Wrestling With Gaming

Nick Arcade was a TV game show centered around what are now considered retro video games video games that aired from 1991 through 1992. Two teams of two were pitted against with the winning team after 2 rounds getting to compete inside of an actual video game (well before virtual reality, PS4, orother modern means) for the grand prize. Nick Arcade was a technical marvel at the time and an extremely popular show for Nickelodeon. This is the story of how a group of pioneers, Amiga Computers, and a charismatic host made the impossible happen… putting people inside of real video games. This is the story of Nick Arcade.

To many gamers in the 90s, The Neo Geo AES was the ultimate home console. While many other consoles claimed to bring an arcade experience home, they did so by downgrading graphics, sound, and other compromises. The Neo Geo on the other hand, brought truly perfect Neo Geo MVS arcade games to the home with ZERO compromises. If you owned a Neo Geo AES console you got to play actual 1:1 arcade games at home. But this level of quality came at a steep cost with the console's Gold Bundle coming in at over $600 for just the console, controllers, and one game. Individual games were also extremely expensive, averaging $200 or more each. This is the story of how SNK brought its highly successful arcade games to the home with one of the most expensive consoles of all time and after becoming one of the biggest names in gaming in the 90s, lost everything and yet somehow rose from its ashes.

In August of 1997 Rare released Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64 and with it came a paradigm shift of what most thought a first-person shooter on a console could be. Based on the 1995 James Bond film of the same name, today Goldeneye is revered for it it’s enemy A.I., level design, gameplay, and of course, its legendary multiplayer. This is the story behind the making of Goldeneye, a Nintendo 64 masterpiece.