As I am nostalgic and of a certain age, I recently bought a VHS video recorder, just for the retrospective thrill of it; then I won a 32-inch CRT television at an auction in Shepton Mallet. Partly, this was to play a few old videos I had found in my loft, including one of me appearing in a 1990s youth TV show talking about sexism and Tomb Raider. (I was against the sexism, to be clear). But it was also because I wanted a new way of spending my money on fragile video-game nostalgia.
The rise of the games industry in the 1980s and 90s coincided with the explosion of the home-video business, and the two crossed paths in lots of interesting ways. There are the obvious treasures I want to get hold of: VHS copies of
There are rarer videos I want to track down, too. This era saw a lot of tie-in cartoons, as TV channels began to understand the massive appeal of the medium. There are VHS tapes collecting episodes of the terrible Pac-Man and Pole Position cartoons from the early 1980s, and, from later in the decade, The
Before the internet, video cassettes were also valuable promotional tools for games publishers. Arcade game companies such as Konami and Irem would produce promo videotapes of their newest machines for distributors and arcade owners. In the 1990s, Capcom ran a fanclub in Japan and, along with a magazine and later a newsletter, sent out
I know I will end up ordering a videotape mould remover from the wonderful fansite
While we’re on a retro trip, I’ve just started a 1990s football management career with Nutmeg!, a nostalgic footie sim crossed with a deck-building card game, which is launching later this week on PC. Using real player names from the era, you can build a squad, train your players, select formations and then take part in card- battle-based matches. There are a lot of systems to learn, but you soon pick it up and the presentation is wonderful, using recognisable relics from the 1980s and 1990s, including old PCs, cork boards and a league table resembling one of those charts that used to be offered free with footie magazines at the start of every season. Fans of the old Kevin Toms Football Star Manager or Championship Manager titles will relish every moment.
Available on: PC
Estimated playtime: 90 minutes, plus many, many hours of extra time
What to read
Fortnite creator Epic Games announced that it is making more than 1,000 staff redundant. CEO Tim Sweeney blamed difficult industry conditions, as well as a downturn in player engagement with Fortnite. The global games industry has seen tens of thousands of redundancies in the past three years. The increasing costs of game development together with intense competition from other digital entertainment formats such as social media and streaming TV, are putting huge pressure on publishers.
Another day, another developer realising that, oops a daisy, they left some AI-generated art in their game by accident. This time it’s Crimson Desert creator Pearl Abyss, which has released a statement explaining that visual props created by generative AI unintentionally made it into the final release, instead of being replaced by human-created art. This type of curious accident also befell 11 Bit Studios, which issued an apology for leaving AI-generated assets in The Alters, and Sandfall Interactive which was stripped of its Indie game awards after it was discovered that experimental AI art had found its way into the finished release (it was patched out five days later).
If ever there was a game crying out for its own theme park it was Minecraft – and thankfully the gods of brand extension were listening. Minecraft World is coming to Chessington World of Adventures in 2027. Looking forward to gangs of teenagers running through the carefully styled biomes throwing popcorn and yelling “Chicken Jockey”.
I’m a big fan of books that collect video game essays together, and a lovely new example has just been published. CTRL: Essays on Video Games (from the Liliput Press) is a compilation of interesting, funny and thoughtful pieces of games writing by novelists such as Lisa McInerney, as well as game creators, including the legendary Brenda Romero.
Staying on our retro theme, this question came to me from Howard, via email.
“I’m sure I remember a quizshow from the 1980s which featured several rounds where contestants played video games against each other, but I can’t remember what it was called or what the games were. Did this really happen or did I make it up?”
No, you didn’t make it up! I think you’re referring to the BBC children’s quizshow First Class, which began as a one-off pilot episode from BBC Wales in 1984 before becoming a teatime staple from 1986 to 1988. The quiz involved two teams of three children answering trivia questions based on movies, music and general knowledge, interspersed with gaming rounds. The titles featured included Paperboy, Hyper Sports and the skateboarding sim 720°, and presenter Debbie Greenwood even relied on a computer to keep the scores. It wasn’t the first TV quizshow to feature video game rounds, though. Starcade ran in the US from 1982 and featured dozens of games including Donkey Kong, Crystal Castles and BurgerTime. Later in 1991 came another US quizshow, Video Power, co-hosted by Terry Lee Torok, who also provided commentary at the Nintendo World Championships esports events. But then came the zenith of the format, UK’s GamesMaster, which aired on Channel 4 from 1992 and was brilliantly presented by Guardian games columnist Dominik Diamond. This is surely a concept that needs reinventing for the 2020s – perhaps by combining the noughties gameshow 1 vs. 100 with Fortnite?
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