Your Move

Are you an out of work historian? I have some good news for you. Bungie, the developer of the video game series Destiny , is looking to hire a historian. But the events this historian will be chronicling will not be those of the production of the game, but of the events that have happened in the world of the game itself.

Every year, game companies announce what will be coming up for the next year at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, popularly known as E3. This year, it’s an all-online event. E3 for this year ended yesterday, and there were a lot of announcements.

For more than three decades, Japan has been a leader - the leader, in a lot of respects - in the global video game industry. Names like Nintendo, Sony, and Sega were the only names in video games for years, and even since Microsoft joined, Japanese companies still dominate the market. But of course these companies didn’t just emerge out of nothing, and Matt Alt’s book Pure Invention is a history of how Japanese pop culture exports shaped our culture, too.

When I first played Mass Effect in 2007, I was immediately taken with the world that had been built for the game. Or, rather, worlds, as it takes place across our entire galaxy. There were dozens of solar systems to explore, and several alien species, each not only with their own unique relationships to humans, but to each other as well.

The Nintendo game New Pokemon Snap , like its Nintendo 64 predecessor from 1999, is a first-person shooter, but is one of the rare examples of the genre that is non-violent. Instead of wielding a firearm, you have a camera.

Your PlayStation 4 is a ticking time bomb. OK, don’t worry, it’s not actually going to explode. But there is a little coin cell battery inside it, called the CMOS battery, that powers a tiny clock inside the system. That clock is critical to some of the PS4’s security systems, and after 10 or 15 years, when it dies, no games—physical or digital—will work on the console at all.

In the mid '90s, there was a Burger King on East Kellogg. I was 12 or 13, and although I didn’t have any great love for the food there, very often it was where I wanted to go for lunch after church. The reason was a single, red and white arcade cabinet tucked into a corner. Of course, back then you could find arcade machines in any manner of place, including gas stations and laundromats, but this machine was special.

One of these days, we’ll all be able to feel comfortable going to places like theme parks again. While today is not that day, it seems like it’ll be soon. And for when that is the case, Nintendo has been working on something special at Universal Studios.

A port of 2013’s Super Mario 3D World was recently released on the Nintendo Switch console. This is one of my favorite Mario games ever, but the fact that it was originally released on the Wii U meant that very few people had the hardware to play the game. Now, it’s on a much more popular console.

The first Street Fighter game, released in 1987 by Capcom, was mostly unremarkable.