Video Games

SEGA Game Gear Turns 36 With a Color Screen That Drank Batteries

By Bill Smith October 6, 2026

SEGA shipped its first handheld in Japan on October 6, 1990, priced at ¥19,800 ($320 today) and built under the internal name Project Mercury. Hayao Nakayama had pushed the company to answer the Game Boy, which Nintendo had put on shelves the year before. Engineers reused the Master System’s Zilog Z80 running at about 3.5 MHz and the same Texas Instruments sound chip, then widened the color palette from 64 shades to 4,096. A 3.2-inch backlit screen, 160 by 144 pixels and able to show 32 colors at once, sat between grips shaped like a shrunken Genesis pad. Six AA batteries fed a cold-cathode fluorescent lamp behind the glass. Playtime landed between three and five hours. A Game Boy on four AAs could run past thirty.

DOOM on the Vectrex Draws a Glowing Hell on a Forty Year Old Screen

By Bill Smith October 6, 2026

Milton Bradley shipped the Vectrex in 1982 as a complete arcade cabinet small enough for a coffee table. A screen, a speaker, a joystick, and a cartridge slot arrived in one case. Games showed up as bright strokes rather than blocks of color. Mine Storm, the pack-in, looked related to Asteroids because both were drawn the same way: an electron beam steered across phosphor, switched on for a line, switched off for the jump to the next point. Forty-four years later, footage of DOOM running on that same tube has been passing around, and the corridors of the first episode are still recognizable once the walls become thin glowing strokes.

Nineteen Years Later, The Simpsons Game Finally Runs Natively on PC

By Bill Smith October 4, 2026

Electronic Arts shipped The Simpsons Game in 2007 across the Nintendo DS, Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and PSP, and never put a copy on a personal computer. Nearly two decades on, a solo developer going by YesterMester has rebuilt the Xbox 360 version so its own code runs on Windows, Linux, and Steam Deck. Version 0.0.6.2 of The Simpsons Game Recompiled landed on GitHub in early October 2026, and it already boots, plays its videos, saves, loads, and runs its levels.

ClearTunes Sold Prisoners a See Through Handheld and Fifty Unlicensed Games

By Bill Smith October 3, 2026

Eternal Electronics spent a while looking for a ClearTunes handheld before one finally reached the bench. Commissary sheets from the early 2010s listed it next to socks and typewriters, a small plastic game machine built for jails and prisons rather than a store shelf. ClearTunes already supplied those facilities with radios, alarm clocks, and flat televisions, every one of them sealed in a shell you can see straight through.

GPT-6 Astra Clears World of Warcraft Orc Quests Without Ever Seeing the Screen

By Bill Smith October 3, 2026

OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra finished every quest in World of Warcraft’s orc starting area in 40 minutes and never died once. A level 1 orc walked out of the Valley of Trials and into Sen’jin Village with the full list checked off, and the model never looked at a single frame of the game. The run sits on a private server, driven by the open-source agent-wow client, and the whole job began as one line typed into Codex.

GoldenEye 007 Plus Finally Brings James Bond Into Full View

By Bill Smith October 3, 2026

Joshua-1248 spent the late stretch of September pushing a public snapshot of GoldenEye 007 Plus, a fork of the fully decompiled Nintendo 64 source that can place James Bond on screen for an entire mission. Footage from Graslu00, shot on an Analogue 3D and confirmed to run on original hardware, walks Silo, Bunker I, and Surface I with the camera sitting behind Bond instead of inside his eyes.

Gamer’s GCVHS Project Brings Night Trap, Mario, and DOOM to a VHS Tape

By Bill Smith October 3, 2026

Throaty Mumbo already spent an hour proving a vinyl record can cough up a SEGA game if you are patient enough and a little mean to the format. His follow-up, posted as Can We Port Video Games to VHS?, asks the meaner question. A cassette is linear. A videotape is also linear, except it also carries a moving picture, two audio tracks, and a deck that can be told to wind forward or back. GCVHS is his attempt to turn that mess into a console.

Super Mario Bros Wonder Is Playing on Windows as Rebuilt Native Code

By Bill Smith October 2, 2026

A laptop with an RTX 3050 is running Super Mario Bros. Wonder as a Windows program, and a clip from a developer called Belmante is the clearest look yet at how far that work has come. World 1-1 plays at close to 60 frames a second. Menus, character select, the opening cutscene, and the world map all line up with an earlier Mac build of the same project. Sound comes through the game’s own audio path, routed on Windows through XAudio2.

Pinball Machine 2.0 Builds a Full Desk Game From 3D-Printed Square Tiles

By Bill Smith October 2, 2026

Steven at 3D Printer Academy spent close to a year tearing up his own desktop pinball machine and starting over. The first one, sold as file packs after a spring Kickstarter that drew about 1,500 backers and roughly $120,000, already proved a strange point. A playable pinball table can come off a normal home printer, run with no wires, and live on a desk. Version 2.0, shown in his latest build video and lined up for a new Kickstarter, treats that first machine as a draft with real limits.

Drum Machina Go Puts a Four Voice Drum Machine Inside a 1989 Game Boy

By Bill Smith October 1, 2026

Nintendo shipped the original Game Boy in 1989 with a sound chip small enough to live on batteries for hours, and that same chip is now running a full drum machine. Drum Machina Go!, shortened to DMGo!, treats those four voices as a step sequencer you can carry in a coat pocket. Two of them are pulse waves, the square tones behind so many early game soundtracks. One is a programmable waveform. The last is noise, the hiss and crackle that usually stands in for explosions and static.