SpriteCell
@spritecell
Making charts and graphs of video game data, and archiving video game history.
The winner was Chris Tang, who had earlier won the Hawaii and Los Angeles division of the Nintendo World Championships. He started working for Tengen at 14 years old and may have still been an employee during Rock the Rock. More about his career on Sega Retro: segaretro.org/Chris_Tang
They really leaned into the theming, the contestants were put into limos by actors playing cops, which were followed by armored cars. Many of the contestants were children, but they were put in something resembling prison uniforms and had suitcases with a copy of the game handcuffed to their wrists.
Rock the Rock was a promotional event for Sonic & Knuckles where 55 people were taken to Alcatraz Island to play the unreleased game and try to get as many rings as possible in three minutes. The two top scorers then faced off head to head in a dome.
I made a Gantt chart showing when U.S. gaming magazines were active, and then charted how many there were by year. This uses Retromags' database, minus a few that were only peripherally related to gaming. Here's the 2327x8580 original Gantt chart: spritecell.com/wp-content/u...
This is what UK gaming magazine Zero called their handheld game review section.
Trying to figure out what my next project will be so I made a spreadsheet.
Hyper magazine's September 2014 interview with Shigeru Miyamoto has been added to the archive thanks to the author himself, @jickle.net. He got to see a version of Star Fox Zero at E3 2014 that was about two months into full development, with a Twilight Princess enemy used as a placeholder.
Mick Hocking of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe says that people are very excited for 3DTV and that sales are very encouraging for the future of the format. From Edge Magazine May 2011.
A 1999 Miyamoto interview from Happy Puppy. Some Ocarina talk, online gaming, hiring people who don't just play games, feeling envy about SimCity. web.archive.org/web/20000608... web.archive.org/web/20000608... I'm not familiar with Happy Puppy but it claims to be the first commercial gaming site.
I sure hope this is the full extent of the Miyamoto and Aonuma interviews in Dutch magazine Power Unlimited issue 113.
I love looking at attempts to list the video game genres, and here's one from Italian magazine Consolemania circa 1994. Arcade Adventure is an interesting one, they are described here as games where you search for things. A bit too early for "Fighting" games, and Strategy and Sim are combined here.
The subtitles on the video games episode of Shin Denshi Rikkoku that I reposted may be machine translated, so take this with a grain of salt, but it says that Shigeru Miyamoto chose the Famicom's color palette.
That cake picture bothers me, though. Nintendo must have sent it around to celebrate Mario's anniversary. Interestingly, Game Informer has a slightly different cake photo, but this mini article describes it as Mario's 15th anniversary, counting from Donkey Kong instead of Super Mario Bros.
Editor-in-chief Frank O'Connor had published an interview in both Total and Game Players two years before, and it took place at Nintendo headquarters in Japan. The quote about invisible things was cut from the original and reused two years later in a third magazine.
Videogames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine had an article about Super Mario Bros.' 10th anniversary which included a stray Miyamoto quote that bothered me for years. I couldn't find the source, where he talked about invisible things above our heads.
Eiji Aonuma talking Zelda with N-Zone in May 2007, and the Google Translate version.
Another N-Zone interview added, from April 2002. What really interests me is that Mr. Miyamoto is described as coming to Germany. This was the same month that the mysterious "Nintendo Power except it can't be" Q & A with European children was published somewhere. www.zeldadungeon.net/wiki/Intervi...
Looking through more N-Zone covers paid off, here's another interview from October 1999, which is of course about Zelda. Google Translate's take also included.
Sorry, one more new-to-me Miyamoto interview. N-Zone is a German magazine that is still around. A few years ago they released a DVD with scans of all their previous issues. This is from May 2006 and is mostly about the Wii and DS.
Shocked to find that Get Rich Playing Games actually does have a Miyamoto interview in it. In fact, 31 people involved with video games have an interview or write something, plus Nolan Bushnell's foreword.
A pretty derisive look at the growing phenomenon of video games and Nintendo in 1989 from the Sun Sentinel, with a side of possible plagiarism (more on that later). www.sun-sentinel.com/1989/05/04/n...
A picture taken at about the same time from another angle was used for Nintendo Official Magazine's Hands Up If You Hate RPGs interview later that year, and almost the same title (a play off a Lenovo ad campaign) was used for an NGC interview a year later.
I was looking for something else and came across a single question Miyamoto interview from Cube that was new to me, the sidebar on the second image. The rest is about the London Virgin Megastore press Q&A.
Just finding out that there was an English version of the Casa Brutus Mario issue. Shigeru Miyamoto talks about 2D Mario being like drawing manga and 3D Mario being like a puppet show. @drewgmackie.bsky.social there's a few quotes from Miyamoto about the Mario enemies.
Shigeru Miyamoto talking about trying to get people playing Star Fox, in 2009. web.archive.org/web/20230124...
According to Dimension PS-X if you don't like Doom for PlayStation you are a communist vegetarian. Scan by Retromags.
All of the ads for Tiger Electronic's ill-fated interchangeable cartridge system R-Zone that I can find in the Video Game Catalog and Circular Ad Archive. There were a few versions of the device, but the original was strapped to the player's head.
Seven new entries have been added to the Shigeru Miyamoto Archive. Mostly from the Japanese premiere of the Galaxy Movie. There doesn't seem to be a transcript or recording of the Sonobe speech. Also a newly scanned (by RevengeOfTheHubz) Family Computer Magazine interview.
spritecell.com/bp15-game-pr... A study examining the physical and digital prices of 900 games on four platforms over the course of three years. Find out how often physical is cheaper, which publisher puts their games on sale the most, what days of the year have the most sales, and more.