Consider: They did a few AD&D games on the mighty Mattel Intellivision. Bethesda Softworks' Elder Scrolls series of RPGs goes back a loooong way. Imagine if these two titans of history met...| Video Game History 101
Hello there. I wanted to give anyone reading the blog and history articles a heads-up that we are in the throes of a redesign of the site. The relaunch will be happening on May 1st, but there is a lead-time to get everything up and running. To that effect, I have exported the Blogger blog to the hosted TDE blog, and hence will not be making any further major updates to this one. | Video Game History 101
Having long since moved on from just being a simple online bookseller, Amazon has gradually expanded to become the Wal-Mart of online businesses, shilling everything under the sun. The company has recently made a move to become a one-stop shop for retro game collectors with their new Retro Gaming store. From Atari to Zelda, mint boxed systems to boxes of motherboards, they seem to have it all. | Video Game History 101
Coming across the pond from London, England is Game On 2.0, an interactive exhibition featuring the history of video games. Starting tomorrow, it will run at the Ontario Science Centre here in Toronto until Sept. 2. | Video Game History 101
Reverberating throughout the 80's landscape of bleeping arcades and flashing colours of home video game consoles is Nancy Reagan's simplistic anti-drug slogan "Just Say No". Every First Lady needs a bugaboo to pursue while the President rules in office, and Reagan's was youth drug use. I'm not saying that trying to reduce drug abuse among youth is akin to merely chasing a boogeyman, but if you reduce your anti-drug campaign down to a catch-phrase, well then that's how the public is going ...| Video Game History 101
If it's Monday, it must be another video game retromeme:| Video Game History 101
Hey, you got Star Wars in my Pac-Man!| Video Game History 101
As the first "superstar" Surgeon General of the United States, C. Everett Koop held a lot of sway over public opinion when it came to health issues in the 1980's. With his passing on Monday at the age of 96, one figures he must have had some knowledge on the subject of longevity.| Video Game History 101
The Gashlycrumb Tinies is an infamous 1963 book written and illustrated by Edward Gorey. In it 26 children, each one with a name that starts with the next letter of the alphabet, die from various causes, all put to rhyme.| Video Game History 101
It it's Monday, it must be another video game retromeme:| Video Game History 101
Nolan Bushnell founded Atari in 1972, sold it to Warner Communications in 1976, and was eventually ushered out of the company in 1978. The writing had been on the wall for awhile, for the man who had kept Atari alive by constantly innovating, by constantly swimming forward in a sea of ravenous competitors. By then, Atari had gone from a company about innovating to a company about marketing past successes, and that attitude eventually helped sink the entire industry in 1983-84. What Nola...| Video Game History 101
Vanguard was an arcade game developed by "shadow" developer TOSE, and released in Japan by SNK in late 1981 and licensed for North America by Centuri. It was an important intermediate step towards modern side-scrolling shoot-em-ups such as Gradius and R-Type, improving on a genre first formed by William's seminal Defender. | Video Game History 101
If it's Monday, it must be another video game retromeme:| Video Game History 101
This poster is freaking fantastic. It has a great feel to it. I was thinking that this is the way Disney should have gone with the promotion of their groundbreaking CGI video game movie from 1982. Be mysterious with it, low key... instead of the "computerized Fantasia" they pushed. Although, thinking about it, the poster feels a bit too 70's, a vibe that would probably have given the public the idea that the movie was dated even before release:| Video Game History 101
It's impressive to me that I've been able to watch Zombies shamble into the pop-culture landscape, lurch past the "played out" label, and become a new, timeless horror genre akin to vampires and werewolves. AMC's The Walking Dead is a cable TV series that premiered in 2010, designed to bring Zombies to the small screen, and was wildly successful in the process. | Video Game History 101
Happy Valentine's Day, from Kirby and Friends:| Video Game History 101
The Call of Duty series has been a bit of a hit for Activision. It started as an entry in the WWII PC first-person shooter sweepstakes of the early 2000's with the original Call of Duty, released in 2003. This was followed by a, well, army of sequels and spin-offs for every gaming device of any note, eventually shaking off its historical warfare roots and moving into modern times. The most recent iteration of the series is Call of Duty: Black Ops II, released in late 2012, netting Acti...| Video Game History 101
Can you guess the unique video game system Electronic Games magazine was so jazzed about in this quote?| Video Game History 101
If it's Monday, it must be another video game retromeme:| Video Game History 101
Gotta love Dorkly. Chose wisely, Ash:| Video Game History 101
But wait, look what else you get!| Video Game History 101
I need one of these:| Video Game History 101
Featured in today's post is a video fascinating to me. It was released by Depth Analysis, the Australian sister company to Team Bondi, developers of L.A. Noire for Rockstar. DA was formed to do the ground-breaking motion capture work for the game.| Video Game History 101
Today is Nolan Bushnell's 70th birthday. Before co-founding Atari and the video game industry, a previous job had held while a student attending the University of Utah was as a carnival barker. It was a job he ended up doing his whole life. Today's What Nolan Said:| Video Game History 101
If it's Monday, it must be another video game retomeme:| Video Game History 101