One of the formative figures of video games is Tomohiro Nishikado. Known for creating the arcade game smash hit Space Invaders, I caught up with him about his long and storied career.

“I was born in Osaka, in a place called Kishiwada, and I spent most of my young life there until I moved to Tokyo when I was 18, when I went to university. My father ran a business related to the making and maintenance of craftsmen's tools. So when I was growing up, I could always find spare materials and tools to make things.

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If you've ever been lucky enough to visit the historic UK city of York, then there's a good chance you've visited the excellent Sore Thumb Retro Games, an independent store packed to the rafters with video games, anime products, vintage toys and much, much more.

As a regular visitor to the city, I've been popping in multiple times each year and on a recent trip, store owner Lee Cunningham mentioned that Sore Thumb is getting its very own video game—and if that wasn't cool enough, it's been coded by the 13-year-old David Carter.

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In December 1996, Sony Computer Entertainment published the video game PaRappa the Rapper in Japan – a groundbreaking title about a paper-thin rapping dog on a quest to win the heart of his beloved (a humanoid flower named Sunny Funny).

Developed by NanaOn-Sha – a game company that was founded several years earlier by the Japanese pop star Masaya Matsuura (of the band Psy•s) – the title went on to become a worldwide sleeper hit and has since acquired a passionate fanbase thanks to its charming visuals (designed by the American artist and graphic designer Rodney Greenblat) and its memorable tunes featuring catchy lyrics about everything from learning karate (“Kick! Punch! It's all in the mind”) to needing the restroom.

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Jon Hare is a figure whose name is likely to conjure up warm nostalgic feelings in the hearts of many who grew up playing computer games in the UK in the '80s and '90s.

As one of the co-founders behind the influential software house Sensible Software, he helped design some of the best football games for home computers like Microprose Soccer, Sensible Soccer, and Sensible World of Soccer, as well as a bunch of other non-sports-related titles too, such as Parallax, Wizball, and Cannon Fodder.

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On February 25, 2025, it was announced that the Washington-based developer Monolith Productions would be closing its doors for good, causing a mass outpouring of grief from all corners of the games industry.

Since its formation back in 1994, the developer had built up a large and loyal following in the gaming community, thanks to its work on licensed games like Middle Earth: The Shadow of Mordor, Tron 2.0, and Alien Versus Predator 2, as well as classic first-person shooters like Blood, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, and F.E.A.R.

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The Segagaga director Tetsu "Tez" Okano has had an extraordinary but unconventional career in video games.

As a kid growing up in 1970s Japan, he fell in love with arcade games like Space Invaders and Galaxian but never initially considered that he would be able to make a career for himself in video games. As a result, he put his growing fascination with the burgeoning new industry to one side for a number of years, finishing his education and later going on to land a job with the Japanese publisher Kodansha as a manga artist contributing stories to "Morning" magazine between 1990 and 1991. Very quickly, though, as he has said in the past, he ended up discovering, that the occupation of an manga artist offered very little in the way of job security and decided that he should probably start looking for some more stable employment. Because of this, he soon found himself applying for a job at the arcade company Sega, which he claims was on the search for unusual talent at the time, eventually getting a job at Sega's AM Research & Development No. 3 in 1992.

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When WayForward and Limited Run Games announced that they were planning to resurrect the GBA classic Sigma Star Saga earlier this year for GBA, PC, and modern consoles, it attracted a lot of excitement online — especially among those who had previously played the game growing up.

20 years later, fans of the adventure RPG/shoot 'em-up hybrid were finally being given the perfect reason to revisit the beloved title from the developer of Shantae, with the team not only promising to bring the title to a wide range of platforms but fix a bunch of lingering issues and address decades of feedback.

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Those of you with a love of physical media and retro games will no doubt have heard of the name Limited Run.

Founded in 2015 by Josh Fairhurst and Douglas Bogart, the company started out publishing games created by Fairhurt's Mighty Rabbit studio before transitioning to distributing the titles of other companies. Since then, Limited Run has worked with some of the biggest names in the industry to help create unique physical releases for a wide range of modern and retro formats, and in 2022, the company was acquired by Embracer.

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Katsuya Terada is a Japanese illustrator and artist whose work has spanned many mediums over his impressive four-decade-long career.

Initially starting out in the world of advertising, following his graduation from Tokyo's Asagaya College of Art and Design, he has since gone on to contribute artwork to countless video games, films, TV shows, and manga, developing an art style that is a melting pot of different inspirations, drawing influence from classic manga, old Japanese film posters, and Franco-Belgian comics.

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Julian Rignall is one of the most famous and influential video game journalists of the '80s and '90s, having worked on magazines such as Zzap!64, CVG, Mean Machines and Nintendo Magazine System.

He would later help to establish IGN as one of the leading video game websites in the world, and has also worked for Walmart and GamePro during a career which spans five decades.

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Once upon a time, save data was immovable and untouchable; when you sold your game cartridge or its internal battery died, your precious progress was lost forever. However, in the modern era, save data is saved in the cloud, always accessible, even if you change consoles.

