Gaming History You Should Know: The Story of Super Mario Bros 2 July 16, 2015
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I make it no secret that the first video game I’ve ever played was Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Really, do I need to say anything about this game? It is one of the greatest games ever made, has one of the most iconic theme songs that even non gamers can hum to themselves, and was responsible for resurrecting the entire video game industry in the US.
While I enjoyed the game a ton, I have to admit I never picked up a copy of its western sequel, Super Mario Bros 2. In fact, I can’t really remember many of my friends talking about that game at school, nor do I remember a lot of my friends admitting to playing it. What I do remember is a phenomenal reception for the release of the third Mario title, Super Mario Bros 3, and I got my parents to get me my own copy of that game after I played it at a cousin’s house.
When I finally did play Super Mario Bros 2 at a friend’s house, I was extremely disappointed. It felt nothing like a Mario title. Years later while I was watching a documentary about the Super Mario franchise on G4 (back when it was a legitimate video game centric channel) I found out the reason why the game was so different was because the version of SMB2 released in the west wasn’t a Super Mario game at all, but a Japanese game which came to the west with Mario characters swapped into it. It turned out the original game released in Japan as Super Mario Bros 2 was deemed too difficult for a western release, and Nintendo decided it would not be a good idea to release it outside of Japan, despite it being a true Super Mario sequel.
Years later, the west would finally get the original Super Mario Bros 2 released on the SNES as part of the Super Mario All Stars compilation game, where it was titled The Lost Levels and released with updated graphics. It wouldn’t be until some time after Nintendo launched the Virtual Console digital download service for the original SMB2 to get a western release with its original graphics.
Why did Nintendo make the decision not to release Super Mario Bros 2 in the west and instead take an unrelated game and release it over in the west with Mario characters? Well, I know someone who has that answer. The Gaming Historian is a YouTube content creator with an amazing channel focusing on obscure gaming information.
If you ever wanted to know what the full story was about this game, give this great video a watch.
Gaming History You Should Know: The Pokemon Trading Figure Game June 3, 2015
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Lets face it, everyone has heard of Pokémon. Since the original Pokémon games launched in the late 90s, the franchise has become a gaming powerhouse with tons of commercial tie ins. For the past fifteen years we’ve seen Pokémon prominantly featured in animated movies, trading cards, posters, toys, and a long running animated television show.
But did you know that in the late 2000s, there were plans to create an all new way to play Pokémon with competitive figurines? That’s right. YouTube celebrity TheJWittz, who many know fondly for his Pokémon Fact of the Day series, reminisces about the history of this short lived game.
Gaming History You Should Know: Atari’s SwordQuest Contest May 20, 2015
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With all the recent talk about Nintendo’s upcoming World Championship series and the ongoing success of electronic gaming competitions all over the world, I want to talk a little bit about one of the first true gaming championship contests that I can think of. In the early 1980s, Atari ruled the video game industry and they were planing an epic contest unlike anything that has been seen since to give back to their die hard fans. This is the story of the SwordQuest games. Four exclusive games were planned for release on the Atari 2800, with each one themed around the four basic elements. A contest was planned to be held for each game’s release, and the winner of each one would receive a special prize. These prizes weren’t simple trinkets, these were incredibly elaborate items constructed of precious metals and stones. Five prizes were produced, with four to be handed out to the winner of each game contest, and the fifth prize would be given to the top winner among the four. Unfortunately, Atari’s future crashed right in the middle of the contest, and its status was thrown into question.
James Rolfe, who you may know better under his alias, The Angry Video Game Nerd, produced an incredible video about Atari’s $150,000 SwordQuest game series. If you wanted to know what was involved in one of the most epic plans in the history of competitive gaming, give it a watch.
The true bearer of that Sword still has yet to be named.
Gaming History You Should Know – The Nuon April 28, 2015
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Everyone remembers the utter failure of the Atari Jaguar from back in the mid-90s but I bet a lot of you had no idea that the Jaguar actually had a spiritual successor nobody remembers. That’s right, the Jaguar’s developers got back together and created an entirely new gaming system exclusively for licensed DVD Players, the Nuon. What is the Nuon? I’ll let Rerez fill you in on all the details.
