From the Vault columnist. Grew up feeding quarters to the Ms. Pac-Man machine at his uncle's pizza place; still owns his childhood SNES and every Nintendo Power he ever begged his mother for. Writes the retrospectives and the hidden-gem hunts.
Lucasfilm’s strangest Atari trip: a brass-and-crystal time machine, diary in hand, stealing fire from the guardians of fractal caves. Atmosphere like nothing else in 1985.
Before Prince of Persia there was the cliff, the hawk and the bow. Mechner’s cinematic karate epic on the Atari 8-bit, frame by rotoscoped frame.
Loren Carpenter’s fractal mountains made the Atari 800 fly in 1984. Rescue downed pilots, mind the visor colour, and never trust a Jaggi — Lucasfilm’s astonishing debut.
Bill Hogue’s claim-checking platformer gave the Atari its first great home-grown hero. Ten stations of slides, ladders, telephones and mutants — the 1982 gold standard.
Dan Bunten’s Irata is still the finest multiplayer economy ever coded: land grants, auctions and crystite fever for four players around one Atari. A masterpiece of social design.
Doug Neubauer’s 1979 killer app turned the Atari 800 into a starship — Galactic Chart, hyperwarp and Zylon dogfights in 8K of code. The blueprint for every cockpit game since.
Captain Quazar, Icebreaker, Immercenary and seven more: ten games the launch coverage ignored and the price-tag joke buried, rescued from the 3DO’s deep shelf.
ODEs, emulators, homebrew and a complete community archive: the open standard that failed in 1994 finally got its ecosystem, built by its fans.
Bought for a reported $100 million, demonstrated, developed for and cancelled by inches: the M2 is the most fully realised console that never launched.
A three-dollar royalty, an open standard and any manufacturer welcome: the 3DO’s business model failed in 1993 and quietly became the industry’s future.