Ys [1987/1989]

You may or may not have picked up on this if you're a regular reader, but I'm not good at playing video games. I'm kinda bad at them, with limited exception. Most titles, I muddle through with nothing more than bloody-minded persistence to try over and over again. I don't ever know first-hand what high-level …

NetHack [1987-2023]

NetHack [1987-2023] is a "Forever Game." I use that phrase a lot in casual conversation, and now is the time to pin it down and define it for future reference, even though it will mean repeating myself a bit. Theoretically, one can play basically any game forever: people can and do play Super Mario Bros …

Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device [1947]

Apologies for the shuffled chronology here, but it is a war game and I was inspired. When Philo T. Farnsworth first demonstrated his all-electronic CRT television to anyone outside of the laboratory where it was invented, he said "here's something the bankers can understand" and turned it on to produce an image of a dollar …

OutRun [1986]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDFYjKqg8M0 Koto - Jabdah (Instrumental) [1986] {Down the 5-lane freeway cruises a salmon-pink Ferarri Testarossa Spider at a ludicrous speed. We follow close behind as it bobs and weaves through intermittent traffic and wide curves, squealing its tires for some reason every couple of seconds. In its left seat sits a Dude, and on the …

Tetris [1984]

What can you say about Tetris [1984]? Nothing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6mPHfJTpYk Marek Biliński - Po Drugiej Stronie Świata [1984] I know it's different for everyone, but me, I think in full sentences. Even simple things, like hunger or pain or sensing temperature, are mediated through concrete and often surprisingly verbose language. It's not that I can't imagine …

Mystery House [1980]

Humans are such fragile meat, no? And they're past their expiration date... Life itself is proof of guilt.

Pac-Man [1980]

Since Space Invaders [1978], the game in the arcade has become more clear: it's all about managing and producing tension. If Space Invaders was a jazzed-up marching band tune, Pac-Man is an Alfred Schnittke all-out orchestral assault. It could not be a starker contrast to the stately Lunar Lander [1979], in its loud poison-frog colors …

Colossal Cave Adventure [1977]

There is no other game of its era or the next one, all the way up to Super Mario Bros [1985], that is anywhere near as celebrated and long-lived as Colossal Cave Adventure [1975/77]. In 1995, Graham Nelson, author of Curses [1993] and of the Inform programming language in which he implemented the port I …

Magnavox Odyssey [1971] + Pong [1972]

The most famous Magnavox Odyssey game is Table Tennis. It was the direct inspiration for Pong, and there is an infamous lawsuit decided in Magnavox's favor to that effect, which became famously the first of decades of copyright trolling putting up a hundreds-of-millions tollbooth on the mere concept of video games at home. If we …

Spacewar! [1962]

Spacewar is still the first video game. Not technically: the developers of Spacewar were already aware of a playable Tic Tac Toe implementation on the very computer they were working on, which by that point was already a more-than-decade-long tradition for computers, not to mention Tennis For Two [1958]. (For greater detail on this cascade …