This is a big one. Youtube channel Atari Archives usually makes videos that average around 16 minutes in length, with the occasional entry that goes up to twenty or, once in a while, even thirty minutes. Their entry on Atari VCS/2600 Pac-Man, the infamous title that many claim destroyed the video game market in the US in 1983, goes for 38 minutes. (Their side episode on the Bally Astrocade is 48 minutes long, but it covers the history of an entire platform.)
The video’s states a thing that I have long suspected: Atari 2600 Pac-Man did not itself destroy the game console industry. I also don’t think the other prime suspect, Atari E.T., did it.
If you pressed me, I’d think that both may have been contributing factors, but only as part of a larger trend: stores shelves were inundated with a flood of games at the time, as lots of companies jumped heedlessly into the software market. The opportunity created by Activision, which was famously founded by Atari programmers upset by how they were treated there, which established in court that it was legal for competitors to make their own software for a company’s system, was soon taken advantage of by dozens of other outfits. For every Activision and Imagic, however, there were a bevy of Apollos and Froggos, whose mostly terrible games, in that pre-Internet era, looked about as good to a typical buyer.
Plus, I think there was an element of the bursting of a fad at that time. The success of the Atari 2600 was possibly unsustainable. Even the widely ridiculed VCS port of Pac-Man sold over seven million copies, a sales record that wouldn’t be matched until the middle of the NES’s life.
For more information on the game, and its many other contemporary ports, I refer you to the video.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Pikmin 2 introduced Olimar’s disreputable underling Louie. (Their names are an in-joke: “Olimar” is mostly the syllables in “Mario” in reverse order, and Louie thus references Luigi.)
Whereas Olimar is mostly trying to get home, or else earn money to pay off his company’s debts, Louie is mostly along because he’s a working stiff, or else perhaps because he loves the taste of planet PNF-404’s native wildlife. Olimar’s entries on the creatures in Pikmin 2’s Piklopedia take a naturalistic, even scientific, style, Louie’s mostly concern the best way to prepare each beast for the dinner table. It a humorous little detail, and one of Pikmin 2’s most charming elements.
Wooden Turtle on Youtube has made a stop motion animation of a new cooking show on Hokotate television featuring the starfaring chef, titled Cooking With Louie. But sadly it doesn’t go that well, due to the regenerative properties of one of the critters being prepared. And someone should get those camerapikmin unionized immediately.
An extra: from Napkins X, a line of Pikmin dancing to everyone’s favorite decade-old dance hit.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
By the way, I made this post while sitting in Peachtree Center in Atlanta the Wednesday before DragonCon 2023! Hello! These posts will probably be somewhat low effort, but they’re still coming! It beats being back home in Brunswick, GA this weekend where Hurricane Idalia is smacking things around!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
In the year + one half we’ve been doing this, we’ve dug up a lot of varied things for Sundays. This one’s pretty short, but still, the fact they made it in stop motion is respectable. (At least I assume it’s stop motion. They could have made it in a computer I guess, but then, why make look like it was stop motion? Some kind of Lego Movie stylistic flex?)
Anyway, it’s another Pikmin 4 video. Pikmin 4 is not as sharply designed as Pikmins 1 or 3, it takes after 2 (it has caves, and even has one starring that game’s most infamous boss, the Waterwraith), but even the flabbiest Pikmin game is still a wonderful thing to behold.
This video covers is about an actual boss battle in Pikmin 4. Previous games had you fight monsters in the Long Legs family: the Beady Long Legs from Pikmin 1, the Raging Long Legs from 2, the Shaggy Long Legs from 3 and now… the Groovy Long Legs. This video is not confabulating much: it shines lights around, plays music, and your Pikmin actually do get down when you’re fighting it–which usually results in them getting turn into Pikmin Paste. Time to reload the floor….
There’s a playlist of the 51 (as of this writing) stars, and none of them have many hits right now. It’s possible that he does them in batches and just posts one a day, but that’s fine. It’s nice to just follow along at this pace.
Twinbeard hasn’t fallen prey to something I hate about the video internet, which I could complain of as TikTokification, but honestly there are people on TikTok who aren’t nearly as bad as some on Youtube. And Youtube was trending towards it anyway, with their often unwatchable Shorts section serving as just an extreme example of pre-existing trends. It may just be my advancing age, but I really really really dislike much of what I see on Shorts, and Twinbeard’s videos are a nice alternative to it.
If there’s two constants here at SSB, it’s that we post a lot of Nintendo content, and a lot of Youtube video stuff.
Nintendo, because they’re the most interesting of the major console manufacturers, and one of the most consistently great developers around today. I still think that Atari’s coin-op division, later split off as Atari Games, was more ingenious in their classic era, because they made such a wide variety of games and rarely did sequels, but Nintendo would definitely be second place, and has the advantage of still being alive as a company. (Atari Games has been gone for 18 years now, and that number isn’t getting lower. That makes me really sad.)
One of Nintendo’s biggest series is, of course, Super Smash Bros. It wasn’t always so. Smash on Nintendo 64, the first in the series, was a great little game, and the first time that they crossed over between basically all their properties, but it wasn’t until Melee, the second game, that it really became huge, despite being on the relatively low-selling Gamecube hardware.
Super Smash Bros. Melee was the game that really established the pattern for the rest of the Smash series: offer a ton of content, give everyone unprecedented amounts of fanservice, and offer a super fast-paced game with an eye towards the esports scene.
On that last point they succeeded: Melee is a very popular esports game. I don’t know if it’s more popular than Ultimate, the current Smash game released for Switch, although I don’t follow that scene generally so I really have no idea. All of the Smash games have some esports interest, but Melee’s the most popular previous title, I think.
Melee had a 13 month development time, fairly short, and resulted in a fair number of bugs, and that’s where AsumSaus’s videos are most interesting. Few games have had their internals splunked as deeply as Melee’s has, and they dredge up the most interesting facts from all that data.
I’ll just present one of their videos this time out, from three years ago, but I leave the door open to spotlighting others in the future. They’re just that interesting. So, here’s their 37-minute video asking, in considerable depth: outside the specific and highly particular subset of Super Smash Bros Melee that is tournament-level competitive play, taken as a whole: is the game actually good? He obviously enjoys that one tiny bit of it a great deal, but, what about all the rest? Watch the video to find out.
There are a number of NES games that feel like they’re held together with paperclips and chewing gum. Some of them are almost endearing for their glitchiness. When it comes to janky NES games, a few that I tend to think of are those made by Micronics (who implemented Ghosts N’ Goblins, which has an awful frame rate) and Athena (where one boss has a death animation that causes it to flip through many of the sprites in the game).
A company that usually did a lot better with their internally-developed games was Capcom, makers of Mega Man, 1943, Bionic Commando, and all the Disney Afternoon games from the time, all of which have slick 60 fps update rates and smooth animation. One game they made of which that is definitely not true, however, is NES Strider.
If you’re only familiar with Strider from the beautiful arcade version, you might wonder what even NES Strider has to do with it. It’s not proper to say Famicom Strider, because Capcom never released it in their home territory, perhaps because they were too embarrassed to.
Other than the first stage being set in generally the same fictional location in Russia (even if it doesn’t look at all the same), its story has absolutely nothing to do with it. Jeremy Parish looked at it (and remarked on its glitchiness) in an episode of Metroidvania Works from a couple of weeks ago. Some people, like Kid Fenris of the self-titled blog, actually likes it, although acknowledges its many issues.
Behind the Code, one of the best game internals series on Youtube, had a look at the implementation of NES Strider. It’s an interesting 15 minutes to my taste, but if you want a tl;dr, NES Strider often doesn’t make its framerate target, and instead of slowing the game down as most games do, it plows ahead forward into the next frame, leaving the incomplete data in its update buffer to be copied into the PPU. This causes the individual hardware sprites that compose enemy characters to sometimes have only one of their coordinates updated, or even causing data remaining from previous frames to be copied over.
