Universal v. Nintendo is up on the archive: spritecell.com/shigeru-miya... This includes the 24 out of 86 pages of deposition that were preserved, summaries of the deposition in other documents, and 17 Donkey Kong design documents. All scanned by the Gaming Historian.

After several months of work I am finished with the data entry part of my next project. 52,617 spreadsheet cells, entered one by one by hand covering 900 games.

I will work on getting the scans of Shigeru Miyamoto's deposition(s?) and summaries of them added to the archive, but it's going to take a while. Text searching doesn't seem to work with some of the distorted text and I'm not familiar with how these kinds of things are structured.

When I started the Shigeru Miyamoto Archive I wasn't expecting to trawl through movie premiere events for brief interviews and fast forwarding the parts where the Minions guy talks. youtu.be/D9iiT12dCHU?...

We're seeing more interviews with Nintendo people at the Nintendo Museum. For many years if you had an interview with a Nintendo employee it took place in a ground floor conference room in their headquarters, away from the developers. Hopefully this is a more interesting setting.

Now that I finally beat Hades it's time for my tradition of looking up how long it took others and feeling bad that it took me twice as long as average.

Enhanced Edition Complete Edition

Some glowing praise from computer magazines for Mercer Mayer's Just Grandma and Me.

Finally got a video game on wikigacha.

Sega's Super Game thing is supposed to launch this month, as announced a few years ago. I've been very curious as to what exactly it is, but it seems unlikely that they are releasing multiple AAA live service games any time soon.

It took over two months, but I have seen every ending in The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. As much as I enjoyed it, it also would have been a much better game if it was half as long. An exercise in excess, the contrivances and repetition start to outweigh the amazing characters and story.

EpicArchives claims to be an Australian organization "Preserving the Digital Legacy of Gaming History", but the entire website is full of AI generated images, phony links to articles about themselves, phony links to social media, phony addresses, phony testimonials...why did someone make this?

Strategy/tactics RPG gameplay has sure become the go-to genre to add on to visual novels/adventure games. I can see the logic when the story involves battles in some way and the characters' personalities can be further expressed through their combat abilities.

After reading so many interviews, watching so many video essays, and hearing about how the series has changed so many people's lives over ~40 years I decided it was finally time to experience it for myself. I'm also going to play The Legend of Zelda for the first time once I finish The Hundred Line.

40 years of Zelda, over 150 different dungeons! This week I want to know your Top 10 Zelda Dungeons of All Time! Which stands out to you either because of the theming, the puzzles, the bosses, the item, or how well all those elements blend? This should have fun results! forms.gle/pvcvMKc1bZga...

Australian magazine Hyper has a short interview with Eiji Aonuma, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Koji Kondo in the August 2005 issue, #142. Miyamoto said in a 1997 interview that his favorite item in 3D Zeldas was the boomerang, and here he says it is his favorite overall.

www.latimes.com/archives/la-... Another Miyamoto interview that had escaped me until now. Nothing about Zelda, sorry. Some details on the elephant hangers, a chair made of rope made for a school project. "I thought it would be nice to make a game people can buy while they’re at the pet store."

Swedish, Dutch, Polish, Korean, and more versions of Wikipedia use a picture of this odd looking Mario as the lead image for their Mario pages.

Game Head eventually became GameTrailers TV with Geoff Keighley and there was another Miyamoto interview in 2013. This is unfortunately only available on Amazon Prime Video and protected by DRM. So I bought it and copied the closed captions of the entire interview.

A couple of new-to-me Miyamoto interviews, starting with Geoff Keighley's Game Head from 2007. This whole episode was a tribute to Mr. Miyamoto, but he isn't listed on IMDB for it. Several people speak about him, including Mega64, Game Jew, and Koji Kondo. www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw4X...

I've been overwhelmed with various crises happening all at once lately. And then today my internet stopped working suddenly. I managed to get that sorted out, but I still need more time before I'm back to where I want to be. I've got about 20% of the data I need for my next project. Maybe April.

Kensuke Tanabe announced that he is retiring in an interview today! He was a script writer who worked on A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening, so let's talk a little bit about him and his career. #Zelda #TanabeQuote LTTP team (via @glitterberri.bsky.social's site!):

Trying something new today! Zelda Dev Highlight: Satomi Asakawa, Character Designer In (mostly) her own words, Asakawa's game dev career from start to end! #Zelda #TwilightPrincessQuote, #OcarinaOfTimeQuote, #MajorasMaskQuote #AsakawaQuote Full image: drive.google.com/file/d/1ywWD...

I decided to find out what game has the highest Metacritic metascore that doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. A game is still considered to have a page if you are taken to a series overview that includes the game, the game that a DLC belongs to, or the non-remastered/remade/deluxe version of that game.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUDo... A short Japanese-language interview from Fuji TV with Shigeru Miyamoto and Chris Meledandri. There's also a short interview with Shuntaro Furukawa in the earlier segment about the Famicom's 40th anniversary.

