Retro Gamer

I’d love to choose multiples, but my favourite cover is the Ultimate: Play The Game loading screens from issue 109. In fact, I love it so much it hangs in my gaming shed. Expertise: Juggling a gorgeous wife, two beautiful girls and an award-winning m

Musician Chris Huelsbeck has one of the most extensive CVs in games, stretching over 30 years across more than 80 releases, from Great Giana Sisters and Tunnel B1 to the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron series. Possibly his most well-known game works, howev

Sega is founded by Martin Bromley and Richard Stewart and is initially known as Nihon Goraku Bussan. A Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 is installed at MIT. The minicomputer catches the attention of all, including one Steve Russell. William George

This is it – the beginning, the decade where humanity gained the ability to go out into the world, drop a coin in a machine and play a videogame. And that’s largely what they did, as the arcades hosted many of the decade’s most famous games and accou

Though we look back to the Seventies as the start of our own technological revolution, David’s personal memories are of a childhood relatively free of the devices that have become ubiquitous in the modern world. “Compared to today, there was remar

Nolan was the cofounder of Atari and its driving force in its earliest days. His grand visions, freewheeling culture and moxie helped Atari create a series of enduring games, while also birthing a new industry. Following his departure from Atari, Nol

Over the course of the Eighties, games began to flourish as a rounded creative medium. As hardware capabilities increased, the depth and storytelling possibilities of text-based games became available to graphical games. Meanwhile, companies created

For Trip, the Eighties was defined by a drive towards videogames as an art form. But the high cost of arcade games kept them out of the home, and the low cost of consoles limited their power – in both cases, limiting the depth that could be offered.

After self-publishing coin-op clones in the early Eighties, David and his brother Richard began freelancing for Mastertronic, and by 1985 they owned half of the company. The brothers next went independent with Codemasters, and built it up by publishi

■ The trading name of surreal shoot-‘em-up specialist Jeff Minter, Llamasoft alternated between self-publishing and freelancing for publishers during the Eighties, making home-baked classics like Gridrunner and the Mutant Camel series. Besides a few

Gaming’s greatest ape might have been overshadowed by his adversary Mario, but he’s had a great run of his own. While his early arcade career ended pretty quickly, he was revitalised in the mid-Nineties and has starred in classics including Donkey Ko

OPM’s demo discs were a real boon for cash-strapped gamers with nary a full-priced game to their name. Each came with a selection of playable demos along with trailers for new titles, and later on they’d feature full games created using specialist Ne

If the Eighties had been a time of experimenting and staking a claim on the still-blossoming videogame market, then the following decade really saw the games industry begin to grow up. “The Nineties felt like the decade when gaming became mainstream,

It took its time in creating a successor to the NES, but Nintendo’s patient approach ensured it had a powerhouse on its hands – the SNES could handle more colours than the competition, and advanced scaling and rotation effects. Of course, the game li

There was a distinctive shift during the Nineties that continues to this day. Consoles finally took over from home computers as the systems of choice for many gamers, while Japanese developers (who had largely been confined to the arcades) began to l

Animated gifs, autoplay MIDI music, poorly compressed images, affiliate webrings, plus a whole lot of unbridled passion and creativity. Whether Angelfire, Tripod, GeoCities, Homestead or any other hosting solution, this is probably how most remember

Myst was a key driver of the CD-ROM format and, for a time, the best-selling PC game. Slow drive read speeds were a constraint that needed to be overcome but, aside from music, the storage capacity allowed for 2,500 rich and detailed scenes and 66 mi

On its very first day of sale in Japan on 3 December 1994, Sony sold 100,000 PlayStation consoles. When the console was finally released in the United States the following September, it shifted the same amount again but what made jaws truly drop is t

1 Masaya Matsuura’s quirky rhythm game kicked and punched its way into the minds of gamers in 1996 before spawning a spin-off – Um Jammer Lammy – and a sequel PaRappa The Rapper 2. More than that, the button-tapper set the tone for scores of other po

B PlayStation efore Sony developed , it worked what with we Nintendo know in today order as to the develop a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. It also sought to supplement that with a Sony-branded console based on the SNES that could play ‘Super Discs’ as

After tinkering away with various simulator titles throughout the Eighties and Nineties, Will Wright and his talented Maxis team eventually created the ultimate life simulator. It went on to become one of the biggest PC games of all time and has led

If the Nineties had been about pursuing the possibilities of 3D games then the Noughties was about perfecting them. The visual advances weren’t lost on PlayStation 4 lead architect, Mark Cerny. “Games took huge steps towards photorealism, helped by a

“There are 10 million people in the World Of Warcraft, because Chuck Norris allows them to live.” So goes the iconic advert that came alongside the success of World Of Warcraft, and Chuck Norris wasn’t the only famous face giving the game their stamp

As the years have rolled on, Blizzard has been all too ready to make big changes to the key characters of the game – and actually this has been to its benefit. Yes, it has meant that beloved and long-lasting characters have been killed off from time

As the basic melee character, Warriors can either deal damage or take it. They’re best suited as tanks, however, and except for those irritating moments when a player charges in to steal your quest enemy, are often the most in-demand class when it co

Games like DayZ, Minecraft and Ark: Survival Evolved fall into this category and they often feature mechanics like crafting and are typically set in procedurally generated environments and can often have a hostile theme. They’re far more entertaining

■ David Braben and Ian Bell’s legendary 1984 space sim was revolutionary, and a case can be made that it is the first true open world game. ■ 1997’s Grand Theft Auto might look very different to the GTA we know now, but that formative DNA still pers

Is gaming better than it’s ever been? It could well be. Mobile gaming has continued to grow in popularity, and the traditional gaming market is bigger than ever. Sony’s PlayStation 4 has soared past 100 million units, Microsoft is beginning to undo m

While everyone was praising Super Mario Odyssey, it was Astro Bot which really shook up the platform genre in 2018. While it’s very conventional in some ways, VR gives it a tangibility and sense of scale that no other game within the genre can match.

» System: Switch (tested) PC, PS4, Xbox One » Buy it from: Online, retail » Buy it for: £24.99 As much as we enjoyed Playtonic’s first game, there was certainly room for improvement. For this sequel, we now find ourselves wondering how the talented