» The Curse of Monkey Island The Digital Antiquarian

» Choose Your Own Adventure The Digital Antiquarian

The first and most iconic of all the Choose Your Own Adventure books involved spelunking, just as did the first and most iconic of all computer-based adventure games.

Shadow of the Colossus: An oral history

Celebrate the 20th anniversary of Team Ico’s PlayStation 2 masterpiece by looking back with 11 people who worked on it (and three who didn’t).

» The Last Adventures of Legend The Digital Antiquarian

The early days were the best. We had successes, we had fun, and we had a good business model. As the industry changed, everything became more complicated and harder.

» Grim Fandango The Digital Antiquarian

My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword]. No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.

» Half-Life The Digital Antiquarian

Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite work out of the game — was a kind of ideological stake in the ground: we really did want the game and the story to be the same thing. It was far from flawless, but it was really trying to push the boundaries of a young medium.

» The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 2: The Scandal The Digital Antiquarian

That’s the challenge: giving the public a formula they know and feel comfortable with, but making it different from anything they’ve seen or experienced before.

Review: ‘Chaos Monkeys’ Is a Guide to the Spirit of Silicon Valley (Published 2016)

Underneath the braggadocio and evisceration of professional nemeses in Antonio García Martinez’s book lies the beating heart of a formidable teacher.

» The Truth Is Out There, Part 3: The Game of Belief The Digital Antiquarian

If traditional film is a river, the viewer of that film sits on the bank and watches the water flow by. We wanted to take that viewer and turn them into a fish and put them down into that river.

» The Game of Everything, Part 2: Playing Civilization The Digital Antiquarian

As a game designer, you have ultimate power. And with this ultimate power comes very little responsibility.

» The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings The Digital Antiquarian

For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore Amiga, its Liverpool-based publisher Psygnosis brought it to no fewer than 23 other platforms, from natural habitats like MS-DOS and the Apple Macintosh to such refugees of the 8-bit era as the Sinclair Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, from cutting-edge multimedia appliances like the Philips CD-i and the 3DO to handheld gadgets like the Atari Lynx and the Sega Game Gear. In all of its incarnations, it outsold any other game ever to have passed through the hands of Psygnosis by a veritable order of magnitude.

» The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization The Digital Antiquarian

If my gravestone says, “Sid Meier, developed Civilization,” I’m happy with that. It’s a game I’m happy to be known for.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild review

Link’s latest adventure is a bold and much-needed reinvention of the beloved franchise

The forgotten mistake that killed Japan’s software industry - Disrupting Japan

This is our 200th episode, so I wanted to do something special. Everyone loves to complain about the poor quality of Japanese software, but today I’m going to explain exactly what went wrong. You'll get the whole story, and I'll also pinpoint the specific moment Japan lost its way. By the end, I think you'll

London's Forgotten Banana Nuisance

Death by banana skin.