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
Staff of Polygon name their “500 Best Games of All Time”
Polygon recently celebrated its fifth birthday with a weeklong countdown of their choices for the “500 Best Games of All Time.”
Along with a high-profile roster of special guests (including Jeremy Parish, Susan Arendt, Jon-Paul Dyson, and Benj Edwards), the site’s staff put together this massive ranking of games that includes titles from nearly every platform and stretching back to the very beginning of the medium. They even set some ground rules:
We asked everyone to vote based on innovation, polish and durability, rather than simply personal taste. We cut games released in 2017 to eliminate recency bias. And we left out sequels that we deemed too similar to the games that came before them.
Collecting all those votes together, we then combed through the data for anomalies and came up with the final order you see here.
Polygon’s final tally looks very similar to our own “Scientifically Proven Best Video Games of All Time,” and that includes their selection of Tetris as the #1 game of all time.
45 years ago today… Atari delivered and installed the first Pong arcade cabinets
November 29 is a momentous day in video game history.
It was on this day in 1972 that the founders of Atari (Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney, and Al Alcorn) delivered and installed the very first Pong arcade cabinets. To celebrate the 45th anniversary of this world-changing event, the company currently known as Atari has declared today to be “Pong Day.”
The Atari of 2017 is very different from the Atari of 1972, but both companies are still obsessed with Pong. Today’s Atari has even partnered with a group of engineers and artists to create Table Pong, a coffee table that also doubles as a real-life recreation of the classic arcade game:
Table Pong [is] an oversized Pong game embedded in a stylish coffee table, perfect for the home or arcade. Amazingly, it has no screens or digital software; instead, the game is recreated in three dimensions with motors, rails, pulleys and magnets to perfectly simulate the game’s familiar 2D movements.
Developed as a tribute to Generation X and its most iconic video game, Table Pong lets players experience the Atari Pong game on a whole new dimension that fuses the high-tech mechanical engineering of today with the beloved ‘80s game. The table easily transforms from a true-to-life mechanical game of Pong to a stylish living room accessory that features four USB charging ports, as well as a Bluetooth speaker so you can enjoy your favorite music while you play.
Table Pong will be available sometime in Early 2018, and you can learn more about the project at TablePongProject.com.
If you’d like to further explore the history of Pong, our Scientifically Proven Best Video Games of All Time series includes an essay about the game’s creation, and you can also point your browser at Atari.com to play a few rounds in your browser.
Pokemon UltraSun/UltraMoon help Pokemon franchise surpass 300 million copies sold
The Pokemon franchise began in 1996 with the (Japanese) launch of Pokemon Red and Green. Since then, The Pokemon Company has added 74 more games to the franchise, including Pokemon UltraSun and UltraMoon, which launched for the 3DS on November 17. And according to the developer, the initial sales of those two games have pushed the Pokemon franchise’s lifetime sales tally above 300 million copies sold.
To celebrate, they’ve released a brand new “Accolades Trailer” for Pokemon UltraSun and UltraMoon, which is embedded above.
This milestone places the Pokemon franchise among some very exclusive company, as Nintendo’s Super Mario franchise is the only other game franchise to surpass 300 million in total sales. However, Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto and Activision’s Call of Duty will likely join the “300 Million Club” soon, as both franchises are currently sitting at around 250 million copies sold.
Nintendo has sold 2 million Switch consoles in US… Switch update adds game clip recording and save data transfer
Extra! Extra! The Nintendo Switch is a massive hit!
OK, that’s not exactly news. But Nintendo did announce sales figures for their latest console today, as well as unveiled a brand new system update.
You can read all about both stories after the break. (more…)
Posted in 3DS, News, Retro, Switch
Tagged Arms, Mario Kart 8, Splatoon 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Video Game Canon – Mega Man 2
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look at the the blockbuster success born out of the simple ambitions of Mega Man 2. Here’s a teaser…
The first Mega Man game is a bit of an odd duck, which has become even more pronounced as the years go by. The graphics are simplistic, the sound is tinny, there’s only six Robot Masters instead of the traditional eight, and there’s even a score counter (a feature that was jettisoned from the dozens of sequels that followed). There’s just a smoothness to subsequent games in the franchise that Capcom had yet to master with the first entry.