What is really disappointing about this is that the idea behind the Nuon could have worked better if only it had been integrated into DVD Player hardware sooner. DVD Players, while expensive at launch, sold like crazy due to the incredible picture quality (for the time) and extra features that they offered consumers. In the year 2000, $350 US for a standalone DVD Player was not considered an unreasonable price, and because DVD was getting a huge positive response from consumers since its launch, people would have happily paid that price if it was for one of the first DVD players. Unfortunately, by the year 2001, 20th Century Fox had already released most of their most popular films (like Fight Club and X-Men) on DVD and it was far too soon for them to consider creating entirely new discs for the Nuon. It makes a little bit of business sense that Fox chose to integrate Nuon features into new DVD releases for films they were planning to release anyway, although it seems fate wasn’t kind to the Nuon for the four films 20th Century Fox had lined up for Nuon exclusive features were huge critical and theatrical flops.
If you ask me what the biggest shame out of the whole Nuon story is, I would say that it would have to be the world’s ignorance to the game Tempest 3000, which would never see a rerelease on a more popular console. To this day, not many people know it even exists, and that’s a shame since it could have been a huge selling point for the Nuon hardware. Given Atari’s recent legal issues with Tempest 2000’s creators I doubt this game will ever get another release. A true shame.
Gaming History You Should Know – The History of the CD-ROM Console November 30, 2014
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In the 90s, Nintendo ruled the gaming industry with an iron fist. After bringing video games back into the mainstream after nearly a decade of darkness, Nintendo proved that video games were once again a viable business model and a lot of competition wanted a piece of that market. Nintendo’s major rival at the time, SEGA, had just released a CD add on to their popular Genesis console, and several major companies stepped up, each with their own motivation, to help Nintendo produce a competing product for their just released Super Nintendo console. The end was a mess which killed Nintendo’s faith in the optical medium for another generation and set the stage for one of the greatest gaming consoles of all time to be released, the Sony Playstation.
The guys over at From Concept to Console have posted up a pretty in depth video detailing just how this ambitious product could derail so badly for everyone involved. If you grew up in the 90s like me and remember what it was like to have your friends pick a side in the the 16-Bit console war, you should really give this video a look.
Gaming History You Should Know: The Kingdom Hearts Timeline November 5, 2014
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We’re less than a month away from the release of Kingdom Hearts 2.5 HD ReMIX, which will contain no less than two full games from the Kingdom Hearts franchise, and the remastered cinematics from one other, so what better time to talk about it?
The Kingdom Hearts series has had a very clear timeline, but unlike some series, the games have had a tendency to interweave their stories across games, making it difficult to determine just what was happening at some points, or where a scene would place along the overall timeline of the franchise. Well, worry no longer as GameTrailers.com has released one hell of a well researched hour long video on the official Kingdom Hearts timeline. For fans of the franchise, it’s a great trip down memory lane and for newcomers it can help set the stage on just what the stakes are when Kingdom Hearts III is released for the Xbox One and Playstation 4.
Gaming History You Should Know: The Half-Life 2 Leak October 16, 2014
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After producing our recent site video about the long and grueling development of Half-Life 2: Episode 3, I thought I would take another look into Half-Life 2’s past. We all know that Half-Life 2 launched in 2004 and is considered one of the best PC FPS games ever made, but did you know some people just weren’t willing to wait until the game’s release to play it? In 2003, an early build of Half-Life 2 leaked onto the internet. With all the buzz generated from the game’s E3 2003 showing, the Half-Life 2 leak quickly became one of the most illegally shared pieces of content at the time. Now, sit back and join me as I look ten years into the past at one of the biggest leaks in gaming history. It is meant to inform gamers of a dark time in the history of gaming, and as a cautionary tale to game developers. Enjoy.
Back in April of 2003 Valve announced that a sequel to their hit PC game Half-Life had been in production for the past five years in secret and would be coming out later that year. Using a cutting edge in-house developed graphics engine and a real-time physics engine, Half-Life 2 was first shown to the public at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles in May 2003. All of the gaming press, myself included, were blown away by the incredible thirty minute demo shown at the trade show. To cap the excellent showing off, Valve announced Half-Life 2’s release date would be September 30th, 2003. Unfortunately, this wasn’t soon enough for someone.
