A retrospective of Martha Cooper’s work shows the ramshackle toys and improvised games from a bygone era of growing up.

"You wake up one day and find it's all been a dream..."

A look back at the Donkey Kong Country track that defined underwater music.

And now they're making a documentary about it!

Prompted by a class called "Mixtape Memoirs," I've begun to revisit some of the music that has shaped my life. For the first time, I write about my Seattle relocation following profound trauma and grief, and then how Temple of the Dog pointed me in the right direction.

A Mod, A Mystery, A Media Storm

In the summer of 2005, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was already a phenomenon. It was controversial, sure, but no more than you’d expect from a series built on crime, chaos, and pushing boundaries. For Rockstar Games, outrage wasn’t

"What that character is feeling inside that environment is what I want the players to feel as they play the game...I want the players to not only have a fun and exhilarating experience, but also think about many different things." - Hideo Kojima

A spiritual successor to System Shock 2 and helmed by Ken Levine of Irrational Games, BioShock tells a compelling narrative. It's the kind of story that only a video game could tell, an irony only a ludonarrative could illustrate, and a warning we should've heeded a long time ago.

Loosegroove Records digs into its archives with a re-release of Weapon of Choice's "Nutty Nut-Meg Phantasy," a trippy smorgasbord of sound and visuals.

Over the past few months, I've spotted something a little odd and unexpected happening to Sony's old PlayStation Portable. There's been no corporate push, no announcement of the truly portable Sony handheld we used to hope for (_sorry, Portal_). Instead, through something far less

In 2005, a bug in World of Warcraft turned Azeroth into a virtual pandemic, and gave scientists a rare glimpse into human behavior during an outbreak.

It has been one year since I started this site. Originally, I intended it to be nothing more than a WordPress site; "The Bryant Blog" as I initially called it.

But then it took on a life – and an audience – of its own. Where I was

Half man, half fish, half sea-monkey (featuring Leonard Nimoy)

The Impossible Shooter

In 1997, a first-person shooter based on the latest James Bond film launched for the Nintendo 64... and it somehow managed to alter the trajectory of console gaming forever.

On paper, it should have been a modest success at best. The film it was tied to had

In 1995, _Star Fox 2_ was essentially finished. That’s the strangest part of this rabbit hole we went down while writing this. This wasn’t a vague prototype or a half-baked proof of concept buried in a vault somewhere. By most accounts, the game was _fully playable_

The Vision of a Portable PlayStation

In the early 2000s, Sony Computer Entertainment was riding extraordinary momentum. The PlayStation brand had reshaped the industry in the late ’90s, and the PlayStation 2 was well on its way to becoming the best-selling console of all time. Internally, however, there was

A retrospective at Lincoln Center showcases the French filmmaker’s masterworks of social conflict and inner struggle.

I’ve never been what you’d call an RTS fanatic. My relationship with the genre has always been more of interest. Curious, appreciative, but never fully immersed. Lately, though, I’ve been exploring its history more deliberately, trying to understand how it evolved and why it

Pixar just turned forty. Which, depending on how you measure time, is either a blink in studio years or an eternity in computer graphics. When they began, digital animation was still experimental: glossy, impressive, kinda futuristic. By the time _Toy Story_ arrived in 1995, it felt like the future had

In this blast from the past review/retrospective, I take a look at my personal "holy grail" of an MP3 player from the year 2000.