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The writer on his experience being on the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”: “Did I mention on my questionnaire that I could perform a serviceable impression of Chewbacca? Did I offer that up to them as proof of my willingness to give them whatever they wanted in exchange for a chance at […]

“Modern journalism is a kind of video game…to be silent is to lose points.” How social media editors for mainstream media sites, feeding off the Reddit community, incorrectly identified a missing 22-year-old Brown University student as one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. The family of Sunil Tripathi, who was later found dead, has now […]

Inside the breakup of Activision Blizzard and its star game developers, Vincent Zampella and Jason West, who created the multi-billion-dollar franchise “Call of Duty”: “During an hour-long interview in the summer of 2011, [CEO Robert] Kotick, sporting a sweater vest over a white T-shirt, waxed nostalgic about his past and emphasized that he’d negotiated in […]

A young man who grew up experiencing years of violence in Burundi’s civil war is bewildered by the violent, war-like video games played by Americans when he encounters them in a prep school in Massachusetts: “In the hallway at Deerfield, the boy, whom I’ll call Luke, went on talking about video games, as we waited […]

A visit to Iceland and CCP Games, the company behind the sci-fi video game Eve Online. The game has grown to 500,000 users and $65 million in revenue: “Economists have written dozens of papers celebrating the sophistication of Eve’s economy and the amazing level of industry among the players, who basically create everything within the […]

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 […]

A brief history of the title that launched Atari and the video game industry: “In 1976, Atari took a monetary hit, settling a lawsuit out of court in Chicago with Magnavox. (Alcorn remembers the settlement being $300,000; Bushnell thinks Atari coughed up $500,000; Curt Vendel, who had seen documentation surrounding the suit, notes that $1.5 […]