Retro games
Gaming
31 rabbit holes · 16 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Why do Melee players still use CRT TVs?
- Why do Super Mario Bros. speedrunners talk about 'framerules'?
- Is it legal to write an emulator?
- How is Ocarina of Time any% so short?
- Did Nintendo almost make the PlayStation?
Rabbit holes
- Flash stopped on January 12, 2021, and people saved 160,000 games
An entire generation's childhood was Flash games and Flash cartoons, all in a format that was always going to die. I wanted to know how much actually got saved.
Ayodele Bankole · 7 sources
- the longest-standing video game record turned out to be impossible
A 5.51-second run on Activision's Dragster for the Atari 2600, claimed in 1982 and recognized for decades as the longest-standing record in video games. Then a TAS maker analyzed the game's code and found the best possible time is 5.57. Twin Galaxies removed the record in 2018, and 5.57 is now the record, hit by several people.
Ethan Cole · 5 sources
- why people still haul CRTs to Melee tournaments
Melee's competitive play runs on frame-tight tech (wavedashing is an air dodge into the ground that turns into a slide), and most flat screens add enough display lag to throw it off. So CRTs it is. Then Slippi brought rollback netplay and kept the scene going through the pandemic.
Dev Malhotra · 6 sources
- the Japanese Castlevania III has a sound chip in the cartridge
The Famicom's cartridge slot had audio pins, so a cartridge could carry its own sound chip and mix it in. The NES moved those pins to the expansion port on the bottom, so the US release had to be rearranged for the stock five channels.
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- the Tetris rights saga
Written on a Soviet computer with no graphics in 1984, then a mess of Western companies selling rights they didn't have. The Game Boy deal happened in Moscow with everyone in different hotels.
Ben Adler · 6 sources
- Space Invaders speeds up because the hardware was struggling
Kaito Morimoto · 5 sources
- SMB1 world records move in 21-frame chunks
The game only checks whether to start the next level every 21 frames. So saving a few frames in a stage usually does nothing unless it gets you onto an earlier window, and records mostly improve in chunks of about a third of a second.
Sol Herrera · 5 sources
- speedrunners reprogram Super Mario World with a controller
Line up the right sprites in the right slots and the game jumps into memory it shouldn't and runs whatever is there as code. TASBot has injected Pong and Snake into SMW live at a GDQ, and SethBling entered Flappy Bird into it by hand on a real console. A TAS is just button presses, nothing about the cartridge gets modified.
Ethan Cole · 6 sources
- is emulation actually legal?
Dev Malhotra · 6 sources
- Ocarina of Time any% barely involves playing Ocarina of Time
First came wrong warps: interrupt a scene transition at the right moment and the game loads somewhere it shouldn't, way later in the game. Then runners found a way to set up memory so the game executes their own instructions and jumps straight to the credits.
Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources
- finally watched the 'parallel universes' video
The A Button Challenge: collect stars pressing A as few times as possible. The explanation for one 'half an A press' route involves building up speed for hours so Mario can reach copies of the level that only exist because of how positions get stored. Understood maybe 60% of it and loved all of it.
Callie Sutherland · 5 sources
- the PlayStation started as a CD add-on for the Super Nintendo
Sony announced the SNES PlayStation at CES in 1991, and the next day Nintendo announced it was working with Philips instead. Sony went off and built its own console. A surviving prototype turned up years later and sold at auction in 2020 for around $360k.
Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources
- Twitch Plays Pokémon: a million people, one Game Boy
February 2014: an anonymous Australian programmer hooked Pokémon Red up to a Twitch chat, so every 'up' or 'a' typed by anyone became a button press. Over a million people took part and they beat it in a little over 16 days.
Hazel Park · 6 sources
- the IBM Model M still works after 40 years
Buckling springs, a steel backplate, weighs as much as a small dumbbell. People still pull them out of e-waste and they work fine.
Marco Bianchi · 4 sources
- Polybius, the arcade game that never existed
Legend: a mysterious arcade machine in Portland in 1981 that gave kids nightmares and amnesia, and men in black collected data from it. Reality: no evidence any of it existed. It probably borrows from real 1981 Portland stuff, like two people getting sick at an arcade and the FBI raiding arcades over gambling machines.
