There was much fanfare today as Atari celebrated its 40th birthday. Only, it’s not really Atari’s 40th birthday. I hate to be that guy, but the Atari of 2012 has about as much in common with Nolan Bushnell’s original company as my beard trimmings do. Maybe even less, since Nolan has a killer beard. The…
One game featuring a German with extendable robot arms is a thing. Two is a coincidence. But three? All starring in games developed by Japanese studios? OK, three is a pattern. This post over on GameWTFs, highlighting ten cyborgs starring in Super Nintendo games, contains not one, not two, but three Germans with robot arms.…
A: Because this ad, and this console, never appeared outside Japan. Many people blame the Dreamcast for Sega’s exit from the console market, but that’s a harsh point for both the console and the company. Really, it was the Saturn that marked the beginning of the end. The market share the Saturn ceded to Nintendo…
Regular Kotaku readers will of course know that Nintendo hasn’t always made video games. The company has dabbled in everything from love hotels to badass “LEGO” sets. It also, in the early 1970s, tried its hand at electronic card games. In about the most bizarre way imaginable. This is Electro Poker, released in 1971. It…
Don’t try and make sense of Spinal Breakers, a 1990 coin-op game. It’s got a story that centres around nuclear war, something called “hildroids” (which look a lot like Nazis to me) and the alteration of the Earth’s axis. What’s important is that you play as a man (and walking Michael Biehn tribute) called Captain…
Like anyone else who played PC games in the early 1990s, I was, and still am, madly in love with Wing Commander III, perhaps the finest moment of the period’s fixation with using real actors. One thing always seemed a little weird to me though: why was there a porn star on the ship? Yes,…
It’s OK to get frustrated by a video game. They’re often designed to do just that. But there’s a line you cross once you get past frustration, and once you get to the other side, you’re in angytown. That’s usually not OK. It’s a sign you should maybe put the controller down, take a step…
Ah, Bleeping Relics, we meet again. The Beligan retro crew with a taste for rad hardware (and a very nice camera) are this episode sitting down with Puck Monster, a rather crude Pac-Man clone. Which should be a recipe for five minutes of boredom, but this isn’t about game reviews, or judging companies who choose…
Activision may be heralded/hated as one of the world’s biggest video game companies today, but in 1981, it was a much smaller company. A very different company, in a very different time. Which is the only reason I can think of to explain this bizarrely wonderful promo video the company put together in 1981, which…
Hey, RoboCop, you’ve got mechanical arms and a gun in your leg. Why’d you have to go and smash a perfectly good arcade game? And it was pretty good. If you couldn’t make it out beneath all the broken glass and criminal hair, it’s Sly Spy, Data East’s 1989 side-scroller that took more than a…
Companies like Sega and Namco tend to get all the credit when it comes to weird and wonderful arcade cabinets, but even all the way back in the 1970s, Atari was trying its hardest to be different. To that end, it came up with a number of prototypes for cabinets that went a little further…
The unveiling earlier today of Microsoft’s new “Surface” tablets was a strange one for me. Not because of the nature of the product, but for its name. It’s one Microsoft has been using for years, only, for an entirely different device. One that, for a while there, we thought could change the way we played…
Ha, ha, Journey reviewer. You think you’re so clever, inserting Journey lyrics into your game review. Well as it turns out, there once was an arcade game based on the band Journey. Well, it was something of a minigame collection, telling a somewhat awesome story of the band reuniting with their instruments, do a show,…
Since I had not played Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater until recently, I had also not seen its introductory credits sequence and accompanying movie. How? I ask you. How had I not seen this? This song, performed by Cynthia Harrell, was a classic almost from the moment the game was released. When the song…
You don’t have to be a regular Kotaku reader to know that “8-bit” has become one a hugely popular aesthetic. 8-bit art, 8-bit music, 8-bit everything. This terrific mini-documentary at PBS goes in-depth into the origins for the trend, pulling together all manner of artists familiar with the movement, from Dr. Octoroc to Anamanaguchi to…
Sega earned itself quite the reputation during the 1990s for its bold advertising, especially in the European market. Sometimes, though, the company went a little too far. Like these British ads from 1992. Which had dick jokes, masturbation jokes, pissing, enormous breasts and, well, pictures of a guy either rubbing his junk on the back…
Think back to the video games of the 80s and 90s and most characters, let alone protagonists, were dudes. But not all of them. Which is where the delightfully-named Femicom comes in. It’s a website that’s looking to “collect information about 20th century electronic games and toys, especially video games and computer software, that feature…
This is the first episode of Did You Know Gaming?, a new series close to my heart because it does exactly what I try to do here with Total Recall: not necessarily dwell on the known history of games, but the more interesting stuff hiding in the background. It’s off to a good start, with…
In the 1982 film Tron, nearly everything takes place, in one way or another, inside a joint called Flynn’s Arcade. While at E3 last week, video game historian Scott Patterson decided to skip the noise and light and go and see how the building used for filming is looking today. It’s…not bad! It’s still clearly…
DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is in many ways the great scourge of modern gaming. Designed to limit the effects of piracy, it’s often more of a pain in the ass for paying customers than it is a hindrance to pirates. It’s usually associated with PC games, but Nintendo is no stranger to it either.…
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