Featured articles represent some of the best content on the English Wikipedia.
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Spyro: Year of the Dragon is a 2000 platform game developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation. The third installment in the Spyro series, Year of the Dragon follows the adventures of the titular purple dragon. After an evil sorceress steals magical dragon eggs from the land of the dragons, Spyro travels to the "Forgotten Realms" to retrieve them. Players travel across different worlds gathering gems and eggs, defeating enemies, and playing minigames. Year of the Dragon introduced new characters and minigames to the series, as well as offering improved graphics and music.
Year of the Dragon received positive reviews from critics, who noted the game successfully built on the formula of its predecessors. The game sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. Year of the Dragon was the last Spyro title released for the original PlayStation, and the last developed by Insomniac Games due to Universal Interactive Studios and Sony's souring relationship. Year of the Dragon was followed by the multiplatform title Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly, and was later remade as part of the Spyro Reignited Trilogy in 2018. (Full article...)
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South Park: The Stick of Truth is a 2014 role-playing video game developed by Obsidian Entertainment in collaboration with South Park Digital Studios and published by Ubisoft. Based on the American animated television series South Park, the game follows the New Kid, who has moved to the eponymous town and becomes involved in an epic role-play fantasy war involving humans, wizards, and elves, who are fighting for control of the all-powerful Stick of Truth. Their game quickly escalates out of control, bringing them into conflict with aliens, Nazi zombies, and gnomes, threatening the entire town with destruction.
The game is played from a 2.5D, third-person perspective replicating the aesthetic of the television series. The New Kid is able to freely explore the town of South Park, interacting with characters and undertaking quests, and accessing new areas by progressing through the main story. By selecting one of four character archetypes, Fighter, Thief, Mage, or Jew, each offering specific abilities, the New Kid and a supporting party of characters use a variety of melee, ranged, and magical fart attacks to combat with their enemies.
Development began in 2009 after South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone approached Obsidian about making a role-playing game designed to look exactly like the television series. Parker and Stone were involved throughout the game's production: they wrote its script, consulted on the design, and as in the television program, they voiced many of the characters. The Stick of Truth's production was turbulent; following the bankruptcy of the original publisher, THQ, the rights to the game were acquired by Ubisoft in early 2013, and its release date was postponed several times from its initial date in March 2013 to its eventual release in March 2014, for PlayStation 3, Windows, and Xbox 360. (Full article...)
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Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—ZorkI: The Great Underground Empire, ZorkII: The Wizard of Frobozz, and ZorkIII: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.
The original game, developed between 1977 and 1979 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), the first well-known example of interactive fiction and the first well-known adventure game. The developers wanted to make a similar game that was able to understand more complicated sentences than Adventure's two-word commands. In 1979, they founded Infocom with several other colleagues at the MIT computer center. Blank and Joel Berez created a way to run a smaller portion of Zork on several brands of microcomputer, letting them commercialize the game as Infocom's first products. The first episode was published by Personal Software in 1980, after which Infocom purchased back the rights and self-published all three episodes beginning in late 1981.
Zork was a massive success for Infocom, with sales increasing for years as the market for personal computers expanded. The first episode sold more than 38,000 copies in 1982, and around 150,000 copies in 1984. Collectively, the three episodes sold more than 680,000 copies through 1986, comprising more than one-third of Infocom's sales in this period. Infocom was purchased by Activision in 1986, leading to new Zork games beginning in 1987, as well as a series of books. Reviews of the episodes were very positive, with several reviewers calling Zork the best adventure game to date. Critics regard it as one of the greatest video games. Later historians have noted the game as foundational to the adventure game genre, as well as influencing the MUD and massively multiplayer online role-playing game genres. In 2007, Zork was included in the game canon by the Library of Congress as one of the ten most important video games in history. (Full article...)
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The Flood is a fictional parasiticalien lifeform and one of the primary antagonists in the Halo multimedia franchise. First introduced in the 2001 video game Halo: Combat Evolved, it returns in later entries in the series such as Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo Wars. The Flood is driven by a desire to infect any sentient life of sufficient size; Flood-infected creatures, also called Flood, in turn can infect other hosts. The parasite is depicted as such a threat that the ancient Forerunners constructed artificial ringworld superweapons known as Halos to contain it and, as a last resort, to kill all sentient life in the galaxy in an effort to stop the Flood's spread by starving it.
The Flood's design and fiction were led by Bungie artist Robert McLees, who started from unused concepts from earlier Bungie games and was inspired by personal experiences. The setting of the first game, the ringworld Halo, was stripped of many of its large creatures in order to make the Flood's surprise appearance midway through the game more startling. Bungie environment artist Vic DeLeon spent six months of pre-production time refining the Flood's fleshy aesthetic and designing the organic interiors of Flood-infested spaceships for Halo 3.
