Long-ass fuckin’ time ago, the Coca Cola Company made a change. I don’t know why they made it, but they decided that the formula their entire company was built on wasn’t good enough, suddenly, and they decided to kill regular-old Coca Cola and replace it with “new coke.” People didn’t…

This is not an essay about lore. I mean, it is, sure. We discuss lore, what it is, how to best use it, and how it can trap you into writing worse stories… but that’s not really what this essay is about. Instead of telling you exactly what it is…

Everyone has their pile of shame, those games that everyone expects you to have played but, for whatever reason, you haven’t. Other than computer game demos from Maximum PC or the occasional game at a friend’s house, I didn’t get to play video games, so I missed a lot of…

Alright, here’s a quick hypothetical for you. There’s a guy, and he’s like “i hate that guy. would you give me a gun so I could shoot him?” You, for whatever reason, give the guy the gun. He shoots the other guy, who dies. Are you an accomplice? Well, in…

So 2022. What a year, huh? I did some digging — turns out my average from 2015, when I started tracking completions, until now was about 57–58 games a year. If we remove 2015’s measly 33 completions, we leap up to 63 games a year. This year, we finished —…

Hello, I’m Doc Burford. Most of you know me as a guy who makes video games and writes about them. It’s true! I do those things! But… a long time ago… I used to fly model rockets. I think it’s a little twee to talk about one’s past in an…

I don’t get much out of other people’s dreams. The human brain is a vast neurological labyrinth of fat and nerves and electrochemical impulses that, during moments of unconsciousness, gifts its person with bizarre sequences of human imagination. You close your eyes, you drift off to sleep, and you experience…

I knew people liked Metroid Prime. I knew people said it was magnificent, that it was best of the best. In 2009, some guy named Michael Thomsen told ABC news that it was gaming’s equivalent to Citizen Kane, triggering a whole wave of “are games art?” …

So, over the years, auteur theory discourse rears its ugly head, and a whole lot of people offer an opinion that makes complete and total sense: it sucks when a gigantic project with thousands of people working on it is credited to a sole visionary, when we know that person…