Why does it does this instead of just slowing the game down? Possibly the coding was so crappy that it would have caused excessive slowdown; the scene chosen as an example in the video has the problem occur when there’s only two basic enemies on the screen in the game’s first area! Not the best engine on the system there Capcom.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Sometimes on Sunday we find very old things that survive down to us through years. But sometimes we find some fairly new memes, and this is one of those.
I don’t know when or where this started, but there’s this collection of videos on Youtube that are just silence, but with, very once in a while, maybe every two or three minutes, a sound effect to break the repose. Fortunately, most of these videos lead off with the sound effect, so you’ll know kind of what the result will be.
Why load up a video like this? Well as far as I can tell, the idea is to have it playing in the background while you do other things, such as watch a movie. Once in a while, the sound will happen to play around the time something significant in the other thing happens, and the unexpected juxtaposition is humorous, or at least interesting. Basically, humor through randomness. I’ve long had an idea for a mobile app that would do something like this, with randomized noises, but in the end figured it was too niche to bother with. Maybe I should try it after all?
While this idea extends beyond just video game sounds, several prominent examples have to do with games, keeping us within our site’s roomy theme. For best results, whatever those might be, it’s probably best to have on an ad blocker, or else some of the random noises will be commercials for terrible mobile games or Old Spice deodorant.
Here’s Lego Yoda screaming sporadically:
Mario, doing something similar:
Now the interruption is by the first four notes of Megalovania from Undertale:
A Minecraft Villager peppers your the next hour with infrequent noises:
Or here, just Minecraft sounds in general. The sounds in this one are fairly frequent, two or three a minute. There has got to be a Creeper noise in there somewhere to cause sudden jolts, I’m sure:
Angry Bird game noises:
The Mario 64 Thwomp sound effect:
Waluigi:
And, a duck quacking. It’s not a video game duck. I just like ducks.
If you watch more than one of these, expect your Youtube suggestions to get weird for a while. Now that your day has been enlivened and enriched I take my leave of you until the morrow. Ta!
For this podcast I did, we took a look at the Shooter genre focusing on the 2010’s, when more RPGs elements were added to shooters and the rise of the “Role Playing Shooter”.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Did you know there was a Parappa anime? It was released in around 2001, around the time Parappa the Rapper 2 for PS2 was released.
Parappa creator Rodney Greenblat said, in a Gamasutra interview in 2005, that other than character designs he wasn’t allowed to be involved with producing the anime. I it shows, especially with the focus on the new characters Matt and Paula. They feel like the writers included them because they wanted to write to their personalities, maybe because they didn’t want to step on the toes of the developers of the games by writing for their characters. It’s not an awful show, but it’s not what a Parappa show should have been.
An episode that ties in with the games a bit more than usual is Episode 13, which involves Parappa’s karate teacher Tamanagi-sensei, known to English speakers as Chop Chop Master Onion. He sounds a lot like he does in the game, even speaking Japanese, and it’s great to hear him get more lines.
This editorial doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of this blog. However, blogs don’t have views anyway, so what would that even mean?
This is a slightly edited version of a diatribe I emitted on mefi.social. I really want people to see it and think about what it means though.
A dismaying thing is how much of current gaming culture is locked behind Discords, and/or is revealed to the world only through Youtube videos.
These two phenomena are the result of the Myth of the Benevolent Corporation, which was largely started by early Google and their “Do No Evil” policy, which sustained the early web for a good while but itself did huge damage to online culture, and yet promises to do much much more, when they decided that profits mattered more.
When Youtube started, everyone saw it as a kind of miracle. In the early days videos were limited to 10 minutes, but even so they began attracting a huge amount of material. When they switch to just letting people upload anything for free, that exploded.
It’s not just gaming stuff that I’m talking about really, although as a popular fixation for people it’s kind of a hint of things to come. Lots of information is currently exposed to the world through Youtube videos and minidocs.
From U Can Beat Videogames’s video on Shadowrun. It’s great, but some day it’ll be gone. How will people beat an ancient obscure SNES game like this then?
