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…
Nintendo made last year’s pandemic-related lockdowns more bearable with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Naughty Dog ruled the Summer with The Last of Us Part II. CD Projekt finally showed us their vision of the future with Cyberpunk 2077. And Valve brought virtual reality to a new level with Half-Life: Alyx (the first expansion to the Half-Life franchise in over a decade).
Oh, and Sony and Microsoft each launched brand new consoles in November.
But it was Hades, developed by the small team at Supergiant Games, that walked out of Hell with the most “Game of the Year” accolades in 2020.
You can find the other four, as well as more of last year’s most-acclaimed titles, after the break in the 2020 GOTY Scoreboard.
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…
OK, you caught me, ranking the guest hosts who’ve appeared on Jeopardy! this season is slightly outside the purview of Video Game Canon.
But there have been a lot of video game adaptations of the show over the years, and the firestorm surrounding the selection of Mike Richards as the permanent host (and his quick exit from that job just a week-and-change later) makes figuring out who the next host should be a very interesting question.
Plus, I’m a huge Jeopardy! fan, and I’ve been slightly obsessed with this whole process from the beginning.
If you want a good overview of the video game industry’s early days, Steven L. Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games is a great place to start. Beginning with a quick primer on the pinball craze of the 1930s, the author quickly introduces readers to touchstones like Spacewar, Ralph Baer’s Brown Box, and Pong. Hitting all the highlights from the next 30 years over the book’s 600 pages, the story culminates with the launch of the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox in 2000-2001.
But a lot has happened since then, and so Steven L. Kent has returned with The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming. As you might have gleaned from the title, he picks up right where he left off with the turn-of-the-millennium’s four-way fight for console supremacy (you can’t forget about the Dreamcast), but the book also delves into the later PS3-Xbox 360-Wii era:
The home console boom of the ’90s turned hobby companies like Nintendo and Sega into Hollywood-studio-sized business titans. But by the end of the decade, they would face new, more powerful competitors. In boardrooms on both sides of the Pacific, engineers and executives began, with enormous budgets and total secrecy, to plan the next evolution of home consoles. The PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Sega Dreamcast all made radically different bets on what gamers would want. And then, to the shock of the world, Bill Gates announced the development of the one console to beat them all—even if Microsoft had to burn a few billion dollars to do it.
A short excerpt touching on Ken Kutaragi’s tenure at Sony’s is available on the official website for the book’s publisher, Crown.
The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming is available to purchase from your favorite bookstore (or digitally as an ebook) beginning today.
With the 2021 Update to the Video Game Canon just around the corner, I thought it would fun to look at one of the historical lists I plan to add to the calculation in Version 5.0… Flux Magazine’s “The Top 100 Video Games” from 1995.
Proudly featuring the tagline “The most dangerous video game & comic ‘zine” along the top of each issue, Flux Magazine launched in 1994 as a more adult alternative to GamePro and Wizard. The magazine folded a year later after publishing just seven issues, though not before creating one of the first Best Games lists to cover the full spectrum of games available at the time (arcade cabinets, consoles, PC platforms, and handhelds).
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…
Rally, a “stock market of collectibles,” made a splashy entrance into the world of high-value game collecting during the Summer of 2020 when they purchased a sealed and graded copy of Super Mario Bros. for $140,000.
After acquiring the game (which received a 9.8 A+ grade from Wata Games), the company sold 3,000 “shares” in the collectible cartridge to investors for $50 apiece
Rally’s $140,000 purchase set a record for a single game sale at the time, but it’s been eclipsed multiple times in the past year, including twice just in the last month. That’s when this merry-go-round of motivated sellers and deep-pocketed buyers culminated in sales of $870,000 (for a copy of The Legend of Zelda) and $1.56 million (for a copy of Super Mario 64).
But now Rally gets to sit on the top of the mountain for a little while, and that’s because the game’s shareholders have decided to sell their copy of Super Mario Bros. for $2 million to a private collector:
Punks, X-Men, Declarations, and some news…
?A NEW WORLD RECORD on Rally?
…w/ the $2,000,000 sale of our 1985 Super Mario Bros., marking the HIGHEST PRICE EVER PAID for a video game of any title.
Read more in todays New York Times (cc: @nytimes): https://t.co/mJzEcVMXuQ pic.twitter.com/segsfw6Jw9
— Rally (@OnRallyRd) August 6, 2021
According to The New York Times, each shareholder will receive roughly $475 per share after the sale is completed. That’s honestly a pretty great return on their initial investment.
Evan Amos’s The Game Console dissected the “grisly innards” of more than 80 different platforms when it was first published in 2018. The author explored each machine’s history in a series of short blurbs while also using the “exploded view” photography on each page to dive into the many layers of silicon, plastic, and metal used to build them.
No Starch Press recently announced that this incredible visual study is getting a sequel next month with the release of The Game Console 2.0: A Photographic History from Atari to Xbox, a “Revised and Expanded” edition that’ll add more than 50 consoles, variants, and accessories to the original book:
Revised and updated since the first edition’s celebrated 2018 release, The Game Console 2.0 is an even bigger archival collection of vividly detailed photos of more than 100 video-game consoles. This ultimate archive of gaming history spans five decades and nine distinct generations, chronologically covering everything from market leaders to outright failures, and tracing the gaming industry’s rise, fall, and monumental resurgence.
The book’s 2nd edition features more classic game consoles and computers, a section on retro gaming in the modern era, and dozens of new entries — including super-rare finds, such the Unisonic Champion 2711, and the latest ninth-generation consoles. You’ll find coverage of legendary systems like the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari 2600, NES, and the Commodore 64; systems from the ‘90s and 2000s; modern consoles like the Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5; and consoles you never knew existed.
The Game Console 2.0: A Photographic History from Atari to Xbox will be available in bookstores and as an ebook in August 2021.
This year’s Game Developers Conference is operating slightly out of sync with its normal spot on the calendar, but it was still business as usual (in more ways than one) for the 2020-2021 Game Developers Choice (GDC) Awards.
Ghost of Tsushima, Hades, and The Last of Us Part II tied for the most nominations with six apiece, so competition was stiff for the night’s biggest prize, but it was Hades that took home “Game of the Year” (as well as “Best Audio” and “Best Design”) during last night’s virtual ceremony.
Supergiant’s roguelike just narrowly missed a clean sweep of all the major year-end awards, and the only statuette to elude the veteran developers was the “rising angel” from The Game Awards, which instead went to Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II.
As you may have guessed, Sony’s one-two punch from the PS4’s final Summer didn’t go home empty-handed. The Last of Us Part II was selected as the recipient of the “Best Narrative” award, while Ghost of Tsushima picked up “Best Visual Art” and the “Audience Award.”
Other games that expanded their trophy case last night included Genshin Impact (“Best Mobile Game”), Half-Life: Alyx (“Best VR/AR Game”), Microsoft Flight Simulator (“Best Technology”), Dreams (“Innovation Award”), and Phasmophobia (“Best Debut”)
You can find a full list of all the winners, nominees, and Honorable Mentions from the 2020-2021 Game Developers Choice Awards, as well as a video replay of the show (which was hosted by writer Sam Maggs), after the break.
