Simon Parkin
@SimonParkin
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non-fiction writer // @newyorker // fellow @royalhistsoc // podcast: @myperfectcnsle // THE FORBIDDEN GARDEN - coming 2024 ( @sceptrebooks / @scribnerbooks ).
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Joined February 2009
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This, from Shigeru Miyamoto, on how Nintendo only hires designers who have deep and wide interests outside of video games, to the point where perhaps they don't even play games, is close to the heart of it all.
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The New Yorker interview: Shigeru Miyamoto. Super Mario’s maker on philosophy, his kids love of Sega, abusive bosses, video game guns, and how he tries to ensure his work adds more to a person’s life than it takes.
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(l) 1859: journalist berates young man's chess tournament win, a game that 'robs...valuable time that might be devoted to nobler achievements'.
(r) 2019: journalist berates young man's Fornite tournament win, a game 'responsible for so many lost childhoods'.
plus ça change.
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Here is a photograph of Kojima's farewell party on October 9th at Konami, which Konami claims no knowledge of:
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Get yourself a girl that looks at you the way George Osborne looks at exit polls.
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Yesterday a Hearthstone tournament winner said ‘liberate Hong Kong’ during his post-match interview. Now the game’s publisher Blizzard, part-owned by the Chinese conglomerate Tencent, has rescinded the player’s winnings and issued him a year-long ban...
[BREAKING] Hong Kong Hearthstone player
@blitzchungHS
calls for liberation of his country in post-game interview:
@Matthieist
#Hearthstone
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Recently discovered Götzendiener, a 1994 PC Engine game in which you play as the damsel in distress, whose rescuer dies in the very first scene, leaving her to GET SHIT DONE HERSELF:
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An ex-Konami employee recently told me that the company examined other photographs taken at this event to determine out who took the below shot, and duly disciplined the individual.
Here is a photograph of Kojima's farewell party on October 9th at Konami, which Konami claims no knowledge of:
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Something I think about often is how the 1996 arcade game Art of Fighting 3 would check the date from the system clock and, if it was one of the character's 'birthdays', would make that character super-powerful for 24 hours.
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As Final Fantasy VII Remake launches today, let's all remember the man who spent two years maxing out Cloud's level without leaving the game's starting area, in order to teach a forum user called 'Dick Tree' a lesson about tenacity:
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There is a growing mental health crisis among YouTubers. Exploring the dark side of a profession that is leaving young people stressed, depressed, lonely and exhausted, in todays’s
@guardianweekend
:
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Many giant video game companies claim their work is about politics the same way that the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland is about robbery on the high seas.
On the sly, disingenuous severing of games from politics:
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Roblox became the largest video game company in the world by encouraging children to become game-making entrepreneurs - a laudable aim, fraught with dangers. My story in today’s
@ObserverUK
:
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The 1917 board game “Suffragetto,” where players compete as police or suffragettes to defend their political bases:
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2017 was a spectacular year for Nintendo. I spoke to some of the company's brightest stars to understand the concatenation of reasons why:
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In 2021 a bartender named Jack Chadwick borrowed an obscure 1930’s novel from a local library, and became obsessed with finding out more about the book and its author. He stuck posters in the pubs around Manchester, asking if anyone had known the writer in decades past.
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It was a good run but, alas, the YouTube sleuths are finally on to me
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In January Sega sold its last arcade, an industry the company first entered in the 1940s. In this month's
@edgeonline
I visited Tokyo to talk to those hoping to save these businesses, some of the last remaining places where digital play is represented in public spaces:
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The prototype Steel Battalion controller required you to *break glass* to expose the ejector button that ensured the game file wasn't erased
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Turns out 3DS doesn't work if you close one eye. Guess Nintendo really is serious about clamping down on pirates this hardware generation.
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Jilted Towers
Fortnite has now been cited in more than 200 divorce proceedings
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Includes Shigeru Miyamoto, once again, being brilliant:
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First the game makes you a god. Then off you toddle. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is not so much an evolution of the blockbuster video game as a counter-proposition:
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An executive reportedly described Future Publishing's magazine staff as "lazy" at its annual conference this week. An astonishing, abusive claim at a time when editorial teams half the size of their forerunners produce work of equivalent quality, and to equivalent deadlines.
