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.
Before Madden taught a generation to read a playbook, 4th & Inches taught computer owners to call one. Accolade’s American football game reached the Commodore 64 in October 1987, and it did something
By the autumn of 2016, publishing new cartridges for old consoles had grown from a hobbyist stunt into a small industry, and nobody embodied the shift like Piko Interactive. That October the company o
Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice — at a glance · Developer: Sanzaru Games · Publisher: Sega · Platform: Nintendo 3DS · Released: 27 September 2016 (North America), 30 September 2016 (Europe), 27 October 2016 (J
In September 2016 a Croydon games shop filled its floor with working Amigas, a leaderboard and five pounds-a-head of pure scene spirit. This is the story of that night — and of the user groups and gatherings that still pull Amiga people into rooms together.
Every genre has a patient zero, and for the first-person shooter it is arguably a shareware oddity from 1991 in which you piloted a hover tank through wireframe mazes, rescuing hostages for a shadowy
Some fan translations rescue famous games. The Dahna Megami Tanjou English translation, which arrived in September 2016, rescued a rumour: a bloody, strange Mega Drive action game from 1991 that most
Every autumn, the Sonic Hacking Contest opens its doors and the strangest, funniest and most technically outrageous versions of classic Sonic appear from nowhere. Whole new levels built inside thirty-
In the summer of 2016, Sonic fans were arguing about the future again. Sonic Mania had been announced, Sonic Forces was on the horizon, and official 3D Sonic was still searching for a formula that fel
The poster promised the greatest fight in history. In one corner, billed as a “juicy peanut butter jammer”: Sonic the Hedgehog. In the other: Dr. Robotnik, the tank-bot. On 1 September 2016, SEGA Chan
Somewhere on an Amiga forum in August 2016, a player posted a description of an Amiga 3D maze game they had been trying to identify for years, and the thread this site’s original post pointed to becam