Gaming

With a rather positive launch and a relatively large community, Nexon’s new title is off to a good start. The First Descendant is a third-person action title with looter shooter mechanics and online cooperative PvE gameplay. Players will have various skills and weapons to use against a well-developed variety of enemies. 

However, many users are complaining about something basic that happens at the beginning of the game once the player opens it. The community, in general, hopes that the studio will fix this issue soon.

Promoted as a kind of direct competitor to Destiny 2, this title, where players must work together to defeat various powerful bosses, is gaining quite a bit of popularity. The First Descendant is a looter shooter that allows players to choose all kinds of characters and skills in order to defeat various enemies controlled by artificial intelligence. It is a free-to-play game that has a ton of microtransactions.

Despite receiving a generally positive reception at launch, the community is beginning to voice complaints about the initial issues this title presents. One of these issues is that when the user opens the game, the Nexon logo emits a loud sound that seems to annoy players.

The title “Nexon” screen needs a nerf. Way to loud.
byu/thatoneguyy22 inTheFirstDescendant

Users report that the elevated volume of this particular sound literally blows their ears out once the player opens the game. Seemingly, it’s just an incredibly annoying problem, that should hopefully be fixed soon.

This is something the studio can quickly fix without making it too loud. Games like Fortnite, which often surprise players with a rather loud ambient sound during the loading screen, also exhibit this type of issue.

Another obvious possibility is that players may directly lower the game’s volume, at least in this particular area, or adjust their sound system settings. The game has other, more important issues.

Reddit users quickly recalled the famous THX sound, which also had the effect of practically blowing your ears out, in response to this complaint. In general, while the game’s reception is positive, social media does not seem to be actively talking about this title. However, it still has many active players on the various platforms where it is available. This title could be more successful in the coming months.

The First Descendant is not Nexon’s first game as a service; this South Korean developer also launched Warhaven, which unfortunately did not have a favorable reception from players. This could be the studio’s opportunity to create a game that becomes quite popular and receives periodic content. The success of such a game is seen only several months after its release, when the number of active players can be verified.

What are your thoughts on this player’s complaint? Let us know in the comments!

• Lost in Play has seen its first-year anniversary arrive
• The game has been the recipient of two Apple awards
• It features a childlike odyssey filled with puzzle solving and exploration

Happy Juice Games’ Lost in Play, published by Snapbreak, is seeing in its first-year anniversary today. Winner of two Apple awards, for best iPad game in 2023 and a design award in 2024, Lost in Play features a childlike odyssey of discovery and puzzle-solving.

Lost in Play follows two siblings, Toto and Gal as they journey through a world of childlike imagination. One of Happy Juice’s key design points is their use of a simple hint system and clever design to make the game as quick-paced as possible and avoid the usual ‘pixel hunting’ elements of exploration games that Lost in Play emulates.

Happy Juice Games have definitely earned the awards and accolades that Lost in Play has been given. For our part, we contributed to this praise with our own review, with a Platinum score which is rare even for positive reviewers like us. In particular, we singled out the graphics and gameplay design as key points which drew us in.

Lost to the world

Two Apple awards, especially in consecutive years, are nothing to be sneezed at. So we’re pleased to see that Lost in Play is able to boast about it. For our part, we’re intrigued to see what Happy Juice Games comes out with next, if anything. And after the innovative approach they took with Lost in Play, our expectations are definitely high.

In the meantime if you’re looking for other top games that caught our eye, why not take a deep dive into our massive master list of the best mobile games this year (so far)?

Even better we’ve got the latest entry in our regular feature of the top five new mobile games to try this week, featuring some of the best titles to hit storefronts over the last seven days in a variety of genres.

After more than four years, the base-building, resource management sim Satisfactory got a surprise release date announcement on Friday, along with the reveal of an important feature: flushable toilets.

