Back in 2013, I wrote a post about Spelunky HD and its demonstration of "rule horizons," a concept I described as "expanding layers of complexity that radiate from a central core ruleset." Like many games that strike a delicate balance between simplicity and depth, Spelunky expands with the player's expertise. For the casual player, it's a cartoonish platformer with destructible terrain, obtuse mysteries, and a comical ecology of physics interactions. Place a bomb too close to a lava pool ...
In preparation for an article I'm writing on hobbyist Japanese Famicom programmers in the 80s, I've spent the past few days diving into a quirky bit of software from Nintendo called Family BASIC. If you've never heard of it before, FB was a Japan-only release for the Nintendo Family Computer that built an interpreted programming language into a cartridge, allowing users to program rudimentary games, utilities, and music compositions on their console using a custom keyboard peripheral. In partnership with ...
Though most of my research into 1980s Japanese board games has focused on Bandai's prodigious output, they had several competitors in that era, including Hobby Japan, Tsukuda Hobby, Epoch, Takara, Hanayama, Enix, and Nintendo. During their brief stint into wargames (c. 1981–84) via the "Game for Adult if Series," Bandai's two primary competitors were Tsukuda Hobby and Epoch. There's a nice history of Japanese wargames on this wargaming blog, but the short version is as follows: Hobby Japan introduced ...
A Japanese toymaker's role in the history of board games If you played NES in the 80s, watched Power Rangers in the 90s, or dipped into the world of Japanese toys in the past five decades, you've likely heard of Bandai. Established in 1950, the toymaker managed to insinuate their name into the American consciousness like many other Japanese companies of the time—via toys, television, and videogames. Though much younger than the House of Mario, Bandai's own rise to toy stardom ...
In January 1977, the Electronic Engineering Times organized a three-day gathering of designers, manufacturers, consultants, and suppliers hailing from the nascent electronic game industry. Eighteen talks from this First Annual Gametronics Conference were later collected in the Gametronics Proceedings, archiving a fascinating glimpse into the diverse and exciting future of electronic games, comprising everything from coin-operated arcade machines to touch-based input devices to the then-new 'programmable' (i.e., cartridge-based) TV games pioneered by Fairchild's Video Entertainment System (VES). At this point ...
The latest announcement of the Final Fantasy VII remake’s episodic structure has triggered the expected blowback from those who hoped their beloved JRPG would never stray from the perceived perfection of the original. Square is in a no-win position, both trying to update the dated aspects of a strange and sprawling game while also honoring the spirit, scale, and narrative of the original. But what’s more interesting than both developer and fan rationale and reactions is the general willingness ...
Images of Videogame Narratives The following paper was originally delivered at the Readers' Advisory Forum of the American Library Association in Washington D.C., June 2010. As you may notice from the title of my discussion, I have, through a minor prepositional adjustment, taken on today’s theme in a slightly oblique manner. The prescribed topic should be ‘Images in Videogame Narrative,’ a suitably rich source of conversation, since games are certainly involved in visual storytelling, but I am far more interested in ...
How Donkey Kong's programmers used compression to save ROM space. The following section is one of I AM ERROR’s oldest—it appeared in the initial drafts of chapter 2 (which I wrote first) in early 2012. It also remained intact until quite late in the manuscript process—at least until mid-2014—lodged between the 'Missing Pies' and 'Binary Kill' sections. As such, it made it through numerous revisions and copyedits. In the end, I cut the section because it felt supplemental. Though compression is an ...
Cuts, corpora, and commentaries from I AM ERROR. Good writing means making sacrifices, and editing is among the hardest tasks that a writer will face. During the nearly four-year process of pitching, researching, drafting, editing, revising, and finally publishing my first book, I AM ERROR, I wrote over 160,000 words and included over 100 images. At its most bloated, in August 2013, the book was over 600 pages long. And it would have been a poorer, more boring book if ...
How Konami's developers used the MMC3 scanline counter to create large moving enemies. The following section was originally intended to directly follow the Mega Man 2 Mecha Dragon discussion in the 'Big Boss' section of chapter 6. According to my notes, I began dissecting the Super C Area 1 boss fight on September 9, 2012, though I recall that it took me several days to understand how the scanline counter worked and translate that into readable prose. (I also planned to ...