Thursday, May 24, 2012

1UP Has a Great Series of Retro-Themed Articles This Week (5/21-5/25)

In case you haven't checked in on the gaming news site 1UP recently, there have been changes afoot. Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Parish announced a couple of weeks ago that the site would be changing its focus. Instead of trying to keep up with the 24-hour gaming news cycle that the larger sites cover, 1UP is going to focus on writing more about the industry and the hobby itself, offering unique perspectives on gaming instead of just previews and reviews.

The shift in focus started this week, and there is some great stuff over on 1UP right now. This week's "cover story" for the site is a series of What If? articles, where they examine what might have happened if certain events in the history of gaming had turned out differently.  Here are links to a couple of my retro-themed favorites:

What If Third-Party Development Didn't Exist? takes a look at the Activision vs. Atari legal battle that led to the company being able to make games for the Atari 2600, as well as what might have happened had the decision went the other way;

What If Video Games Never Came Home? is a short video about what gaming might be like had home consoles never happened;

AND

Musings from the Public Domain paints a picture of a world where the "Mickey Mouse" copyright extension act never came into being.

Those are just a few of the great articles that have gone up over the past few days. You can head over to www.1up.com to read all of them, and I highly recommend you do.

Which system do you like best!?