Unwinnable

“Those pesky play-it-safe publishers are concerned only about their quarterly profits,” says a fictitious composite of veteran developers on Kickstarter. “They won’t let us innovate and make a sequel to this two-decades-old game. That’s where you can help. With Kickstarter, you have the power to make a statement that you do want innovative games. Games just like your grandma used to make. Now in HD! Remakes and sequels so original that publishers run away screaming.”

For years, we’ve been told that publishers stifle innovation. But now that we’ve found a way to bypass them, in place of safe and predictable sequels to last year’s hits, we get safe and predictable sequels to decade- or two-decades-old hits. (more…)

In less than a week, I’m going to visit my parents. This alone is a bit of an event; we usually see each other every six or eight months, but it’s been three years since I saw them in the house that I lived in for the first 18 years of my life. Not all that much has changed there – my childhood bedroom has morphed into my mother’s second closet, but the stacks of Garbage Pail Kids and mid-’80s Mad Magazines are still in their rightful places. Like always, I’ll run errands with my mom. I’ll dig old bikes out of the garage, go to same pizza place where I nursed an 8-year-old’s crush on the waitress, drive aimlessly around the college town where I grew up. And like always, I’ll sit with my dad and crack jokes.

But this year, for the first time, I’ll have to tell him who I am. (more…)

While Unwinnable was having its vacation theme week, I was on actual vacation, half of which I spent in Washington, D.C., fitfully attempting to visit every major landmark and museum. Naturally, I left the city with a list of things I wanted to see but never got around to, but one thing that I was determined to see was a particular exhibit in the Smithsonian American Art Museum: The Art of Video Games. I am that guy who writes about videogames and I simply can’t pass up the chance to see my preferred medium presented in a positive light in one of the more esteemed venues for what we call “art.” (more…)

There is something to be said for the simplicity of classic videogames. Bound by the limits of processors and technology, those original few efforts were like the first fish that dared to wiggle from the water and breathe air.

They crawled out of the muck, unsure of what they would find, into a world that had never known anything like it before.

Two-dimensional adventures such as Donkey Kong and Space Invaders go hand in hand with the first motion pictures. Pong is easily the videogame industry’s The Horse in Motion, one of the first movies ever made in 1878.

Their concepts were simple, their mechanics generic and the fun never seemed to end.

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