The player's discovery of the Flood in Halo: Combat Evolved is a major plot twist, and was one of the surprises reviewers noted positively. The Flood's return in Halo 2 and Halo 3 was less enthusiastically praised. Reaction to the Flood itself has been positive, being consistently placed amongst the greatest video game villains by video game magazines. (Full article...)
The open world setting, modelled on Los Angeles and other areas of Southern California, constituted much of the development effort. Key team members conducted field trips around Southern California to gather research and footage, and Google Maps projections of Los Angeles were used to help design the city's road networks. The proprietary Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) was overhauled to increase its draw distance rendering capabilities. For the first time in the series, players control three protagonists throughout the single-player mode. The team found the multiple-protagonist design a fundamental change to the story and gameplay devices. They refined the shooting and driving mechanics and tightened the narrative's pacing and scope.
The actors selected to portray the protagonists invested much time and research into character development. Motion capture was used to record the characters' facial and body movements. Like its predecessors, the game features an in-game radio that plays a selection of licensed music tracks. An original score was composed over several years by a team of five music producers. They worked in close collaboration, sampling and incorporating different influences into each other's ideas. The game's 2014 re-release added a first-person view option along with the traditional third-person view. To accommodate first-person, the game received a major visual and technical upgrade, as well as new gameplay features like a replay editor that lets players create gameplay videos. (Full article...)
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Rare Replay is a 2015 compilation of 30 video games from the 30-year history of developers Rare and its predecessor, Ultimate Play the Game. The emulated games span multiple genres and consoles—from the ZX Spectrum in 1983 to the Xbox 360 in 2008—and retain the features and errors of their original releases with minimal edits. The compilation adds cheats to make the older games easier and a Snapshots mode of specific challenges culled from parts of the games. Player progress is rewarded with behind-the-scenes footage and interviews about Rare's major and unreleased games.
The compilation was one of several ideas Rare considered to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Inspired by fans, upcoming Xbox Onebackward compatibility features, and a desire to link Rare's past and future, the company sorted through 120 games to choose those that best represented its oeuvre. It prioritized games with characters and environments original to the company. Rare incorporated four hardware emulators in the package, and worked with its parent company, Microsoft, to use its then-unannounced Xbox 360 emulation. Rare Replay released worldwide as an Xbox One exclusive on August 4, 2015.
Rare Replay's reviews were generally favorable. Critics appreciated the package's design and craft and called the release a new pinnacle for compilation releases. They commended its "rewind" and Snapshot features, but criticized technical issues in the Xbox 360 emulation and game installation. Among its games, reviewers preferred Rare's Nintendo 64 games, especially Blast Corps, and disliked Perfect Dark Zero, Grabbed by the Ghoulies, and the Spectrum games. Some outlets lamented the absence, due to licensing issues, of the Donkey Kong Country series and GoldenEye 007, while others thought the package was fine without them. Critics deemed the archival game content and developer interviews as among the compilation's best features, but were upset to see the content hidden behind time-consuming in-game challenges. Rare Replay became Rare's first United Kingdom all-formats charts bestseller since Banjo-Kazooie in 1998. (Full article...)
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Islands: Non-Places is a 2016 abstract art game developed and published independently by artist and animator Carl Burton, best known for the animated GIF illustrations he created for season two of the Serial podcast. The game was released on November 17, 2016, on iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux, and consists of a series of anonymous, liminal environments – the eponymous "non-places". These scenes appear mundane at first, but become increasingly surreal as the player interacts with the scenery.
Each place is rendered in the stylized manner that characterizes Burton's work, with solid monotone colors, dark shadows, and foggy backgrounds. The gameplay is minimal and consists mainly of clicking on the environment and observing what unfolds, a design choice that Burton hoped would engender a sense of slight confusion in the player without overwhelming them with difficult puzzles. In developing Islands, Burton drew inspiration from diverse sources, including the work of anthropologist Marc Augé, the installation art of James Turrell, and the field recordings of Chris Watson.
Critical response was generally positive, and the game was nominated for the Nuovo Award at the 2016 Independent Games Festival. Much of the positive reception focused on the abstract visuals and sound design; on the other hand, some critics were disappointed with the limited scope of the gameplay. Although divided on the precise message the game expresses, many critics described Islands leaving them with a feeling of renewed wonder at mundane things in the real world. (Full article...)
