Read This 25th Anniversary Retrospective on TGFX-16

image courtesy of boomhammer.com

In another video game milestone that is sure to make some of my readers feel very old indeed, 2014 marks the 25th anniversary of NEC's video game console, the TurboGrafx-16. While the name may be a little chuckle-worthy, the history of the console and the impact it had on video games are both fascinating and important. Leigh Aexander has a great retrospective entitled "TurboGrafx-16: A Quarter Century of Gaming Excellence". She blends a look back at the console with personal reflections, including one element that really hits home for me, too-- playing video games with Dad. An excerpt:

The thing was absolute magic to me: Black as a beetle, sleek as an animal, elegantly compact. Even when I knew about other consoles, I preferred this one: It was the Hu-Cards, you see. TG-16 games came on small, flat rectangular cards just a little bit thicker than a credit card. Usually they were a bright, solid color with the game’s logo on it. They dwelled in slick, lucid plastic sleeves. Their business end was black licked in gold connectors. You slipped one into your machine like you were at a chip-and-pin machine.
...It was the only phase of my life during which my Dad and I played videogames together. At the end of the very first jungle level, the boss music would begin with a dissonant, almost locomotive hooting, insistently, and two prehistoric bears would shamble ominously onto a screen from which there was suddenly no retreating. Dad called up the hint line about the bears. Although I learned to get good at Legendary Axe eventually over the years—and I persisted at it for years, even after the TG-16 had attained total obsolescence—I could not quite get as far as Dad got, to some temple-land of pit traps where monkeys would leap onto your back, chipping away at your life.

The whole essay is a great read, and there's some great reminiscing in the comments section too.

Game Developer Works With Alaska Native Community to Create Awesome Video Game

Never Alone - Game Trailer from Never Alone on Vimeo.
Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) is an atmospheric puzzle platformer currently in development at Upper One Games in partnership with E-Line Media and members of the Alaska Native community.

Leigh Alexander sat down with Sean Vesce to talk more in depth about the game for a recent article on Gamasutra. An excerpt:

"Sean Vesce left Crystal Dynamics after 20 years in commercial games, with a few goals not uncommon to veterans of the triple-A machine: He wanted to collaborate with small, focused teams, aimed to create social impact, and wanted to create games he could play with his young daughters. Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) seems to fit the bill: Its trailer presents a dreamlike, beautiful and playful experience, starring a young Alaska Native girl, Nuna, and her arctic fox friend as they solve puzzles together. First shown during E3, the $15 PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One game favorably caught the attention of all the big consumer sites, and received an Editor's Choice award from Polygon."

When asked what his greatest hope for the game was Vesce answered, "Our hope is that as players play, they begin to develop an appreciation for some of the core values of Inupiat culture - including interdependence (mutual reliance on each other), resiliency (the ability to persevere through seemingly insurmountable challenge), and respect for wisdom and knowledge that is passed from one generation to another.

It's a really great article, so I urge you to read the whole thing.

Why are video games' brightest stars abandoning AAA games?

Image courtesy of Crave Online

Jeffrey Grubb tackles this question for VentureBeat's Game Beat section in an article entitled "Why triple-A devs are going indie (and why indies aren’t going triple-A)":

"Joe and Anthony Russo had a pretty good summer. The brothers directed and released Marvel’s summer blockbuster Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The pair got that opportunity after working with smaller budgets in the independent-film scene and on television, and they worked their way up to making one of the biggest movies in the world.  That’s a story we don’t really have in gaming.   

Independent and triple-A gaming development is experiencing the opposite, really. The big names from top developers are leaving their jobs directing huge projects to start their own, smaller development studios. Meanwhile, the hottest talent responsible for beloved, best-selling indie games aren’t moving up to direct larger projects for major publishers with enormous budgets. They’re sticking to their roots or focusing their efforts on expanding the games that made them popular in the first place.   

The question is why is “upward mobility” in gaming broken?"

While the article goes into a lot more depth on the reasons why, with a host of great quotes from developers and other industry professionals, I'm also pretty sure that over-specialization on dev teams, the grueling hours expected of workers on AA titles and the relatively low pay probably don't help matters either.