What was the first videogame? 1958's Tea For Two, maybe? Nope. A new book by Noah Wardrip-Fruin called Media Archaeology contends that it could have been Christopher Strachey's draughts, or checkers, game for the Manchester Mark I, which employed opponent AI and represented the board and counters on a cathode ray tube, and was probably completed in 1951.
After ten consecutive weeks on top of the UK all-formats software chart, Zumba Fitness has at last been dethroned, with Deus Ex: Human Revolution entering the chart at number one.
Its total sales in just two days were 26,000 copies less than predecessor Deus Ex: Invisible War's lifetime sales, with the majority of purchasers - 57 per cent - buying the Xbox 360 version.
Markus "Notch" Persson has said that his Mojang studio is in talks with Valve in the hope of making Minecraft available through Steam, but admits there is an "inherent incompatibility" between the two firms' approaches.
Chet Faliszek knows more about the living dead than is healthy. In October 2008, a month before the launch of Valve’s zombie-horror game Left 4 Dead, the writer was standing in a supermarket ice-cream aisle when a girl came running over and enlisted his help in settling an argument with her boyfriend. “Hey, mister,” she asked without a flicker of embarrassment.
“Most kids’ games are cheaply made,” says Jon Katz, an associate producer at Warner Bros. Interactive. “They’re made fast, they’re shoved in a box and put on the shelf, and they’re not of high quality. The perception is, “Oh, they’re just kids. They don’t know the difference between a 90 rated game and a 30 rated game, and they don’t care.
Say what you will about golf but it at least gave us crazy golf, so it can’t be all that bad. And if crazy golf – which is surely an arcadey reconfiguring of a game that can often seem tedious and drawn-out – wasn’t good enough by itself, it’s now given us Wonderputt. Wonderputt is everything that crazy golf aspires to be: it’s intricate, devious, and magical.
Beautiful geekery time: some Redditors have been recording their mouse movements while playing PC stalwarts using IOGraphica: virusdotexe playing L4D2, Nastybutler playing TF2, cpadliub playing Quake Live, desports playing DOTA.
With Costume Quest, Stacking and Trenched already in the wild, and Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster soon to join them, Double Fine's Amnesia Fortnights have proved nothing if not prolific. We speak to studio founder and development legend Tim Schafer about the inspiration for the fortnights and how they've affected the studio's fortunes.