But like most Mega Man fans, I only learned all this after the fact. At the time, whatever memories I have of the first game were formed by guide writers who described it as an unfairly difficult game, old episodes of Captain N, and the fact that none of the local rental outlets owned a copy (unsurprisingly, Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf was always available).
I finally got the chance to see what all the fuss was about with Mega Man 2, which was also the first game in the Mega Man franchise to be spearheaded by Capcom’s Keiji Inafune. With an expanded role in the sequel’s development, Inafune became known as the “Father” of Mega Man to plenty of fans, and codified many of the traditions and patterns the series is known for.
Visit VideoGameCanon.com to continue reading this article and to explore the complete Top 1000.
NES Classic Edition coming back in 2018… Axiom Verge will be released on Switch eShop on October 5
You can put away your Reggie Fils-Aime voodoo dolls, Nintendo has announced that more NES Classic Edition microconsoles will be released in 2018. In other Nintendo news, Thomas Happ has confirmed that Axiom Verge will be available to download through the Switch eShop on October 5.
Read all about both stories after the break. (more…)
Posted in News, Retro, Switch
Tagged Axiom Verge
The Video Game Canon – Super Mario Kart
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look at how Super Mario Kart strengthened and shattered friendships after it debuted in 1992. Here’s a teaser…
Even from its earliest days, the personalities behind the video game industry looked to pro wrestling’s combination of spectacle and soap opera for tips on how to behave. This dedication to competition came to a head in the early 90s when Nintendo and Sega engaged in the first “Console War.”
Beginning with the “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t” campaign in 1990, Sega began mercilessly picking at their rival over a variety of claims, some provable and some not. But that was just a warm-up for the infamous “Blast Processing” campaign and Nintendo’s eventual reply of asking their fans to “Play It Loud.” The Genesis and Super NES used these advertisements to compete in a head-to-head contest for the love and support of gamers everywhere, but the heaviest fighting actually took place on playgrounds and lunch tables between kids that weren’t even old enough to shave.
No game better symbolized this battleground of friend-versus-friend than Super Mario Kart.
Visit VideoGameCanon.com to continue reading this article and to explore the complete Top 1000.
Posted in Features, Retro, Top Story, Video Game Canon, Wii, Wii U
Tagged Super Mario Kart
The Video Game Canon – Pong
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look at the birth of Pong and asks why early game developers were so obsessed with recreating table tennis on our TVs. Here’s a teaser…
Why were early game developers so fixated on bouncing a ball back and forth?
It’s hard to pinpoint the very first video game, but it most likely belongs to A.S. Douglas and OXO. This electronic version of Tic-Tac-Toe was created by Douglas in 1952 to support his doctoral thesis, Interactions Between Human and Computer. But after that, the only question early gamemakers wanted to ask was, “Tennis, anyone?”
William Higinbotham was probably unfamiliar with OXO when he unleashed Tennis For Two on the world on October 18, 1958. Presented to the public during an open house at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the game harnessed the pulses of an oscilloscope to give players the illusion of a playing field with a net in the center and a ball bouncing back and forth. Unlike Douglas, Higinbotham was trying to wow a crowd with the possibilities of science and add a little pizazz to the BNL’s normally staid event:
“The instruction book that came with the computer described how to plot trajectories and bouncing shapes, for research. I thought, ‘Hell, this would make a good game.’ It took me four hours to design one and a technician a couple of weeks to put it together. Everybody stood in line to play. The other exhibits were pretty static, obviously. The game seemed to me sort of an obvious thing.”
After the open house, Higinbotham’s invention was dismantled, and his status as a game development pioneer was forgotten… until the early 70s when he was dragged into the legal battle between Table Tennis and Pong.
Visit VideoGameCanon.com to continue reading this article and to explore the complete Top 1000.
Posted in Features, Retro, Top Story, Video Game Canon
Tagged Pong