NES Tetris Unplayable?
Did you know there were THREE versions of Tetris for the NES? Most North American gamers only knew one, but Japan got a version first, and there’s a banned version Nintendo tried to erase from history. We’re breaking it all down at Time Rift Arcade, including the Japanese release with the most baffling control scheme […]
Pac-Man Was Designed for Women??
By the late 1970s, arcades had a bit of an identity problem. If you walked into one, you pretty much knew what you were going to get: waves of aliens, spaceships, explosions, and a whole lot of blinking lights. Games like Space Invaders were wildly popular, but they all followed the same formula: fast, aggressive, […]
Hack Made Space Invaders Possible
The Atari 2600 only had 128 bytes of RAM total… yet developers still managed to bring Space Invaders to the console. How? Instead of storing the position and state for every alien individually, programmers used a clever trick: they stored the position of just one alien and mathematically calculated the rest. The only thing they […]