Golden Sun's story follows a band of magic-attuned teenagers called Adepts on a mission to protect the world of Weyard from alchemy, a potentially destructive power that was sealed away long ago. During their quest, the Adepts develop new magic abilities called Psynergy, assist others, and learn more about why alchemy was sealed away. Golden Sun is followed by a sequel, The Lost Age, which together form a complete story.
Golden Sun began as a single planned game for the Nintendo 64, but production shifted to the Game Boy Advance over the course of development. After facing hardware constraints, the developers decided to split the game into two. (Full article...)
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Lost Luggage is a 1982 action video game developed and published by Games by Apollo for the Atari 2600. The player controls skycaps working at an airport and tries to collect pieces of luggage that fall overhead from a frantic luggage carousel. A two-player mode, in which the second player controls the direction the luggage falls, is also available.
Programmer Ed Salvo was inspired to make Lost Luggage when he was waiting for his luggage at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, and the game took around four weeks to produce. Reviewers criticized the game's similarity to Activision's Kaboom!—which itself is based on the arcade game Avalanche—believing Lost Luggage to be an inferior clone. (Full article...)
The gameplay of Resident Evil 5 is similar to that of the previous installment, though it is the first in the series designed for two-player cooperative gameplay. It has also been considered the first game in the main series to depart from the survival horror genre, with critics saying it bore more resemblance to an action game. Motion capture was used for the cutscenes, and it was the first video game to use a virtual camera system. Several staff members from the original Resident Evil worked on Resident Evil 5. The Windows version was developed by Mercenary Technology.
Resident Evil 5 received a positive reception, despite some criticism for its control scheme. The game received some complaints of racism, though an investigation by the British Board of Film Classification found the complaints were unsubstantiated. As of December 2023, when including the original, special and remastered versions, the game had sold 13.4 million units. It is the best-selling game of the Resident Evil franchise when not including remakes, and the original version remained the best-selling individual Capcom release until March 2018, when it was outsold by Monster Hunter: World. A sequel, Resident Evil 6, was released in 2012. (Full article...)
... that the video game Manor Lords was wishlisted more than three million times on Steam after its developer had estimated it would receive around 14,000?
... that a pink skin for Mercy in the video game Overwatch helped raise more than $12 million for breast cancer research?
Hironobu Sakaguchi (坂口 博信, Sakaguchi Hironobu, born November 25, 1962) is a Japanese game designer, director, producer, and writer. Originally working for Square (later Square Enix) from 1983 to 2003, he departed the company and founded independent studio Mistwalker in 2004. He is known as the creator of the Final Fantasy franchise, in addition to other titles during his time at Square. At Mistwalker, he is known for creating the Blue Dragon and Terra Battle series among several standalone titles, moving away from home consoles and creating titles for mobile platforms.
Originally intending to become a musician, he briefly studied electronics and programming, joining Square as a part-time employee, then later a full-time employee when Square became an independent company in 1986. He led the development of several titles before helping to create the original Final Fantasy, which proved highly successful and cemented his status within the company. Following the financial failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, his debut as a film director, Sakaguchi withdrew from Square's management and eventually resigned in 2003. He continued his game career through Mistwalker, first co-developing projects through external partners and then smaller in-studio mobile projects. (Full article...)
Sierra was acquired by CUC International in 1996, leading to layoffs and management changes. Williams took a brief sabbatical, and returned to the company in a game design role, but grew increasingly frustrated with CUC's creative and business decisions. After the release of King's Quest: Mask of Eternity in 1998, she left the game industry in 1999 and focused her retirement on traveling and writing historical fiction. In 2021 she released her historical novel, Farewell to Tara. Soon after, she returned to game development with the 3D remake of the classic adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure, released in January 2023 as Colossal Cave. (Full article...)
Toriyama first achieved mainstream recognition for creating the manga series Dr. Slump, for which he earned the 1981 Shogakukan Manga Award for best shōnen/shōjo. Dr. Slump went on to sell over 35 million copies in Japan. It was adapted into an anime, with a second series created in 1997, 13 years after the manga ended. (Full article...)
A fan of arcade games in his youth, Tajiri wrote for and edited his own video gaming fanzineGame Freak with Ken Sugimori, before evolving it into a development company of the same name. Tajiri claims that the joining of two Game Boys via a link cable inspired him to create a game which embodied the collection and companionship of his childhood hobby, insect collecting. The game, which became Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green, took six years to complete and went on to spark a multibillion-dollar franchise which reinvigorated Nintendo's handheld gaming scene. Tajiri continued to work as director for the Pokémon series until the development of Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, when he changed his role to executive producer, which he holds to this day. (Full article...)
