Warp Zoned Presents
Video Game Canon- Angry Birds, Dragon Quest, FIFA Soccer, and Silent Hill are the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026
- BAFTA Games Awards: All the Winners from 2003 to Today
- Clair Obscur Completes the Sweep by Winning “Best Game” at 2025-2026 BAFTA Games Awards
- Boss Fight Books to Get a New Look for Richard Moss’s “Age of Empires”
- GDC Awards: All the Winners from 1996 to Today
Warp Zoned Presents
- Video Game Research Library
- We Pitched a Museum a 1993 Game Hint Line (And They Actually Said Yes) – Yarn Spinner (2026)
- The History Of The Word “Metroidvania” And How It Spread – A Critical Hit (2025)
- Creator of Hit Game Shovel Knight Is at a ‘Make or Break’ Moment – Bloomberg (2025)
- Shadow of the Colossus: An oral history – Design Room (2025)
- In 2005, games started rewiring our brains – The AV Club (2025)
Most Recent: Retro
Ralph Baer, the Father of Video Games, dies at age 92
Ralph Baer stepped away from video game development more than 35 years ago, but he will always be known “The Father of Video Games” for his contributions to the earliest game consoles. Sadly, Baer passed away over the weekend at the age of 92.
Baer began tinkering with the possibility of playing games on a television set in the late 1960s while employed by Sanders Associates. By 1969 he completed work on a prototype that was nicknamed the “Brown Box” due to the brown tape added to the case to simulate a wood grain finish. In 1972, the “Brown Box” was released as the Magnavox Odyssey, the first game console designed for consumers. Baer designs served as the inspiration for Nolan Bushnell’s work with the Atari 2600 and Baer himself would help Magnavox produce the Odyssey 2 in 1978.
Baer has been honored many times for his work with video games. In 2006, President George W. Bush awarded him with the National Medal of Technology for his contributions to the “groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development, and commercialization of interactive video games.” And in 2008, the Game Developers Conference awarded him a long overdue Game Developers Choice Pioneer Award.
PBS profiled Baer as part of their Inventors digital series last year, which you can view above.
[Source: Gamasutra]
First batch of excavated E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial cartridges sell for $500-1500 apiece
The first batch of excavated Atari 2600 cartridges from the Alamogordo landfill have been auctioned off and checkbooks were opened wide to own a piece of history. The auctions were managed by the Tularosa Basin Historical Society and the priciest E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial cartridge (complete with an original box) sold for $1,537. Other E.T. cartridges sold for similar prices, though the ones without a box sold for closer to $500. Other games (including Defender, Asteroids, Centipede, and more) all sold for under $500 with a copy of Missile Command responsible for the lowest sale of $157.50. A complete list of every auctioned off game can be found at eBay.
The city of Alamogordo will continue to sell some of the excavated cartridges in the coming days, though it’s unknown when the next wave of auctions will begin.
Atari: Game Over, a documentary chronicling the dig, as well as Atari’s rise and fall, will be available to download through Microsoft’s Xbox Live service beginning tomorrow.
City of Alamogordo begins selling excavated E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial cartridges
As promised, the city of Alamogordo has begun selling some of the unearthed Atari 2600 cartridges found during this Spring’s landfill excavation. Nearly 100 titles are now up for bid on the city’s eBay page including E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Asteroids, Missile Command, Defender, and many others.
Bidding for all titles began at $50, but the price of the most sought after titles has quickly gone up. Unsurprisngly, the copies of E.T. are currently the most expensive games in Alamogordo’s auction with one copy garnering $520 in bids with eight days remaining (as of this writing). So if you want a piece of history, be prepared to empty out your piggy bank.
For those of you who’d rather experience the Alamogordo landfill excavation for a cheaper price, be sure to log in to Xbox Live on November 20 to stream a free download of Atari: Game Over, a Microsoft-produced documentary that explores the history of Atari and this Spring’s big dig.
