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Frank Cifaldi (Unlicensed).nes
@frankcifaldi
Founder, co-director and noisemaker and co-host of . Former ink-stained wretch. He/him.
Frank Cifaldi (Unlicensed).nes’s posts
ROM sites shutting down only feels as big as it does because of the completely abysmal job the video game industry has done keeping its games available. There is no alternative BUT piracy for like 99% of video game history.
Confession: We were paid to provide these things for the Stadia display. They didn't know what they wanted, changed the scope about four times, and ended up mish-mashing two different concepts that worked together into one that didn't.
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Remember when Google compared Stadia with the Powerglove, Atari ET and the Dreamcast?
Morning affirmations. Recite these instructions out loud upon waking up to maintain toughness and mental clarity.
I really miss Super Mario's old catchphrase. Why doesn't he say this anymore?
Nine out of ten classic video games are no longer available to consumers, and that number is unlikely to get any better. It's practically guaranteed that something you grew up with is gone, forever.
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An alarming 87% of classic video games released in the US are unavailable. Here’s why that matters.
gamehistory.org/87percent
This is even funnier with context:
The game's hardest difficulty level is "Impossible," and if you choose it Lou Reed stops you on the street, murders you, and explains that impossible doesn't mean "very hard," impossible is eating the sun. The game becomes literally impossible.
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Lou Reed murders Penn & Teller in their unreleased Sega Genesis videogame from 1995
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🚨Attention video game preservation fans with money to spare🚨
There are currently TWO unreleased, one-of-a-kind, never-digitized games for the original NES on eBay right now. This has literally never happened before. Our resources are stretched thin, and we could use help.
It's significantly cooler than "dumped," we manually reassembled the game from its source code, spread across 40ish dying floppy disks left forgotten in its programmer's basement for 30 years. Nobody has ever seen this game before, as it was never announced.
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An NES Prototype NOBODY knew about has been found, the rom has been safely dumped and, this Sunday, you'll know the story and how you can play it for yourself.
"Soulja Boy is buying cheap emulator boxes off Ali Express and reselling them as his official console" is not the news I expected to wake up to twitter.com/souljaboy/stat
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Outer Worlds is an actual Fallout follow-up, replacing the original's dark humor about the Cold War killing us all with modern dark humor about capitalism killing us all.
The actual Fallout sequels lost context years ago and are just RPGs with cartoon boy and old timey music.
Call me a killjoy if you want but it's kinda hard to be excited about yet another garden-walled video game platform promoting AAA games built from exploitative labor practices after I just got 1,000 games in exchange for donating to social justice charities
Commercial emulation is rarely a better product than "amateur" emulation. Business needs cannot compete against DECADES of communal knowledge-sharing and labor. Working at Nintendo doesn't make you better equipped to emulate Nintendo systems.
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On my way home from Milwaukee yesterday I did a triple take when I saw an ancient used book store, IN THE AIRPORT!!! I felt like I walked through a portal to a world where everything was a little bit cooler. 🧵
Video game industry: "Our artistic medium has elevated itself to meet, and possibly exceed, film and novels."
Also video game industry: "Art doesn't actually SAY ANYTHING, it's just fun."
Merry Christmas everyone, let's talk about SimCity on the NES. Today we published the results of about a year of research on this unreleased Nintendo work, and uploaded relevant files - including the game - to the Internet Archive. You should take a look! gamehistory.org/simcity/
I think we can all relate to this horrible eBay auction
Notch calls female developer a "cunt" publicly: nothing happens
Someone tells him he's an asshole for saying it: punished by Twitter
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Omg, I just found a screenshot of the lost "Married...With Children" point and click adventure game, I had no idea this was real and not just a licensing announcement
This is every original IP video game made in the UK between 1983 and 1995
I would watch a two-hour documentary about this
First they made a Vanilla Ice game, then they took his name out of it, then it was canceled, then someone stole it from Nintendo in a cyber crime, then I put it on a Ukranian development cartridge and played it on a high end $250 Game Boy clone
Remember when Google Stadia had that GDC display where they sat it next to three of gaming history's most famous failures?