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I’ve interviewed Miyamoto a few times over the years, but always in contexts that preclude this kind of wide-ranging, reflective conversation. What a treat to have the time and space to speak properly.
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'go home lara, the club has been shut for, like, seven hours'
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It’s the night of the first literary E3. Salman Rushdie strides onto stage in Britney head-mic, fingers steepled. “It’s time,” he smiles, “to come out of hiding.” The lights thud out, the screen lights up. A thirty foot logo: The. Satanic. Verses. 2.
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As Trump moves to ban Syrian refugees from entering US why not make a donation to a refugee charity if you're able?
President Trump has officially ordered a Mexican border wall
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'From a height of three meters, porcelain figurines are dropped on the ground, and the sound they make when they hit trips the shutter release.' -
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Front cover of the only known surviving copy of the game:
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Daughter has a new thing where, whenever I give her any advice she replies: ‘ok TED talk’
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“All shooting games are inherently political, because they all put forth a vision of violent force being an acceptable catalyst for change.” I spoke to Tom for this piece close to a year ago now, and I think about this line all the time.
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I love this question/ observation from the novelist David Mitchell in conversation with Brian Eno:
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Last year E3's organisers hired crates to block
@devolverdigital
's unofficial stand from the public. So this year...
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“Tencent is not a business as you know businesses in the West. It is essentially an extension of the official Party. They are beholden to stakeholders but the line between the board and government is thin. Some of Tencent’s stakeholders are high-ranking officials in the party.”
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I spoke to
@jasonschreier
, an investigative journalist for Bloomberg, about the complexities of covering the games industry, where workers often sign lifetime NDAs, where credit is often withheld, and where the consequences of speaking out can be severe:
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This skylight to a lava flow looks like a scene from Dante (source:):
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Footage of abandoned Sega arcade inside the red zone at Fukushima:
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On the joy of being a horrible goose in this time of deep moral crisis:
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I feel despondently sure that NFTs are going to be widespread in blockbuster games within 2/3 years, but also they absolutely won’t be called NFTs. (See ‘freemium’ etc)
NFTs are coming to Ubisoft games, starting with Ghost Recon Breakpoint
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Josh Widdicombe became a father while shooting. One day he arrived at his dressing room to find a task addressed to his newborn daughter. He opened the envelope and broke down in tears. The task read: “Have the best life. Your time starts now.”
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some p̰̞̼̭͉er̰̯̰̼̭̺̕s̘͓̳̬̦̼͝ͅo̵͚̗͞n̨͕̟̭̖͙̳̺ͅa͠͠҉͚ͅl̤̹̼̫̺̟̬̀͝ ̥̝̣̝̀͠ n̴͜҉̱̘̘̮͍è̢̡̛͓͉̥̣̼͕̞̼͖͈͜w̧̧̛̪̜͎̥̝͇̱͇̪͔̬̹͝s͢҉̥̠͇͇̖͎̯̝̼̗͍̞̞͝
Exclusive: Amblin picks up true-life naval war story 'A Game of Birds and Wolves'
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'Hardcore' and 'casual' refer to one's approach to a video game, not a game type. There are casual Dark Soulers & hardcore Candy Crushers.
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Video games don’t cause mass shootings. But the conversation shouldn’t end there. When there is a mass shooting in America most days, it usually does.
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‘Rare’s management asked all development staff to sign a waiver relinquishing themselves from EU legislation that sought to limit overtime. Every member of the team signed bar one.’
25 years later - on the joy and cost of making GoldenEye 007:
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asked my kid if he wanted ketchup with his bacon sandwich this morning and he replied ‘ketch-yup’ and honestly it’s my proudest moment
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This is the UK cover for my new book, which is about a group of young women who helped devise a game that enabled the Allies to defeat the German U-boats that were attempting to blockade the UK during the Second World War:
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An interviewer once asked Amis why, in 1982, he wrote a non-fiction book about arcade games. Amis replied that he had needed to find a way to get paid for all the time he had spent playing them. As well as everything else, he was a quintessential freelancer.
