By J.G. Newman
I typically don’t role-play when I play games. Which isn’t to say I don’t invest deeply in whatever game I’m playing; my emotional connection to my avatar is just fueled more by traditional audience-to-character empathy than actually inhabiting the role of whatever druid or space marine whose shoes the game places me in…
By J.G. Newman
What should have been a couple-session run-through of an old RPG somehow morphed into a piecemeal, month-long slog. It’s the first “historically significant” game I’ve played that feels like a cave painting, a work enjoyable only as a first step toward things to come…
By J.G. Newman
Spacewar! (1962) was the first video game the way that Little Richard was the first rock star. Both wrote a fairly complete rulebook for a future worldwide obsession, yet were known to such niche (or, in Richard’s case, unfairly marginalized) audiences that they now play footnote to the Pongs and Presleys of history…
By J.G. Newman
To say that the box office success of Star Wars in 1977 shifted Hollywood’s interest toward blockbuster genre fare is, to put it lightly, an understatement. Before the release of George Lucas’ space saga, realistic, Oscar-lauded films such as The Sting (1973) and The Godfather (1972) stood on nearly equal box office footing as more fantastical effects movies like Jaws (1975) and The Exorcist (1973)…
We Are the Mutants 