The Black Mesa Research Facility is a fictional underground laboratory complex that serves as the primary setting for the video game Half-Life and its expansions, as well as its remake, Black Mesa. It also features in the wider Half-Life universe, including the Portal series. Located in the New Mexico desert in a decommissioned Cold War missile site, it is the former employer of Half-Life's protagonist, Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist, and a competitor of Aperture Science. While the facility ostensibly conducts military-industrial research, its secret experiments into teleportation have caused it to make contact with the alien world of Xen, and its scientists covertly study its life-forms and materials. An "anti-mass spectrometer" experiment conducted on Xen matter causes a Resonance Cascade disaster that allows aliens to invade Earth, and is the catalyst for the events of the series.
Starship 1 is a first-person shooter space combat game developed and manufactured for arcades in 1977 by Atari, Inc. The game, which takes great inspiration from the then very popular television series Star Trek, contains the first known Easter egg in any arcade game. The arcade game was distributed in Japan by Namco in 1978, and it was ported to the Atari 2600 as Star Ship.
Stefano Gualeni, Ph.D., is an Italian philosopher, Associate Professor, and game designer who has created interactable websites and video games such as Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths,Gua-Le-Ni; or, The Horrendous Parade, and Something Something Soup Something.
Gua-Le-Ni; or, The Horrendous Parade is an action puzzle video game designed by Stefano Gualeni. Developed between 2011 and 2012 by Double Jungle S.a.S. and Stefano Gualeni, Gua-Le-Ni is the first commercially released casual video game that was designed and tuned with the support of biometric experiments.
Spacebase DF-9 is a space simulator video game developed by Double Fine Productions. It was prototyped during Double Fine's open Amnesia Fortnight 2012, directed by JP Lebreton. After being released as an open beta on October 15, 2013, it was officially released on October 27, 2014, for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux. After the official end-of-life of the game in May 2015, the community took over the development based on an open-source code fork.
No Man's Sky is an action-adventure survival game developed and published by Hello Games. It was released worldwide for the PlayStation 4 and Windows in August 2016, for Xbox One in July 2018, for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S consoles in November 2020, for Nintendo Switch in October 2022, and for macOS and iPadOS in June 2023. The game is built around five pillars: exploration, survival, combat, trading and base building. Players are free to perform within the entirety of a procedurally generated deterministic open world universe, which includes over 18 quintillion planets. Through the game's procedural generation system, planets have their own ecosystems with unique forms of flora and fauna, and various alien species may engage the player in combat or trade within planetary systems. Players advance in the game by mining for resources to power and improve their equipment, buying and selling resources using credits earned by documenting flora and fauna or trading with the aforementioned lifeforms, building planetary bases and expanding space fleets, or otherwise following the game's overarching plot by seeking out the mystery around the entity known as The Atlas.
Catlateral Damage is a first-person video game in which the player plays as a cat. The goal of the game is to knock as many of the player character's owner's belongings onto the floor as possible. There are game modes in which the player can either race against the clock and get a certain number of items onto the floor as fast as they can, score as many points in a 2-minute time-frame, or a free play mode where there is no clock and there are no points.
Incremental games, also known as clicker games, clicking games or tap games, are video games whose gameplay consists of the player doing simple actions such as clicking on the screen repeatedly. This "grinding" earns the player in-game currency which can be used to increase the rate of currency acquisition. In some games, even the clicking becomes unnecessary at some point, as the game plays itself, including in the player's absence, hence the moniker idle game.
Overwatch was a 2016 team-based multiplayer first-person shooter game by Blizzard Entertainment. The game was first released for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One in May 2016 and Nintendo Switch in October 2019. Cross-platform play was supported across all platforms.
