Warp Zoned Presents
Most Recent: Retro
Insert Quarter: The Rise and Fall of THQ’s Empire
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Gamers often didn’t know what to make of THQ. The publisher built its empire on the backs of tie-in games based on Nickelodeon and Pixar properties such as SpongeBob SquarePants and The Incredibles. But they also produced intriguing original games such as Saints Row: The Third and Darksiders. They were even the initial driving force behind Evolve, one of 2015’s most anticipated games. But that all changed when the company went bankrupt early last year.
So what happened? Tracey Lien, writing for Polygon, set out to discover the answer by talking to as many former THQ employees as she could including the charismatic (but possibly crazy) Danny Bilson. Her portrait of a publisher in free fall makes you wonder, could anything have been done?
Many blame the company’s fall on the licensed games well drying up. Some pin it on the commercial failure of the company’s uDraw tablet for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Others point to poor management and too many risky bets.
“There isn’t any one, isolated event that killed the company,” says a former THQ executive who asked to not be named. “This was one of the most successful video game businesses in America. We were a billion dollar company. It was complicated.”
THQ suffered a “death by a million spider bites,” the executive says.
The full article is available for your perusal at Polygon.
Posted in 3DS, DS, Insert Quarter, Mobile, PC, PS2, PS3, PSP, Retro, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360
Tagged Darksiders, Evolve, Saints Row: The Third
Insert Quarter: A Classic Interview With Ralph “The Father of Video Games” Baer
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Ralph Baer passed away this weekend at the age of 92. After spending all his life as a self-described “tinkerer,” Baer claimed more than 150 patents on various gizmos and doodads including the beloved handheld game Simon. But Baer will probably best be known as the man who invented the home video game console. Game Informer’s Matt Helgeson sat down for an interview with Baer in 2009 and the publication re-ran an expanded version of the conversation today as part of a celebration of the developer’s life.
It is an interesting look inside the mind of a man who contributed so much to the game industry:
Game Informer: What’s your opinion of what games have evolved into?
Baer: It’s utterly amazing. It’s simply the result of the semiconductor industry going sky-high over the last 20 years. I have an early Apple computer; it had 32K of memory. You can go to the store and for $50 buy 10 gigabytes of memory on a semiconductor stick that plugs into a USB. It’s like going from bows-and-arrows to the space age in 20 years.
The full article is available at Game Informer.
Posted in Insert Quarter, Retro
Ralph Baer, the Father of Video Games, dies at age 92
Ralph Baer stepped away from video game development more than 35 years ago, but he will always be known “The Father of Video Games” for his contributions to the earliest game consoles. Sadly, Baer passed away over the weekend at the age of 92.
Baer began tinkering with the possibility of playing games on a television set in the late 1960s while employed by Sanders Associates. By 1969 he completed work on a prototype that was nicknamed the “Brown Box” due to the brown tape added to the case to simulate a wood grain finish. In 1972, the “Brown Box” was released as the Magnavox Odyssey, the first game console designed for consumers. Baer designs served as the inspiration for Nolan Bushnell’s work with the Atari 2600 and Baer himself would help Magnavox produce the Odyssey 2 in 1978.
Baer has been honored many times for his work with video games. In 2006, President George W. Bush awarded him with the National Medal of Technology for his contributions to the “groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development, and commercialization of interactive video games.” And in 2008, the Game Developers Conference awarded him a long overdue Game Developers Choice Pioneer Award.
PBS profiled Baer as part of their Inventors digital series last year, which you can view above.
[Source: Gamasutra]
First batch of excavated E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial cartridges sell for $500-1500 apiece
The first batch of excavated Atari 2600 cartridges from the Alamogordo landfill have been auctioned off and checkbooks were opened wide to own a piece of history. The auctions were managed by the Tularosa Basin Historical Society and the priciest E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial cartridge (complete with an original box) sold for $1,537. Other E.T. cartridges sold for similar prices, though the ones without a box sold for closer to $500. Other games (including Defender, Asteroids, Centipede, and more) all sold for under $500 with a copy of Missile Command responsible for the lowest sale of $157.50. A complete list of every auctioned off game can be found at eBay.
The city of Alamogordo will continue to sell some of the excavated cartridges in the coming days, though it’s unknown when the next wave of auctions will begin.
Atari: Game Over, a documentary chronicling the dig, as well as Atari’s rise and fall, will be available to download through Microsoft’s Xbox Live service beginning tomorrow.
City of Alamogordo begins selling excavated E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial cartridges
As promised, the city of Alamogordo has begun selling some of the unearthed Atari 2600 cartridges found during this Spring’s landfill excavation. Nearly 100 titles are now up for bid on the city’s eBay page including E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Asteroids, Missile Command, Defender, and many others.
Bidding for all titles began at $50, but the price of the most sought after titles has quickly gone up. Unsurprisngly, the copies of E.T. are currently the most expensive games in Alamogordo’s auction with one copy garnering $520 in bids with eight days remaining (as of this writing). So if you want a piece of history, be prepared to empty out your piggy bank.
For those of you who’d rather experience the Alamogordo landfill excavation for a cheaper price, be sure to log in to Xbox Live on November 20 to stream a free download of Atari: Game Over, a Microsoft-produced documentary that explores the history of Atari and this Spring’s big dig.
Atari: Game Over documentary will premiere on November 20
Director Zak Penn has confirmed (via Twitter) that the Atari: Game Over documentary will make its Xbox Live debut on November 20:
Atari: Game Over premiering Nov 20 on XBOX #ataridoc
— Zak Penn (@zakpenn) October 31, 2014
Atari: Game Over will tell the story of the game company’s downfall, with a particular focus on E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which was the subject of a massive dig in an Alamogordo landfill back in April. During the dig, Penn and his team discovered a treasure trove of Atari 2600 titles under the dirt, confirming a long-held belief that the company trashed thousands (perhaps millions) of copies of unsold games.
With the recent closure of Xbox Entertainment Studios, the film has the distinction of being one of the first (and one of the last) film productions created by Microsoft.
Insert Quarter: A Profile of the Video Game Archivists at the Library of Congress
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
With more than 6,000 titles, the Library of Congress is home to one of the largest video game archives in the world. But the curation and management of the collection is in the hands of just four part-time employees. BuzzFeed’s Joseph Bernstein reached out to these four men to learn how the Library of Congress is attempting to preserve America’s gaming heritage and how much more still needs to be done:
No, the work of game copyrighting and archiving at our country’s signal institution for cultural preservation is not done by a dedicated full-time staff. Instead, it’s the passion project of a handful of archivists who want to be the new standard-bearers in the preservation of video games. Indeed, the state of video game collection at the Library is something of an expression of the liminal state of video games in American popular culture writ large. The Library recognizes the cultural importance of video games, but only devotes four people part-time to their archiving; Game companies insist that their products are the medium of the future, but don’t trust archives with their source code; Collectors sell their troves on Craigslist and eBay rather than considering donation.
Even to get to this point, though, has been a journey in and of itself.
You can read the rest of the article at BuzzFeed.
Watch This! Every Game Boy title screen in alphabetical order
He did the NES… Then he moved on to the Super NES… Now, YouTube user “NicksplosionFX” has created a video that depicts the Start Screen of possibly every Game Boy game in existence. A few may be missing as NicksplosionFX admits, “It was really difficult to find a complete list of original Game Boy games.”
The video runs nearly three hours (starting with the infamous 4-In-1 Funpak), so I’d recommend starting with a bathroom break first.