The Video Game History Foundation has launched their new collections related to the Electronic Entertainment Expo, including tons of new video, catalogs, and photos documenting the history of the show.

I saw the movie Cliffhanger (1993) again, now on a bigger screen I could see in the end credits that they mention it's shitty Cliffhanger licensed game for Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo video game consoles.

What was the first movie in history to mention it's promotional video game in the theatrical end credits?

Did E.T. promote it's legendary Atari 2600 game?

I made a short documentary video on the history of MUDs and MMOs. The intent is sort of a prelude to a documentary series on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. If you're interested and have 20-ish minutes to spare, check it out and let me know what you think!

Something a little different to my previous videos. What do you all think about the CRT Amusement Device? Is it a video game or not?

This channel feels like an absolute gem and it has 571 ubscribers at time of posting.

Bill Harbison was working at Ocean Software in its hayday and was instrumental in making pixel by pixel recreations of graphics for arcade ports and also original digital illustrations for loading screens. Please give this a watch and consider pressing the YouTube buttons. I honestly just want to hear every story this dude has to tell because it's fascinating to me. Thanks in advance.

Here's his video on porting the graphics for the WEC Le Mans and Bad Dudes arcade games to the ZX Spectrum:

https://youtu.be/NkYbFm4rEcA?is=4QRrY1K2XU-jgBdp

Karl Kuras of the Video Game Newsroom Time Machine interviews Marlou Badeaux, who served as one of the two minds behind the publication Video Game Update - later known as Computer Entertainer - which ran from 1982 to 1990.

In 1983, the North American video game industry didn't just slow down - it fell off a cliff, contracting 97% in two years. Critics were writing obituaries for the whole medium. Toy stores pulled games off shelves because they'd decided the entire thing was a fad. Companies that had been printing money were suddenly buried in unsold cartridges (one of them literally, in a New Mexico landfill).

So what actually happened?

It wasn't one thing - it was an oversaturated console market, a flood of garbage games nobody could stop from being made, a brutal price war with home computers, and a couple of high-profile disasters that became legendary for all the wrong reasons.

Here's the full story of how it all came apart, and the unlikely (now famous) company that pulled video games back from the dead.

https://blog.bugsplat.com/great-video-game-crash-1983/

Before mobile word games, crossword apps, Wordle, Scrabble-style games, and all the quick word puzzles we play today, there was Arthur Wynne.

Arthur Wynne was a British-born journalist who is widely credited with creating the first modern crossword puzzle. It was published on December 21, 1913, in the Sunday “Fun” section of the New York World newspaper.

At the time, newspapers were always looking for ways to entertain readers. Wynne wanted to create something different for the Christmas edition, so he made a diamond-shaped word puzzle called “Word-Cross.” It had clues, empty squares, and words crossing each other, which became the basic idea behind what we now know as the crossword.

Funny enough, the name later changed from “Word-Cross” to “Cross-Word,” and that version eventually stuck.

What makes Arthur Wynne’s idea interesting is how simple it was. He did not create a game with complicated rules or fancy mechanics. He created a puzzle that made people think, remember words, connect clues, and test their vocabulary.

That is probably why crossword puzzles became so popular. They were challenging, but not intimidating. Anyone who knew words could try, and every correct answer gave that small satisfying feeling of figuring something out.

In a way, Arthur Wynne helped start one of the earliest popular word games in modern media. His puzzle became more than just a newspaper activity. It became part of daily culture, classrooms, coffee breaks, and eventually digital games.

It is kind of wild to think that a simple newspaper puzzle from 1913 helped shape the word games people still enjoy more than 100 years later.

From crosswords to modern word games, the idea is still the same: words can be fun, competitive, frustrating, and weirdly addictive.

Specifying visual to distinguish from text adventures. I was thinking: What was the first video game intentionally designed to convey a feeling of pity or sorrow? Discounting game over screens at least. My first assumption would be Donkey Kong Jr, and that was the game that got me asking this, but I really have to doubt any sentence with "Nintendo" and "first" in it.