Articles
This page will eventually contain non-audio posts related to games history — a sort of written complement to the show where I can delve into things not suited to an audio format. But for now it's just a master list of all the games history-related writing I've had published elsewhere on the Internet. (Split into five categories and sorted roughly from newest to oldest.)
Oral histories, creator profiles, and Making Of articles
- How Warcraft III birthed a genre, changed a franchise, and earned a Reforge-ing | Ars Technica
- How Nintendo Introduced the Game Boy, Tetris, and Pokémon to the West | Polygon
- What happened when Sega courted female players in the mid-'90s | Polygon
- Early Mac game developers on the original Macintosh | Medium
- Assassin's Creed: An oral history | Polygon
- Veteran game developers reveal their childhood creations | Polygon
- Wipeout's co-creator looks back at three decades of [making] racing games | Polygon
- The making of Dark Castle: An excerpt from The Secret History of Mac Gaming | Gamasutra
- "The least-worst idea we had"—The creation of the Age of Empires empire | Ars Technica
- The Mac game console that time forgot | Ars Technica
- Remembering Nuon, the gaming chip that nearly changed the world—but didn’t | Ars Technica
- The first first-person shooter | Polygon
- “It felt like robbery”—Tomb Raider and the fall of Core Design | Ars Technica
- How an Aborted Arcade Game Became FIFA's Short-Lived But Loved Indoor Mode | VICE
- The gory story of Doom's 3DO nightmare | Archive.vg
- From Warlords to Puzzle Quest: The journey of a video game pioneer | Polygon
- A Fool and his Money: Cliff Johnson's Long Journey to Develop a Sequel to a 25-Year-Old Game | Archive.vg
- Interview: John Calhoun on the Origins of Glider (Part 1) (...and part 2) | MacScene
Genre histories
- ASCII art + permadeath: The history of roguelike games | Ars Technica
- Build, gather, brawl, repeat: The history of real-time strategy games | Ars Technica
- Roam free: A history of open-world gaming | Ars Technica
- Much more than Mario Kart—The history of kart racers | Ars Technica
- Headshot: A visual history of first-person shooters | Ars Technica
- Want to see gaming's past and future? Dive into the "educational" world of PLATO | Ars Technica
- From SimCity to, well, SimCity: The history of city-building games | Ars Technica
- From SimCity to Real Girlfriend: 20 years of sim games | Ars Technica
- A truly graphic adventure: the 25-year rise and fall of a beloved genre | Ars Technica
Trends and reports and topic-based history
- MIGW: How Australia's Indie Game Scene Went From Threatened To Thriving | GameDaily.biz
- How bad crediting hurts the game industry and muddles history | Gamasutra
- Big Game: The birth of Kenya's games industry | Polygon
- The History of THQ Through its Logos and Branding | Archive.vg
- Impermanent Games | The Magazine
- Writing the Manual on the Virtual Boy Hardware | Archive.vg
- The Perils, Challenges, and Uncertainty of Collecting and Preserving Video Games | Archive.vg
- Maniac Tentacle Mindbenders: How ScummVM’s unpaid coders kept adventure gaming alive | Ars Technica
- The Rocky History of Gaming on the Mac | Bitmob/GamesBeat
Retrospectives and retro reviews
- My Favourite Art Style: SimCity 2000 | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
- Retro Book Look: The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook (publ 1990) | Archive.vg
- From The Archive: F-1 Race | Archive.vg
- Happy 15th Birthday, PlayStation 2 | Archive.vg
- From The Archive: Ultimate Soccer (Game Gear) | Archive.vg
- The serene, interconnected world of the brilliant The Settlers 2 | Eurogamer
- Premier Manager 2, the last of the old school management games | Eurogamer
- From The Archive: Courier Crisis | Archive.vg
- Rediscover Three Arcade Classics in Double Dragon Trilogy | AppStorm
- From The Archive: Where’s Waldo? | Archive.vg
- The Many Hacks of Donkey Kong | Archive.vg
- From The Archive: Snoopy: The Cool Computer Game | Archive.vg
- Lost in the Wasteland Part 16: In the Mind of a Madman | Archive.vg
- [The last in a series that started with Diary of a Child-Killing Ranger]
- From The Archive: Ultimate Soccer (Game Gear) | Archive.vg
- Let Me Edutain You: Buy My Lemonade! | Archive.vg
- From the Archive: Payback | Archive.vg
- From The Archive: Courier Crisis | Archive.vg
- From The Archive: Super Fire Pro Wrestling | Archive.vg
- From the Archive: Hexen: Beyond Heretic | Archive.vg
- From The Archive: Xenophobe | Archive.vg
- From The Archive: Mr Angry | Archive.vg
- From The Archive: Simulation Zoo | Archive.vg
- Caught in a Loop: The Sound of Falling Tetrominoes | Bitmob
- Cultural Victory: A Personal History of the Civilization Series | Bitmob
- Airborne retrospective | MacScene
- Retro Game of the Week: Shufflepuck Café | MacScene
- Retro Game of the Week: The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle | MacScene
- Retro Game of the Week: NBA Jam | MacScene
- Retro Game of the Week: Ceremony of Innocence | MacScene
- Retro Game of the Week: Civilization 1 & 2 | MacScene
- Retro Game of the Week: Lufia & the Fortress of Doom | MacScene
- Retro Game of the Week: Prince of Persia | MacScene
- Growing Up Mac: Windows to Another Dimension | MacScene
- Growing Up Mac: Life with a Plus | MacScene
- StuntCopter retrospective | MacScene
- Glider PRO retrospective | MacScene
- Maelstrom retrospective | MacScene
Editorials and other stories with a historical component
- What makes Oddworld tick | Polygon
- The sunk cost fallacy: Devs describe how it almost destroyed them | Gamasutra
- How a 17-year-old community is keeping Elasto Mania alive | PC Gamer [also published in UK print issue #309]
- Lucas Pope and the rise of the 1-bit 'dither-punk' aesthetic | Gamasutra
- Chris Crawford’s Unslain Dragon Of Interactive Storytelling | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
- The Return of a Macintosh Shareware Classic | USgamer
- Raiding the Fan-Made Tombs of Lara Croft | Rock Paper Shotgun
- The fans who would fix Tomb Raider’s most broken adventure | Eurogamer
- Game Changers | Edge Magazine #270
- Get nostalgic with the R-Kaid-R retro portable video arcade | Gizmag
- Life After Death [online version published 2/6/14] | Edge Magazine issue #267
- How passion killed and revived a 20-year-old indie game | Polygon
- Adapt of Die: The Perilous, Uncertain Landscape of Current and Future Video-Game Magazines | This is my fall back plan (personal blog reposting of academic research essay)
- The life of a porting house | Eurogamer
- Keeping the game alive | Eurogamer
- Tell Me a Story | Archive.vg
- Bring on the Old and Obscure | Archive.vg
- Bit by Bit | The Magazine