Avellone recaps his journey from learning on a TRS-80 to today. Chris Avellone wants you to have a good time. People often ask creatives—especially those in careers some dream of entering—”how did you get started?” Video game designers are no exception, and Avellone says that one of the most…
CD Projekt Red says shift to Unreal Engine allows for more rapid development. It’s been over 10 years since the launch of the excellent The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and nearly four years since the announcement of “the next installment in The Witcher series of video games.” Despite those…
Interview: Storied designer talks lost RPG, a 3D Monkey Island, “Eat the Rich” philosophy. If you know the name Ron Gilbert, it’s probably for his decades of work on classic point-and-click adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Monkey Island series, and Thimbleweed Park.…
DOS platformers didn’t have a reputation for being fun, but this one is a blast. Boy, was 1992 a different time for computer games. Epic MegaGames’ Jill of the Jungle illustrates that as well as any other title from the era. Designed and programmed by Epic Games CEO Tim…
Upcoming gaming box will be priced in line with a similarly specced PC, Valve says. After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to…
There are fan-made browser versions of Red Alert, Unreal Tournament, and more. Over the past couple of weeks, friends and colleagues have made me aware of multiple ingeniously implemented, browser-based ways to play classic MS-DOS and Windows games with other people on basically any hardware. The late 1990s and…
GeForce Now Fast Pass is a new service tier exclusively for Chromebooks. Earlier this year, Google announced the end of its efforts to get Steam running on Chromebooks, but it’s not done trying to make these low-power laptops into gaming machines. Google has teamed up with Nvidia to offer…
Excellent design and display filters, but the lack of OpenFPGA support rankles. If you’ve ever tried to hook an old Nintendo 64 up to a modern HDTV, you know the results can be less than ideal. Assuming your original hardware still works and your flatscreen even has the requisite…
“Concord Delta” project locks down Discord after YouTube video takedowns. A group of dedicated coders has managed to partially revive online gameplay for the PC version of Concord, the team-based shooter that Sony famously shut down just two weeks after its launch last summer. Now, though, the team behind…
Paradox subsidiary Iceflake Studios will take over work on the storied city simulation. For well over a decade now, the Cities franchise has done its best to pick up the urban simulation ball that EA’s SimCity famously dropped. Going forward, though, that ball will be handed off from longtime…