The short trailer shows a character having to go to the bathroom. They run and jump over obstacles before rushing into a toilet while another character stares at the camera. The release date for Satisfactory 1.0 is unveiled at the end: September 10.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming

“The HUB’s once-trivial toilet has been updated with an advanced flushing mechanism, providing an extra luxurious worker experience for pioneers,” a post on Steam reads. As a fan of flushable or interactable toilets in video games, this seems like a top, extremely important feature.

The PC game is also getting a ton of updates for the 1.0 release. First up, the map has gotten many new resource nodes (places throughout the world where you can use extractors to mine for resources), along with balance tweaks on the distribution of caterium, sulfur, quartz, iron, copper, limestone, coal, and water geysers. Secondly, the dedicated servers will receive more support, including advanced settings like auto save.

There are a ton of balance updates in general, with many aimedat helping players in the early and midgame. For example, some recipe costs have been changed to make it easier to reach higher tiers, like heavy modular frames and screws for computers. Moving between tiers has also been smoothed out, with a more gradual transition for research trees.

Of course, 1.0 will introduce more optimizations for game performance. As you play through Satisfactory and build out your factory, you’ll gather a lot of assets and moving parts, which can really strain your PC. This is a common problem with city builders and base builders like Cities Skylines, and the developers at Coffee Stain have worked to reduce performance issues.

The developers say more changes are incoming as well, so fans should be on the lookout for updates.

Satisfactory has hit it big on PC since it came out in June 2020 — just a few months into COVID-19 lockdowns. It sold over a 1 million copies in the month after launch, and 5.5 million as of February 2024.

Part of the reason for its four-year-long early access concerns a switch to Unreal Engine 5, which bumped up the minimum system requirements. There have also been long development times as the developers integrated certain features and ideas, like the priority power switch to help with power issues, according to an interview in PCGamesN.

Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t look down.

Waves the size of skyscrapers explode beneath me as I creep across a busted metal beam in the middle of the North Sea, suspended at the base of an oil rig that’s in the process of collapsing. I’m crawling swiftly but carefully, knees sliding on the wet metal and eyes locked on the platform in front of me. Don’t look down.

I look down. The cold sea is boiling just inches from my beam, white spray reaching up, threatening to pull me under miles of suffocating darkness and pressure. Fuck.

In Still Wakes the Deep, horror comes in multiple forms. Violent creatures stalk the walkways on thin, too-long limbs that burst from their bodies like snapping bungee cords. Human-sized pustules and bloody ribbons grow along the corridors, emitting a sickly cosmic glow. The ocean is an unrelenting threat, wailing beneath every step. And then there’s the Beira D oil rig itself, a massive and mazelike industrial platform supported by slender tension legs in the middle of a raging sea, groaning and tilting as it’s ripped apart from the inside. Each of these elements is deadly; each one manifests a unique brand of terror.

Still Wakes the Deep is a first-person horror game from The Chinese Room, the studio behind Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. The game is set in the winter of 1975 and its action is contained to the Beira D, a hulking metal maze that offers mystery, a growing familiarity and death at every turn. The rig is filled with a rich cast of characters from the British Isles, most of them Scottish. Players assume the role of Caz, an electrician on the rig whose best friend is Roy, the cook.

Still Wakes the Deep feels like a hit from the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, devoid of modern AAA bloat. It’s restrained like the original Dead Space, with a core loop that serves the narrative and vice versa. The mechanics steadily evolve without becoming repetitive or cumbersome. Its monsters are murderous but not overplayed. In Still Wakes the Deep, the horror is unrelenting but its source is constantly shifting — vicious eldritch beasts, the crumbling rig, the angry North Sea — and this diversity infuses the game with a buzzing tension until the breathtaking final scene.

The game is fully voice acted and its crew members are incredibly charming. An undercurrent of good-natured ribbing belies every interaction, and the dialogue is earnest and legitimately funny, even in life-or-death situations. This skillful sense of character development only makes the carnage more disturbing once the monsters board the Beira D.

