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The Creator
Markus Persson has the body of a politician but the features of a rock star: Fixed, handsome eyes and a deep-dimpled smile that offsets his baldpate and thickening torso. Perhaps this is why, when he visited Las Vegas in 2011 for the first international convention held in honour of Minecraft, the video game he designed ...
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Leaving a home for a home
Every summer holiday I’d lay awake on the narrow bed and listen to the only other piece of furniture in the room – the hulking wardrobe, as the beetles dined. This was the nightly ritual at my grandparents’ cottage, where the insects would feast en masse during the dark, tapping their mandibles loud against the ...
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Drink and Revive: The rise of Barcade
Video games owe a great deal to the American bar. It was here, on sticky carpets, before glinting taps and amidst woozy patrons, that the medium made its public debut — when Atari founder Nolan Bushnell installed his first arcade cabinet, Computer Space, in the Dutch Goose near Stanford University in 1971. The video game ...
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The importance of video game violence
Nobody remembers their first kill. It’s not like the high security prison-yards, where they pace just to forget, dream-haunted. When it comes to video games, nobody remembers their first kill. If you can recall your first video game, well, then you’ve a chance of pinpointing the setting (over a blackened Space Invaders’ killing field? Atop ...
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Shooters: How Video Games Fund Arms Manufacturers
The American confectionery company Victoria Sweets claims to have invented the candy cigarette. A thin stick of chocolate, wrapped in edible paper and designed to impersonate a roll-up, the sweet debuted in 1915 and soon became the accessory of choice for children keen to play grown-up. Hollywood star, GI Joe, team captain: the candy cigarette ...
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Who spilled Hot Coffee?
Not for the first time that month, Patrick Wildenborg was disoriented. With a one year-old baby in the house he was familiar with the fug of a deep sleep cut short by noise. But this awakening was different. It was prompted not by an infant’s wail but the hysteria of a telephone ringing in the ...
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Death by gaming: investigating the Taiwan café fatalities
When the paramedics lifted Chen Rong-Yu from his chair his hands remained frozen in place, one clawed as if holding an invisible computer mouse, the other poised to tap out a shortcut on a vanished keyboard. At 10pm the previous day Chen had taken a seat in the farthest corner of an internet café in ...
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In search of Nolan Bushnell, gaming’s absent father
Asteroids arrests. Piercing white vector lines bisect the screen’s black void, issuing a flickering beacon out towards the bar, as if to plead: ‘play me, save us’. If you catch its gaze you can’t look away, pulled towards the machine as if drawn in a tractor beam. Break the spell and you notice the other ...
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The Rise and Collapse of Yoshinori Ono
Rumours of Yoshinori Ono’s death have been greatly exaggerated. As we sit together in the lobby of a Roman hotel, three weeks after his release from hospital, Street Fighter’s creative custodian has a healthy red glow to his chubby cheeks while the irrepressible smile that has made him the approachable face of his employer Capcom ...
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Hideo Kojima: video game drop-out
Six months after Hideo Kojima joined Konami, one of Japan’s most respected video game studios, he was asked by a university friend to be best man at his wedding. “The groom stood up to introduce me. He said: ‘Welcome everybody. This is Mr Kojima. He’s a very talented and otherwise likeable person. But I am ...
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Shigeru Miyamoto: Tired of games?
“Why do you still play video games?” Shigeru Miyamoto is tired. Jetlag is partly to blame, the 11-hour flight from his hometown Kyoto to Paris combined with a day’s worth of interviews with journalists eager to pull headlines from his lips accentuating the bags under his eyes. But it’s more than that. This November Super ...
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Jenova Chen: Journeyman
“There’s this quotation from St Augustine…” Jenova Chen puts down his hamburger and fixes me with a warm but firm stare. Trust the designer of Flower and Journey to invoke a 3rd century theologian as an entry point to the subject of online tea-bagging. “Augustine wrote: ‘People will venture out to the height of the ...