Atari: Game Over documentary will premiere on November 20
Director Zak Penn has confirmed (via Twitter) that the Atari: Game Over documentary will make its Xbox Live debut on November 20:
Atari: Game Over premiering Nov 20 on XBOX #ataridoc
— Zak Penn (@zakpenn) October 31, 2014
Atari: Game Over will tell the story of the game company’s downfall, with a particular focus on E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which was the subject of a massive dig in an Alamogordo landfill back in April. During the dig, Penn and his team discovered a treasure trove of Atari 2600 titles under the dirt, confirming a long-held belief that the company trashed thousands (perhaps millions) of copies of unsold games.
With the recent closure of Xbox Entertainment Studios, the film has the distinction of being one of the first (and one of the last) film productions created by Microsoft.
Insert Quarter: A Profile of the Video Game Archivists at the Library of Congress
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
With more than 6,000 titles, the Library of Congress is home to one of the largest video game archives in the world. But the curation and management of the collection is in the hands of just four part-time employees. BuzzFeed’s Joseph Bernstein reached out to these four men to learn how the Library of Congress is attempting to preserve America’s gaming heritage and how much more still needs to be done:
No, the work of game copyrighting and archiving at our country’s signal institution for cultural preservation is not done by a dedicated full-time staff. Instead, it’s the passion project of a handful of archivists who want to be the new standard-bearers in the preservation of video games. Indeed, the state of video game collection at the Library is something of an expression of the liminal state of video games in American popular culture writ large. The Library recognizes the cultural importance of video games, but only devotes four people part-time to their archiving; Game companies insist that their products are the medium of the future, but don’t trust archives with their source code; Collectors sell their troves on Craigslist and eBay rather than considering donation.
Even to get to this point, though, has been a journey in and of itself.
You can read the rest of the article at BuzzFeed.
Watch This! Every Game Boy title screen in alphabetical order
He did the NES… Then he moved on to the Super NES… Now, YouTube user “NicksplosionFX” has created a video that depicts the Start Screen of possibly every Game Boy game in existence. A few may be missing as NicksplosionFX admits, “It was really difficult to find a complete list of original Game Boy games.”
The video runs nearly three hours (starting with the infamous 4-In-1 Funpak), so I’d recommend starting with a bathroom break first.
Blizzard ceases development on their Titan MMO and officially cancels StarCraft: Ghost
In an interview with Polygon, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime has confirmed that the company’s upcoming MMO, Titan, has been canceled. Development on Titan previously hit a snag when Blizzard delayed it into 2016 “at the earliest” last year. This massive delay was due to Blizzard blowing up their work on the game to start from scratch. According to Morhaime, that wasn’t enough to save Titan:
“We didn’t find the fun,” Morhaime continued. “We didn’t find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that’s the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no.”
Morhaime is unsure if the developer will ever try their hand at an MMO again, but he still has big plans for World of Warcraft. “My hope personally is that we’ll support it forever,” he told Polygon. And finally, after being “on hold” for years, Morhaime also confirmed that StarCraft: Ghost is officially canceled as well:
“It’s always really, really hard to make those kind of decisions. It was hard when we canceled Warcraft Adventures. It was hard when we canceled StarCraft Ghost. But it has always resulted in better-quality work.”
The decision to cancel Titan was definitely affected by Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, which just notched its 20 millionth player last week.
Posted in News, PC, Retro
Tagged StarCraft: Ghost, Titan
It Came From 19XX: Lethal Enforcers
The first time I encountered those twin blue and pink light guns, I was eight years old. The new school year had started, Sonic 2 was glued in the port of my shiny new Sega Genesis, and my parents and I were visiting some family friends. I honestly don’t remember who they were, but I would thank them if I could, because we somehow came home with their copy of Lethal Enforcers, complete with the famous Konami Justifiers. These oversized revolvers dwarfed the Nintendo Zapper both in size and coolness. Whether by gift or by accident, these half-remembered friends never saw the game again. (more…)