Stories
Long reads on how things actually workThe 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.
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.
How a single bug created an entire genre
A defect nobody fixed, because it turned out to be more interesting than the plan.
For twenty years the loading screen minigame belonged to somebody else
Namco filed in 1995, received US patent 5,718,632 in 1998, and it ran until 27 November 2015. The demonstration was Ridge Racer, which launched Galaxian while the disc was being read.
The 10NES chip did not protect against copying. It protected against publishing without permission
Nintendo put a chip in the 1985 NES that resets the console forever if it does not get the right answer. A 1992 ruling made picking such locks lawful — yet Atari Games lost anyway, for a reason that had nothing to do with engineering.
Why remasters became more profitable than new games
Production costs outran the average price. Doing the maths on re-releases.
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.
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.
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.
Rollback netcode lies to you for a few frames, and that is why fighting games work online
Tony Cannon wrote GGPO around 2006 so he could play Street Fighter III over the internet. The method is brazen: predict the opponent's input, show the result immediately, and when the prediction is wrong, rewind the simulation and run it again.
Sixty dollars held for fourteen years. It was not a price but an agreement
59.99 was fixed at the Xbox 360 launch in 2005 and stood until 2020. Through all those years the real price of a game fell, and publishers made up the difference elsewhere.
The ea_spouse letter did not win an argument about morality. It won one about job classification
On 11 November 2004 an anonymous LiveJournal post described the schedule at an Electronic Arts studio: months of eighty-five hour weeks with no overtime pay. The author was Erin Hoffman. The outcome was two class actions and thirty million dollars in settlements.
The PS5 drive did not change loading times. It changed the price of dying
On 18 March 2020 Mark Cerny took apart the PlayStation 5 architecture: 5.5 gigabytes per second and hardware decompression. The most interesting consequence is not the absence of loading screens but how failure is now designed.