After the oil rig drills through a mysterious substance deep in the North Sea, a giant eldritch organism takes over the structure, crunching its metal corridors and infesting the bodies of some crew members. Caz is on a mission to survive the creatures and escape the rig — and help save Roy, whose body is fading fast because he can’t get to his insulin.

Gameplay in Still Wakes the Deep is traditional first-person horror fare, executed with elegance and expertise. The action involves leaping across broken platforms, balancing on thin ledges, running down corridors, climbing ladders, swimming through claustrophobic holes and hiding from monsters in vents and lockers. There are no guns on the Beira D, and Caz has just a screwdriver to help him break open locks and unscrew metal panels, placing the focus on pure survival rather than combat. Interactive materials tend to be highlighted in yellow, so it’s never a question of what to do or where to go, but rather how to get there without falling prey to the monsters, the sea or the rig.

Each input feels perfectly precise and responsive. Climbing a ladder, for instance, requires holding RT and pressing the analog stick in the proper direction — but if Caz slips, players need to suddenly press and hold LT as well, so he can regain his grasp in a quicktime event. In these moments of sudden panic, squeezing both triggers feels like the natural thing to do. It’s deeply satisfying to clasp the gamepad as tightly as Caz is holding the rungs of the ladder, player and character completely in sync in the aftermath of a sudden scare. Still Wakes the Deep is a prime example of intuitive game design.

It’s also just a gorgeous game. I stopped short multiple times while playing Still Wakes the Deep simply to admire the crisp lines, complex lighting and photorealism of specific scenes, but every frame is dense with thoughtful and well-rendered details. The otherworldly structures littering the rig cause Caz’s vision to bubble like a melting film reel, and multicolored circles overtake the screen every time he passes too close to a pustule — it’s disorienting and eerily pretty, much like the rest of the game.

Still Wakes the Deep is an instant horror classic. It’s filled with heart-pounding terror and laugh-out-loud dialogue, and it all takes place in a setting that’s rarely explored in interactive media. Amid the sneaking, swimming, running and climbing on the Beira D, Still Wakes the Deep manages to tell a heartfelt and powerful story about relationships and sacrifice. Caz and Roy have a special friendship, but they also have family back on shore and returning to these people — alive, ideally — is a constant driving force.

Still Wakes the Deep is available now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and it’s included in Game Pass. It’s developed by The Chinese Room and published by Secret Mode.

EA has announced that it will delist three Battlefield titles from the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 digital storefronts at the end of the month. 

On July 31, the PS3/Xbox 360 versions of Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4, and Battlefield: Hardline, along with their associated DLCs, will be removed from sale. Owners of these games will still be able to play their single-player content, but online support for these titles will end on November 7. The embedded announcement post on X also includes a link to an FAQ to answer additional questions about the sunsetting process. 

While the digital PS3/Xbox 360 versions of these games are going away, Battlefield 3 will still be available to purchase on PC. The same is true for Battlefield 4 and Hardline, and these two titles will also remain on sale for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The PC/PS4/Xbox One versions will remain unaffected by today’s updates.

It never feels good to see games get removed from sale like this. The reason likely has to do with EA sunsetting online support; it wouldn’t be right to continue selling games with popular online modes if that component doesn’t work anymore. For those still logging into Battlefield matches on PS3 and 360, you’ve got a few more months to enjoy the ride.

For more on Battlefield, you can learn about how the next entry is shaping up (which is being made with help by Dead Space remake developer Motive Studios) here. 

There was a time when there were a few games based on The Matrix movies, and they were even pretty good at times. Today, while video game adaptations are tougher to come by (although you can be Neo or Trinity in Fortnite), fans shouldn’t sleep on a tabletop opportunity to delve into the Matrix, with Upper Deck’s Legendary Encounters: The Matrix deckbuilding game, available on Amazon.

