#video-game-history

#video-game-history

While the video game industry is now larger than the movie and music businesses combined, it began with a simple game created as a training project. Al Alcorn, Atari's first engineer and the inventor of Pong, will talk about the early history of Atari and how Pong launched the video game industry at a Feb. 9 Speaker Night at the Sunnyvale Heritage Park Museum.

They've never all appeared together at once, except on lists of video game legends. And, surely, in the dreams of some gamers. They would certainly make a peculiar group: a mustachioed plumber, a fearless archeologist, a lightning-fast hedgehog, a warrior and a princess, a monkey in a tie, a marsupial in jeans and a strange yellow rodent. Outlandish, to those unfamiliar with them. But for those who know of their existence, these creatures are global icons.

The show traces how a simple yellow circle dreamed up in Japan in 1980 by designer Toru Iwatani grew into a global pop-culture heavyweight. From early arcade cabinets to living room consoles and far beyond, PAC-MAN redefined what video games could be, while still welcoming in first-time players. At the exhibition, visitors can jump straight into the action with classic Pixel Bash arcade cabinets, competitive rounds of PAC-MAN Battle Royale Chompionship and newer titles like PAC-MAN WORLD 2 Re-PAC .

An original but unused ending cutscene for Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro, released in 2001, was long thought to be lost to time, with only a single screenshot of it remaining online. But that all changed earlier this week when someone who downloaded the original ending over 20 years ago remembered they had it and uploaded it to the internet. First, a bit of history:

Nintendo's star heroine wasn't always named Princess Peach, and for many years prior to the release of Super Mario 64 went by a different name: Princess Toadstool. Now, fans know the reason why, and it wasn't because of any decision Nintendo made. In an interview with Time Extension, Nintendo veteran Leslie Swan, who over the course of her nearly three-decade career helped localize countless Nintendo classics, wrote for Nintendo Power magazine, and even voiced Princess Peach in Super Mario 64, spilled the beans on the unlikely origin of the Toadstool moniker. She said in Nintendo's early days, there wasn't a lot of communication between the development teams in Japan and those working on marketing in the US.

Computer Entertainer, owned by sisters Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan, was established in 1982 and uniquely survived the 1983 crash, offering critical insights into the industry.

"At first, we wanted something closer to Tactics Ogre in terms of map size and character count. But no matter what we tried, the framerate dropped to 30fps."

Fire Emblem was one of the early titles that helped define grid-based tactics games.

Three recently found screenshots of an unreleased Mario game for the Virtual Boy provide a glimpse into an abandoned chapter of Nintendo history.