Psychic/possessed children are creepy. They do creeeepy things, like stare blankly at you and speak in a monotone and maybe set your hair on fire with their minds. But sometimes, they do something even creepier. They play video games… without using the controllers This scene, from the apparently terrible 1981 horror film Kiss Daddy Goodbye,…
We’ve all done it. Anyone who’s played an open-world game, from Grand Theft Auto III to Fallout 3 to Red Dead Redemption, has gone on a murderous rampage. Those civilians. They’re all just… sitting there. You know what else is sitting there? Your dark, murderous id. Time to go to town. The number of video…
You may have seen one or two of these clips before, maybe even here on Kotaku, but boy, seeing them all laid out in a single video like this is something else. Witness stars like Christian Bale, Jack Black and…30 Rock’s Jenna Maroney and…Paul Rudd get a big break on crappy old video game commercials.…
Sure, I could bang on about Caveman, a tabletop electronic game released by Tomy, and how it had a rad soundtrack and some terrific box art. But my Australian accent is, while occasionally loud, not exactly sexy. And I’ve never actually played this thing. So let’s kick back and watch the Belgians at Bleeping Relics…
Ronald Jardine was one of the very first employees at Atari. We’re talking the early 1970s here. Employee #159. Wonderfully, Jardine recently took photos of his old ID badge from his time there and uploaded them, giving us an insight into the cutting-edge security methods employed at the blossoming tech company. It was…a card with…
Soft & Cuddly was a 1987 game for the ZX Spectrum. It was neither soft, nor cuddly. It was horrifying Strange and mildly disgusting in a way only British-developed game for personal computers in the 1980s could be – and I say that as a good thing – it tasks the player with collecting the…
This old Diablo II commercial, from around the time of the game’s launch in June 2000, is notable for two things. The first is that it’s a rare example of official live-action Diablo The second is the use of the word Macintosh in the closing splash. For all the credit companies like Valve get these…
In 1999, Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto gave a keynote address at the Game Developers Conference. An address you can watch here in its entirety. Remember, this isn’t the quasi-executive, Wii Music Shigeru Miyamoto we know today. This is the designer at perhaps the height of his powers, with games like Super Mario 64 still fresh…
If you’re short on ideas for new wallpaper, and have a bit of a thing for old video game hardware, check out French artist Alan Cloiseau’s collection of vintage Sega, Sony and Nintendo systems and controllers. His personal site has plenty more great art.
Has it been a while since you last played Full Throttle? I’m guessing it has. Sit back, relax, and watch the intro movie from the game. I remember the gravel-voiced intro, the long shots of the road… but more than anything I remember that song that kicks in when Ben ramps his bike over that…
Most everyone has some memory or another of 1943, the top-down airplane bullet-hell shooter to which we all lost a good deal of quarters. When I think of 1943, I think of things like “Difficulty” and “Insane Difficulty.” I do not, however, think of a flying baby. But in the Japanese ad campaign for the…
They say Red Dead Redemption is haunted, you know. They’ve said it for years now—ghosts exist in the system, devils and spooks and specters and maybe even a class-5 full-roaming vapor or two. I’ve never encountered any ghosts in the game myself, but I’ve heard and read enough accounts that I’m willing to believe something…
Via Vice mag’s tech site, Motherboard, we get a look at one of the best pieces of work ever done on a Game Boy. And it’s not even a game. In response to recent excitement over things like the iPhone’s Game Boy camera app, Michael Byrne shares this clip, made by some friends of his…
The Book of Watermarks is an adventure game released in Japan, and only in Japan, in 1999. Rare for a Japanese adventure game, it featured full-motion video acting and 3D visuals. Oh, and it also tipped its hat to the work of William Shakespeare. Though it’s of course heavily inspired by Myst, being a puzzle-based…
Of all the teen movies that crawled out of the 1980s, High School USA was far from the finest. And yet here we are, watching a scene of it, right here on Kotaku. Why? Because Michael J Fox is in it, looking divine. And because it reminds us Crispin Glover has always been a little…
The word “arcade” is these days synonymous with video games, but it wasn’t always that way. In 1968, there was no such thing as a consumer video game. So arcades had to make do the old-fashioned way. With pinball machines, novelty amusement machines and lightgun games. There was even room for a fortune teller. These…
I’m not American, and I don’t live in America, so my familiarity with Sonic (apparently a drive-in burger chain) is limited. I am however very familiar with classic arcade racer OutRun, which Sonic is tapping into with this retro-infused commercial. Sonic Drive-Thru Guys / Out Run Commercial [PatrickScottPatterson]
As a box art fetishist, this might be the best website I’ve ever seen. It’s called Box vs Box, and its purpose is to compare the box art of Japanese video games and their Western counterparts. Sometimes it’s a straight Japan vs US matchup, other times it’s a three-way royal rumble, with PAL games joining…
These wonderful shots are courtesy of Bleeping Relics, and show the control boards of a trio of old Pong consoles. These old analog systems weren’t adjusted via menu screens or fancy UI systems. If you wanted to change something, well, there was a button right there on the console. Bleeping Relics [Flickr]
Before the internet existed, millions of players toiled away in lonely obscurity to find the best way to beat the oh-so-hard games of yesteryear. Lots of us scribbled in notebooks, drew our own maps and called tips lines to figure out how to beat the games we were obsessed with. And then we shared this…
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