How Studio ZA/UM’s first game demands a reckoning with history.

Archives of media from the Bioshock universe

Post-mortem on development of the Anthology of the Killer games.

Just three days before the deadline, I discovered something horrible. I had made a mistake with the subtitle “World Warrior”, mis-spelling it “World Warrier.”

• Akiman, Lead graphic design on SF2 (translated by Shmuplation)

Again, the internet used to be better

The internet used to be amazing

This passage occurs as part of an argument that it’s possible to port videogames between platforms without changing the underlying game design (an argument that I ultimately agree with). However, I think that Emily Dickinson is—for reasons I’ll get into shortly—an inopportune choice as an example of a poet whose work “can survive a transcription.” In fact, I think Emily Dickinson’s work is an example of how, in fact, nothing survives transcription, and that’s the statement that I set out to prove in this talk. But along the way, it occurred to me that the converse is also true: nothing doesn’t survive transcription, and that the tension between these two seemingly opposite claims actually informs and explains them both.

Insightful talk about game design

P.T. (initialism for “playable teaser”) is a psychological horror game developed by Kojima Productions, under the pseudonym “7780s Studio”, and published by Konami. It was directed and designed by Hideo Kojima, in collaboration with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.

Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories, mythologies, and artifacts. I reached out to him to see how he’s managed a single, growing codebase over 15+ years, the perils of pathing, and debugging dead cats. Our conversation below has been edited for clarity.