For an innocuous and perfectly likeable little mammal, lemmings seem to have attracted something of a bizarre press. For instance, it was once widely believed that they formed clouds and were rained down during storms. It was then argued that … Read more

In 1984, 8 bit computers all over the country started running seed numbers through fixed algorithms, creating sequences of other, bigger, numbers that might, for example, be used to determine the fictitious characteristics of a fictitious planets within a fictitious … Read more

The ZX Spectrum is a great technological milestone. Not only was it pretty much the first popular home computer, it contained – as the rainbow device on the right hand side of the machine will verify – the first gay … Read more

Sixty four thousand shades of madness – that’s berzerk for you. Berzerk is an eerie and malevolent game. Visually and conceptually simple – the stick figure player wanders around the screen from room to room avoiding stick figure robots programmed … Read more

Defender has been described as ‘quite possibly, the hardest significant game there is’ by people who know about these things. It is also the most referenced in popular culture, appearing as the subject of part six of our Pac Man … Read more

Imagine the scary music from Jaws, but played on a cardiac monitoring machine in a hospital corridor. That is the enigmatic sound of all round minimalist Asteroids, track five on our journey through Buckner and Garcia’s Pac Man Fever album. … Read more

Frank Krmel, of Atlanta, Georgia and Shigeru Miyamoto of Kyoto, Japan are unlikely to find themselves mentioned together in any sentence other than this one. Miyamoto spent his childhood exploring the lakes and caves with which the land around his … Read more

Dona Bailey was one of the only female programmers involved in gaming at the turn of the 1980s. As a representative of a gender not traditionally at ease with insects, spiders, and creepy crawlies generally, it is perhaps remarkable that … Read more

As we have often observed, the first great rush of gaming technology was hallmarked by the drive for novelty. While the rest of the industry tended to concentrate upon space battles and threats to the ever-luckless planet earth, and with … Read more

Ohio based songwriting duo Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia have always resented the ‘novelty’ tag often attached to their work by the wider musical community. They must, therefore, feel the odd twinge of we-have-kind-of-bought-this-upon-ourselves-ness when considering their back catalogue, which … Read more