‘Videogames’ Category Archive


February 5, 2021

The Fractal Roguelike

Back in 2013, I wrote a post about Spelunky HD and its demonstration of "rule horizons," a concept I described as "expanding layers of ...

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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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July 21, 2017

Bandai’s Joy Family

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 ...

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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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December 9, 2015

Don’t Call It A Remake

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 ...

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August 4, 2015

Knots & Loops

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 ...

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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

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 ...

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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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April 3, 2015

Bravely Default’s Temporal Strata

Videogame time is weird. Though all manner of clocks and timers, whether computational or diegetic, drive play, time rarely operates in games as it does ...

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