With emulation increasingly becoming one of the most convenient ways of playing classic games, many of us are grappling with the issue of managing and migrating our save data across multiple platforms, such as emulation handhelds, PCs and even smartphones. The problem is that this data isn't a one-and-done deal; different emulators create different save files, and managing them as you upgrade your equipment can be something of a nightmare.

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Back in the day, there were few games we played more on our Sega Mega Drive / Genesis than the 1991 title ToeJam & Earl and its 1993 sequel ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron.

A collaboration between the developer Johnson & Voorsanger Productions and the publisher Sega, the two games were undoubtedly some of the stranger family-friendly titles released for Sega's 16-bit console, focusing on a pair of funk-obsessed aliens as they embark on adventures filled with Looney-Tunes-esque slapstick humour and colourful and unconventional enemies.

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Taki Udon is one of the leading figures in the world of FPGA gaming, and he's achieved that position in a surprisingly rapid time. The reason? His MiSTer Pi project has shaken up the FPGA world by offering a truly affordable entry point for players, and his next project – which comes as part of his Retro Remakes line – could have even more impact.

Taki Udon is set to launch an FPGA console based on the PS1. While it will remain fully compatible with FPGA cores for other systems, the focus here will be offering a fresh take on Sony's classic system, and it will be compatible with PS1 controllers, memory cards and (via an optional dock) discs.

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Don't worry – you're not suffering from déjà vu. If you feel like you've read this before, it's because we're republishing some of our favourite features from the past year as part of our Best of 2024 celebrations. If this is new to you, then enjoy reading it for the first time! This piece was originally published on March 25th, 2024.

Jerry Momoda may not be a name that many modern Tekken fans are familiar with, but the former Namco US product manager played a huge part in launching the iconic fighting game in North America.

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Don't worry – you're not suffering from déjà vu. If you feel like you've read this before, it's because we're republishing some of our favourite features from the past year as part of our Best of 2024 celebrations. If this is new to you, then enjoy reading it for the first time! This piece was originally published on March 5th, 2024.

Digital Eclipse has made a name for itself over the last decade for delivering quality game collections like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection and 'interactive documentaries' like Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration and The Making of Karateka. So when it was recently announced that its next "Gold Master Series" project was primarily focused on the work of the game-making genius Jeff Minter, we couldn't help but pay close attention.

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Don't worry – you're not suffering from déjà vu. If you feel like you've read this before, it's because we're republishing some of our favourite features from the past year as part of our Best of 2024 celebrations. If this is new to you, then enjoy reading it for the first time! This piece was originally published on February 19th, 2024.

Hal Barwood has had a fascinating career. Not only did he pen the script for Steven Spielberg's first-ever motion picture film The Sugarland Express and the 1981 dark fantasy film Dragonslayer (along with his writing partner Matthew Robbins), but he has also had a fairly lengthy career at the video game company LucasArts where he was behind the creation of the 1992 point-and-click adventure Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and the 1999 3D action-exploration game Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.

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Don't worry – you're not suffering from déjà vu. If you feel like you've read this before, it's because we're republishing some of our favourite features from the past year as part of our Best of 2024 celebrations. If this is new to you, then enjoy reading it for the first time! This piece was originally published on February 6th, 2024.

In the mid-to-late '90s, the UK developer Perfect Entertainment partnered with the author Terry Pratchett to produce three games based on the writer's Discworld series of novels.

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Recently, we at Time Extension had the opportunity to interview the Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 3) composer Hiroki Kikuta, talking about his early influences, his work on the popular RPGs, and his approach to composing.

The legendary Japanese musician is an individual whose music we've admired for decades now and is someone who will probably need no introduction if you have an extensive knowledge of the role-playing genre. But for those who don't, it's probably best that we give a quick overview of his career before we dive deeper into our conversation, in the hopes that it may get across why he has become such a respected and admired artist in the field.

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Konami has given Contra a real boost lately via the release of Contra: Operation Galuga, and the famous run-and-gun franchise is getting more exposure thanks to an upcoming collaboration with Japanese studio Thirdverse's free-to-play VR hero shooter X8 called Contra: Super Wall Storm.

"As someone who grew up with the original Contra, this collaboration with Konami is incredibly special to me," Thirdverse VP Dax Berg tells Time Extension ahead of the December 12th launch. "I can still remember racing to my friend Jason’s house in middle school to play Contra co-op on his NES. Those moments defined a generation of gaming for me, and when Contra: Operation Galuga launched this year, I played it the day it came out, and I really thought it was an excellent modernization of the franchise."

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If you walk down the aisles of most toy stores today, you'll likely find no shortage of action figures based on video game characters: from toys modelled after Fortnite, Minecraft, and Five Nights at Freddy's to other perennial favourites like Mario & Sonic. But this wasn't always the case.

In the early to mid '90s, most toy manufacturers had yet to capitalize upon the explosive popularity of the medium, considering action figures based on video games to be just another novelty that wasn't worth the time and investment. This attitude quickly began to change, however, over just a few short years in the late '90s, when several companies (independently of one another) started to release their own lines based on some of the biggest titles in gaming, proving once and for all that kids didn't just want to play with their favourite video game characters on a screen, but occasionally wanted to unplug and concoct brand new scenarios that the developers had never imagined with their own private collection of figures.

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