If you’re a tabletop or deckbuilding game fan but unfamiliar with the Legendary series, you’re missing out. They’re a series of cooperative games you can play solo or with friends where you battle against the deck, and they’re constructed really well to capture the feeling of venturing into the licensed worlds they’re trying to portray. The first Legendary game was a Marvel superheroes deckbuilder and has a ton of expansions, but I have the first Legendary Encounters, where the franchise expanded into movies with the Alien franchise. While that one seems to be out of print, the game manages to replicate the specific feel of the original Alien franchise, but with cards, and not only is it a fun and well-designed game, it’s genuinely pretty tense for a game you play with cards.

Legendary Encounters: The Matrix was released in 2023, and captures the same feel of the films and lets you join up with up to four other players, and includes characters like Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus, as well as villains such as Agent Smith and the Merovingian. The game is played not only with cards, but with a special playmat that dictates the flow of the game and makes learning it a little easier, as well.

There are actually a ton of Legendary Encounters games, dipping into lots of different media franchises–some of which are even a little unexpected. In addition to the Alien game (which I can’t recommend enough), there’s also an X-Files edition and a James Bond edition, which also has several expansions based on different movies. Check out the list below, and find more on Amazon.

And if the Matrix deckbuilding game inspires a rewatch of the film series, you can buy the four-film collection on 4K Blu-ray for $60.

Best Legendary Encounters Deckbuilding Game Deals

Updated July 4, 2024: We added a new code!

Admin RNG offers a virtual playground where you can test all sorts of commands and roleplay as an admin of your very own server. Roll to unlock as many commands as you can and redeem Admin RNG codes to increase your chances of getting the best in-game commands!

• INVITE – Super Spin (New)
• UPDATE1111 – 2 Super Spins
• 6KLIKES – Super Spin
• 3kLikes! – Luck Potion

Related: Dungeon RNG codes and Unknown RNG codes

By following our guide below, you’ll redeem your Admin RNG codes in less than a minute:

• Join the Admin RNG Roblox group.
• Launch Admin RNG on Roblox.
• Click the cogwheel icon (1) on the left to open the settings menu.
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Get the latest Admin RNG codes by bookmarking this page and checking back every day. We’ll add new codes as soon as they appear so that you can redeem them right away.

In The First Descendant, there’s a whole encyclopedia’s worth of materials in the game. They all have their uses, but the Ceramic Composite takes the cake. It is one of the most sought-after materials in the game, and here’s how to get Ceramic Composites in The First Descendant.

Ceramic Composites drops from only one location, the White-night Gulch. It is quite far in the main mission chain, so you must progress until you unlock the area. Once you have unlocked the White-night Gulch, you can find Ceramic Composites through the following methods:

• White-night Gulch (Normal and Hard) – Resource Boxes
• White-night Gulch (Normal and Hard) – Munition

These are quite specific, but these Resources Boxes and Munition Capsules spawn all over the area. Munitions spawn near cliffs, obstacles, and terrains, so you must look to the sides when searching for them. Resources Boxes are quite random, but you can easily spot them as these bright orange boxes. Once you find them, you can shoot or smash them with a melee attack.

Munition and Resource Boxes don’t always contain Ceramic Composites. From experience, you might get more Flectorite than Ceramic Composites. However, they seem to have the same rarity, so it might just be based on luck. If you need thousands of Ceramic Composites, you’ll spend hours running around White-night Gulch. On the bright side, you’ll get some Flectorite and other materials while farming.

These Ceramic Composites are used in several crafts or research. The extensive list of recipes is included in the table below.

Several of these items are highly wanted crafts, especially the Ultimate versions of the skins. Even the popular Ultimate Bunny skin needs Ceramic Composites to craft. I would suggest doing other activities in the White-night Gulch, so at least you are hitting two birds with one stone. You can unlock the Special Operations, and the Munition and Resource Boxes will still spawn in the Operation. You’ll also get some Amorphous Material Patterns through this farming strategy to get more materials.