Ludovica Ferri · 6 sources
- they actually dug up the E.T. cartridges in the desert
Grew up assuming this was an urban legend. Then in 2014 a documentary crew dug into a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and there they were. Not only E.T. though, it was all kinds of unsold Atari stock.
Yara Haddad · 6 sources
- 0x5F3759DF
The famous magic number in the Quake III source, with the very honest comment next to it. It wasn't even invented at id; people traced it back to earlier graphics work.
Ludovica Ferri · 6 sources
- people finally 'beat' NES Tetris by crashing it
For decades level 29 was treated as the end, because pieces fall too fast to move across the board with normal tapping. Then came hypertapping, then 'rolling' (drumming your fingers against the back of the controller), and suddenly players were reaching levels the game was never tested for. At the end of 2023 a 13-year-old became the first person to make it crash.
Sol Herrera · 5 sources
- the first Pong machine 'broke' because it was full of quarters
Atari put a prototype in a bar in Sunnyvale in 1972. Not long after, the bar called to say it had stopped working. Alcorn opened it up and the coin box was overflowing. Also learned Bushnell had played the Odyssey's tennis game before Pong existed, and Magnavox sued; Atari settled by taking a license.
Kaito Morimoto · 5 sources
- MissingNo. is the game reading your name as a Pokémon
Priya Natarajan · 5 sources
- LSD: Dream Emulator is a PlayStation game based on someone's dream diary
1998, Japan only. No goal, no score: walk into anything and you get warped to another dream. Based on a dream diary an Asmik Ace employee kept for over a decade. It fell into obscurity and then got rediscovered through forums and Let's Plays.
Callie Sutherland · 6 sources
- conversational interfaces were already a thing in 1970, with blocks
SHRDLU let you type to a simulated robot arm in a world of blocks and pyramids, and it could answer questions about what it had done and why. It looked like a huge leap but only worked inside that tiny world. A few years later text adventures put a (much dumber) parser in front of a lot of ordinary people.
Callie Sutherland · 7 sources
- combos started as a bug in Street Fighter II
Ludovica Ferri · 4 sources
- Nintendo started in 1889 making playing cards
Kyoto, 1889, hanafuda cards. In the 60s it tried running a taxi company and selling instant rice, got close to going under, and was rescued by an extending grabber toy that one of its maintenance engineers had built for fun.
Noor Rahman · 6 sources
- Super Metroid basically wants you to break it
Wall jumps, bomb jumps, shinesparks, mockballs. The game lets you skip big chunks of the intended order, and the ending changes depending on how fast you finish. More than 30 years later it's still one of the classic speedrun games.
Sol Herrera · 6 sources
- racing the beam: the Atari 2600 had no frame buffer
Ludovica Ferri · 6 sources
- the NES had DRM, and Tengen got the code from the Copyright Office
Tengen's engineers couldn't crack Nintendo's lockout chip in time, so its lawyers asked the US Copyright Office for a copy of the lockout program, saying they needed it for litigation. That part did not go over well in court.
Ludovica Ferri · 6 sources
- every Pac-Man ghost has its own targeting rule
Blinky aims at your tile. Pinky aims four tiles ahead of you. Inky's target uses both your position and Blinky's. Clyde chases until he gets close, then wanders off to his corner. Four tiny rules and it feels like they're coordinating.
Sol Herrera · 5 sources
- lateral thinking with withered technology
Yokoi's idea was to use cheap, well-understood tech in new ways instead of chasing the cutting edge. The Game Boy had a worse screen than the Game Gear or the Lynx and beat both easily, partly because it ran for ages on four AA batteries. People still point to the DS and the Wii as the same thinking.
Kaito Morimoto · 6 sources
- R.O.B. the robot was a trojan horse
After the crash, American stores didn't want to stock video games. So the NES launched in the US as an 'Entertainment System' with a robot and a light gun, so it looked like a toy and not a console. R.O.B. only ever worked with two games.
Quinn Harlow · 5 sources
- P.T. can't be downloaded anymore, and most old games aren't for sale either
P.T. was a free playable teaser for Silent Hills. When the game was cancelled, Konami pulled it from the PlayStation Store and made it impossible to redownload, and PS4s with it installed briefly listed on eBay for over $1,000.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources