Star Control III is a Beautiful Trainwreck
Star Control II, often called one of the greatest computer games of all time, recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. For those who aren’t familiar, the game sees you take on the role of a starship captain tasked with uniting a number of alien races against a genocidal species of giant centipedes called the Kohr-Ah. You…
LAN Party
For some time now, I’ve been working on a photo book called LAN Party. It began as an off-the-cuff joke tweet about wanting a coffee table book full of photos of awkward, Y2K-era teens staging elaborate in-person Counter-Strike and Starcraft battles and the response was enough for me to take the idea to a publisher. The book is now fully…
Pivot to Web
Illustrated by Ike Whitehead, written by Eric Thurm and me. All arachnid-themed superheroes are the property of their rights holders.
A Conversation With Zophar of Zophar’s Domain
I spoke to Zophar earlier this year for the Forgotten Worlds episode on emulation in the early 2000s, but not much of the conversation made in it into the video. Here is the full interview, which paints a detailed picture of the development of Zophar’s Domain in the late 1990s. merritt: How did you get…
Give Up on Your Dream of Making It in Games Media
So, you love video games and you want to write about them professionally, and maybe you’re looking at the shuttering of so many projects over the last couple of months and wondering about how to break into the industry given all the turmoil. My advice to you is this: give up. I don’t mean that…
Microsoft’s Hover! and the Multimedia Craze of the 90s
In the mid-90s, “multimedia” was the word when it came to personal computers. The concept of a home machine that could play music and video via compact disc was still relatively novel, and hardware companies routinely bundled software with their products designed to show off these capabilities. One such piece of software, developed by Microsoft…
The Story of the Infamous 1979 ‘Alien’ Action Figure
When I was six years old, my dad drove the family down to Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Being young, adventurous adults, my parents wanted to check out a number of attractions that absolutely terrified my little brain, film-based rides like Jaws, Earthquake, The Tower of Terror, and so on. But nothing left a stronger…
Breath of Fire II and the Afterlife of Digital Ghosts
A version of this piece originally appeared at ZEAL in 2017. It is the mid-90s and you are at the video store on a Friday night, the air swirling with the smells of buttered popcorn and plastic VHS cases. CRT screens suspended from the ceiling play one of the latest releases, the list of titles enumerated…
The Shrouded Origins of “The Helicopter Game”
If you’re of a certain age, there’s a good chance you’ve played the Flash helicopter game. You know the one — you’re piloting a helicopter down a tunnel, avoiding obstacles and seeing how far you can go. It’s extremely straightforward, using only one button. You hold the mouse to ascend, and release it to let…
Lessons from Running My First Game of Vampire: The Masquerade
I only ever played Vampire: The Masquerade once growing up. It was disastrous — I mean, we were in junior high, and none of us were emotionally mature enough to handle the game. We were used to playing games like Rifts, more straightforward titles about powerful heroes going on daring adventures. I’m not even sure how we got…