Doom history enthusiast and Spacebase creator JP LeBreton joins id Software co-founder John Romero as the two play though the first episode of Doom, “Knee Deep in the Dead,” in its entirety. John Romero’s run through each level turns up fresh and encyclopedic insight into how this genre-defining title was designed and set the stage for first-person action games for years to come.
Street Fighter 2 is one of the game industry's biggest success stories, but its history is often told secondhand, through official statements and loosely translated interviews. In an effort to remedy that, over the past year we tracked down more than 20 former Capcom employees and business partners and asked them to tell it in their own words. They tell a story of extreme personalities coming together to make a game, and the egos, cultural differences, glitches, rivalries, lawsuits and police raids that followed.
Houser hasn't given a long interview to anyone but me, and that's baffling, because what he has to say is sincere, compelling and complex. He can be both insightful and rebellious, embracing different cultures and at the same time full of a healthy paranoia in a kind of punk-rock, hip-hop sort of way. He is an astute student of human nature and, as president of Rockstar Games, a tough negotiator when contracts come up for renewal with parent company Take-Two Interactive. Partly because of his reputation as a loner and recluse, everyone from journalists who can't get interviews to a handful of disgruntled former employees has labeled Houser crazy. He is not. He can be intensely private, even avoiding a GTA voice actor when he comes in to record his voice-over work. Houser is a workaholic and he's stubborn, clearly used to getting his way when he knows he's right, but he's definitely not crazy. In fact, there's something about Sam Houser that is close to genius. If Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto is the Steven Spielberg of video games, Houser is the Martin Scorsese.
Tecmo Bowl is an arcade game developed and released in 1988. The godfather of football video games, Tecmo once ruled the controllers of sports fans everywhere. The documentary features coverage of an annual Tecmo Bowl tournament in Madison, Wisconsin, along with retired NFL players who played and starred in the game, most notably Christian Okoye.
To commemorate Wolfenstein 3D's 20th anniversary, id Software co-founder John Carmack provides director's commentary for the game.
Der Gütersloher Spielehersteller Ascaron hat große Spiele wie Sacred hervorgebracht, und mindestens ebenso groß waren seine Reinfälle. Mit der Pleite im April endet eine Ära - auch eine von Pfusch und Nachlässigkeit. Die Geschichte einer schleichenden Katastrophe.
It was never completed. Screenshots and video snippets would leak out every few years, each time whipping fans into a lather — and each time, the game would recede from view. Normally, videogames take two to four years to build; five years is considered worryingly long. But the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie — Toy Story — and Xbox did not yet exist.
FOCUS is a documentary about Mike Ross, a professional video gamer known for being one of the world's top Street Fighter players. The film is a portrait of his summer, as he travels the country competing in events in order to prepare for the biggest tournament of his life, while discussing the motivations, hardships and misconceptions of the gamer lifestyle.