retro games

Intro and gameplay footage of Rescue on Fractalus, the 1985 Lucasfilm Games title for Atari XL/XE, programmed by Loren Carpenter and David Fox. It shows the game's fractal-generated mountain terrain.

Karl Jobst investigates the retro video game bubble, examining who caused it, who profits, and how graders and auction houses like Wata Games and Heritage inflate prices. It runs almost an hour.

A roughly 75-minute video essay from Ahoy's RetroAhoy series on the making and history of The Secret of Monkey Island. It covers the small LucasArts team, the game's development and its sequel.

Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.

Stuart Ashen presents a talk at the 2017 Norwich Gaming Festival on Hareraiser, a notoriously bad video game tied to the Masquerade treasure hunt. He explores why it may be the worst game ever made.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms makes a 76-minute argument that selling video games as a service is a form of consumer fraud. He lays out legal arguments that games are goods, covers ownership and programmed obsolescence, and discusses game preservation.

Making-of video about ROM City Rampage, the NES version of Retro City Rampage, covering how the game's core was crunched to run on real 8-bit hardware and how NES games are made.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms lays out a campaign to stop publishers from permanently shutting down games, using The Crew as the test case. He covers government initiatives and the legal options, and the stopkillinggames.com site.

LGR reviews the weeCee, a tiny mini PC that boots MS-DOS and Windows from a microSD card. It offers Sound Blaster Pro and General MIDI compatibility with VGA output, and the video tries it with DOS and Windows 98 games.

LGR reviews the Book 8088 and Hand 386, newly built DOS retro PCs sold on AliExpress that use real legacy chips on custom boards. He covers what is neat about them and their compromises and odd design decisions.

The final scene of the 1983 film WarGames, in which the WOPR computer runs through nuclear war scenarios and concludes that the only winning move is not to play. It is a six-minute clip uploaded in higher quality than earlier copies.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained dissects how Atari's Quadrascan vector displays and vector generator hardware drew games like Asteroids and Tempest.

Noodle explores how retro pixel art was designed for CRT displays and why games look different on LCDs, with input from pixel artists and CRT researchers.

A one-minute demo comparing RetroArch shaders on the Sonic the Hedgehog waterfall, where Sega Genesis dithering creates a transparency effect. It shows how different shaders emulate the CRT look.

Roaring Kitty's July 2020 analysis of GameStop, arguing a bullish deep-value case when the stock was about $4 and short interest exceeded 100%. It covers fundamentals, cash balance and technicals.

The climactic lesson scene from the 1983 film WarGames, in which the computer learns that the only winning move in nuclear war is not to play. It includes the character entering zero players and the famous closing line.

David Crane, designer of Pitfall for the Atari 2600, gives a GDC 2011 postmortem on the game's design challenges. He covers how he fit a large world into the console's tiny memory. The session ends with Q&A.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Ocarina of Time at Summer Games Done Quick 2022, using TASBot and arbitrary code execution to reach an alternate ending in about 53 minutes. The run is introduced by its creators and followed by an interview.

Myst co-creator Rand Miller recounts how the HyperCard-built game struggled to run on 1x CD-ROM drives. He and his brother Robyn compressed image and audio data heavily to get acceptable performance. Part of Ars Technica's War Stories series.

A /noclip documentary on GOG, covering how it finds and re-releases classic games and pushes DRM-free releases. It also touches on the company's origins in Poland.

A HandmadeCon 2016 panel where Chris Hecker, John Miles, Sean Barrett and Chris Green give an oral history of software texture mapping in 90s games.

Modern Vintage Gamer explains why PlayStation 1 graphics warped and jittered, comparing it with the Nintendo 64. The causes are affine texture mapping and the lack of sub-pixel vertex precision.

Jacob Geller's video essay examines how architecture in schools and in video games, such as cover shooters, is shaped by violence. It touches on brutalism, campus policing and protests.

Jonathan Blow gives a roughly 90-minute talk, followed by Q&A, on how video games could actually improve education, in contrast to what is currently being tried.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained shows how the Atari 2600 draws images with almost no video memory, by having the CPU race the CRT beam line by line. It walks through the techniques in detail.

Tom7 explains and demos software that learns to play NES games by finding score patterns in memory and then searching for inputs that raise it. It is the video companion to his SIGBOVIK paper.

Jason Scott discusses making his documentary GET LAMP at a Google Tech Talk and screens part of the film. It covers the history of text adventures and interactive fiction, with interviews of Infocom developers and others.

Eric Chahi's GDC 2011 postmortem of Another World (Out of This World), describing how he built the game. He shows his polygon art approach, rotoscoping and animation tools.

The 8-Bit Guy explains the color limitations of 1980s computers and consoles such as the NES and Commodore 64. It shows how sprites, attributes and palettes shaped the look of old games.

A 69-minute documentary on the Polybius arcade-game legend. It examines visual, physical and anecdotal evidence, traces the story's source, and concludes the game never existed beyond one website entry.

An hour-long video essay on Elite, the 1984 BBC Micro game by David Braben and Ian Bell. It covers how they fit a 3D engine, economy and universe into 22KB on a 2MHz 6502.

David Crane's 2011 GDC postmortem of Pitfall, the classic Atari 2600 game. He explains how he created the game under the severe hardware limits of the console.

Modern Vintage Gamer explains how Eric Chahi built Another World on the Amiga 500, using 2D polygons, rotoscoping and clever techniques to run well on a stock 7MHz machine.

Gameplay footage of Zarch, the 1987 3D Defender-like game by David Braben for the Acorn Archimedes. It shows the 256-colour 3D landscape where you stop landers spreading a virus.

An episode of Coding Secrets by Jon Burton on retro copy protection, in particular physically damaging a disk with a laser so copies fail. It explains how this defeated hackers and pirates.

Gaming Historian recounts how Atari subsidiary Tengen challenged Nintendo's licensing rules with a lawsuit and unlicensed NES games, including the lockout chip fight.

A two-hour complete longplay of the 1993 MS-DOS puzzle game The Incredible Machine, in which players assemble Rube Goldberg contraptions to complete simple tasks.

Gameplay footage of the original 1986 Macintosh version of Dark Castle by Silicon Beach Software. The uploader argues the original is a great game that was tarnished by inferior ports.

A one-minute clip of the Warcraft II sound card test in setup, where the test sample plays and the voice says the sound card works perfectly.

Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.