Rooftop Shouting

I thought it would be nice to follow-up on the Final Fantasy 7 story with a look at what its main character is doing now. Art: Michael Firman

Why retail is in trouble. Photo: Jonathan Castillo

I have mixed feelings on this one. I had to do the story on a tight deadline, which in some cases meant relying on email interviews, which in some cases resulted in quotes that read like they came from email interviews. And since I wanted to stick to the talking heads format, I ended up…

In early 2014, I posted a story called Street Fighter 2: An oral history. Three years later, here’s Final Fantasy 7: An oral history. Photos: Jonathan Castillo, Irwin Wong

http://www.polygon.com/features/2016/11/21/13696872/last-guardian-spiritual-successor-vane-mare Photo: Irwin Wong

It takes a lot of people to make a headset. Photo: Irwin Wong

Last year, I bumped into someone who used the term “white label” to describe his work. I hadn’t heard of it, so I asked and heard about developers who make games but don’t appear in the credits and don’t publicly acknowledge the work. More recently, I decided to look into the idea and see how common it…

Mario Maker is one of those games I can’t help but want to write about. I love the concept, the nostalgia, and the yellow packaging/branding. So I did a quick story on how Nintendo embraced Mario’s weird side in it.

I had nothing to do with Brave Wave’s phenomenal Street Fighter soundtrack, but they were nice enough to ask me to write an essay for the booklet, so that counts for something.

As part of Polygon’s VR cover story, I visited Minority to get a first look at its game about an unlikely love story. Any time a developer references both Ico and LMNO in an interview, they’re probably talking about a game I want to play.

Recently, I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing a literal day in the life series. Each story would follow someone from the game industry doing something notable, and we’d structure the text with timestamps and random details to play up the timeline. Not sure if I’ll stick with it, but here’s one of them — a…

At one point Yu Suzuki was arguably the most famous arcade game designer in the world. Now he runs a small production company designed to generate and oversee game concepts. As part of Polygon’s Life in Japan cover, I talked to him about game ideas that never got off the ground and what he wants to do…

In the late 1980s, Hideo Yoshizawa, Masato Kato and Keiji Yamagishi worked with a small team to create action game Ninja Gaiden for the NES. As part of Polygon’s Life in Japan cover (which also features the debut of Yamagishi’s first single from his new album, and the reveal of a game he’s composing music for), when they…

I tend to like stories about games that have been in development for a long time — seeing what kinds of struggles the developers ran into, what the hardest roadblocks were to overcome. So when BioShock 2 creative director Jordan Thomas co-founded an indie studio and started work on a game about crazy development issues, I…

I’d wanted to do a story on game industry agents for years, but had always been looking for the right way to do it — as an overview of the industry, focusing on one person, etc. Then last year, Creative Artists Agency reached out about a possible story and we started talking, and I realized there were…

This is one of those ideas that came up a lot over the years: “Wouldn’t it be fun to dig up the Atari landfill in New Mexico?” I heard it at 1UP. We talked about it at Polygon. And as I learned doing this story, there were a bunch of others interested like Discovery Channel. But it…

About two years ago, Vanity Fair ran an oral history of The Sopranos. That approach is nothing new and Vanity Fair isn’t the only one doing it, but when I read it I realized I hadn’t seen much of that for games. So I tried to think of a game that would make sense to…

Awhile back, I saw a magazine story with Matt Stone and Trey Parker drawn as South Park characters. I think it was in Entertainment Weekly, and I wanted to rip it off. I wanted to ask a game studio artist to draw their team’s director in their game’s art style. Then when I started on a feature…

I suppose you can consider this part two in a series on canceled projects designed to make players cry, following the LMNO story I did at 1UP. With Milo, I was fascinated by the tech and ambition — creating a virtual boy who could talk to players and interact with them through Kinect. It was…

Lawsuits and a falling out with Midway: the story of what happens when a game becomes a phenomenon and not everyone gets paid. Huge thanks to Incredible Technologies VP of marketing Scott Morrison for digging up outtake photos from the 1994 “Daniel Pesina, who starred as Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat has switched to BloodStorm” print ad. Photo: Scott Morrison

It’s a lot easier to write a story about someone who make games when he puts himself in the game. Weirdest moment: Going to a Sony press event, seeing a PlayStation-themed alcoholic drink menu with a “Papa & Yo” on it and thinking it was a strange fit for a game about an abusive alcoholic father.…

Before Street Fighter 2 snowballed the arcade industry, Takashi Nishiyama and his team created a predecessor remembered more for awkward pressure sensitive controls than for the game itself. Nishiyama hadn’t done an interview in 12 years, so I took a shot and reached out. It ended up being extremely popular, covering Nishiyama’s career as he moved…

At the 2011 Tokyo Game Show, Jeremy Parish, Thierry Nguyen, and I scheduled interviews with developers who had been affected by the 2010 Tohoku earthquake in an effort to see how things had changed a year later. Most were more open than we anticipated. Katsuhiro Harada discussed a scene with a drowning character that his…

With The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Starbreeze broke out as a developer, acclaimed for its tech abilities and efforts at telling a story in first-person. Behind the scenes, though, the team struggled to finish that game and others, and went through growing pains, canceled projects, shifting priorities, and staff turnover. I dug…

LMNO was supposed to be the second game in a three-game deal between Steven Spielberg and Electronic Arts — an ambitious idea featuring a woman named Eve in a first-person adventure designed to make an emotional connection with players. But as the years went on after EA announced the game, the news surrounding it got quieter…

EA’s 2010 NBA Jam revival made for a good excuse to do a history feature on the franchise, so I talked to ex-Midway developers about the original game’s development, Acclaim’s former CEO about the license confusion, and people who worked on Acclaim’s less popular series titles. Then EA showed us a bunch of modern prototype stuff to…

Prior to Brutal Legend‘s release and 2 Player Productions’ excellent Double Fine documentary, I did a story noting the parallels between Double Fine head Tim Schafer and Brutal Legend star Eddie Riggs, with a bit of a Rolling Stone influence to play up the game’s music roots. Thanks to a couple timely coincidences in the form…