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Yesterday legendary game studio Volition, formerly known as Parallax, has closed their doors after 30 years. They were responsible for Descent, Red Faction, and of course Saints Row. We are grateful for the good times they gave us and for opening the code for the Descent series. There was hopes they would do this with their other older titles like Saints Row, but it seems this will sadly be unlikely. The community will once again remain the main spirit keeping these games alive. Feel free to check out our Descent or Descent II pages and play a couple rounds in their honor.

The existing game pages now have a Magazine features section.

These sections will be developing over time, but currently have been focused on issues of Computer Gaming World as those are incredibly well preserved over on The Internet Archive.

If you'd like to help out and add missing appearances, swing by our Chat and drop us a message.

While this isn’t purely video game related, we are sadden by the recent passing of Ryuichi Sakamoto. His death, along with his former bandmate Yukihiro Takahashi also passing earlier this year, is a giant loss to the music and video game world. YMO and Sakamoto’s solo work had a major influence on some of your favorite pop charts, video game and even movie soundtracks. Some say it was YMO, Kraftwerk, and even Bruce Haack we have to thank for inventing Electronic Music as we know it.

He will be greatly missed.

As archivists and preservationists ourselves, we found this quote from Sakamoto himself insightful, and it would be fitting to let him have the last word:

For the last 100 years, only a few organisations have dominated the music world and ripped off both fans and creators. But this is an exceptional circumstance that has only existed in the last century. It started at the end of the 19th century, so if we look at human history it is a very exceptional point.

In the old days people shared music, they didn’t care who made it; a song would be owned by a village and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now with the internet we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.

Here's one paragraph that sticks out and applies to the work we do here:

Every game should make sure they still work at some level without central server support. Even when not looking at end of life concerns, being able to work when the internet is down is valuable. If you can support some level of LAN play for a multiplayer game, the door is at least open for people to write proxies in the future. Supporting user-run servers as an option can actually save on hosting costs, and also opens up various community creative avenues.

You can read the full statement, with full context, here.