Insert Quarter – Video Game Canon

New Study by Video Game History Foundation Finds 87% of Games Released Before 2010 Are Out of Print

Thousands of games for the Wii, Wii U, DS, 3DS, and PSP became permanently unavailable after Nintendo and Sony shuttered the digital storefronts on their previous-generation platforms over the last few years. And while they remain available for now, similar closures are on the docket for the Xbox 360 Marketplace and the PlayStation Store for the PS3 and Vita.

These are just the most visible examples of a problem that has always plagued the video game industry, but it’s getting worse. A new study by the Video Game History Foundation has found that 87% of all games released in the United States before 2010 are now unavailable to purchase.

How does something like this even happen? And is there anything we can we do about it?

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Three Mini-Documentaries for Mario Day

It’s March 10th, which can also be written as MAR-10, which means that it’s Mario Day, an annual celebration of Nintendo’s mustachioed plumber.

Like Disney and Star Wars Day, the consolemaker has embraced this fan-driven holiday, and it’s likely that some kind of major announcement will happen later today (the smart money is on the first trailer for the upcoming Super Bros. Mario movie).

But you need to get into the proper headspace to truly enjoy the holiday, so sit back and enjoy this trio of mini-documentaries about the man they call Mario.

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Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole With Enter the Matrix, Path of Neo, and The Matrix Online

Even though its fast approaching the silver anniversary of its release, The Matrix still feels like a modern blockbuster to me. Maybe I just don’t want to admit how long its actually been, or maybe the eternal agelessness of Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Hugo Weaving has permanently trapped my brain in 1999 (my apologies to Laurence Fishburne and Joe Pantoliano).

Whatever the reason, it’s still great to go back and experience The Matrix all over again today. The gravity-defying fight scenes and its green-tinged cyberpunk aesthetic have forever etched the movie in our collective consciousness… and cast a long shadow over the game industry thanks to titles like Max Payne, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Control, and Nier: Automata.

But The Matrix also had a more direct inspiration on three incredibly ambitious tie-in games (Enter the Matrix, The Matrix: Path of Neo, and The Matrix Online) that were produced between 2003 and 2005. Let’s see how deep that rabbit hole goes…

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Comedians Ask… Why Don’t They Make Advergames Anymore? Are Games Just for Boys? And Are Games Too Violent?

It’s easy to assume that a comedian wouldn’t be the best source to go to for some random bit of game history, but in some cases, they’re actually pretty pretty good.

So come along as a few funny folks tell us what’s the deal with advergames, video game violence, and why some people think games are just for boys…

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National Videogame Museum Launches “The Animal Crossing Diaries” Podcast

The unique world that players inhabit in Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons has helped a lot of people cope with the events of the last two years, and the curators at the National Videogame Museum have embedded themselves within this welcoming community, collecting stories from the public for their excellent Animal Crossing Diaries online exhibition.

Recently, the UK-based museum expanded their oral history project with the launch of The Animal Crossing Diaries podcast on Spotify.

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Celebrate 20 Years of Xbox With the Microsoft-Produced “Power On: The Story of Xbox” Documentary Series

Microsoft’s anniversary celebration for the Xbox has reached its final form with the release of Power On: The Story of Xbox, a new six-part documentary series.

Power On was produced in-house by Microsoft and it promises to tell the full story (“glitches and all”) behind the creation of the original Xbox. Bungie’s Halo: Combat Evolved gets the spotlight in the fourth episode, and viewers who stick with the series to the end will be able to dive into the fallout from some of Microsoft’s costly mistakes, with two final episodes devoted to the Xbox 360’s Red Ring of Death and the Xbox One’s TV-centric debut.

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Wata Games, Heritage Auctions, and the Suspected Fraud at the Center of the Graded Games Market

The market for retro games has exploded exponentially in the last few years, with the record for the price paid for a single game rising steadily from just over $30,000 in July 2017 to $114,000 in July 2020, $660,000 in April 2021, and $1,560,000 in July 2021. Earlier this month the record climbed again to $2,000,000.

It would be easy to chalk this phenomenon up to an aging base of collectors ready to spend their hard-earned dollars on something they could never obtain as children. After all, you saw the same thing with comic books and baseball cards in the 1980s and 1990s.

But something else might be going on here…

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The E3 Expo is Changing: What Will it Look Like After 2021?

The future of the E3 Expo is once again on shaky ground.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo split off from the Consumer Electronics Show in 1995 and originally served as a place for the game industry to show retailers what they had in development for the holiday shopping season. But mainstream media attention soon followed, allowing the event to grow in size and spectacle over the next decade.

After a 2007 rebrand as the slimmed down “E3 Media and Business Summit” failed, the event continued to hum along as an important date on the Summer calendar for yet another decade. Even after the introduction of a wide range of digital showcases from the major publishers (including all three consolemakers), as well as the rise of player-focused events such as PAX, E3’s importance as a one-stop-shop for major announcements is only somewhat on the wane.

But that hasn’t stopped game journalists from musing about the future of E3, even before the 2020 event was canceled in the face of the coronavirus pandemic…

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Someone Found a Director’s Cut of 1993’s Super Mario Bros. Movie on an Old VHS Tape

That headline might sound like some kind of bizarre April Fool’s Day hoax, but I promise, every word of it is true. Someone (two someones, actually) found an extended director’s cut of the Super Mario Bros. movie adaptation from 1993 on an old VHS tape.

So who managed to sniff out such an odd piece of cinematic history? That would be Ryan Hoss and Steven Applebaum, the operators of Super Mario Bros.: The Movie Archive and the caretakers of an extensive collection of production material related to the film.

Trust the fungus and read on to learn more about Super Mario Bros.‘s almost-mythic place in the video game movie canon and how this extended cut will give fans a glimpse at a version of the movie that’s even crazier than what we got in 1993…

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Gold-Plated “Royal Wii” Created for Queen Elizabeth II is Being Sold on eBay

Like Acclaim and Sega before it, no marketing stunt was ever considered too outlandish for the original incarnation of THQ.

Before the publisher went bankrupt in 2012, it used its marketing budget to hire expensive Hollywood talent like Guillermo Del Toro (who consulted on the story for the never-released Insane), while also doling out a few bucks to hire an army of porn stars to promote Saints Row 2 and Saints Row: The Third. But THQ’s marketing department had to get extra creative when promoting the company’s more family-oriented titles.

Sticking with the “family” theme, THQ tried to recruit Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of the Royal Family in the marketing effort for 2009’s Big Family Games, a budget title that was similar to Wii Sports. While they were likely hoping for a slew of “Royal Wii” headlines, it was not to be, as Her Royal Highness was obviously not going to just stop off at the studio for a commercial shoot. So THQ went to her…

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