Gaming

In March 2020, Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the darling of quarantine.

Just five years ago, Nintendo was at a crossroads. The Wii U was languishing well in third place in the console wars and, after considerable pressure, the company was making its first tentative steps into mobile gaming with Miitomo and Super Mario Run.

In March 2013, Irrational Games released BioShock Infinite, the third game in the bestselling BioShock shooter series. It should have been a triumphant moment — early reviews were strong, the game shipped millions of copies, and the developers started work on an expansion called Burial At Sea.

In the 1970s, in the fledgling days of the video games industry, an engineer named Gerald “Jerry” Lawson designed one of the earliest game consoles, the Channel F, and also led the team that invented the game cartridge, a defining innovation in how games were made and sold.

The cheat-making group known as "Chicken Drumstick" made more than $70 million selling cheats for PUBG Mobile. This is the story of its rise and fall.

Industry-changing shifts are easier to spot in hindsight, long after hundreds of little decisions steered video games into a new epoch. The parallel rise of downloadable content, post-launch patches, and in-app purchases happened over years. Today is different.

Knockout City is the best team-deathmatch game I've played in years. It celebrates and elevates the genre's roots in ways that make me think I've somehow reinstalled my old Voodoo2 GPU. And the game elevates this familiar format all under the guise of family-friendly dodgeball.

Thinking through alternatives to life under capitalism, the vestiges of colonialism or the catastrophic impacts of climate change is hard but necessary work. But could it also be play?

Elon Musk finally got to show off his monkey. Musk has boasted about Neuralink's tests on primates before, but this is the first time the company has put one on display. During a presentation in 2019, Musk said the company had enabled a monkey to "control a computer with its brain."

Nintendo wants to make exercise easy and fun. At least, that’s the message the company tries to broadcast through health-conscientious developments like step counters and memory games.

Here's an unavoidable fact: the original Nintendo Game Boy is reaching middle age. The world may have moved on to sleeker, less bulky technology since Nintendo's first portable landed in shopping malls and mom-and-pop electronics stores back in 1989.

Now that Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the remaster of BioWare’s groundbreaking space trilogy, is out, the video game series likely to reach a whole lot of first-time players—especially considering the current drought in new game releases.

Video game popularity soared during the pandemic, as people sought distraction and ways to connect with loved ones.

Recently, I finally had an opportunity to play Sucker Punch's samurai epic Ghost of Tsushima, and its story of the Mongol invasion of Japan made me think about the way games treat revenge. At the heart of it, waging war is taking revenge, a form of payback for an injustice committed to you.

Black players pioneered what we now call esports. The industry hasn’t paid them back. Jason Cole didn’t own a computer, but he was fairly certain that he was the best Street Fighter player in California.