The head of the company’s gaming subscription service explains its priorities as it anticipates the Vision Pro revolution, and tries to bring originality to a market still dominated by free to play mobile titles When Apple launched its games subscription service, Arcade, in September 2019, it drew a huge amount of attention – as with everything the company does. Offering 100 premium (ie, not ad-infested) mobile games for a monthly subscription fee of £4.99/$4.99 (now £6.99), and the promise of more titles to come, it was an attempt to bring the Netflix business model to gaming. It offered an a ..read more

The handheld console introduced millions to the joy of video games, and remains one of the best-selling consoles ever On April 21, 1989, Nintendo released a chunky grey game-playing rectangle to stores in Japan. It’s fair to say that nobody expected much of it. Internally, at Nintendo’s Kyoto HQ, the portable console was reportedly not a well-loved project. But within two weeks, it had sold out its entire 300,000-unit initial run. The Game Boy would arrive later that year in the US, and across the rest of the world over the next couple of years. Everywhere it went, it proved just as popular. T ..read more

As the show becomes a global hit and is renewed for a second season, experts say game adaptations are the new superhero movies In the first few days of its release, Fallout – the Prime Video adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game franchise – has become a hit with global audiences, shooting to the top of the UK chart and ranking among Prime’s top three most-watched titles ever. On Friday, just a week after the show debuted in more than 240 countries and territories, Amazon announced it had renewed it for a second season. “The bar was high for lovers of this iconic video game and so far w ..read more

Todd Baker composed the soundtrack for the indie puzzler as he was living through the loss of his mother. On the series’ 10th anniversary, he reflects on the experience ‘The part where the mother and child are separated on a red mountain, in a level quite early on in the game where you have to get back to the mother and find her … I was completing the sound design and music for that in a hospital, right beside my mum when she was sleeping, recovering from open heart surgery.” Todd Baker pauses for a second. He is recalling the development process of 2017’s Monument Valley 2, an indie puzzler ..read more

In this week’s newsletter: Great game adaptations are increasingly high-budget fan-fiction, thanks to a generation of writers who actually understand games • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here I am a few episodes from the end of the series Fallout on Prime Video. It’s funny and gory, at times sentimental and at other times ridiculous. In other words, it’s just like the games, which veer between quiet, tragic moments exploring the vestiges of America, and being chased down a hill by irradiated scorpions because you’ve run out of ammo. Fallout’s ensemble cast – with ..read more

iPad/iPhone, Nintendo Switch (version tested), PC; Nerial/Devolver DigitalQuick-witted and hilarious, this madcap band tour/space caper is sold short by its premise You may remember the Reigns series from its excellent Game of Thrones tie-in: its signature is Tinder-esque card swiping, where you make snap decisions on what to say or do by flicking left or right, before watching the consequences unfold. After crash-landing on a random planet, you are roped in to joining an intergalactic rock band, which seems only fair as you just accidentally killed their guitarist with your out-of-control shi ..read more

Fourteen years in the making, this character-driven sci-fi tale is a wonder of technology and imagination so texturally convincing you’ll want to touch it Ticktock, ticktock. In the dripping confines of the Fedora 1, an aquatic space colony of exquisite retro-futuristic design, it’s not water but time that exerts an unmistakable pressure on inhabitants. A cataclysmic meteor looms on the horizon, threatening to wipe them all out. But this cast of lovably eccentric characters, including the titular Harold, hurry for no one, preferring to amble about their days while staring down the barrel of co ..read more

The director of the Fallout TV series and the director of the modern Fallout video games sit down together to talk about the audacity of video-game storytelling and hope in a post-apocalyptic wasteland If you had asked director Jonathan Nolan what his favourite film of the year was in the late 00s, more often than not he would have given you the name of a video game instead. “Having grown up with the entire history of the medium – I started playing Pong with my brother Chris many, many years ago – that was when games started to take on this level of audacity in their storytelling, their tone ..read more

Somerset House, London A world away from Fortnite and Call of Duty, the UK’s biggest festival of experimental games celebrates quirky one-offs and making it up as you go along Video game conventions are typically boisterous affairs, as thousands of visitors queue under a constellation of screens for the chance to play one of the hundreds of as-yet unreleased titles on display. Now in its 10th year, Somerset House’s Now Play This is to mainstream exhibitions what folk festivals are to raves. None of the experimental games presented here are destined to be advertised on the sides of buses, not l ..read more

An icon of millennials’ childhoods languished for nearly two decades. Now it’s attempting a comeback – banking on the fact that it hasn’t changed at all In the early 2000s, Olivia Packenham would get home from school, listen to the familiar sound of the dial up tone as her family computer connected to the internet, and navigate her AOL browser to the virtual gaming world of Neopets. Starting at the age of eight, Packenham played for years before losing interest when she was in high school. But in December 2023, after a nearly 15-year hiatus, she logged back on to neopets.com – and found the pe ..read more