Reading…]

Tim Lapetino and Arjan Terpstra Will Publish “Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon” in Summer 2021

Tim Lapetino spent all of 2020 plumbing the depths of Pac-Man for daily updates for his Twitter account, 365ofPac. But this project wasn’t just a fun distraction, it was also research for his next book… Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon.

Set to be published by Cook and Becker this Summer, Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon will look back at “historical imagery” and “concept designs” from the game’s genesis, as well as check in with an international cast of characters that helped make Pac-Man a star.

Co-written by Arjan Terpstra, and created with the full assistance of Bandai Namco, the book promises to explore the complete 40-year history behind one of video gaming’s first franchises:

Full of historical imagery, concept designs, marketing photos and more, the book examines the game’s design philosophy and origins through the artists, designers, developers, and other creative teams who brought Pac-Man to life.

This new non-fiction book will journey from creator Toru Iwatani’s “pizza slice” inspiration to the game’s incredible success in arcades and beyond. The book also dives into Pac-Man’s unprecedented impact on pop culture, with more than 40 new interviews from key players around the world.

With untold stories, new details, and archival imagery, Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon showcases the franchise’s complex history from Tokyo to Chicago to Boston, unpacking the stories of video game industry stalwarts Namco and Midway Manufacturing.

In addition to the “Standard Hardcover Edition”, Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon will also be available in a “Collector’s Edition” that comes packaged in a Pac-Man-shaped slipcase. Inside, readers will be treated to an exclusive arcade token and a brand-new 7″ vinyl pressing of “Pac-Man Fever” by Buckner & Garcia.