Introduction

Few types of media hook me like a good documentary. The genre uses the best elements of traditional filmmaking to amplify what will always be the greatest story ever told: reality. Whether it’s an educational look at the natural world, a gripping true crime tale, or an enlightening biography of a noteworthy figure, the best documentaries manage to educate as effectively as they entertain.

The video games industry is now old enough to have been subjected to its fair share of documentaries, from The King of Kong to Indie Game: The Movie to Netflix’s High Score. But no matter how good they are, they all generate a tough-to-pin-down anxiety in me I never consciously noticed until recently: By the time the film ends, or, more often, in the middle of it, I just want to stop watching and play the games in question.

It’s a frustration shared by Chris Kohler, the editorial director at Digital Eclipse. And it’s one of the reasons why he enjoys working on the studio’s Gold Master Series. Essentially the gaming equivalent of the Criterion Collection, it consists of two titles, The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. Each game takes players on a playable history lesson of its subjects, be it a single game, a creator, or an entire studio. The result is a new genre Digital Eclipse can call its own: the interactive documentary.

Digital Eclipse’s neon-lit arcade

Built On Preservation

Built On Preservation

Digital Eclipse has led the charge in commercial video game emulation since its early years. Founded in 1992 as Williams Digital Arcade, it specialized in creating arcade-accurate console ports of classic arcade titles via emulation at a time when this was mainly accomplished by replicating an arcade game’s code from scratch.

“It was if you went and bought The Godfather on VHS, and it was just new people trying to recreate the version of The Godfather that was on film instead of somebody coming up with technology that would allow you to take a filmstrip and get that information onto a Blu-ray or DVD or whatever it is,” Kohler explains.

Digital Eclipse is a pioneer in commercial emulation. While the studio’s methods equated to a more enjoyable gaming experience, it also served as an early example of game preservation. Kohler says the company was essentially built on the need to pay retro games the proper respect.

Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration

The 2000s saw the company undergo a complicated period of mergers and rebrands before reemerging in 2015 as Digital Eclipse once more. This saw the studio shift its focus back towards preservation in the form of retro game compilations such as the Mega Man Legacy Collection, Disney Afternoon Collection, and Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. These titles included bonus features such as long-lost concept art and other development and marketing materials that, with each release, gradually grew from being a sideshow to almost the main attraction.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, released in 2022, is perhaps the most impressive of these game bundles. In addition to packing in 13 old-school TMNT games, it boasts an exhaustive number of forgotten materials such as original magazine ads, scans of the original game boxes and manuals, comic book covers, and never-before-seen concept art. For ’80s babies, they weren’t just revisiting old TMNT games; they were reliving the franchises’ early pop-culture boom while getting a behind-the-scenes look at how these games were brought to life.

While retro collections help keep old games alive, Kohler says they only offer the “What” of a game’s overall history. They don’t provide the “Who,” “Where,” “How,” and, most importantly, the “Why.” To fill those gaps, Digital Eclipse needed a fresh approach.

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Creating A Genre

Creating A Genre

Kohler joined Digital Eclipse in July 2020. At the time, the company had licensed the Karateka IP from creator Jordan Mechner to create a new retro collection of sorts. Unlike its previous projects, Digital Eclipse had full control over the Karateka game’s direction since the studio didn’t have to work with a publisher. The Karateka title became Kohler’s first major project, and the team also gained access to years’ worth of Mechner’s personal materials. These included his journals documenting his daily life while developing Karateka, design documents, publisher correspondences, and more. As Kohler pored over decades-old legal negotiations and Mechner’s written insights into creating Karateka and other games, he and the team saw the potential to tell Karateka’s story in a new fashion.

