The team at Rare had already established themselves as marque video game developers by the mid 90’s. Previous titles like Battletoads, Knight Lore and Sabre Wulf had earned the company’s founders Tim and Chris Stamper critical acclaim. Not happy to rest on their laurels when Nintendo bought up a majority share in the company in 1994. The brothers saw it as a chance to take on one of Nintendo’s characters and innovate on the medium. Continue reading
Nintendo’s business and financial ideology was shaped by the video game crash of 83’. In a time of copycat consoles and next to no level of quality control on the games produced. Nintendo’s had the unique business model of making their game cartridges proprietary, forcing third party developers pay a licence fee to get their games on the NES console. Continue reading
As the console wars heated up between Nintendo and Sega in the early 90’s, Sega was lagging behind its main rival. Nintendo was dominating the market with its NES console hitting it big with gamers and the follow up SNES on its way. Continue reading
In the mid 80’s Nintendo reigned supreme over the video game industry, with their NES console the must have device for any gamer. The popularity of the NES was in no small part due to Shigeru Miyamoto and his best-selling titles like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. In February of 1986 Nintendo released a new peripheral for the Famicom (Japanese NES) console, it would allow for the use of proprietary floppy disks. Continue reading
The Stanley Parable is a game that has captured the attention of a certain subset of gamers. They are interested in challenging the linear and pre-determined nature of video game narratives. Traditional video games have seemed to make many assumptions about player’s actions, with the narrative guiding the player down the developers chosen path. Davey Wreden’s game looks to make a critic on the trend in modern video game storytelling. Continue reading
Nintendo had already established itself as a major video game developer by the mid 80’s. Smash hit titles such as Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. had put the company on the map and increased its market share of the American arcade sector. Now Nintendo wanted to tap into the lucrative console market. Continue reading
“Leave Luck To Heaven” is the translation for the Japanese video game company Nintendo. The company would see its rise to prominence out of the ashes of the 1983 video game crash. Continue reading
The year of 1982 was a dark period for the video game industry. Early in the year the port of the popular arcade game Pac-Man was released. Atari bet on the game selling well and thus produced 12 million cartridges, however in the end it only sold 7 million units. Atari were facing into a bleak financial period and would soon to be facing completion from within. Continue reading
Donkey Kong was not only responsible for Nintendo breaking into the American market but also featured a protagonist that would become one of the companies’ most iconic figures. The game also looked to set milestones in the industry for technical innovation, it pioneered new game development techniques and was one of the earliest examples of multileveled games with only Midway’s Gorf proceeding it. It helped define the platform genre of games which it would later return to in the Spin-off Mario Bros games that helped lift the company to legendary status within the video game community. Continue reading