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This week’s Longreads Member Exclusive is “Forever Young,” a story by Jason Johnson for the literary video game magazine Kill Screen. Johnson tells us how he first discovered a group of Hungarian developers who have spent more than 20 years developing a game for the Commodore 64:  “This wasn’t supposed to happen. As originally conceived, […]

How a nine-person video game company is bringing little known Japanese games to the U.S.: “If you play video games, you’ve probably played something that came out of Japan. Many of gaming’s biggest and brightest series—Mario, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil—were developed by Eastern companies, then translated and programmed for North American or European machines. “But […]

[Site not safe for work] A profile of Nolan Bushnell, the entrepreneur behind Atari and Chuck E. Cheese: “With Atari on the brink, Bushnell had to dig himself out of his hole fast. He hatched a business philosophy that became his guiding principle: the meta-game. Knowing Atari’s hardware was being copied by competitors, Bushnell began […]

Meet a NASA scientist who suggests the possibility that we’re all living inside a video game: “Two years ago, Rich Terrile appeared on Through the Wormhole, the Science Channel’s show about the mysteries of life and the universe. He was invited onto the program to discuss the theory that the human experience can be boiled […]

Japanese-pop star Hatsune Miku has millions of YouTube hits, sells tickets to her concerts at $76 a pop and has adoring fans from all around the world. She’s also not human: “Created by Crypton Future Media, Miku is the most popular avatar created to sell Vocaloid 2, the singing synthesizer application originally developed by Yamaha. […]

How George Hotz, a teenager from New Jersey, kicked off a hacker war that pitted Sony against Anonymous and the group LulzSec: “That year, someone mailed Hotz a PlayStation 3 video-game system, challenging him to be the first in the world to crack it. Hotz posted his announcement online and once again set about finding […]

David Kushner’s new book explores the origins of the infamous videogame, which began as a straitlaced driving simulation: “By casting the player as the cop, they realized, they had cut out the fun. Some dismissed it as Sims Driving Instructor. “When an unruly gamer tried to drive his police car on the sidewalk or through […]

The strange story of Martin Amis’s lost book, Invasion of the Space Invaders, which offered tips on how to play video games like PacMan: “He is almost as enthusiastic about PacMan, although you get the sense that he sees it (in contrast to Space Invaders) as a fundamentally unserious endeavor. ‘Those cute little PacMen with […]

A trip to John Madden’s man cave, and whether sports video games can ever be described as “art”: “Clearly, the way sports games are played, and the way Madden in particular is played, is ripe for some massive paradigm shift. Why doesn’t the quarterback position feel as visceral and pinpointy as firing a rifle in […]

(Fiction) My son, Douglas, loves to play with toy guns. He is thirteen. He loves video games in which people get killed. He loves violence on TV, especially if it’s funny. How did this happen? The way everything does, of course. One thing follows another, naturally. Naturally, he looks like me: shorter than average, with […]