“And just realizing that there was this incredible narrative behind this game, and because we had Jordanʼs journals where he was writing down day by day everything that was happening in his life as he was creating this game, we could really go far beyond the idea of the retro collection,” says Kohler. “We could really tell this in a narrative way, and the story itself can become the main event, as it were.”

The Making of Karateka

The seed for the interactive documentary had been sewn, and the team began brainstorming. What if they could tell a linear story that takes players down the complete timeline of a game’s development? Better yet, what if players could play not only the finished product but also its various prototypes?

It was around this time that Digital Eclipse began a partnership with Atari to create a title celebrating the companyʼs 50th anniversary. Coincidentally, Atari wanted something different than the average retro collection, and Digital Eclipse saw this as the perfect opportunity to implement its nascent documentary game concept. The idea that was originally envisioned for The Making of Karateka would make its debut in Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection.

In addition to conducting a staggering amount of research, Digital Eclipse filmed interviews with former Atari employees and industry luminaries. Perhaps most impressively, it included over 100 playable Atari games, from the iconic to the forgotten, via emulation. The result was a robust story of Atari’s founding and golden age told through linear timelines divided by chapters. Players read informative blurbs, viewed development documents and other key materials, watched documentary clips, and, of course, played the games that define a generation. As a bonus, it had even developed modern reimaginings of select titles.

Digital Eclipse CSO and Head of Publishing Justin Bailey summons Karateka’s dreaded hawk at the Portland Retro Expo

The result was a resounding success. Atari 50 earned widespread acclaim as one of the most complete and well-made video game compilations ever created. It also worked as a successful proof-of-concept for the fledgling interactive documentary concept.

“By taking that all the way to the finish line, we were able to kind of work out the structure and the format,” says Kohler. “And as weʼre kind of getting towards the end of Atari 50, it was like, ‘Okay, now itʼs time to take all these learnings that weʼve had by finishing out Atari 50 and then revisit that back on to Karateka.’”

By this time, Digital Eclipse had also signed on with famed UK developer Jeff Minter, creator of hits such as Gridrunner and Tempest 2000, for a title documenting his studio, Llamasoft. Thanks to Atari 50, Digital Eclipse found a winning formula for telling more great stories from video game history. The Gold Master Series was born as a result, and The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft adhered to Atari 50’s blueprint to tell their respective stories and expand players’ appreciation for them.

Reshaping History

Reshaping History

“Nobodyʼs really doing what weʼre doing,” says Kohler. “And maybe for good reason. Maybe weʼre crazy, but weʼre doing our best to try to figure out what this new type of video game is.”

The Gold Master Series team consists of former game journalists like Kohler and Dan Amrich, who handle the lion’s share of researching and crafting the resulting narratives. The games are made using the Eclipse Engine, proprietary software specially designed to easily ingest emulators, either licensed or developed in-house, to run several old games from a plethora of platforms. The Eclipse Engine is the secret sauce of the Gold Master Series, as its ability to juggle emulators alongside sound and video in a fast and responsive manner is the reason why navigating the games’ timelines feels smooth and snappy.

Of course, each game needs a central topic, and everyone at Digital Eclipse, as you might expect, has a personal wishlist of subjects. “Iʼm still waiting for that call from Shigeru Miyamoto,” says Kohler. “He has my number.” I found it hard to think that anyone could top Jordan Mechner. His absurdly meticulous note and record keeping (Kohler: “Nobody’s that organized! Who does that?!”) makes him the gold standard when it comes to providing enough reference material to fill a game. But Kohler tells me that so long as the subject is interesting/important, how much they choose to hold on to isn’t a prerequisite to be considered for a Gold Master Series game. If Digital Eclipse needs something, one way or another, they’ll find it. And whatever they gather will shape the game accordingly. Jeff Minter didn’t have as many design documents as Mechner, so Digital Eclipse leaned more into showing what the actual games looked like. Llamasoft includes models of the cassette tapes along with advertisements and reviews from UK gaming mags at the time. Some materials aren’t found until close to the end of production.