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The use of the online review as political weapon, whereby internet mobs attempt to materially punish artists for their creative choices, continues to spread:
Total War: Rome II is currently getting review bombed on Steam. Despite positive reviews since launch, its suddenly had a huge influx of negative reviews in the last couple days.
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The institution of the comedy double act marriage is in crisis. Why do comedians split-up, and what does it take to stay together? With
@Baddiel
@Herring1967
@Glinner
and more:
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the fact that the couple who “married” in the “metaverse” work for the company that also makes the software should have nixed publication of the story imo:
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Ivan Chermayeff's 1974 poster for the stage production of War and Peace is *chef's kiss*:
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A woman approached and offered him an address for one the author's drinking buddies. So began a quest that has culminated in the news that, next month,
@vintagebooks
will republish “Caliban Shrieks” for the first time in more than eighty years:
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White supremacist groups target young male video game fans on the internet in the same way they targeted young male football fans in the '70-80s. The hooliganism -- the slurs, mobbings, and racial violence -- has just moved from the stands to the forums.
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Absolutely beyond fed up with this journalistic complicity.
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Excited to share with you a new audio project, 'My Perfect Console', a series of interviews with interesting people from video games, film, music and comedy. Each week I ask a guest to pick the five video games they want to immortalise on their very own fictional console.
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imo, the Monopoly film Margot Robbie should be making is a biopic of the game's inventor, Lizzie Magie, who, after the game was taken from her, recorded her vocation in the US census as “maker of games” and her annual income as “$0”:
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I spoke to Bryan Lee O’Malley, creator of Scott Pilgrim, about quitting college to live with artists he met online, how Edgar Wright asked to adapt the graphic novels before most of the story was written, and the creative impact of a having a huge hit.
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The Last Guardian's Fumito Ueda once had a fistfight on Sony's rooftop that left him with lifelong neck pain:
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I spoke to
@RonanFarrow
, the investigative reporter who, throughout his life, has been drawn to video games as places to exercise his interest in—and talent for—unravelling mysteries:
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This seemingly disproportionate response s more understandable when you consider the relationship between Tencent and the Chinese government. Last year, while reporting on Tencent's moves to dominate the Chinese PC games market, a developer told me the following:
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are you absolutely certain that saying’s yours, sonic the hedgehog?
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"We cannot guarantee interesting video games just through the use of better technology." Hiroshi Yamauchi, 1927-2013
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So after all the Troy crowing about Corybn's IRA links, they've made a deal with a party supported by voter-threatening paramilitaries?
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That lucky shot you made in Peggle? May not have been so lucky after all. How game designers fake luck to flatter:
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Game of Thrones death threats for unruly Belgian schoolchildren (Via
@aliceingameland
) -
http://t.co/gUZNvfyOEb
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The full transcript of my recent interview with
@fumito_ueda
, on his childhood, his art, his injury and his legacy:
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gamers: “pls remove these women from my period war game their presence is ahistoric”
Women of World War 2:
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Spent the day with a 99-year-old lady, still so bright and so witty, who told me she hopes she dies at some point this year because going at 99 feels “romantic”, while going at a 100 would be “common.”
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This story, about the trail of a matryoshka-style chain of cowardly, subcontracting hitmen, reads like farce:
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Thanks for the plug, er, hideo kojima!
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"A Game of Birds and Wolves" by Simon Parkin. The little bird-like girls of the Women's Royal Naval Service; an illustrated exercise (wargame) to predict the wolfpack of U-boats.
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I spoke to Yoshinori Kitase, producer of
@finalfantasyvii
, about the challenge of holding an artistic vision when faced with millions of conflicting opinions, his choice to remain at
@SquareEnix
after the departure of his friend and mentor, Hironobu Sakaguchi, and the comic book…
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ah yes, TLOU2, the extended parable on the futility of pursuing reprisals
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I spoke to
@kelslewin
, co-director if the
@GameHistoryOrg
, about rifling through boxes in people’s attics in search of video game treasure, preservation work that once helped Disney out of a tight spot when it came to re-releasing some lost titles:
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Spoke to a university student today who was three-years-old when Halo 1 came out. Then a gust of wind carried me away as a cloud of actual dust.
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extra-terrestrial: hm I wonder how the humans are getting on fixing the imminent extinction of their species via a self-inflicted climate death-blow?
humans:
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