I gave up on the final boss of Labyrinth of Refrain. An exhausting game where you use standard attacks 99% of the time. I might try the sequel eventually.

I've been looking at how Nintendo Power talked about Pokémon early on, and there's quite a few errors and lots of bad advice. What really takes the cake though is this assertion that you can start a new game and keep all of your Pokémon! How many save files were destroyed because of this?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFhj... This is a short documentary about the making of Black College Football, released in 2007 and 2009 for Windows and Xbox 360. Developers at Nerjyzed Entertainment offices are interviewed. One dev is a Ukrainian man who knew very little about American Football.

A 1985 news report on how Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz Pizza are moving away from video games due to a "loss of interest of teenagers in video games" and focusing more on skill games, like SkeeBall. All these news reports have gone on my YouTube channel, including a few I haven't posted here.

Here are the 50 most visited pages on SpriteCell in 2025. I’m glad my more modern and better statistical projects are generally the ones mixed in with the archives. The Konami Game project, my most recent, continues to do well at being utterly repellent to any potential reader.

2025

I've added a new-to-me Shigeru Miyamoto interview from December 2nd, 1998 to the archive: www.salon.com/1998/12/02/f... The bit about being one of the first game designers is very similar to something he said a few months later during his 1999 GDC keynote speech.

By unanimous vote at SpriteCell offices, Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is the Console Game of the Year.

Another KXAS report, this time about a father who was looking for an online guide to a Zelda game (likely Ocarina of Time) for his daughter, and found one that had a banner ad for a porn site. Anyone recognize the The Ultimate Zelda Walkthrough? Originally aired February 26, 1999.

A KXAS report on an ad for the "Cartridge Club of America" that appeared in TV Guide, which never sent the Atari games people paid for. Originally aired December 27, 1982. I can't find any more information about this, maybe some Atari historians have heard of it?

I dug up a couple old clips from Forth Worth's KXAS that deal with video games, thanks to texashistory.unt.edu. Nothing extraordinary, but here's Howard Phillips sitting in someone's living room playing Wrecking Crew. Originally aired May 18, 1987.

100% Pascal Sensei: Kanpeki Paint Bombers is a 3DS game by Konami, based on a children's manga about a dumb mole teacher. It's basically a cross between Bomberman and Splatoon, exploding bombs paint the playfield, the winner being the one who painted the most. There's also a board game element.

Who coined "Metroidvania"? It wasn't @jparish.bsky.social, and he'll be the first to tell you. Besides, there are far more interesting questions, like: How did it spread? Evolve? And what's it got to do with rickrolling? Watch til the end for a post-credits sting. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8set...

We don't get a lot of data about the gender breakdown of specific games, so I wanted to graph the ratio of female to male players for games released on Sega Channel. The data is from a document acquired by the Video Game History Foundation: archive.gamehistory.org/item/0bb0d61...

The Video Game Catalog and Circular Ad Archive has been updated for 2025. Unfortunately, many retailers nowadays just have walls of randomly arranged products on a web page, but I was able to scrape up 117 images from previous years, some of which I will share here. spritecell.com/bp3-catalog-...

Didn't play all that much PlayStation 4 this year, but The Caligula Effect 2 was a pleasant surprise. I gave Kingdom Hearts a try and don't plan to ever play it again.

Do you remember the video game Mario? From Target's Wii launch guide for employees. archive.org/details/wii-...

Spent a couple hours gathering data and making a graph to post here before deciding it wasn't worth it. I do this several times a year.

This doesn't advertise any electronic games so it doesn't qualify for the Catalog and Circular Ad Archive, but I wanted to share this illustration of Pac-Man in the process of trying to swallow a ghost who is desperately trying to escape.

The JRPG Magazine Review Archive has been updated! This smallish update has 390 new scans and includes reviews from several PC magazines that were not previously included. Thirteen new games have been added, bringing the total to 978. spritecell.com/bp7-jrpg-rev...

What does it say about the state of gaming history education that the first google search result for the very common question "Why is it called Final Fantasy?" is an eight year old thread on Brave Exvius subreddit with 0 net upvotes, filled with bickering and arguments and replies from years later?

After going really hard on PvP during the bonus week I now have the 537th most achievement points in Guild Wars 2, on the North American server. Getting 305 AP in a week is incredible and I'll never be able to do that again, but I'm still over 7,000 AP from #1.

I hope there's an update on Catly at the Game Awards this year. I don't want to play it, I just want to know what the deal with this strange game is. They haven't posted to Twitter in 11 months and the website and Steam page seem to be unchanged too.

I recorded a whole lot of data about games nominated for Game Awards in order to try to predict 2025's winners. I did not alter any scores based on my personal opinion. Some of these I'm a bit skeptical of, but it will be interesting to see how accurate these are.

I love adding new, obscure games to the JRPG Magazine Review Archive and the next update will include Square Enix's iPod game Song Summoner: The Unsung Heroes. Possibly the only review of the game in print.