Play Value

Back in the day, people left their homes to play video games! Hosts discuss the rise of arcades and all the old school games: Space invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Frogg...

Nintendo's long trek from playing cards to gaming monopoly. While most Americans thought video games were a fad, Nintendo was pushing their way to the top of the gaming world. Lear...

The stunning rise and steep decline of Atari. Atari started the home video game, quickly becoming the fastest growing company in American history. In the last six months of 1982, h...

You won't believe the drama behind one of the best loved games of all-time. Tetris is not only one of the most universally loved games ever created, it also has one of the most fas...

The history of the bitter feud between Atari and Nintendo. In the high-stakes world of early console gaming, Nintendo knew it would have to think outside the box to prevent crappy...

The trashcans of the past are stuffed with consoles that didn't catch on. From the Atari 5200 and the ill fated Nintendo Virtual Boy, to the Atari Jaguar and the poorly timed Sega...

More video game consoles that failed to attract fans. The continuing saga of consoles that couldn't cut the mustard. From the ill-fated and poorly conceived Atari Jaguar, to the do...

Remember when Sonic and Mario went head to head? Video game rivalries are no joke, especially considering the billions of dollars up for grabs for the console with the most success...

Sex and violence in video games is a potent issue and has been for quite some time. It may surprise you to know that long before Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat raised eyebrows,...

The story of an upstart leather company that took on a corporate titan. ColecoVision could've been the next big thing if it wasn't for some major problems that popped up along the...

This little computer rocked the gaming world. Back in the day, the Commodore 64 came screaming out of the gates into the waiting hands of gamers all over the world. Although it is...

The arcade is back! You might not have noticed, but it returned to the gaming scene. After the advent of home gaming systems, many assumed the end of arcade gaming as we know it wa...

This rivalry tells us an important story about electronics in the 20th century. Based on the information that Sony accrued creating peripherals for the console makers, they were ab...

Game designer Shigeru Miyamoto has set the gold standard for gaming. If you play a fair amount of home video games, one thing you'll notice is that they all have a certain general...

Follow the various video game mascots during the late '80s to the late '90s. Video game mascots used to be all the rage in the late '80s to the late '90s. Similar to the Hollywood...

Did you know that almost half of the world's gamers are women? Since the beginning, gaming has most often been associated with guys. Guys made the games; guys played the games; guy...

Meet the two most famous American game designers. While video game designers aren't rock stars, there were two who got about as close as game designers could get: John Carmack and...

The Founding Fathers—the men who started it all. The video game industry is thought of as having started in the early '70s with Pong and other early arcade hits. While this may hav...

A history of gaming's unsung hero: the controller. While good hardware and creative software are both key, the controller is what actually connects the player to the game. It's the...

The Sega Dreamcast was one of the greatest game consoles ever released. Usually, the history of video game failures is pretty simple. Either the games, the hardware, or the marketi...

Landmark lawsuits exploded as the video game industry struggled to define itself. In video games' early days, the law was struggling to figure out how exactly to regard video games...

Two students, without money or contacts, found their own way into the game business. In 1981, A couple of MIT students named Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran started a small company ca...