"A world is more than a space, more than a place; it is something to inhabit & be inhabited by. What you infuse a space w/ to make it habitable, to make it memorable (since memory is profoundly spatial), gives the place its character, its soul…

Zelda would be better if it had no story…no plot to structure the adventure…first Zs barely had any plot…were better for it. With plot, sequence matters too much…early Zs had situations, worlds & scenarios that framed action, gaps to be filled in by player, sequences to be broken. Optimal paths & shortcuts weren’t a given; they had to be earned. Items were the most prominent plot devices, & even they were not unduly strict about order. You could be slow & steady or blast straight through with a little know-how…basic rules of the gameworld were what bound you, not some artificial necessity imposed for the sake of plot."

…a world is not for you. A world needs a substance, independence, sense that it doesn’t just disappear when you turn around."

Some say the story begins with the CD-i. The real story however begins with the growing use of CD-ROM and the emergence of multimedia - devices that played games, movies, music, edutainment and more.

"But wait… That wasn’t all they did. They disabled embedding of all content on our site, even the things we had made ourselves. Sure, the videos were still available by going directly to Vimeo.com and going into our account, but embedding was gone, so every occurrence of a video on our site was replaced with a block that said “embedding has been disabled for this site.”"

Nintendo, the world’s family-friendly video game maker, formed under less virtuous auspices. Before Nintendo made video games, they made playing cards for gangsters and ran their own love hotel, which some assert their own president frequented—during work.

Origin of various video game character's names.

Shigeru Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment. He’s the closest thing there is to an autobiographical game creator, and shuns focus groups: “As long as I can enjoy something, other people can enjoy it, too.”

If anybody has more info about this please let me know ! As it is, I really don't know much about this game. I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. After dusting off my NES for like, 20 minutes I got it working, and jesus. So weird. Apparently it's an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called "Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari", but I haven't found anything about that either. What's left of the manual was just rubberbanded to the cartridge.

RT @nxthompson: Nick Paumgarten's @newyorker masterpiece on Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, the mind behind Mario. http://nyr.kr/fGe5R1 #lo ...

Great memories of this game. RT @rob_schmitt: The hoops LucasArts had to jump through to get Maniac Mansion approved http://bit.ly/bX3cdB

There were no tools to speak of so everything was entered as numbers in the assembler/editor. Later on I turned the numbers for command codes into macros to make entering and reading the sequences of notes a little easier but that’s as sophisticated as it got. I worked out tunes on a little Yamaha keyboard and typed in the pitches and durations. Often I’d work out timings on some squared graph paper, mostly by trial and error.”

"My first thought after playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the first few hours was that Nintendo was kind of being a jerk about the whole thing. It's much harder to nail a satisfying game mechanic—whether it's in 2D or 3D—than people understand. Nintendo constantly shows you something amazing and masterfully produced, and just when you've gotten over being amazed at how well it plays, the game throws it away and offers up something else, equally good."