Marcel Vos's creation hit the highest intensity rating possible on RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. Vos has named the coaster "Big Scary Motherfucker." Read the rest
This fellow reached the highest intensity level possible on Roller Coaster Tycoon 2
Fancy arcade game simulator cabinet inspired by Pong's design
The design of the ORIGINX wall-mounted arcade cabinet was inspired by the simple wood and yellow paint of the original Pong arcade game from 1972. The walnut and aluminum tribute is an edition of 50 and available for €2,899.00 (US$3407). From Love Hultén:
The standard version runs on a built-in modern computer, emulating all your favorite games through MAME - but the cabinet can aslo be customized to run the original JAMMA board of your choice. OriginX comes with a 19" 4:3 LCD, and to boost the authentic arcade experience Hultén adds a custom barrel distortion filter to mimic classic CRT monitors.
(via Uncrate)
Kamasi Washington's killer new soul-jazz track inspired by videogame arcades of yore
Cosmic saxophonist, composer, and spiritual jazz revivalist Kamasi Washington has released a new jam inspired by his teenage experiences at the videogame arcade. "Street Fighter Mas" will appear on Washington's forthcoming album "Heaven and Earth" out June 22. Listen:
Washington says:
Read the restWhen I was younger, I was in between the end of the arcade generation and the beginning of the console generation. We used to go to this place called Rexall to play Street Fighter. At Rexall, there would be different people from different hoods there playing the game. It was the one place that was like an equalizer. It was just about how good you were at Street Fighter...for the most part. In other places, you were afraid of these dudes; there, you would just play the game and it was what it was, you know? I was really good at Street Fighter, so where the song really came from was me jokingly saying I was going to have my own theme song so that when I showed up to play Street Fighter they’d play my theme song before I came in, like a boxer. In the context of the album, it was the connection that we got with those guys in our neighborhood. We used to call them OGs, the older guys that we looked up to.
In a lot of ways, for me, video games was the way I connected with them because I was never affiliated with any gangs, but I knew them and I was cool with them and that was mainly through the video games.
Legal battle royale: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds maker sues Fortnite maker
Fortinte has eclipsed the previously reigning PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and now PUBG believes that success has come at the expense of their copyrights. So here comes the lawsuit! Read the rest
Tank: an excellent animated short paying homage to 80s vector videogames
Red Giant's chief creative officer Stu Maschwitz used Adobe After Effects to painstakingly create Tank, a fantastic tribute to 1980s vector graphics videogames like Battlezone, the Vectrex system, and the original Star Wars coin-op machine. Below, "The Making of Tank."
See this over-the-top $30,000 PC gaming setup
Unbox Therapy built this intense gaming cockpit around a Xidax PC, LG 42.5" monitors, the Imperator Workstation Game Chair with massage features, and other components totaling around $30,000. I especially appreciate the "snack cart."
Celebrate Myst's 25th anniversary through this Kickstarter
In 1993, Cyan Inc.'s Robyn and Rand Miller created Myst, a magical interactive story/puzzle published on CD-ROM that forever changed the landscape of immersive gaming. Myst proved once and for all that videogames could be art. To celebrate Myst's 25th anniversary this year, Cyan launched a Kickstarter for a marvelous "historical anthology of the complete series, along with some special, Atrus-approved, authentic game artifacts." The games will be playable on Windows 10. (Mac editions may be in the future.) The Myst 25th Anniversary Collection will certainly spark the imagination of anyone who plays it, including those developing the next generation of immersive experiences.
Myst: 25th Anniversary Collection (Kickstarter)
Play free emulators of all those handheld video games of yesteryear
The Internet Archive has an incredible free collection of 1980s handheld game console emulators. In 1978, my brother and I played the hell out of Coleco Electronic Quarterback. It's amazing how compelling and addictive a flashing array of LED dashes was back then, and still is. From the Internet Archive:
This collection of emulated handheld games, tabletop machines, and even board games stretch from the 1970s well into the 1990s. They are attempts to make portable, digital versions of the LCD, VFD and LED-based machines that sold, often cheaply, at toy stores and booths over the decades.
