Joust is an action game developed by Williams Electronics and released in arcades in 1982. While not the first two-player cooperative video game, Joust's success and polished implementation popularized the concept. Players assume the role of knights armed with lances and mounted on large birds, who must fly around the screen and defeat enemy knights riding buzzards.
George Edward "Ed" Logg is a retired American arcade video game designer, first employed at Atari, Inc. and later at Atari Games. He currently resides in Los Altos, California. He was educated at University of California, Berkeley and also attended Stanford University.
An action-adventure game is a video game hybrid genre that combines core elements from both the action game and adventure game genres.
Robotron: 2084 is a multidirectional shooter developed by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar of Vid Kidz and released in arcades by Williams Electronics in 1982. The game is set in the year 2084 in a fictional world where robots have turned against humans in a cybernetic revolt. The aim is to defeat endless waves of robots, rescue surviving humans, and earn as many points as possible.
Howard Phillips is an American video game consultant and producer who was an early employee of and spokesman for Nintendo of America in the 1980s.
David Crane is an American video game designer and programmer. Crane grew up fascinated by technology and went to DeVry Institute of Technology. Following college, he went to Silicon Valley and got his first job at National Semiconductor. Through his friend Alan Miller he learned about potential video game design work at Atari, Inc. and began work there in 1977.
A video game clone is either a video game or a video game console very similar to, or heavily inspired by, a previous popular game or console. Clones are typically made to take financial advantage of the popularity of the cloned game or system, but clones may also result from earnest attempts to create homages or expand on game mechanics from the original game. An additional motivation unique to the medium of games as software with limited compatibility, is the desire to port a simulacrum of a game to platforms that the original is unavailable for or unsatisfactorily implemented on.
Foundation 9 Entertainment, Inc. was an American video game company based in Irvine, California. The company was formed in March 2005 through the merger of video game developers Backbone Entertainment and The Collective.
Backbone Entertainment was an American video game developer based in Emeryville, California. The company was formed in 2003 as the result of a merger between developers Digital Eclipse and ImaginEngine. In 2005, Backbone merged with The Collective to form Foundation 9 Entertainment.
In the history of video games, the second-generation era refers to computer and video games, video game consoles, and handheld video game consoles available from 1976 to 1992. Notable platforms of the second generation include the Fairchild Channel F, Atari 2600, Intellivision, Odyssey 2, and ColecoVision. The generation began in November 1976 with the release of the Fairchild Channel F. This was followed by the Atari 2600 in 1977, Magnavox Odyssey² in 1978, Intellivision in 1980 and then the Emerson Arcadia 2001, ColecoVision, Atari 5200, and Vectrex, all in 1982. By the end of the era, there were over 15 different consoles. It coincided with, and was partly fuelled by, the golden age of arcade video games. This peak era of popularity and innovation for the medium resulted in many games for second generation home consoles being ports of arcade games. Space Invaders, the first "killer app" arcade game to be ported, was released in 1980 for the Atari 2600, though earlier Atari-published arcade games were ported to the 2600 previously. Coleco packaged Nintendo's Donkey Kong with the ColecoVision when it was released in August 1982.
Bandai Namco Holdings Inc., commonly known as Bandai Namco, is a Japanese entertainment holding company founded in 2005 by the merger of Namco and Bandai. The company specializes in toys, video games, arcades, anime, restaurants, and amusement parks.
Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc. is a Japanese multinational video game publisher owned by Bandai Namco Holdings. It was founded in 2006 as Namco Bandai Games Inc., following the 2005 merger of Namco and Bandai. Namco acquired Bandai's video game business division through a corporate split. In 2009, Bandai Namco Games absorbed Bandai Networks. It is headquartered in Minato, Tokyo.
Atari SA is a French video game holding company headquartered in Paris. Its subsidiaries include Atari Interactive and Atari, Inc. It is the current owner of the Atari brand through Atari Interactive.
Frank Cifaldi is a video game preservationist, historian, and developer.
Code Mystics is a Canadian video game developer specializing in both the emulation and remastering of older video games for modern systems, and porting of indie titles.
Video game preservation is a form of preservation applied to the video game industry that includes, but is not limited to, digital preservation. Such preservation efforts include archiving development source code and art assets, digital copies of video games, emulation of video game hardware, maintenance and preservation of specialized video game hardware such as arcade games and video game consoles, and digitization of print video game magazines and books prior to the Digital Revolution.
The Video Game History Foundation is a non-profit foundation founded by Frank Cifaldi. The primary aim of the foundation is the archival, preservation, and dissemination of historical media related to video games.
Other Ocean Interactive is a Canadian-American video game developer based in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Emeryville, California. Originally founded in 2006 in Charlottetown, as a studio for Foundation 9 Entertainment, the studio was spun off as Other Ocean Interactive in May 2007. Since then, it has made eight games itself and has been involved in the development of 40 other games.
Atari 50 is a video game compilation and interactive documentary about the history of Atari. It comprises newly shot interviews with former Atari employees, archival footage, emulated games from the company's catalog, and six new games inspired by past Atari games. It was developed by Digital Eclipse, published by Atari Interactive, and released on Atari VCS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S in 2022, the 50th anniversary of Atari's founding. The main feature of the game is a five-part interactive timeline that lays out the history of the company and its products through video, scanned artifacts and related games.
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is an interactive documentary and compilation video game developed by Digital Eclipse. The release chronicles the software of British developer Jeff Minter and over 40 of his programs developed between 1981 and 1994. It is the second release in Digital Eclipse's Gold Master Series that began with The Making of Karateka (2023), which chronicled the history of the game Karateka (1984).