The spiny shell, colloquially known as the blue shell, is a power-up item in the Mario Kart video game series. Originating in 1996's Mario Kart 64 and featured in every main entry of the series since then, the blue shell, when used, aims directly at the racer in first place, stopping them on impact. The blue shell acts as a "catch-up" mechanic, with racers ranked towards the bottom having a better chance of it spawning when driving into item boxes, giving them a better chance at diminishing the lead of the racer in top position. In addition to the Mario Kart series, the blue shell appeared in the Super Smash Bros. series from 2001's Melee onwards, and in Mario Hoops 3-on-3. A character based on the item appears in the 2023 film The Super Mario Bros. Movie, voiced by Scott Menville.
The Button was an online meta-game and social experiment that featured an online button and 60-second countdown timer that would reset each time the button was pressed. The experiment was created by Josh Wardle, also known as powerlanguage. The experiment was hosted on the social networking website Reddit beginning on April 1, 2015 and was active until June 5, 2015, the first time that no user pressed the button before the timer reached zero. The game was started by a Reddit administrator.
Clicker Heroes is an idle game that was developed by American independent studio Playsaurus. It was originally released for browsers in 2014, for mobile devices in 2015, and for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles in 2017. The game is a spinoff of Playsaurus's earlier game Cloudstone, from which it uses many graphic elements.
Tracer is the alias of Lena Oxton, a character who appears in Overwatch, a franchise centered around first-person hero shooter video games developed by Blizzard Entertainment. Tracer was first seen in the 2014 Overwatch Cinematic Trailer short. She was introduced as a playable character in an April 2016 update for the crossover multiplayer online battle arena game Heroes of the Storm, nearly a month prior to the release of the first Overwatch game. She appeared again in Overwatch 2, a 2022 sequel to the original game.
Scott Buchanan, known online as pannenkoek2012 or pannenkoek (, is a YouTube personality who specializes in highly in-depth and technical Super Mario 64 videos. He is best known for his "A Button Challenge" videos, in which he attempts to play Super Mario 64 while pressing the A button as infrequently as possible. The A button is the "jump" button, and a normal playthrough of Super Mario 64 can be expected to take thousands of A-presses.
Blizzard Entertainment's 2016 video game Overwatch inspired a notable amount of fan-made pornography. The game's distinct and colorful character designs drew the attention of many online content creators, resulting in sexually explicit fanart. Character models were ripped from the beta versions of the game and subsequently spread, edited, and animated on the Internet.
The Long Journey Home is a 2017 space exploration video game by Daedalic Entertainment for Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
The live streaming of video games is an activity where people broadcast themselves playing games to a live audience online. The practice became popular in the mid-2010s on the US-based site Twitch, before growing to YouTube, Facebook, China-based sites Huya Live, DouYu, and Bilibili, and other services. By 2014, Twitch streams had more traffic than HBO's online streaming service, HBO Go. Professional streamers often combine high-level play and entertaining commentary, and earn income from sponsors, subscriptions, ad revenue, and donations.
Nicky Case is a genderqueer Canadian indie game developer and theorist. They have developed interactive websites and online video games such as Coming Out Simulator,Explorable Explanations, We Become What We Behold and Parable of the Polygons. Case's works are characterized by their recurring goal to "help people understand complex systems", presenting dilemmas and potential resolutions in a philosophical manner. Case has also collaborated with theorists and academics such as Stefano Gualeni, Vi Hart and Bret Victor.
An auto battler, also known as auto chess, is a subgenre of strategy video games that typically feature chess-like elements where players place characters on a grid-shaped battlefield during a preparation phase, who then fight the opposing team's characters without any further direct input from the player. The genre was popularized by Dota Auto Chess in early 2019 and saw other games in the genre released soon after by more established studios, such as Teamfight Tactics, Dota Underlords, and Hearthstone's Battlegrounds.
Vinesauce is a collective of online content creators founded in 2010. The group primarily focuses on video game livestreaming and commentary videos. The group is most notable for content in which video games are corrupted to cause glitches, as well as content covering obscure video games and other media. The popularity of this content has earned media coverage from major video game outlets such as Kotaku, VG247, PC Gamer and Nintendo Life.
