From the category archives:

FICTIONAL VIDEO GAMES

The Vapors

May 26, 2011

It’s not uncommon for a forthcoming product to be announced only to slip quietly into the dark chasm of Development Hell before the release date. However, it’s the unreleased products heralded by hype and ad campaigns that have a special place in my heart.

The term vaporware was coined in 1982 by a Microsoft engineer [...]

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Gatsby no Monogatari

May 16, 2011

At some point in the 80’s the Japanese tried to give The Great Gatsby the pulse-pounding video game adaptation that Fitzgerald had always intended.  And we missed it.  From GreatGatsbyGame.com:
I really don’t know much about this game. I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it [...]

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Beat up the Bits

January 16, 2011

I wonder how much of the music for this mock-up of The Jersey Shore RPG is original, and how much was taken from 16-bit SNES titles.
I definitely recognize the main theme from Mario Paint at 2:15, and I’m fairly certain that the victory music at 1:12 is from Pilotwings.

Do you recognize any of these [...]

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Recruited by the Star League

January 12, 2011

All gamers, whether they’ll admit it or not, entertain the fantasy that the skills they (or their thumbs) acquire in the video game world will one day prove useful in a real-life situation. Whether it be fishtailing their Honda Civic around a corner to evade capture by a squad of goons, or having the [...]

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Wrestle Jam

January 7, 2011

Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler features an amazing scene that highlights the throwback nature of the tragic protagonist. He’s shown trying to convince a modern kid (accustomed to the PTSD-inducing high-def sensory bombardment of Call of Duty 4) that playing the old Nintendo game Wrestle Jam is actually worth his time and attention. Predictably, [...]

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There Will Be Gamer’s Thumb

November 7, 2010

Created for Empire Magazine’s annual Done in 60 Seconds contest, this mock-up of There Will Be Blood sums up the plot of the film in exactly one minute.

The guys behind the faux Super Nintendo title are Liverpool-based filmmakers Adam Wright & Owen Williams, and this little short got them into the top five of this [...]

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Demakes Roundup

July 7, 2010

Down-conversion is running rampant on the World Wide Webs, lately. It seems as if everyone is getting a kick out of trying to squeeze the present through the filter of the past.
Here are some Atarified anachronisms from the now defunct The-Minusworld.com:

For those experiencing double déjà vu, you’re not going slowly insane – we actually [...]

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GAME OVER

May 21, 2010

As I mentioned in an earlier post, that Lost show everyone’s always yammering on about is a nothing but a shameless rip-off of the old Nintendo 8-bit classic, Lost: The Game. Here’s even more evidence:

Keep an eye on Adam Campbell’s Lost: The Game (NES) Flickr set. He’s promised more gameplay screencaps in the [...]

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Arcade Lore 101

May 4, 2010

It was 1981 when the mysterious cabinet consoles quietly appeared in arcades around Portland. The game was called Polybius, and the play style was a psychedelic vector graphics whirlwind with abstract avatars and trippy music. It was instantly addictive, attracting long lines of players awaiting their turns to relieve themselves of their parents’ quarters.
Within [...]

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Black Box (P)revisited

April 8, 2010

More anachronistic games from the NES Black Box series:

These are the work of Donna Pike (aka Arcade Artist) – an artist with a charming fixation on all things 8-bit. If you’re into this sort of thing (and you are), then check out her Flickr photostream.

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Sleep Gaming

April 1, 2010

Below is an image of the fictional NES game called REM Constable designed by the fictional dream researcher Kurt Manchild.  It’s from Matt Brown’s Design Fancy project:  a series of short stories syndicated at Core77 about fictional designers who make fictional things.

Matt Brown’s website is a cornucopia of whimsical engineering and hilariously half-baked research.  It’s [...]

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