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Soule in 2010
Jeremy Soule (/soʊl/SOHL; born December 19, 1975) is an American composer of soundtracks for film, television, and video games. He has composed soundtracks for over 60 games and over a dozen other works during his career, including The Elder Scrolls, Guild Wars, Icewind Dale, and the Harry Potter series.
He became an employee of Square in 1994 after several years of private composition studies. After finishing the soundtrack to Secret of Evermore in 1995, he left to join Humongous Entertainment, where he composed for several children's games as well as Total Annihilation, his first award-winning score. In 2000, he left to form his own music production company, Soule Media, later called Artistry Entertainment. In 2005, he founded DirectSong, a record label that published digital versions of his soundtracks as well as those of classical composers. DirectSong remained active until 2019. (Full article...)
James D. Rolfe (born July 10, 1980) is an American YouTuber, filmmaker, and actor. He is best known for creating and starring in the comedic retrogaming web series Angry Video Game Nerd (2004–present). His spin-off projects include reviews of retro films, television series, and board games. He is considered a pioneer of internet gaming videos and is noted for his widespread influence on YouTube content after the series premiered on the platform in 2006.
Rolfe began creating homemade video productions in the late 1980s, having made more than 270 videos and short films by 2004. Among these were the first Angry Video Game Nerd episodes (originally known as Bad NES Games, and later Angry Nintendo Nerd), which were released on his Cinemassacre website in 2004. Two years later, he gained mainstream attention when the series went viral after being published to YouTube. Following its success, Rolfe released a feature-length film based on the series in 2014, which received a mixed reception. (Full article...)
Michael Morhaime (born November 3, 1967) is an American video game developer and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) and founder of Dreamhaven, located in Irvine, California. Morhaime is best known as the co-founder and the former president of Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, Inc., that was founded in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse. He served on the Vivendi Games executive committee from January 1999, when Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. became a subsidiary of Vivendi Games, until July 2008. (Full article...)
Keiji Inafune (稲船 敬二, Inafune Keiji, born 8 May 1965) is a Japanese video game producer, character designer, game designer, and businessman. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.
Starting his career at Capcom in the late 1980s, his job was as an artist and illustrator. The first two games he worked on were the original Street Fighter and Mega Man in 1987. He was then a character designer and planner of the Mega Man series during the NES and Super NES era. For Mega Man X, he created and designed the character Zero. (Full article...)
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Fischbach in 2018
Mark Edward Fischbach (/ˈfɪʃˌbɑːk/FISH-bahk; born June 28, 1989), known online as Markiplier, is an American YouTuber, comedian, actor, filmmaker, and influencer. One of the most popular YouTubers on the platform, he is known for his "Let's Play" videos of indiehorror games. He was listed by Forbes as the third-highest-paid content creator on the platform in 2022, and has won four Streamy Awards and a Golden Joystick Award. He has spun off his YouTube fame into a media career, venturing into acting and filmmaking.
After joining YouTube in 2012, Fischbach became popular on the platform with Let's Plays of Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) and the Five Nights at Freddy's series; as of 2024, his channel had over 37 million subscribers. He signed with talent agency William Morris Endeavor in 2016. While with the agency, he released a clothing line, wrote and directed the YouTube Original series A Heist with Markiplier (2019) and In Space with Markiplier (2022), and hosted or co-hosted two podcasts which reached No. 1 on Spotify. (Full article...)
In 2012, Sarkeesian was targeted by an online harassment campaign following her launch of a Kickstarter project to fund the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series. The threats and harassment generated widespread media attention, and resulted in the project far exceeding its funding goal. The media coverage placed Sarkeesian at the center of discussions about misogyny in video game culture and online harassment. She has spoken to TEDxWomen, XOXO Festival, and the United Nations' Broadband Working Group on Gender, and appeared on The Colbert Report discussing her experiences of harassment and the challenge of attempting to improve gender inclusivity in gaming culture and the media. (Full article...)
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Lim Yo-hwan in 2021
Lim Yo-hwan (Korean: 임요환; Hanja: 林遙煥, born September 4, 1980), known online as SlayerS_'BoxeR' (usually shortened to BoxeR), is a former professional player of the real-time strategy computer game StarCraft. He is often referred to as "The Terran Emperor", or simply "The Emperor", and is widely considered to be one of the most successful players of the genre as well as a pop culture icon.