But Youtube has always been a time bomb for all this content. It’s inevitable that Youtube will someday begin deleting things. If not sooner, then later. Yet there are few entities capable of preserving all of it, or even most of it. All of this will [get destroyed] like [crying] in [a downpour].
Of course, it’s not like videos like these have any other hope as it stands. A collection of the incredible size of Youtube’s is so big that only a government could realistically do it, and most of those have their own issues when it comes to continuity of mission and funding.
But combined with Discords as a means of communication, and (bizarrely) information, a lot of online culture is currently a black box to outsiders, unless they sign up to dozens of miscellaneous Discords. And there is a limit to the number of servers you can follow, which is reputed to be 100. (It used to be that Google could get you a quick answer to a question like how many Discord servers can one user follow, but now I’m not sure.)
Social media companies, who all seem to be racing each other to make their services as crappy as possible to non-paying users, are no solution either.
There used to be a Mastodon search engine, at search.noc.social. This is what remains of it. (Yes, it’s just a white page with the text “project has been removed.”)
Fediverse to the rescue! But no, a lot of it is transitory, sometimes intentionally so! In some circles even suggesting that Mastodon be just searchable, let alone preservable, will subject you to a storm of criticism. It’s true that being opaque to general search helps protect vulnerable users, a noble cause, but it also makes Mastodon’s discoverability very low. (One solution, which I think I mentioned here before, is an opt-in search solution called tootfinder, but it currently only goes back three months.)
And I don’t see many other people talking about this, even though the sudden decay of Twitter and Reddit has made this essential problem more visible than its been for a long time.
I feel like going onto every Discord I follow, gaming research ones in particular, and ringing alarm bells, but it’s a task just to find them out, and really what good would it do. People use Discord because it’s free and easy and they even maintain the server for you. These kinds of spaces have always relied on some patron to uphold them; the only real differences are before they were visible to search and the Wayback Machine, and now, it’s a single company that will increasingly hold access to these places obscured behind a storm of pleas to subscribe to Nitro, and someday will delete them entirely.
The Zelda II Randomizer Discord. As a community, it works okay. As a way of storing information, well, it sucks rocks. As a way of preserving everything, it’s DOOOOOMED.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic, there are vast swaths of online culture that are already lost permanently: the Compuserve forums of the era immediately preceding the rise of the web. Compuserve was once the biggest online presence. And AOL, which grew to eclipse it in size, likewise holds (still? I don’t know, it’s on AOL!) a vast amount of early internet culture.
Newsgroup archives are a bit better off because of their openness, although nowadays it’s mostly seen as just a way to enable piracy.
Still, essential web services are at least preservable. The Fediverse resembles those, at least in principle, so it’s immediately better off than Discords and Youtube, for making old information findable, even if it’s currently really hard to do it (and some people are outright opposed to it).
It is time to wrap this all up. I say things like this frequently these days. Maybe someday someone will listen. The power and reach of the internet doesn’t have to rely on big companies. I also have qualms about the ability of a even a horde of individual servers to keep things going, mind you. All those dead links on all those surviving old websites, they once represented living projects too.
I think what we ultimately need is an independent organization that can keep up old sites and communities, and provide a place for new ones, maybe supported by donations, without the explicit profit motive of the bigcorps. Something that looks like the Internet Archive or Wikipedia. There’s places where you can host plain websites even today, like the Tildeverse (but its individual pieces, like Fediverse servers, always feel like they could vanish at any time), ancient-yet-still-here Angelfire (of which, like the Lycos it’s a part of, it’s amazing still survives), or the newer, enthusiast-focused Neocities (which too has no guarantee of longevity).
Companies can live longer than people, or their interest cycles. It doesn’t feel right that something like a website require someone to dedicate their life to maintaining it, but due to the dysfunctional way our economic has come to see companies (involving the hateful words fiduciary duty) are also vulnerable to the winds of change. It feels like a non-profit, or at least a durable privately-held company that isn’t pushed by rapacious groups to chase every profit lead no matter how disastrous, may be a solution. I don’t know if it really is, though. I’m just watching this, mostly from the outside. I hope someone can do something though, to overturn the cold tides of entropy. I really do.
