If you were interested in learning about movies, music, poetry, or any art form from China, you could easily find hundreds of books, articles, documentaries, essays, and videos on the subject. Sadly, if you’re interested in Chinese video games, the story is quite different. Asian game markets outside of Japan…

A lot has been written already about the history of virtual worlds, but most texts usually focus heavily on MMORPGs. …

AKA Brazilians strikes again — When talking about the pioneer MMORPGs of the 90s — Meridian 59, Ultima Online, EverQuest, etc — there is a name that is often overlooked: Tibia, a German free-to-play MMO first released in 1997. More than just curiosity or historical artefact, Tibia has one of the longest and most interesting…

A look at the last three decades of this legendary indie dev tool — Creating a tool to allow regular gamers to make their own game is not a new idea. It has been done several times, from ancient titles like Eamon (1980) and Pinball Construction Set (1982) to things like ZZT (1991), Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures (1993), Neverwinter Nights (2002) and Roblox (2006). …

An interview with Özgür Özol — Sadly, I can’t read Turkish. You, dear reader, probably can’t read it either. This means that we can’t properly play İstanbul Efsaneleri: Lale Savaşçıları — aka Legends of Istanbul: Tulip Warriors — a first-person dungeon crawler first released for the AMIGA in 1994. …

NETFLIX just released High Score, a six-episode series about the history of video games. It’s a great-looking series, with an amazing level of access to historical icons and their personal archives. But, like most works on the subject, it’s nostalgic and celebratory. Blindly so. In works like these, the only…

There’s very little awareness of Computer RPG history in the West, the stories told rarely goes beyond “one day Richard Garriott made Akalabeth”. And that’s with everyone speaking English, developers still being around, many books on the subject (including mine), and impressive preservation efforts like emulators, the Internet Archive and…

Nos anos 80 e início dos anos 90, jogos de computador eram vendidos em fitas cassetes ou disquetes de no máximo 1.44 megabytes. Como era possível então que jogos tivessem várias músicas, se um único MP3 ocupa vários megabytes? O jeito era usar arquivos MIDI: enquanto um arquivo MP3 contém…