Last month, Amazon Prime’s Secret Level adapted fifteen video games to short, animated films. Some of these could fairly be described as retro video games, though the bulk of them dated to the twenty-first century. But one of the odder ones of the full...
No one can ever quite agree what really makes a video game retro. Ten years old used to be a good yardstick, but as time marches on, and ten years ago now includes the PlayStation 4, well, that’s not generally a good definition. Strangely enough, though,...
In the classic situation comedy Gilligan’s Island, which deals with seven colorful castaways stranded on an island, there are two versions of the theme song. In the first version, five of the castaways are named, while two of them are filed away under the...
Having only seen the Pac-Man episode of Secret Level; it was hard to guess what to expect from the Mega Man short. The only real unifying principle of any episode of Secret Level is that engages with some kind of idea from the video game in question. As it...
There’s an old joke about Pac-Man and video games. Everybody knows that video games don’t really influence kids’ behavior. After all, if they were imitating Pac-Man, they’d just be chasing each other around dark mazes, popping pills and...