Half-Life 2’s development was not keeping to Valve’s schedule and as the weeks ticked by it was becoming more and more likely that the game would not be able to meet its September 30th’s release date. According to Valve owner Gabe Newell, on or around September 11th, 2003 a person other then himself was accessing his e-mail without his permission. Whoever this individual was, he wasn’t interested in e-mail. Valve soon discovered viruslike symptoms on their computer systems, including crashes when right clicking, but strangely their anti-virus software wasn’t picking up on anything unusual. The hacker had used a modified version of a virus called “RemoteAnywhere” to exploit an Outlook Express buffer overflow exploit, and since it had been modified it was undetectable by the anti-virus programs Valve was using. Once it had been installed, the virus in turn installed keystroke logs on all the computers at Valve Software. By September 19th, the attacker had downloaded an unconfirmed amount of un-compiled source code and game resources (including sounds, maps, and textures) for Half-Life 2, as well as the source code and resources for as many as two other games they had in development. All this data found itself on peer-to-peer sharing networks within hours, and the amount of users who downloaded and shared the content was monumental. Gabe Newell was forced to officially confirm the leak on October 2nd, 2003, and asked for the help of the gaming public to bring those responsible to justice.
Even to this day, we don’t have a complete picture of just how much of the game was stolen. Owner Gabe Newell claimed at first that only a minor amount of the final source code was taken, and when the leak first sprang up, only the game’s source code was available on the peer to peer networks. As the days ticked on it became clearer that whoever had stolen all of the game’s content hadn’t released all they had just yet. Over the next week gaming news sites were all over this leak, trying to report the most up to the minute information and as time went on, more and more copies were being made of the source code by the peer-to-peer users.
The content leak may have been fun to mess around with for those who downloaded it, but it meant a lot of headaches for its creators. Because of the leak, Valve was now in violation of a contract they entered into with a company called Havok, who Valve used to license their real-time physics engine*. A stipulation to the contract between Valve and Havok was that Valve needed to keep Havok’s code safe, but since their code was also included with the Half-Life 2 code, Havok could now lose a lot of business. This was a major problem for Havok since their income was from leasing their code to game developers. Another of Valve’s issues with having the game’s source code released illegally meant the increased danger of multiplayer cheating. Cheating is a common occurrence among multiplayer gaming and can destroy the fun of playing games online. With the source code out before the game’s release, the program writers for cheating programs can have a head start to write their cheats for release by the time of the game’s release.
On October 7th, 2003 a playable version (dubbed “playable beta”) of the game was released onto the peer to peer networks by the hacker (who refers to himself as Anonymous Leaker). The previously released source code was only ninety-four percent compilable, and without the game’s content it was useless. The leak had to either have been more massive then Valve knew or bigger then they were willing to admit. Half-Life 2’s original publisher, Vivendi Universal Games, did a press release to push back the release to April 2004 and credited the leak.
But the most interesting thing about the playable beta was that users who downloaded the illegally released version of the game found a game that was in fact nowhere near completion. It was missing a lot of content and looked like a barely playable version of the levels shown at E3. While this could have been because the Leaker stole either an early build of the game client, or was unable to completely obtain all the game’s assets before the content leaked and claimed it was a finished build, it raised the question in a lot of gamers’ minds if this incomplete title was what Valve planned to release on September 30th.
On October 9th, in a questionable move, a forum user claiming to be the Leaker announced the content that was released online was indeed the current work Valve had for Half-Life 2 and that the game was nowhere near completion. Because of this, he plead innocent and said that he was not the reason for the delay of the game. On top of that he claimed that if Valve continued to claim that the leak was the reason for the delay, he would release all the stolen content he had. On October 13th, the source code to the game maps were released to peer to peer networks. As far as I know, that would be the final leaked Half-Life 2 content to make it onto the web.
So who was this mysterious Leaker and why did he steal the biggest game of its time, just to release it before it was finished? Well, as it turned out, the man did in fact have a conscience. The Leaker, who’s name will not be posted on this site, would eventually get in personal contact with Gabe Newell via e-mail. The purpose of the e-mail was not to gloat or threaten, but to apologize. After verifying his identity by providing Gabe some information that had not gone public, Gabe knew he was speaking to the real deal. At first, Gabe was furious at him for all the trouble he had caused the company, but he wasn’t planning to let the Leaker know that. The Leaker said that he was just a big fan of Valve Software, and he had never meant for the content to go public as it did. He just wanted the chance to play their games and he pleaded Gabe for his forgiveness.
