Retrospectives
Thief: The Dark Project and the Invention of Hiding
Looking Glass's 1998 game turned darkness and sound into a system, and the stealth genre has been working from its notes ever since.
3 min readRetrospectiveEarthBound and the RPG That Swapped Dragons for Drugstores
A suburban-America role-playing game that sold poorly in the West and became a cornerstone of the genre's odd corner.
3 min readRetrospectiveDeus Ex and the Level Design That Trusted the Player
Ion Storm Austin's 2000 conspiracy thriller was ambitious about choice, and its best moments come from the ways it gets out of your way.
3 min readRetrospectiveEuphoria and the Weight of GTA IV
Physics-driven animation made Niko stumble, sway and scramble. It also made a lot of players argue about whether the game felt good.
3 min readRetrospectiveTwo Stories, One City: The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony
Rockstar's two episodic expansions for GTA IV retold the same Liberty City from the bottom of a biker gang and the top of a nightclub.
3 min readRetrospectiveEverQuest and the Years When the Group Was the Game
Sony's 1999 MMO asked for patience, cooperation and a willingness to lose things. That was the design, not a flaw in it.
3 min readRetrospectiveKatamari Damacy and the Joy of a Budget-Price Big Idea
Namco's 2004 oddity proved that one clean mechanic, a sticky ball and a cheerful lunatic king, could carry a whole game.
3 min readRetrospectiveDoes Morrowind Still Hold Up?
Twenty-plus years later, Vvardenfell is stranger and slower than anything shipping today — and that might be the point.
9 min readRetrospectiveChrono Trigger: When the Dream Team Built a Time Machine
Three of Japan's biggest names in games, one Super Nintendo cartridge, and a role-playing game that quietly dropped several genre conventions.
3 min readRetrospectiveUltima Online and the World That Fought Back
The first big graphical online world was more of an accident than a plan, and its hardest lesson is still one designers argue about.
3 min readRetrospectiveCasual Games Deserve Retrospectives Too
Bejeweled, Zuma, Peggle, Diner Dash: the download-and-try era shaped modern design, and almost nobody writes about it.
3 min readRetrospectiveCivilization II and the Art of the Refined Sequel
Brian Reynolds inherited a landmark and improved almost everything except the premise, which was the hard part.
3 min readRetrospectiveSam & Max Hit the Road: A Road Trip Through Roadside Kitsch
A talking dog and a rabbity thing in an adventure game that turned American tourist traps into a comedy playground.
3 min readRetrospectiveMultiplayer Before GTA Online
Long before 2013, the series had already tried playing with others. Here is what actually shipped.
3 min readRetrospectiveMonkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge and the Ending Everyone Argued About
A funnier, bigger, stranger sequel that ended on a note fans debated for three decades.
3 min readRetrospectiveSimCity 2000 and the Layers Beneath the City
Maxis made its sequel deeper in every sense, including a literal underground, and turned a toy into a serious civics simulator.
3 min readRetrospectiveHow Big Is the San Andreas Map, and How Did a PS2 Hold It?
A state-sized world on 32 megabytes of main memory is less magic than clever streaming, and a great deal of compromise.
3 min readRetrospectiveMajora's Mask and Three Days That Never Get Easier
The strangest Zelda took the series' favourite verb, saving, and made it a burden instead of a reward.
3 min readRetrospectiveVice City's Celebrity Voice Cast, and Why It Mattered
Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Dennis Hopper and more: the 2002 game that made a star-studded cast feel like part of the world.
3 min readRetrospectiveVice City Stories: Vic Vance and the Empire That Wasn't His Idea
The second PSP prequel returned to 1984 Vice City and built a business game around a soldier drawn into crime by circumstance.
3 min readRetrospectivePopulous and the Invention of the God Game
Bullfrog's 1989 debut asked you to shape the land and let your followers do the rest, and a whole genre grew out of the idea.
3 min readRetrospectiveMuscle, Fat, and Stamina: San Andreas's RPG-Lite Body
The game that let you get out of shape, then back in shape, and made that matter to how the world treated you.
3 min readRetrospectiveTommy Vercetti and the Art of the Rise
Vice City's lead is a talker in a series of silent men, and his story is about ambition rather than redemption.
3 min readRetrospectiveFrom DMA Design to Rockstar North: A Studio Changes Its Name
Lemmings, a chain of acquisitions, and a 2002 rename that quietly closed one chapter and opened another.
3 min readRetrospectiveShenmue and the Dream of a Game That Simulates a Life
Sega's Dreamcast epic was more interested in Tuesday afternoons than in boss fights, and that is the reason it is still argued about.
3 min readRetrospectiveFallout (1997): A Wasteland With a 1950s Heart
The original *Fallout* built a tone, a rule system and a whole philosophy of consequence, largely by accident of a licensing dispute.
3 min readRetrospectiveTune In, Steal a Car: How GTA III's Radio Set the Template
Nine stations, a talk show, and the realisation that a game's soundtrack could be a place you visit.
3 min readRetrospectiveDoom, Shareware, and the Birth of the WAD
The corridors were fast and the demons were memorable, but what made Doom permanent was how id let people take it apart.
3 min readRetrospectiveBaldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and the Art of the Confident Sequel
BioWare had a working engine, a loyal audience and a villain worth building a game around. It used all three.
3 min readRetrospectiveKnights of the Old Republic and the Star Wars Game That Escaped the Films
BioWare's 2003 role-playing game worked because it stepped out of the movies' shadow and let the player make the Force mean something.
3 min readRetrospectiveLiberty City Stories and the Case for the Handheld GTA
In 2005, Rockstar shrank a full open-world crime game onto the PSP and mostly got away with it.
3 min readRetrospectiveNeon and Cocaine: Why Vice City's 1980s Worked
Miami Vice, Scarface, a licensed soundtrack, and a setting picked at exactly the right distance from the present.
3 min readRetrospectiveCJ and the Grove Street Story
A returning son, a fractured gang, and a crooked police unit: the small, personal story at the center of a very large game.
3 min readRetrospectiveGrand Theft Auto III and the Leap Into Three Dimensions
It was not the first 3D open world, but it was the one that made everyone else want to build one.
3 min readRetrospectiveThe Sequel That Outgrew Its Franchise
Street Fighter II didn't just follow a forgotten arcade game. It became the reason an entire genre exists.
3 min readRetrospectiveChinatown Wars and the Top-Down Return
Eight years after the series left its overhead camera behind, a handheld sent Liberty City back to the sky.
3 min readRetrospectiveBefore Liberty City Had Skyscrapers: The Original Grand Theft Auto
A top-down crime game from a Scottish studio best known for Lemmings, built on a design idea that flipped halfway through development.
3 min readRetrospectiveHalf-Life and the Shooter That Stopped Cutting Away
Valve's first game didn't invent the story-driven shooter, but it removed the seams that had always separated story from play.
3 min readRetrospectiveThree Cities, One State: The Ambition of San Andreas
Rockstar North's 2004 game did not ask for one city to feel alive. It asked for three, plus everything in between.
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