This Week in Video Game History

Ep 21 — The Last of Us & Metal Gear Solid 4: One Week, Two Goodbyes.

This week on This Week in Video Game History, we cover June 8th through June 14th — a single week that gave us two of the most acclaimed games ever made and the strangest lucky streak on Nintendo's entire calendar. We run the timeline day by day: Torn Banner's gloriously chaotic medieval brawler Chivalry 2 (2021); Radical Entertainment and Activision's open-world monster Prototype (2009); Hideo Kojima's farewell to Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (PlayStation 3, 2008); HAL Laboratory's stylus-only Kirby: Canvas Curse (Nintendo DS, 2005); the Japan-only Famicom Golf: U.S. Course on the Famicom Disk System (1987), which ran a national high-score leaderboard over the Disk Fax decades before "online" meant anything; and Naughty Dog's The Last of Us (2013), released exactly twenty-six years to the day after that Mario golf disk. Then three deep dives: the June 11 phenomenon (Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS Lite, Big Brain Academy, Rhythm Heaven Megamix, Game Builder Garage), the week Interplay almost died (the studio behind Fallout and Baldur's Gate), and the rise and fall of E3.

Tetris, EarthBound, Link's Awakening & More | This Week in Video Game History Ep. 20

This week on This Week in Video Game History, we're covering June 1st through June 7th — a week that runs from 1984 Moscow to 2023 and hits some of the most fascinating stories in gaming along the way. On the timeline: Super Mario Bros. 2 on the Famicom Disk System — the brutally difficult Japanese sequel Nintendo of America refused to release, later rebranded as The Lost Levels. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, the first handheld Zelda, born as an unauthorized side project by Nintendo developers working off-hours. EarthBound on the SNES — Shigesato Itoi's genre-defying RPG, which arrives in North America in 1995 and sets up our second deep dive perfectly. GTA San Andreas landing on Xbox and PC in 2005, bringing the Hot Coffee controversy with it. The Sims 3 rewriting the rules of PC game launches in 2009. inFamous 2 closing out Sucker Punch's PS3 era. And Street Fighter 6, one of the best fighting game launches in years — dropping on the same date as Tekken 7 did in 2017 and Diablo Immortal in 2022. Deep dives this week: the Cold War thriller behind Tetris — how Alexey Pajitnov created one of history's most important games in 1984 Soviet Moscow and didn't own a ruble of it for twelve years. The "This Game Stinks" EarthBound marketing disaster. And E3 2009's Project Natal reveal — the night Microsoft showed the world a controller-free future that half-delivered.

This Week in Video Game History Ep 19 -- May 25-31

0:00 -- Cold Open 1:40 -- Intro 2:34 -- Smash Ping Pong - May 30, 1987 3:54 -- Zero Wing - May 31, 1992 5:04 -- Tokimeki Memorial - May 27, 1994 6:20 -- The Lion King (NES) - May 25, 1995 7:48 -- Worms Armageddon - May 31, 1999 9:14 -- Mario Kart 8 -- May 29, 2014 10:25 -- Deep Dive: Dragon Quest and the Strange American Journey of the JRPG 11:50 -- Deep Dive: Splatoon and the Console That Shouldn't Have Worked 13:14 -- Deep Dive: Super Mario Bros. The Movie, and What Happens When Hollywood Doesn't Get It 14: 28 -- Outro Video Credits Smash Ping Pong (Famicom Disk System, 1987) Full Game Session -- @NenrikiGaming Zero Wing (E) - Intro Sequence [TTS] -- @Bot-ultracorp Tokimeki Memorial ~ Forever With You Opening -- @TokimekiMedia The Lion King (NES) Playthrough -- @NintendoComplete Worms Armageddon Online (WormNET) | Intermediate 3 Players -- @OldNerdPlayingOldPCGames #VideoGameHistory #GamingHistory #RetroGaming #NintendoHistory #JRPG #DragonQuest #Splatoon #MarioMovie #ThisWeekInVideoGameHistory #GamingFacts #GamingPodcast

This Week in Video Game History Ep 18 - May 18 - 24

0:00 - Cold Open 1:54 - Intro 2:50 - May 22, 1980 -- Pac-Man 4:40 - May 1980 -- Golden Axe 6:31 - May 22, 2000 -- Perfect Dark 8:34 - May 18, 2010 -- Red Dead Redemption 10:27 - May 18, 2015 -- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 12:38 - Deep Dive 1 -- Pac-Man's Cultural Invasion 14:46 - Deep Dive 2 -- CD Projekt Red: Poland's Game 16:34 - Deep Dive 3 -- The Burlingame Moment: May 24, 1972 19:05 - Outro #VideoGameHistory #GamingHistory #RetroGaming #GamingPodcast #PacMan #Witcher3 #RedDeadRedemption2 #MagnavoxOdyssey #GoldenAxe #ClassicGaming

This Week in Video Game History Ep 17 May 11 - 17

May 11th through May 17th gave us the first E3, the birth of Guilty Gear, a Japan-only Fire Emblem that never officially left the country, Skate 3's unlikely second life on YouTube, and the story of Team Bondi — the studio that built L.A. Noire's revolutionary face technology, worked itself into the ground, and was liquidated five months after shipping its only game. Plus the press release that accidentally created Counter-Strike. 00:00 -- Cold Open 02:01 -- Intro 03:06 -- Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War (May 14, 1996) 04:37 -- Guilty Gear (May 14, 1998) 06:37 -- Skate 3 (May 11, 2010) 07:50 -- Invisible, Inc (May 12, 2015) 09:02 -- Injustice 2 (May 16, 2017) 10:52 -- The First E3 (May 11-13, 1995) 12:46 -- L.A. Noire and the Studio That Broke Itself (May 17, 2011) 14:42 -- The Mod that Changed Everything (May 11, 1999) 16:34 -- Outro