Witch House
We used to say witches lived there. Probably everyone did something like that when they were a kid. A whole family of witches in our case, living in big old house set way back from the sidewalk that was most likely apartments but we didn’t realize that. We’d see old people shuffle in and out…
The Weirdest Ads in an Issue of GamePro from 30 Years Ago
We never had a subscription to a video game magazine when I was a kid. I had to make do with copies of Nintendo Power borrowed from the library, or the occasional treat from a grocery store checkout aisle. The very first instance of the latter was in 1994, when my family took a trip across the…
Stilts
I thought that everything would change when I got the surgery. For years, I’d been utterly miserable. Everything and everyone seemed to communicate that I was unworthy, unlovable, and inhuman. Growing up, I figured maybe things would change down the line. It got to the point where I went to bed praying that God would…
The Horror of Super Solvers: Midnight Rescue
“Educational” games were all over the road in the late 80s and early 90s. Sometimes they’d just be a cartoon rabbit trying to get you to do math problems, and sometimes they’d have you driving across the country to try and teach you geography. But one game of the time stands out in my memory —…
Preps, Goths, Anime Kids and More Met on The Palace
In the 90s, there was no Twitter, no Discord, no social media of any kind. What we did have were real-time chat rooms and programs. These were mostly text-based, with a few notable exceptions — and one of those was The Palace. Created by Jim Bumgardner and produced by Time Warner Interactive in 1994, The…
How One Man Brought RPGMaker 2000 to the West
When I was younger, the RPG Maker series didn’t have nearly the same western presence as it did today. I don’t even remember how I initially heard of the software, but it was probably through some forgotten anime forum. Back then, the RPG Maker series wasn’t being published outside of Japan, except for a few translated releases in Taiwan…
MindMaze Was the Original Wikipedia Rabbit Hole
During the mid-90s, there was a curious period of time during which home computers were becoming more and more common, but the internet was still in the early stages of mass adoption. More school-age kids had computers in their home than ever, and we were using them to write up papers and do research. But…
Throwback Thursday: Hello Kitty Big Fun Deluxe
In the early 90s, my family purchased our first home computer. My sister and I had played around with our dad’s work computer before, finding way too much amusement in generating pie charts on DOS software. But the home computer was different — it was a “multimedia machine,” a popular term at the time to…
Please, Do Not Draw This Turtle
“Do you like to draw? Or paint? Or maybe just sketch and doodle?” I must have heard this line a hundred times as a kid, whiling away my summer Saturday afternoons watching old movies on TV. It was delivered by a pleasant-looking man with gray hair in a suit hawking a “free art test” over…
I Covered My Entire Body in Gamer Goo
This piece was originally published at Fanbyte in May 2019. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard about Gamer Goo. I was at home, tweeting about Gamer Goo. The jokes soon dried up like so much Goo in a Gamer’s hand. But unbeknownst to me, Gamer Goo quietly persisted, partnering with big names…