Category Archives: video games

Bad Day on the Midway

Posted on February 15, 2014 by Reverend

After exploring Will Crowther’s early Interactive Fiction game from 1976, I somehow found myself thinking about The Residents’s interactive CD-Rom from 1995 Bad Day on the Midway. This was a crazy game, and it is one of the multi-media experiments … Continue reading →

Posted in fun, The Internet Course, video games | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Early Computer Gaming and the Open Net

Posted on February 15, 2014 by Reverend

One bit from Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s Where Wizards Stay Up Late I found particularly interesting was a section of the chapter on E-Mail titled “Adventure and Quasar: The Open Net and Free Speech.” It featured Will Crowther, who … Continue reading →

Posted in The Internet Course, video games | Tagged , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Yie Ar Kung-Fu GIFs

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Reverend

This series of GIFs is in honor of the 1985 classic arcade game Yie Ar Kung-Fu.  I’ve already written about my love for this game on the bava, so I’ll save you my usual flood of verbiage. For the record, … Continue reading →

Posted in video games | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Some Classic Arcade GIFs

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Reverend

Here are a few cutscenes from some classic arcade games. I could do classic video game GIFs all day. Given that, I imagine there are many more of these to come, in the meantime can you name all five without … Continue reading →

Posted in video games | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Animate 2600: Video Pinball

Posted on December 22, 2012 by Reverend

There might be some pinball purists out there who will want to burn me at the stake for this heresy, but give me Atari 2600’s Video Pinball over a “real” pinball machine anytime. That whole face-to-face argument for pinball is … Continue reading →

Posted in digital storytelling, video games | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

Animate 2600: Haunted House

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Reverend

I always knew Haunted House was a classic Atari 2600 game, what I didn’t know is that it inspired a whole new genre of survival horror video games! From the Wikipedia article: Haunted House is an Atari 2600 video game, first released in … Continue reading →

Posted in digital storytelling, video games | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

8-bit Noir

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Reverend

My kids and I have been playing a fair bit of Atari 2600 games lately using the Stella emulator, which works for Mac, PC and Linux—what platform doesn’t love Atari 2600? When playing the 1980 classic Night Driver I was struck … Continue reading →

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8-Bit Shining Art

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Reverend

I finally found some time to play through the modded level of Duke Nukem 3D called The Shining II that I wrote about a little while ago. Turns out the gameplay is actually quite good, but even more than that the 8-bit fan … Continue reading →

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The Shining as Seen through Duke Nukem

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Reverend

I first heard about the Duke Nukem 3D mod of Stanely’s Kubrick’s The Shining while watching Rob Ager’s brilliant video essay on spatial anomalies. I saw bits and pieces of the Overlook Hotel map in the video essay, but never actually … Continue reading →

Posted in movies, video games | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The Digital Legacy of the 1980s: Super Mario Bros.

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Reverend

My kids and I explore movies and series on Netflix to watch on a somewhat regular basis. And while I’ve been underwhelmed by their live streaming library as of late like everyone else,  we recently stumbled upon The Super Mario Bros. … Continue reading →

Posted in fun, video games | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment