You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.
When you’re developing a video game, you have to be ready for inspiration to strike at any time.
For this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look back at how some of the most iconic moments from Journey, Mortal Kombat, and Super Mario 64 went from the drawing board to the screen…
Get a bunch of video game fans in a room, and they’ll gladly talk your ear off about all the ones that got away. Games that hooked us right from the first announcement and then just withered away in development hell. I know it’ll never happen, but I still hold out hope that Capcom will revive Maximo 3 someday. I mean the first two were so fun…
Anyway, for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s talk about a few games, developers, and online storefronts that got away…
Despondent over poor working conditions, a group of developers left Atari in 1979 and formed Activision, the first fully-independent third-party console developer.
Here we are 43 years later, and executives at Activision stand accused by employees (and government regulators) of creating a hostile workplace of their own. But while a number of employees have struck out on their own over the years, Activision’s fate will soon lie with Microsoft, as CEO Bobby Kotick has decided to sell his company to the consolemaker, effectively putting Activision on the path to becoming a first-party developer.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision is a seismic shift for the game industry, and there are a lot of moving parts involved (including those abuse allegations and an FTC approval process that could take up to two years). You’ll find the first steps in that journey in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as a pop-up museum devoted to Pac-Man, and the infamous (and fictional) Nude Code from Tomb Raider.
The Hugo Awards are arguably the most prestigious prize in the science fiction and fantasy community, but it took until 2021 for the members of Worldcon (AKA the World Science Fiction Society) to finally recognize video games with an award of their own.
In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, we’ll look at the Hugo’s first foray into video games, as well as another example of gaming’s lax recognition of copyright law, and say goodbye to the man who defined how football was meant to be played as a video game.
With the right circumstances, it’s possible for a logo to break free from the company it represents and become an iconic piece of history in its own right. It’s easy to point to Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox as some of the most prominent examples in gaming, but they’re not the only ones.
Bite-Sized Game History is back with the working designs of one such logo, as well a former wrestler’s previously-unknown connection to one of the most infamous games of the 1990s, and a farewell to an influential engineer you might not know.
With more than 50 years of history to pick from, a milestone birthday for some game or console happens nearly every day. But 2021 is a particularly big year for the fine folks at Nintendo. The consolemaker extinguished 25 candles for the Nintendo 64 over the Summer and blew out 20 for the GameCube just last month.
We’ll talk a bit about both of those anniversaries in this edition of Bite-Size Game History, as well as a new way to play Doom (which will officially turn 28 in a few short weeks).
It’s an oft-repeated mantra in certain circles (and I’m sure it’s come up in this column before), but game development is hard. Projects morph and mutate as they wind their way through development, and many never make it out the other side. So for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at a few things that disappeared over the years, but still live on in their own way…
LucasArts and Factor 5 were joined at the hip in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But what sorts of games did LucasArts create before their collaboration? And what happened to Factor 5 after the Rogue Squadron series faltered? Oh, and where does the long-forgotten Independence Day Online fit in with both companies?
Find out in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History…
If you’re someone who plays a lot of video games, odds are you’re also someone who loves to collect things. A lot collectors like to gravitate towards high-priced retro games, but with billions of pieces of game-related ephemera out in the world, there are always other aisles to explore.
For this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at three recent finds that were very exciting for collectors…
There’s a lot that can link two video games together. Sometimes it can be as simple as a few developers in common, but other times it can be an influential game mechanic or even a subtle in-game reference that hints at a connection between two universes.
What do Blizzard’s StarCraft, BioWare’s Mass Effect, and Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog have in common? Not much actually, but all three are featured in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.