Gabe played it cool. On the one hand, he finally knew the Leaker’s motivations, but he still wanted to bring this person to justice. He decided to set up an elaborate sting operation, with the intention to bring the Leaker to the United States and have him immediately arrested by the Feds. Gabe told the Leaker that he was impressed by the Leaker’s actions, and wanted to bring him in to interview as a new “security consultant” for the company. The Leaker was skeptical of course, but he didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to work for Valve Software.
After Gabe spent some time trying to set up this elaborate sting operation, the law enforcement agency of the Leaker’s home country got wind of what Gabe was doing and stopped it, preferring to arrest him themselves. Shortly after that, the Leaker was arrested by his country’s local law enforcement. He would maintain that he never wanted the content he had stolen to leak out into the open as widely as it had, and that a peer of his that he had entrusted a copy of the data to had leaked it onto the web.
Half-Life 2 would finally release in November 2004 and became the flagship title for Valve’s online distribution system, Steam. The gamers who purchased the game legally through the service or at retail found a polished masterpiece which won numerous Game of the Year awards in a year which also saw the release of titles like Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Halo 2. The game’s PC release was followed by a console port to the original Xbox shortly afterwards. Two episodic expansions were produced for the game and these expansions were included alongside Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal when the game was released on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in 2007.
As for Gordon Freeman? He has not been seen since.
Gaming History You Should Know – Sonic Xtreme September 13, 2014
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I’ve always been interested in exactly what events transpire for developers to create a completed game. I know game development is a difficult and time consuming process, but in the end it all works out. This is one of the times when things REALLY did not work out.
After the release of Sonic and Knuckles on the Genesis, Sega was riding high on their chief mascot. He had a Saturday morning cartoon on ABC for goodness sakes! Have you ever noticed there was never really a true Sonic The Hedgehog game released for the Sega Saturn? Well there was a game that Sega had in development for the Saturn and they wanted to have it out for the Christmas Season called Sonic Xtreme, but it sadly never saw the light of day.
So why did this game never get released? YouTube User miiyouandmii2 tried to find out and created a very well researched video series on the ill fated game’s development for his series, From Concept to Console. If you’re a gaming history buff like me or a fan of the blue hedgehog you owe it to yourself to give the series a look!
Gaming History You Should Know – The Zelda Timeline January 4, 2014
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Now that we have officially kicked off the start of the New Year, I thought it would be helpful for anyone who was interested in the history behind the gaming industry to learn more about the subject we love, or for people who are familiar with the history of gaming to brush up on their information. I have scoured the internet for some of the best history videos on a variety of gaming topics, and this weekend I’m planning on sharing some of the best of that information with all of you.
The Legend of Zelda is one of the most beloved series that Nintendo has produced, but also one of their most controversial among fans. With well over twenty years of games being produced by Nintendo with very few story threads to connect each of them, people have been debating the order the games take place. I know that during The Legend of Zelda’s 25th Anniversary, I talked about the Angry Video Game Nerd’s video where he discussed this issue, and I’m happy to say that since James Rolfe produced that video, Nintendo finally released an official timeline which made it clear what order all the games in the series takes place. Using that information, the guys at GameTrailers.com produced one fantastic video which they posted up in three parts. It’s a great video which clears up a lot of the controversy, using direct information provided by Nintendo and the games themselves. Just remember, there isn’t just one or two Zelda Timelines, there are three…
Gaming History You Should Know – The History of RPGs January 4, 2014
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Now that we have officially kicked off the start of the New Year, I thought it would be helpful for anyone who was interested in the history behind the gaming industry to learn more about the subject we love, or for people who are familiar with the history of gaming to brush up on their information. I have scoured the internet for some of the best history videos on a variety of gaming topics, and this weekend I’m planning on sharing some of the best of that information with all of you.
To start off this series we’ve got a fully in-depth history of RPGs, produced by Roo from Clan of the Gray Wolf. These guys really did their homework. In this thirty minute video, Roo talks about EVERYTHING from tabletop RPGs, Pen and Paper games, as well as games from the East and West. Give it a watch!
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