Lim won his first StarCraft: Brood War tournament in 1999. From 2001 to 2002, he won multiple major championships, including two OnGameNet Starleague titles and two World Cyber Games gold medals. In 2002, he also created the team Team Orion, which later became SK Telecom T1 (SKT T1) in 2004. He began his compulsory military service in 2006, where he played on South Korea's newly formed Air Force esports team Airforce Challenge E-sports. In late 2010, he retired from StarCraft: Brood War and founded the StarCraft II team SlayerS. He then briefly returned to SKT T1 as a coach in 2012 before retiring due to health related issues. Lim finished his playing career with a record of 603 wins and 430 losses (58.4%). (Full article...)
Newell was born in Colorado and grew up in Davis, California. He attended Harvard University in the early 1980s but dropped out to join Microsoft, where he helped create the first versions of the Windows operating system. In 1996, he and Mike Harrington left Microsoft to found Valve and fund the development of their first game, Half-Life (1998). Harrington sold his stake in Valve to Newell and left in 2000. Newell led the development of Valve's digital distribution service, Steam, which launched in 2003 and controlled most of the market for downloaded PC games by 2011. (Full article...)
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Kojima in 2018
Hideo Kojima (小島 秀夫, Kojima Hideo, born August 24, 1963) is a Japanese video game designer. Regarded as one of the first auteurs of video games, he developed a strong passion for film and literature during his childhood and adolescence, which in turn has had a significant influence on his games. In 1986, Kojima joined Konami, for which he directed, designed and wrote Metal Gear (1987) for the MSX2, the game that laid the foundations for the stealth genre and the Metal Gear franchise, his best known and most acclaimed work. At Konami, he also produced the Zone of the Enders series, as well as designing and writing Snatcher (1988) and Policenauts (1994), graphic adventure games regarded for their cinematic presentation.
Kojima founded Kojima Productions within Konami in 2005, and he was appointed vice president of Konami Digital Entertainment in 2011. Following his departure from Konami in 2015, he refounded Kojima Productions as an independent studio; his first game outside Konami, Death Stranding, was released in 2019. (Full article...)
After working at Capcom for thirteen years, he left the company to form his own studio, Whoopee Camp. His latest game was Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection for former employer Capcom. He is notorious for making his titles difficult for the average video game player and strict personality among peers. IGN listed Fujiwara at number 13 in its "Top 100 Game Creators of All Time" list. (Full article...)
Jordan Mechner (born June 4, 1964) is an American video game designer, author, screenwriter, filmmaker, and former video game programmer. A major figure in the development of cinematic video games and a pioneer in video game animation, he began his career designing and programming the bestselling 1984 martial arts game Karateka for the Apple II while a student at Yale University. He followed it with the platform game Prince of Persia five years later; it was widely ported and became a hit. Both games used rotoscoping, where actors shot on film by Mechner were drawn over to create in-game animation. Prince of Persia has become the basis for a long-running franchise, including a 2010 live-action film released by Walt Disney Pictures and an ongoing series of video games published by Ubisoft.
Mechner is the recipient of many accolades, including the 2017 GDC Pioneer Award. His works are often included in all-time lists of the game industry's best and most influential titles. (Full article...)
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Gunpei Yokoi (横井 軍平, Yokoi Gunpei, 10 September 1941 – 4 October 1997), sometimes transliterated as Gumpei Yokoi, was a Japanese toy maker and video game designer. As a long-time Nintendo employee, he was best known as creator of the Game & Watch handheld system, inventor of the cross-shaped Control Pad, the original designer of the Game Boy, and producer of a few long-running and critically acclaimed video game franchises such as Metroid and Kid Icarus. (Full article...)
In 2013, he resigned from id Software to work full-time at Oculus VR as their CTO. In 2019, he reduced his role to Consulting CTO so he could allocate more time toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). In 2022, he left Oculus to work on his AGI startup, Keen Technologies. (Full article...)
Persson began developing video games at an early age. His commercial success began after he published an early version of Minecraft in 2009. Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over ten million copies. After this point Persson stood down as the lead designer and transferred his creative authority to Jens Bergensten. In September 2014 Persson announced on his personal website that he had concluded he "[didn't have the connection to his fans he thought he had]", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation. He left Mojang in November of that year, selling his company to Microsoft reportedly for US$2.5 billion. The acquisition made Persson a billionaire. (Full article...)
Featured articles represent some of the best content on the English Wikipedia.
Spyro: Year of the Dragon is a 2000 platform game developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation. The third installment in the Spyro series, Year of the Dragon follows the adventures of the titular purple dragon. After an evil sorceress steals magical dragon eggs from the land of the dragons, Spyro travels to the "Forgotten Realms" to retrieve them. Players travel across different worlds gathering gems and eggs, defeating enemies, and playing minigames. Year of the Dragon introduced new characters and minigames to the series, as well as offering improved graphics and music.
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