Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. In 1982, the video game market was a booming seemingly-unstoppable multi-billion dollar juggernaut. Then third party game companies saturated the market with similar and clone hardware and low-quality games based on dog food and soda, culminating in Atari’s Shakespearean mistake of releasing…

There are a lot of things we don’t know for sure from the early days of video games. A lot of information that we would normally take for granted fell through the cracks from lack of coverage or just never being recorded in the first place. We don’t even really…

You’re Already Preparing To Fight Me About This. You’re Still Wrong. “This can’t be true!” you are probably thinking to yourself. “There was a standard font that all the classic NES games had! It was the same font across dozens of games! I vividly remember this!” And you are probably picturing the font from Super Mario Bros, which looks like this:

“I’m an X-Files Kid… you know what I mean? I’m a late-90s conspiracy guy. Man, conspiracy culture used to be fun. It used to not be so malicious and cruel. Area 51, Fish-Human hybrids… Roswell. I mean, it was kind of fluffy in it’s own way. It didn’t really hit…

A few months back I wrote a kinda snarky beginners guide to Game Genie hacking for Modern Rogue. I’m going to assume you read it, and if you haven’t you should because I’m gonna open this up with the same examples but in more detail as a warm up. Opened…

There was a bit of a kerfuffle recently online regarding Steve Martin’s 1978 Saturday Night Live sketch “King Tut” and how the humor didn’t translate to modern audiences. And honestly yeah, it kind of straddles a line of being too niche and topical with little modern analog. John Belushi playing…

Dolphins have been a source of human fascination since pre-history. To hippies, they’re our goofy, friendly, tuna-loving genius sea cousins that are possibly psychic or something. To others, they’re deadly sex-crazed monsters literally worshiped by Neo-Nazis. But we can all agree they inspired the greatest, weirdest Sega Genesis game that…

I honestly can’t cook worth a damn. I know that’s not very Atomic Age housewife of me, but honestly I’d be more of a “feed my family frozen dinners in front of the television while hiding in the closet eating Valium by the handful as if I lived in a…

(This is a short story I posted on my Myspace blog on October 5, 2008, inspired by both an RFID shopping cart wheel lock in a Walgreens parking lot near my apartment, and the sort of “high-density residential centers” starting to pop up in Austin around then which have now…