Now you can recreate this display in your own home! I provided the originals for the display, and now I'm selling them for charity. ebay.com/itm/1447433625
haha it's cute when the corporations send gloatful press releases about sending a person to prison for three years, fire up the funny Photoshop machine
Amazing find from the Getty Images archives: high resolution footage of someone playing a computer game in *1968*
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Most of us in the community knew it was this bad, but it wasn't until we conducted the world's first study on game availability that we could put a number on it.
87 percent.
You can no longer buy 87 percent of video games sold in the U.S. prior to 2010.
The PlayStation Classic uses an open source emulator, PCSX. Lesser educated people might see this as a cause of frustration, but here's the reality: it's an acknowledgement that an "amateur" emulator can be just as valid as an "official" one (and they're usually better!).
release mother 3
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Old enough to remember when Fallout was a parody about the commercialization of the apocalypse instead of literally being the commercialization of the apocalypse.
"Video games are definitely art, here's a giant exhibit we're touring for four years" -The Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012
"This cowboy game sold a lot, perhaps...video games are not just for kids anymore" -The New York Times, 2018
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Emulator authors should have statues erected in public spaces. They're the heroes who put in the exhaustive free labor documenting how these old games worked. As rare as re-releases are now, we wouldn't have seen half of them without people having already done this work for free.
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The pirates are the only ones keeping these games alive, both literally and metaphorically: they are the ones who saved the code, and they are the ones who keep them accessible so that people remember them.
If you've never been to MAGFest here is the thing you need to know:
Every five minutes or so someone does the Colossus scream from the X-Men arcade game, and it causes a chain reaction that gets super loud. They had to put up signs.
I really, really hate how gamer kids automatically assume developers are "lazy" or "stupid" if a critical bug ships. Just so darned lazy, crunching for months to meet a schedule, just incapable of doing the job they do full-time and are professionals at. Sacks of shit, all of us.
It took five years but I finally found it: the very first advertisement for what became the Nintendo Entertainment System, from late 1984!
No they didn't, Empty Clip did. It's a game dev studio that specializes in retro-style demakes, they did them for Final Fantasy XV and Dead Island too, which I think people who are interested in this might like to know?
Let's all try to do a better job of crediting creators...
I'm Douglas Bowser, President of Nintendo of America. Welcome gamers from around the world to the Nintendo Direct for E3 2021. I hope you have all stayed safe during this challenging past year.
Yesterday, there was a heated debate online about Batman that we felt we needed to
Something a lot of people don't know is that every prototype game that gets submitted to WATA since late 2020 has gone through me first. As part of the process I digitize the game and write up analysis, which I'm allowed to share- starting now! (thread)
Yeah dude, alternate universe Superman 64 (the unreleased PlayStation game planned to come out around the same time) just dropped. First time I've ever seen a video game prototype get released on Deviant Art. deviantart.com/digitalexplora
I missed the inauguration speech did he say anything about Mother 3?
TFW you discover there's a lost Myst porn parody game and it becomes the absolute most important thing in your life so you stay late at work desperately trying to untangle a web of Montclair, New Jersey porn companies
I'm not one of those cool people who never thought he was funny (I thought he was brilliant) but I'm done with him forever. which is actually super easy because I'm literally never going to run out of other forms of entertainment. twitter.com/jackallisonLOL
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Collection idea: dead people who never got a chance to say no to Funko Pop
The THQ Nordic promotional link to 8chan is still up, there is official PR linking you DIRECTLY to drawings of sexualized children. Surely every video game platform is ending any business association and pulling all their games, right?
Anybody? No?
Yay video games.
Disney Animation's delivery of the run cycle for "Disney's Aladdin" on the Sega Genesis. Unfortunately a lot of the original frames are probably lost, but Mike Dietz was smart enough to take a giant pile of photocopies home from work, so we have some!
