The arcade cabinet was never about the game. It was about the queue behind you
Eighties mechanics were designed for someone standing and waiting. We inherited the decisions and forgot the reason.
Photo: Arcade Perfect · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
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News
hololive Dreams is out on mobile: rhythm, mini-games and over 150 songs
It launched on 23 July, but only became visible now.
1 min read
Thoughts
A ten out of ten is not a score, it is a statement
We pretend the scale is linear while using only its top third.
1 min read
Stories
Emulators are lawful because a small company won its case and went bankrupt doing it
In 1999 bleem! sold a PlayStation emulator for personal computers at around thirty dollars. Sony sued and lost almost everything. The company folded in 2001, unable to carry the costs, and left behind precedents that still stand.
3 min read
16 August
Konami opens a Metal Gear pop-up at Kinokuniya in Tokyo
14 AugustThe year of the Switch 2 and of Unreal Engine 5 everywhere
14 AugustStar Wars Zero Company: XCOM by the people who made XCOM
12 AugustThe Mortal Shell sequel expands the body-swapping mechanic
7 AugustMGS4 leaves the PlayStation 3 after eighteen years
5 AugustResonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a prequel at a different tempo
4 AugustFinal Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail is out on Switch 2
28 JulyBethesda confirms Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters
27 JulyHalo: Campaign Evolved praised for the engine, criticised for empty levels
23 JulyHalo: Campaign Evolved rebuilds the 2001 campaign on Unreal Engine 5
Stories
Doom solved draw order with somebody else's 1980 paper, and paid for it in level architecture
John Carmack could not afford a depth buffer on a 1993 processor. Instead the engine cuts the level into convex pieces in advance, when the map is compiled. The same fact explains why walls in Doom never move.
3 min read
Stories
Mode 7 on the SNES is not 3D graphics. It is one matrix per scanline
The mode that made F-Zero look like a road racer in 1990 does exactly one thing: it rotates and scales a flat image. Everything else is done by a programmer, by hand, two hundred and twenty-four times a frame.
3 min read
Stories
The kill screen in Pac-Man is not an ending. It is one byte overflowing
On level 256 the right half of the screen dissolves into garbage. The cause is a one-byte level counter and the routine that draws the fruit. Donkey Kong breaks differently at level 22: there it is the timer that overflows.
4 min read
Reviews
Score · tech · verdict →Old Times
What came before us, and worked →2026
The Konami Code exists because a programmer could not finish his own game
Kazuhisa Hashimoto was porting Gradius to the Famicom in 1986, kept failing his own test runs, and wrote himself a ten-button shortcut. He forgot to take it out before release.
2026
Ted Woolsey translated Final Fantasy VI to a budget measured in bytes
From 1991 to 1996 one man handled the English versions of Square's SNES output. What constrained him was less the deadline than the size of the cartridge and Nintendo of America's list of prohibitions.
2026
Final Fantasy VII went to Sony because of storage arithmetic
In January 1996 Square announced it was working with PlayStation. It was not a grudge against Nintendo: the game's video would not fit on a Nintendo 64 cartridge, and if it had, the retail price would have passed ten thousand yen.
2026
Four Atari programmers demanded their names on the box and invented the publishing industry
On 1 October 1979 David Crane, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead and Larry Kaplan founded Activision with Jim Levy. It began with a demand that now looks obvious: a royalty on sales and a credit for the author.
12 August
They fixed it later is not an argument about what happened
No Man's Sky launched in August 2016, a regulator cleared it of misleading advertising, and the players were still right.
2 min read
11 August
Nostalgia is a bad argument but a good question
"It used to be better" is almost always false. What sits behind it is a real observation.
1 min read
6 August
The one case where a failure was admitted rather than patched
Square Enix dropped Final Fantasy XIV in 2010, switched off the subscription, destroyed the game world in front of its players, and built it again.
1 min read