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.
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.
Demographers love to refer to people born between 1977 and 1985 as the “Oregon Trail Generation.” Born on the borderline between Generation X and Millennials, members of the Oregon Trail Generation grew up using analog technology like rotary phones and rabbit ears, but they also became proficient in using computers and the Internet (often thanks to The Oregon Trail) while still in school.
However, an even earlier generation got a chance to play The Oregon Trail before it was immortalized in the glowing greens of an Apple IIe. So let’s travel back to 1971 and meet one of the game’s first players in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.
And stick around to explore the connection shared between Ryu and Kevin Bacon, as well as the secret origin of Noob Saibot.
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.
A good introduction can work wonders for getting an audience interested in your game. Just look at all the words written about the importance of World 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. (not to mention all the video essays and podcasts and infographics and interpretive dance performances).
Not every game can feature such a crackerjack introduction, and even if it did, most people will often first experience a game through some encouraging words from a friend or some kind of advertisement. This first impression is no less important, and we’ll look at three of them in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.
Bite-Sized Game History is a column of extremes. Sometimes, it’s a mind-blowing revelation that completely upends the way we think about some part of the distant past. And other times, it’s a fun piece of concept art from a 30-year-old video game.
You’ll find both extremes in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as the story of the extreme measures that Mattel used to take to stress test the Intellivision.
Google Bombing was a popular activity in the early 2000s, as coordinated groups of people attempted to link humorous results to seemingly innocuous searches.
The search engine had mostly put an end to the practice by 2010, which means that the top result for “miserable failure” no longer points to a WhiteHouse.gov page about George W. Bush. But quirks in the algorithm can still cause trouble for people who don’t bother to read beyond the first few links. Author John Boyne, probably best known for writing The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, learned that lesson for himself recently.
This edition of Bite-Sized Game History will look at Boyne’s blunder, as well as Dragon Quest Builders, and remembering Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game on its tenth anniversary.
When you’re working with video games, you have to learn to be adaptable. In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, we look at adapting in the face of a flop, adapting when you have a blockbuster fall in your lap, and adapting to the reality of creating game adaptations.
Everybody has to get their start somewhere.
For a lot of developers, that start often comes from an opportunity that’s slightly outside the game industry. But even after they’ve been at it for a few decades, some veteran designers need to get to a place where they can restart. And you can’t have a beginning without something else ending, like the game industry’s transition from CES to E3 in 1994-1995.
We’ll talk about all of these scenarios in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.
Welcome to another edition of Bite-Sized Game History!
This time around we’ll be looking at the Animal Crossing: New Horizons habits of a few librarians at the Smithsonian, an infographic that charts the evolution of more than a dozen game characters, and the time Ken Griffey Jr. and one lucky Nintendo Power reader got to play a game on the Kingdome’s big screen.
I’m sure some people may enjoy it, but I am definitely not a fan of April Fool’s Day. I don’t know, calling someone a fool after you’ve deliberately lied to them just seems dumb. Pretty much the only thing this crummy holiday had going for it was the annual catalog of gag gifts from Thinkgeek. But this year we can’t even have that after the online storefront was shut down in June of 2019.
We’ll talk about the April Fool’s Day that could have been in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as a few video game-inspired board games, and just how much gold is hidden in Wolfenstein 3D.
