This is the vault for gaming design, titles released in the past that are still relevant today for design or plot choices.
No one was paying attention to the end of the decade that fateful 31st of December 1999. Hey, we had more important things on our hands. It was the end of the millennium! You were probably busy sending heaps of sms to your friends and family and trying to remember to turn off your pc…
A dead end can never be a one way street. You can always turn around and take another road. Unless you’re playing King’s Quest. Saving and reloading. Bet you wish you could do it in real life, huh? Forgot to pay the rent, died in a car accident while speeding or failed a job…
Forged in Gremlin Interactive studio and protected by a clunky interface, there lies an interesting adventure game. The center for all realms of existence, it is the balancing force between good and evil, Dosbox and Windows. A focal point for all energies, and the one element that has kept the consuming fury of Damien at…
Throw me tomorrow, now that I really have a large medkit… We’ve seen how in the nineties novelists got involved in the development of videogames but that’s not all: popular musicians got involved as well. Looking back now, we really missed the boat: back in the 2000 not only Queen had released their owen…
Why go 3D when you can go 4D? The first game I’ve ever reviewed in my life, way back in 1996 when I was 12, was actually 4D Sports Boxing. Or at least I thought that’s what it was called, even though supposedly the official name is just “4D Boxing”. I was downright ecstatic about…
Leave your kafkian metaphores at the door, ladies and gentleman, cause we’re about to go where no cockroach has ever gone before! Bad Mojo is the infamous game that everyone remembers exactly because you play as a cockroach: roaming around in kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms, trying not to get killed and, at the same time,…
It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad Tv world. The basic plotline of a videogame, how would you describe it? Going back to the medium’s roots, could be just… not dying. A rather straightforward objective, which we can all cater to, but not really a story. More often than not your quest was about saving the…
A game of unspeakable sadness and pain… Even though the modern videogame industry moves as much money as Hollywood, novelists have gradually drifted away from the idea of being directly involved in videogames. Things were different in the nineties: Harlan Ellison got directly involved with the development of the game I have no mouth and…
Back from the dead with a vengeance! Ready to get back to the mafioso family, dude! Far out! Believe it or not but there was a time when Electronic Arts was not the evil colossus we’ve all grown to loathe, but a publisher and developer of titles way ahead of their time thanks to solid…
Johnny Castaway is not a game. It’s a roguelike-like-like(unlike) screensaver with procedurally generated events during a day and night cycle. Indeed, Johnny is a screensaver, developed by Dynamix and distributed by Sierra in 1992, probably one of the best examples of a software designed like a game. Screensavers used to be pretty useful back in…