We have done our best to add instructions and in some cases link to scanned versions of the original manuals for these games. They range from notably simplistic efforts to truly complicated, many-buttoned affairs that are truly difficult to learn, much less master.
They are, of course, entertaining in themselves – these are attempts to put together inexpensive versions of video games of the time, or bringing new properties wholecloth into existence. Often sold cheaply enough that they were sealed in plastic and sold in the same stores as a screwdriver set or flashlight, these little systems tried to pack the most amount of “game” into a small, custom plastic case, running on batteries.
They also represent the difficulty ahead for many aspects of digital entertainment, and as such are worth experiencing and understanding for that reason alone.
(via Waxy)
Pornhub confirms Fortnite as their top searched video game
Fortnite is the most popular game to be searched about in Pornhub's online database of videos. I am not sure what that means, really. While I am enthusiastic about both forms of entertainment-art I find their intersection to be a bit confusing.
There are a lot of great stats and tables about what people are searching for, to answer their Fortnite related pornographic need.
Via PornHub:
Read the restThe most popular Fortnite related searches include “hentai”, “battle royale”, “animation” and “strip”. Following some viral videos on YouTube, “try not to nut fornite” also became a popular search. “SFM” is a term often combined with game searches (see Overwatch Insights).
Meet vintage videogaming's archivist extraordinaire
Back in 2012, we published a feature about Frank Cifaldi, one of the world's leading collectors of rare vintage videogames and related ephemera. Since then, Cifaldi founded the Video Game History Foundation, dedicated to preserving this vibrant art form's history and culture for the ages.
Vintage rotoscoping session from the making of Mortal Kombat (1992)
This 1992 behind-the-scenes footage of a Scorpion rotoscoping session from the making of Mortal Kombat could easily be a piece of absurdist Dada performance art. (via Uncrate)
Russian van comes with Tetris built into the dashboard
Some models of Russian GAZelle Next commercial vans and trucks have Tetris integrated into the instrument cluster as an Easter egg. Here's the Google translation of the YouTube poster's instructions of how to bring up the game:
1) Turning the ignition on 2) Start a car 3) Three times the right turn signal 4) Two times distant 5) Five times on the clutch 6) raise the speed to 2000 and at that moment we light the arrow to the left
Watch: Lego Grand Theft Auto
Nukazooka's latest video brings Grand Theft Auto's disconcerting brand of vehicular violence into the Lego realm.
Watch this Stranger Things refresher wrapped in a faux 1980s videogame
Hack for Super NES emulators turns Zelda and Super Metroid into two-player games
Andi McClure's emu-coop is an emulator hack that brings two-player fun to Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Legend of Zelda for the NES. It works by enabling players to share in-game inventory over the Internet.
emu-coop (GitHub via Waxy) Read the rest
The story behind the sounds of Pong, Pac-Man, and Doom
Four video game audio designers explore the psychoacoustics of vintage video games, from the accelerating heartbeat of Space Invaders to the dramatic woosh of Myst's linking books. From Wired:
With only a few channels of audio to play with, early videogame designers had to get very creative if they wanted their sounds to stand out. Pong, created in 1972, took a single tone and made it iconic, while Donkey Kong utilized the limited sounds of a Game Boy to trigger a range of cues and emotions.
As the games got more complex, so did the audio, and the theories behind it. A loop, or short, repeated section of audio, acts as a recurring cue. Dissonant sounds communicate failure, while consonant ones—think of the sympathetic vibrations of Super Mario Bros.—encourage players to continue. The tones can even mimic human sounds—a modulating synthesizer approximates laughter, like the “wawawawawa” in Duck Hunt.
Teaser for Castlevania series on Netflix
With the classic 1980s Nintendo Entertainment System continuing to rack up extra lives thanks to the retro videogame resurgence, the thirty year-old game Castlevania has been ported to Netflix with a new animated series. Warren Ellis wrote it, which almost guarantees that it will be the best TV program based on a videogame ever, and that includes Hanna-Barbera's Pac-Man.
