The Pop-Culture E-Zine
If you have aged like a fine wine, you’ll remember Commodore’s PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) line of home/personal computers produced in 1977 by Commodore International.
For those of you longing for some Commodore PET computer action, here’s 340 (at the time of publication) Commodore PET programs that you can run in your browser!
The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), a nonprofit that brings old video games back to life by preserving, celebrating, and teaching their history, has recently unveiled the Video Game Source Project, an effort to save and study source code and related development materials before the stories around these games’ creation are lost forever.
“For a video game historian, an archaeological dig through source material is the next best thing to time travel,” said Frank Cifaldi, founder and co-director of the VGHF. “Unfortunately for us, most of that material — especially from our earliest days — has been lost forever. The Video Game Source Project will help us surface more of this material and normalize its use as an educational tool.”
To jump-start this initiative, the VGHF is putting out a call to developers, publishers, and anyone else in possession of source code, documentation, concept art, demo builds, or other materials that can help tell a game’s origin story. Donated materials will be maintained in the VGHF’s Northern California archives and made available to video game historians.
The first games to benefit from the Video Game Source Project will be Lucasfilm Games’ legendary point-and-click adventure The Secret of Monkey Island, which celebrates its 30 year anniversary this month, and its sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge.
The VGHF’s staff and volunteers have spent the past several months studying the Monkey Island games’ source code, uncovering unshipped secrets, and even reconstructing cut rooms and cinematics. Much of this content will be shown for the first time on October 30 when Ron Gilbert, the creator of Monkey Island and of the SCUMM game engine, joins Cifaldi for a livestreamed “fireside chat” and Q&A. Tickets for “The Secrets of Monkey Island” are available for $10 with sales benefitting the VGHF.
“Monkey Island is a special game to me and the creation of the SCUMM system is a large part of that. Looking at the source always jogs my memory and now gives me a chance to answer questions people didn’t even know to ask,” says Ron Gilbert. “As a developer, I see real value in preserving and learning from the work that we never imagined people in the future would care about. I’m glad the Video Game History Foundation is making this a priority while there’s still time to salvage history that’s becoming scarcer by the day.”
Beyond Monkey Island, members of the VGHF are currently studying source material from a beloved 16-bit RPG, abandoned Sega hardware from the 1990s, and a never-before-seen follow-up to a legendary arcade game. Historical analysis and content related to these games and others will be unveiled in the coming months. The VGHF has also established an advisory committee of developers, publishers, academics, and historians to tackle the problems related to source conservation and to encourage industry participation.
To learn more about the Video Game Source Project and sign up to receive email updates, visit the Video Game History Foundation website.
image source: VGHF
What do you do if you don’t have a Game Boy with Tetris? You build a real life Tetris game from some solid cardboard, that’s what!
This creation made us smile, which is exactly what we all needed for the start of the working week.
段ボールでテトリスを作ったお父さん。これは楽しそう。 pic.twitter.com/J3UShJ6tZx
— いっちー@バーチャル精神科医 (@ichiipsy) September 20, 2020
The folks at Replay Magazine have been quite busy of late conducting classic gaming surveys, like Your Top 4 Favourite Classic Video Game Characters of All-Time, and their latest one, Your Top 10 Favourite Classic Video Games.
We were quite surprised to see Ms. Pac-Man at number 1, but then again, it is the best arcade Pac-Man game, so it deserves to be on any favourite classic video games lists. Galaga (woohoo!) was up there in second spot and of course, Donkey Kong! Oh yeah, great to see our fave arcade game of all time, Double Dragon, make the list too. But what happened to Street Fighter II?
Your Top 10 Favourite Classic Video Games by Replay Magazine:
image source: Click Americana
This was an awesome tweet by History Uncovered! The tweet features original footage that was used to animate the first Mortal Kombat arcade game!
Original footage used to animate the first Mortal Kombat video game 😍 pic.twitter.com/z2ZpaFCZwN
— History Uncovered (@Iearnhistory) August 17, 2020
It looks like we will never cross this one off our bucket list 🙁
SEGA’s Building 2 (formerly known as SEGA GiGo / Akihabara GiGo) is set to close on August 30th. Building No. 2 opened on the southern edge of Akihabara in October 2003, becoming a favourite for arcade video game enthusiasts and gaming nostalgia-seeking peeps.
It would seem that the current world health crisis has hit the Electronic Town quite hard, with a big downturn in visitor numbers. SEGA hasn’t as yet provided any formal reason for the impending closure, except for this post and the sign below, which reads (translation by SoraNews24):
image source: Arcade Otaku via Twitter
“Notice of Closure
Thank you for your continued patronage.
We are sorry to announce that this branch, Sega Akihabara Building 2, will be closing.
Our last day of operations will be Sunday, August 30.
The entire staff wishes to express, from the bottom of our hearts, our sincere gratitude at the loving support you have given our establishment for so many years.”
If you have visited SEGA’s Building No. 2, we would love to hear your stories (and see some pics), so please share them with us on Twitter or Facebook!
image source: That Damn Pixel / header image: Google
We also welcome good news, especially news of free video games!
The peeps at SNK have teamed up with Twitch Prime to bring Prime members a number of popular SNK titles completely free! The first wave of games began with seven titles which became available from May 2020, and now the second wave begins with an additional seven, like METAL SLUG 2 and SNK 40th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION. More games will be released in the future, so stay tuned!
If you have an Amazon Prime membership, then do yourself a favour and grab these free SNK titles now from Twitch Prime!
Important things to know:
* You must be an Amazon Prime member in order to download these games
* The available games are their western versions
* Offer available till April 1, 2021 (but don’t wait till then, grab them now!)
image source: SNK Corp.
Just in case you weren’t sick of seeing the inevitable and dreaded ‘Game Over’ screen, here are a few as a kind reminder 😉
Source: dibujoanimado
The good folks at Replay Magazine recently conducted a survey to find out who was our favourite video game character of all time.
Well, it was no surprise to see the usual suspects, however, we honestly thought Mario would be on top of the list. Oh yeah, how did Dirk the Dragon Slayer (Dragon’s Lair) make it in third spot and where was Sonic The Hedgehog?!
Upon reflection, the iconic yellow dot-muncher definitely deserves to be on top. We can’t wait for Replay’s next surveys, so stay tuned.
Top 4 Favourite Video Game Characters of all-time:
image source: Just Kidding
We promised no more Kickstarters, but this FunKey S – the world’s smallest handheld gaming system, has grabbed us by the scruff off the neck and it ain’t letting go!
You can relax with the question about funding, the FunKey S is already well and truly funded – by a long shot! Right, let’s get straight to it – if you want a retro gaming system small enough to fit on your keyring so that it can be taken anywhere, then the FunKey S is your jam. The FunKey S features a clam-shell design, just like the classic GameBoy Advance SP. Once opened, it greets you with a 1.54″ IPS LCD screen and a D-pad style controller. This teensy little beast is no slouch, with an ARM Cortex-A7 CPU @ 1.2 GHz under the hood. Playtime is roughly 90 minutes on a 20 minute charge, which is pretty decent too.
Most importantly, the games are loaded via its SD card slot, supporting memory cards up to 128GB, which should be enough for pretty much every retro game under the sun – which bring us to the shady part. To play NES, SNES, Game Boy (Original, Color, GBA), Sega Master System, Sega Genesis / Megadrive, Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, Playstation, WonderSwan and Neo Geo Pocket games, you will have to hunt for ROMs in some pretty murky areas on the web, which is kinda not so legal.
If you are craving to play classic video games on the go, then you can’t really go past this small and very cute foldable handheld!
story & image source: technabob