GIF
We've been representing the Game Boy incorrectly IMO. Our traditional grayscale palette has pure white on one end and pure black on the other, but a real Game Boy has a low amount of contrast. Here's the palette Nintendo used internally. Black and white is too high contrast.
As you're watching this gorgeous animation, also note the voice casting, the character design, even the sound foley (Clayface's squishes and the security footsteps in particular). And then realize this was a WEEKDAY CARTOON with a 65-episode season. This show makes no sense.
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30 years ago today, this moment aired on television "Feat of Clay" part 2
#BTAS30th
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David Cage had this sent to the press. It's a prop to show how big his script would be for Beyond: Two Souls if you printed it out, but he didn't print it out so it's a giant stack of blank pages.
You don't have to watch The Game Awards
You don't have to watch The Game Awards
You don't have to watch The Game Awards
You don't have to watch The Game Awards
You don't have to watch The Game Awards
You don't have to watch The Game Awards
You don't have to watch The Game A
Forcing the player to feel bad about the things you make them do is some real "are video games Art? 🤔" circa 2006 energy
There's rare and there's "the guy who has been archiving Master System games for over 22 years discovered a new one"
When Kotick bought Activision in 1990 he immediately fired all of the existing executives, just saying
This screenshot I just took of Indigo Prophecy is a perfect summary of David Cage games.
Takahashi Meijin (former Hudson employee, also the basis for the lead character in Adventure Island) just found and sent the long-lost "Hi-Ten Bomberman" game disc to to preserve. This is BIG. ameblo.jp/meijin16shot/e
This is an amazing artifact. The final build of Sega's Propeller Arena - a game heavily rumored to have been cancelled because of 9/11 sensitivity - with writing clearly showing a build date of 9/11/2001.
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Super Bowl Twitter is nostalgic fun, it's like old Twitter where we made jokes instead of reminding each other that we're all gonna die
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You think GOG would exist as a business if not for DOSBox? The only reason all these old DOS games are available at all is because emulator authors had access to pirated games and figured out how to make them run.
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There are two paths to playing most classic games:
1. Maintain antique hardware and expensive secondhand software
2. Piracy
This means we are forever gatekeeping video game history. It's only for collectors and for those with software literacy. They can't inspire new players
This is an ongoing(?) thread of the Stadia-exclusive content in Final Fantasy XV and it's AMAZING, everything looks like a $1 Unity game on Steam
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Press F to pay for bath water
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the official PlayStation account released a trailer for a new FMV game before quickly deleting it
i present to you: GAMER GIRL
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Tonight is like old twitter where all we did was try to make each other laugh
This is what's next to the bed at my Airbnb. Going to be pissed if this room is haunted by a child who was murdered in the 80s.
oh my god pewdiepie is a racist
what a surprise
how could we have possibly known
if only there were warnings or previous incidents
id Software's pitch to Nintendo to port Super Mario Bros. 3 to DOS was just located in a museum archive!
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I can't stress enough how incredible this is. People figured out from the Gigaleak what sound files Nintendo originally used for samples in the Super Mario World soundtrack, tracked them down, and started restoring it. Hearing them uncompressed is WILD.
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Replying to @lebrickster
You may check out the playlist here: youtube.com/playlist?list=
As songs are done, they will be added to this playlist.
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Those of us already "in the know" are set for life. My ROMs are never going away. But I love video game history and I want it to be for everyone, not just the software-literate nerds. I want to see old games inspiring the weird artists of the future.
"What was it like to be a kid in the 90s?"
"Video game strategy guides looked like this, and nobody thought it was weird."
Phantasy Star re-translation 2.0 just dropped today, 14 years after the original! We got the band back together and improved everything:
- Completely re-written script by me
- FM audio support
- Sound test
- Quality of life options
- HAIR COLOR TOGGLE
smspower.org/Translations/P
Been saying for years that the first million-dollar video game sale is going to be one of these original sticker-sealed Super Mario Bros. and it's going to be within our lifetimes.
