video games

The History of Video Games … in Print

We recently received a tip for a forthcoming 2-volume set of books entitled “The History of Nintendo” which is being translated from French to English. But it led us to discover that there are more than a few books written on not just Nintendo specifically but the video gaming industry in general.

Wikipedia has a list, and there’s at least one good Listmania list on Amazon or you could do a search for “history of video games“.

Or if you would just like to read stuff online, check out DMOZ’s huge collection of links on the subject.

Watch as 80s video game characters turn NYC into pixels

1 Comment / Gaming & Toys / By Khalid Hosein / April 8, 2010

This is video is (insert your own superlative here); let’s just say fantastic. Or perhaps as the Guinness guys say “Brilliant!”

What would happen if a bunch of very pixelated video games came to life and ‘attacked’ New York City? I’ve watched this 3 times already, and it’s still amazing. PS> You may want to hit YouTube directly to see it in big(ger) screen glory.

BTW, if you loved this, you’ll also love “8-bit Trip”!

GTA IV rakes in $500M in its 1st week

Miscellaneous / By Khalid Hosein / May 7, 2008

Dang! Take-two has sold approximately 6 million copies of the latest installment in its Grand Theft Auto series of video games. I won’t comment on the style of the video game, but I will comment on the financial windfall that this is for Take-Two. They’ve got some debt, but nothing that the $500 mil couldn’t take care of.

But think about this: the last release of GTA (Vice City Stories) was in Oct 2006, so they’ve been working on this latest release for at least 1.5 years. Let’s say it was 2 years. Let’s say they had 100 guys working on it averaging $100k each. That’s $20M over 2 years. Let’s double it to account for overhead expenses. So in 1 week, they’ve arguably made an 1100% return on their investment.

Yes, I could be completely wrong. I’m hardly a game insider or follow the field very closely. But even we said they had 10x the # of employees working on it (more than half of the company), they still would have made back their money and then some this past week. Very nice. Hmm… I wonder what kind of violent, non-PC game I could invent…?

Kids who DON’T play video games are more at risk of trouble

Gaming & Toys / By Khalid Hosein / April 18, 2008

Aha! I knew it. We already knew that there’s no link between video games and violent behavious, but it also turns out that kids who don’t play video games have a statistically higher risk of getting into trouble than those who do. Here’s a video interview of 2 Harvard profs who’ve done the research and written a book.

We were always suspicious (in our own boyish ways) of other boys who didn’t play (video games or sports or just horsed around). Now we know; science has shown the way.

via Techdirt via Kotaku.