Sundays are for turning finally accepting it’s become Big Coat Weather by stripping off the nine-month-old dry cleaning plastic sheath from said Big Coat, slipping into the sleeves, and exhaling a relieved sigh upon discovering it still fits. Not this year, Popeyes Spicy Chicken Sandwich. Not this year.
With the turn of the seasons also comes another batch of interesting games writing, starting with that rowdy lot Eurogamer’s interview with former Xbox bigwig Peter Moore. It’s a hefty two-parter, covering the birth of the Xbox 360 and Microsoft’s intentional stoking of the console war. I’m glad I’m in PC gaming, where we famously never argue about anything.
PM: We needed to build a complete platform, not just a piece of hardware, and that excited me. And I was brought in; I was a little different, because they needed “people like me”.
EG: What does that mean, people like you?
PM: That means that I’m not… Look, I’m not a self-described nerd. And Microsoft was very much a company that was seen as guys with pocket protectors and thick glasses, so we needed to bring in different people that could stand on stage and throw punches at Sony and be a little bit more aggressive in a different way, and had experience of taking on the PlayStation, which I did, obviously, during my Sega days. So I was not the stereotypical quintessential Microsoft employee. I was brought in to create strategy, lead on stage from the front, be a little irreverent, maybe get a tattoo or two…
Endless Mode are now AV Club Games, having lasted all of four months as their own thing – a shame, given how often they seem to show up in the Sunday Papers. All the regular writers have carried over, at least: here’s Marc Normandin on why 2025 is the year of the Musou game.
What if you could swing your sword – or whatever weapon, there are lots of different weapons in these games – at hundreds and hundreds of foes, except they were all tortured souls trying to keep your benefactor from regaining the throne of Hell? And what if your goal here was to descend deeper and deeper into the bowels of Hell to destroy the demons and monstrosities that had taken it over? And you could choose to play as any number of characters from Dynasty Warriors games, or Samurai Warriors ones, or even the Atelier games since Koei Tecmo publishes those for Gust, which it became the parent company of a decade ago? Maybe you want to battle the forces of Hell with some characters from Ninja Gaiden games, like Ryu Hayabusa or Rachel?
That would all be sick if it were true, and good news: it is.
I can’t credit this one properly because Dominic, of Dominic’s Substack, refuses to write his surname anywhere. But he has written an interesting history of artist Lee Petty’s work with Double Fine, a development studio that’s been strangely quiet after once becoming the darlings of stick-it-to-the-man gamesmaking.
Broken Age was a tumultuous project in Double Fine’s history. Though the game would see relative commercial and critical success, it was considered by many to be a disappointment. For an unfortunately vocal demographic of gamers, the extended development timeline tarnished the reputation of Double Fine and crowdfunding as an alternative to traditional video game publishing models. Not to mention, employees at Double Fine were also exposed to various forms of hate and harassment online, hurting morale within the studio and sparking a desire to escape back into the relative anonymity of publisher funding.
The Guardian’s Keith Stuart remembers the Sega Master System for its 40th anniversary. Sega did what Nintendidn’t?
Sega oversaw the distribution of the Master System in the US (at least initially), but looked to local companies to tackle the more fragmented European market. For the UK and France (and later Spain), that role would go to Virgin Mastertronic. “Sega’s partners had better marketing positioning in Europe,” says Nick Alexander, who was Virgin Mastertronic’s managing director at the time. “They also had better retail and distribution relationships than Nintendo did in those days. The video game industry magazine Computer Trade Weekly had a running joke that Nintendo saw Europe as where the dragons lived – they didn’t understand it, they were nervous of it. So they put their effort into the US.”
Music this week is Bershy’s Radio, the Dispatch-driven success of which apparently reignited the singer’s love of making music. I’d like to say I discovered it on a cassette I rescued from an independent record shop under threat of demolition by its pink-faced landlords, but you know full well I just heard it off the superhero kissing game like everyone else.