An account of Nintendo’s rise from a playing card manufacturer in 1889 to a video game industry giant in the ’80s and ’90s. Adapted from Console Wars, out this month: After several decades of staggering success, Fusajiro Yamauchi retired in 1929 and was succeeded by his son-in-law Sekiryo Yamauchi, who ran Nintendo efficiently for nineteen […]
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Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
The Art of Running from the Police
A young man concerned that the police will take him into custody comes to see danger and risk in the mundane doings of everyday life. To survive outside prison, he learns to hesitate when others walk casually forward, to see what others fail to notice, to fear what others trust or take for granted.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Many Gigs Does It Take to Make It in NYC?
The gig economy (“a phrase which encompasses both the related collaborative economy and sharing economy”) is inescapable.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Karma Bum
What It’s Like To Be 9 Years Old and Playing Video Games with Allen Ginsberg: The following night, after Ginsberg’s poetry reading (why would I want to go to that?) a group of students eager for him to impart morsels of omniscience were forced to wait outside my room while we played video games on […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
A Reading List for My 25-Year-Old Self
This list is a birthday gift to me and, I hope, of use to you, too.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
A Reading List for My 25-Year-Old Self
This list is a birthday gift to me and, I hope, of use to you, too.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Tech Boom, Then and Now
In Guernica, Nathan Deuel visits the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and daughter and writes about how the recent tech boom has changed the city. Here, Deuel recalls being in college during the first dot-com boom when working for a website felt like a novel idea, and before, as he later writes in […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Interview: Bernice King
An interview with Martin Luther King Jr.’s youngest child, Bernice King, on her family’s legacy: In the popular history of your father, people remember “Dream” and his crusade for civil rights. But his other platforms—fighting poverty, antimilitarism—seem to get lost. Was that part of the reason behind your 50 Days of Nonviolence campaign? You have […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Poison Tree
An open letter to Grand Theft Auto IV’s protagonist Niko Bellic about Grand Theft Auto V and video game culture: “Almost everyone I know who loves video games — myself included — is broken in some fundamental way. With their ceaseless activity and risk-reward compulsion loops, games also soothe broken people. This is not a […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Desert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever Created
In the early 1990s, magician duo Penn & Teller decided to create “Desert Bus,” a satirical video game for the Sega CD game console that required players to spend hours driving a bus through Arizona and Nevada: “Penn, Teller, and the game’s publisher, Absolute Entertainment, planned a lavish prize for any player that scored a […]
