Back in the fall of 1980, I was in junior high school, and I liked four things: girls, basketball, rock music, and, of course, video games. At the Quick Way convenience store near my school, they had three arcade games set up in a small corner at the back: Asteroids,...
“In space no one can hear you scream.” So goes the tagline for Alien, one of the greatest (not to mention scariest) science fiction movies ever made. Released in 1979 by 20th Century Fox, Alien was directed by the great auteur Ridley Scott (from a screenplay by Dan...
As a kid in the late 1970s, before I had a video game system of my very own (Santa didn‘t come through until 1982, when he brought a ColecoVision to our house), I would make any excuse I could think of to visit friends who owned an Atari 2600, an Odyssey2,or even a...
From the late 1980s to the present, the super-hero genre has been a constant of the video game industry. For years games based on Batman, The X-Men, The Punisher, The Fantastic Four, Spawn and other spandex-clad vigilantes have been jockeying for shelf space alongside...
In 1979, programmers David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead left Atari to begin creating games independently of the company. They were dismayed with their relatively low salaries, especially given the millions their games were bringing in. Withmusic...