It is fascinating how the history of video games tends to be skewed towards a USA-centric narrative. Still, to this day, it is relatively easy to come across articles – written by Italians of all people – that keep on mentioning the “console wars” in the 90s or the “great video game crash of 1983”,…
Very few people seemed to care about the history of video games in the 90s: everyone just played them really. Truthfully though, back then the medium was still in its teenage years; it would be rather unreasonable to expect people to start looking back and think about the evolution of the medium, let alone on…
What do Zeus and Zombies have in common? Well, beside the letter Z, not very much one would say, but Lucasarts would beg to differ, especially Mike Ebert and Dean Sharpe. The two designers worked on two Lucasarts console releases, Zombies Ate my Neighbors and Herc’s Adventures. The two titles stand apart from the usual…
How does on go about making a sequel to one of the most famous arcade maze games, basically the defining maze game, fourteen years later? But, weren’t there already sequels to the original game? Well, apparently not as such. Ms. Pac-man was considered a spin-off, Pac-mania was a “reimagining”, Pac-land seemed to be another spin-off,…
While playing and remembering various movie tie-ins products, there was one question I found myself unable to answer: how did a publisher decide which movie to license to a game developer (or viceversa)? Despite still not having a clear answer, for the sake of this article, though, my guess would be: box office success with…
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 is one of those abilities one would wish to actually use in real life. All problems would fade away: forgetting to pay the rent, dying in a car…