Before John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero unleashed the blistering corridors of Wolfenstein, they cut their teeth on smaller 3-D experiments: Hovertank 3-D for DOS and the Apple II’s Catacomb 3-D, the latter running on an embryonic version of the engine that...

Beat-em-ups, also known as belt scroll action games in Japan, were all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s in arcades. Players controlled beefy characters who pummeled their way through thugs of a dubious nature with their fists, or a special weapon if they were lucky,...

Those two epic words helped launch the work of Ed Boon, John Tobias, and the rest of the team behind Mortal Kombat in pop culture lore forever. It’s also made it a video game series that essentially always comes back refreshed and inviting, after over 30 years of...

By far the best and most influential of these is Westwood Studios’ Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty from 1992, a landmark Real Time Strategy (RTS) game that not only laid the way for Command & Conquer, but also for the whole genre. Of course, Dune II wasn’t the...

In the 1990's Nintendo had a small part thanks to Super Mario Bros. Sega, who had seen decent success with their own home consoles, decided to challenge Nintendo, hoping to grab their slice of the profit pie. To do so, they created Sonic the Hedgehog, an ambitious...

A proper sequel to their first 1v1 arcade fighting game. Video game designer Yoshiki Okamoto once revealed, “The basic idea at Capcom was to revive Street Fighter (Capcom, 1987), a good game concept, to make it a better-playing arcade game.” And, WOW, did they ever...

In 1984, game design found  Bungeling Bay, he was having more fun making the levels than playing the game. This was the seed that eventually bloomed into the granddaddy of simulation games, SimCity. As the game took shape, one of the key aspects Will brought was the...