by Brian Lesyk | May 11, 2026 | 1980s, 2020s, Magazine Preview
This could have safely guessed that Tetris (Alexey Pajitnov, 1988) would appear in our list of The 50 Most Influential Video Games Ever. There’s a simple reason for this… Tetris is the single greatest video game ever created… No caveats. No clarifications. No...
by Tristan Ibarra | May 9, 2026 | 1980s, 2020s, Magazine Preview
The Legend of Zelda represents, for many gamers, the birth of what is arguably the greatest, and most influential, action-adventure franchise of all time. Released early in the Nintendo Entertainment System’s lifecycle, it arrived during a formative moment when...
by Old School Gamer | May 7, 2026 | 1980s, 2020s, Magazine Preview
Before RPGs, 1986,to strong narrative. Sir-Tech’s Wizardry from 1981 dumped players into a massive 10-floor dungeon with little more than a sentence of congratulatory text for beating the game. The first Ultima came out the same year and switched players from a...
by Old School Gamer | May 5, 2026 | 1980s, 2020s, Magazine Preview
I remember playing a ton of Gauntlet and gathering friends at the Fun Factory arcade in Valley West Mall. This game couldn’t really be played competitively against one another, since you all shared the mission of surviving long enough to make it through the level....
by Jeremy Parish | May 3, 2026 | 1980s, 2020s, Magazine Preview
it’s almost certainly not with any sort of affection. A slow, primitive-looking grind of a game with repetitive music and confusing action, Hydlide came across as nothing so much as a terrible clone of The Legend of Zelda when it hit the NES in the spring of 1989....
by Todd Friedman | May 1, 2026 | 1990s, 2020s, Magazine Preview
While I agree with that, 2 years before Mortal Kombat hit the scene, there was a breakthrough game featuring live-motion capture. This game was Pit Fighter. An underrated game in my opinion, Pit Fighter captures the reality of fighting in a video game. I remember...