‘Technology’ Category Archive


September 2, 2019

Family BASIC in 2019

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 ...

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December 19, 2016

The Future of Videogames, 1977

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 ...

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June 8, 2015

I AM EXTRA: Manic Compression

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 ...

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June 6, 2015

I AM EXTRA: The Super C Helicopter Boss

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 ...

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February 28, 2015

Stencyl Tutorial Series: Blockade (Part I)

For our introductory tutorial, we will use Stencyl to replicate the 1976 arcade game Blockade. Blockade is an early precursor to Snake and ...

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December 10, 2014

Unforeseeable Sentences

Last month, professor and media theorist Jay Bolter wrote a short post called 'Browsing culture' that rebuts a refrain commonly heard from fans of ...

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January 9, 2014

Major League Baseball vs. Retro Criticism

Via Twitter, friend of the site Cameron Kunzelman recently introduced me to Eric Bailey, proprietor of Nintendo Legend, a site dedicated to ...

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September 30, 2013

Prêt-à-Jouer and Videogame Couture

What happens when we stop thinking about videogames as cinema and instead think of them through other media, like fashion, dance, or architecture? Note: This paper ...

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November 18, 2012

VHS as Palimpsest

Ghosts of an obsolete medium As the 90s make their inevitable loop back through the pop culture recycle bin, we find artists embracing the quirks and ...

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May 20, 2012

Don’t Mention It

In the four years I've used Twitter (User #14,519,536) its form and function has transformed from an oddball novelty to a useful daily tool. ...

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