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Mint Sealed Copy of Super Mario Bros. Sells for More Than $100,000 at Auction dlvr.it/QyvqRv
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Dean Takahashi literally just wrote "Saudi Arabia tortures and executes its citizens, discriminates against women, and silences dissent by any means necessary, but you gotta admit, they understand video games."
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For those asking "how did Gamer Girl get made??"
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If your response to this is "just emulate them," then I need you to consider what your priorities are.
I want the next generation to have easy access to the past. Ask any parent right now if their kid knows how to install desktop executables, or knows what a "torrent" is.
I just saw the worst video game developer splash screen in history so now you have to see it too
What if we stopped quote tweeting the former game designer who hasn't shipped anything in years and whose sole existence now is making "the game journalists Canceled me 😱" videos
Took apart a plug & play system to document and uh
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Here's something I guarantee you've never seen before. Street Fighter 1...on the NES! This screenshot was buried deep in a Capcom marketing archive, undiscovered for decades. The game was cancelled, and this is the first time that the public has ever seen what it looked like.
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You think literally any arcade game downloads (yes, even ours) exist without being able to reference the documentation work done by MAME Team? The amount of work that goes into that only happens because of passionate people, it's not commercially feasible to start from scratch.
It's still unbelievable to me that Metroid and Zelda have never been properly reissued with the original soundtracks intact. They got hacked up 24 years ago specifically so they could fit on U.S. cartridges and this has become the canon we all accept.
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I think we should all take a moment to appreciate and give props to Sega for being the only old game company of note that literally pays people to not only archive its historical material but SHARE it, pretty much daily? They're ahead of the curve, others will follow suit someday
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From the archives: Early artwork for X-Perts on the SEGA Genesis, used at the CES show. While similar to the final art, this features more characters, with different designs.
#SEGAForever
Oh sweet it's the Street Fighter II planning doc Capcom told me they didn't have when I requested it for 30th Anniversary Collection lol
Today was a HUGE day for NES game preservation. Konami's ultra rare Space School series was completely undumped yesterday. Today, we have four of the seven ROMs playable on emulators. Listen to that unmistakable, PREVIOUSLY UNHEARD Konami-created music!
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Okay strap in, folks, we're doing a super deep dive into uber-obscure video game research. Let's talk about something so rare it might not even exist, the TV Guide Quizmaster plug & play console.
Since it's the 30th anniversary of Windows 3.x, here's 345GB of pretty much every game and application, complete with a frontend that makes them all work instantly and correctly. retro-exo.com/win3x_M.html
Tired of responding to weird people so this is a thread of high resolution Gex artwork. Congrats to this little idiot for announcing his comeback today.
You haven't seen an old movie if you weren't in a theater with an organ player and a news short and a Bugs Bunny cartoon
You haven't read Sherlock Holmes unless you subscribed to a 19th century magazine the way it was meant to be read
Vinyl just sounds, like, warmer, man twitter.com/Mike_Matei/sta
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Hey wow it's a source code snippet from EarthBound! We'll have lots more to show tomorrow morning, including a ton of never-before-seen content, cut ideas, and developer notes.
Heads up: We're trying to digitally preserve SEVENTY prototype cartridges for the Neo Geo Pocket, including at least two unreleased games, but I don't think our very generous sniper bid is going to cut it. Tweeting to see if any big NGP fans with deep pockets want to throw down.
Haha can you imagine if it was an election year??? The Democratic nominee would have so much fuel right now they'd be on the news nonstop.
I have never needed anything in my life as much as I need this cassette that tells me I'm good at video games.
This was published in 1982 as a humor book but maybe it was actually a warning
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I am NOT. ADVOCATING. CASUAL. PIRACY. I especially am not a fan of websites generating ad revenue by offering downloads of other people's work without permission. In fact I doubt any of these shutdowns would be happening if money was not involved.