Atari 50, for example, had to be patched to include film footage recorded by a Berkeley University student of Atari back when the company was still called Syzygy. Essentially an amateur documentary capturing the birth of Atari, the footage vanished for decades. While the Atari Museum possessed a copy of the film, Digital Eclipse didn’t have the rights to use it. So, instead, the studio had to track down one of the students who made it, get their permission to use their footage, research the legal rights for its commercial use, and patch it into Atari 50 after it was already finalized. “We did so much legwork to get that little like, two, three minutes snippet of a film in this,” says Kohler.

Battlezone designer Owen Rubin at his controller-laden work station

That effort speaks to the length Digital Eclipse will go to ensure its interactive documentaries are as rich and comprehensive as possible. “We have not had a situation yet where weʼve wanted to tell a story and have not been able to find cool things to tell that story,” Kohler says. “So, I donʼt think we ever will. I think we can find the things.”

The closest comparison I offer for the Gold Master Series is they feel like modern museum exhibits. A museum attendee can breeze through exhibits, giving little more than cursory glances, and walk away with a basic understanding of the history lesson told. Conversely, they can read every card, press every button, and play every video to absorb more details. Kohler says Digital Eclipse wants the Gold Master Series to offer the same range of engagement and that either approach, no matter how shallow or deep, is perfectly okay.

Additionally, Digital Eclipse is always looking for ways to add interactivity beyond just playing an emulated game. One great example is The Making of Karateka’s rotoscope theater, where players can watch a short clip of the game while toggling each animation layer, almost like Photoshop filters. In fact, Kohler cites the rotoscope theater as an example of how Digital Eclipse has only scratched the surface of what the interactive documentary can evolve into. That leads to the million-dollar question: Does he consider these types of experiences to be true video games?

‘Yes, I think itʼs a video game,” Kohler explains. “I think itʼs a video game as much as [a] documentary film is a film. And I think that in the same way that filmmakers and film critics back in the ’70s kind of started looking at film and saying, ‘We should be talking about film by making films about film,’ we should be talking about video games by making video games about video games.”

Writing The Next Chapter

Writing The Next Chapter

Kohler says Digital Eclipse regularly receives feedback that players unfamiliar or unattached to the subject of the Gold Master Series are less willing to give them a shot. It’s a constant challenge to communicate that not only has Digital Eclipse made these games with such people in mind, but you’ll likely walk away with a newfound appreciation or even fandom for the games being discussed.

“I think it all goes back to the fact that video games are just such a new medium,” he says. “And weʼre only sort of just scratching the surface of what could be done with that interactive medium.”

Despite this, Kohler says he believes that if Digital Eclipse keeps doing the work, eventually, they’ll attract enough attention to break through to a wider audience. At the end of the day, he believes people do enjoy being educated, as evidenced by the popularity of more traditional documentary-style programs and podcasts. In his eyes, the Gold Master Series isn’t just about teaching – he refers to the term “edutainment” as being “tainted” – but also about bringing more nonfiction into the medium of video games.

The Making of Karateka exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The Gold Master Series titles have unintentionally been released at a cadence of one per year (Llamasoft in 2024, Karateka in 2023, and their spiritual predecessor Atari 50 in 2022). Kohler says not to expect this pattern to continue, but the team has various projects in the works. Atari’s acquisition of Digital Eclipse in the fall of 2023 has presumably provided a stronger financial safety net, so I only hope we have many more Gold Master Series games to come. And while Kohler is hopeful, he also doesn’t want Digital Eclipse to monopolize the genre. He hopes their work creates enough of a demand to inspire other studios to pursue similar projects.

“We should be telling our own stories,” he says. “We shouldnʼt be letting books and films or a Netflix series tell the stories of video games. We should be looking at that ourselves because itʼs all part of the video game industry needing to treat video games with more respect.”

This article originally appeared in Issue 366 of Game Informer