Curated playlist
Nintendo games
- Street Fighter Alpha 2Street Fighter Alpha 2 made its public debut at the February 1996 AOU show in Tokyo. It arrived less than a year after Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams, its direct predecessor. Among the new characters was Sakura, a face that had…
- Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (video game)Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire arrived on the Nintendo 64 on the 2nd of December 1996, three months after the console launched in North America. It put players in control of a character most Star Wars fans had never heard of: Dash…
- The Last StoryThe Last Story arrived on the Nintendo Wii in January 2011, carrying the weight of a question its creator had spent years trying to answer: what was he doing wrong? Hironobu Sakaguchi, the man who invented Final Fantasy, had watched his…
- Final Fantasy IIFinal Fantasy II launched on the 17th of December 1988, almost exactly one year after the original game, and Square's small team of around ten people had already decided it would be nothing like its predecessor. The first game had saved…
- Street Fighter IIStreet Fighter II arrived in arcades in 1991 and changed the way people played games in public spaces. By 1994, an estimated 25 million people in the United States alone had played it. That figure does not count Japan, Europe, or the rest…
- Final Fantasy (video game)Final Fantasy arrived in Japan in 1987 as a last-ditch effort by a company that nearly did not survive to publish it. Square was threatened with bankruptcy. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the game's creator, had privately decided he would quit the…
- Final Fantasy IVFinal Fantasy IV arrived in Japan in 1991, and with it came Cecil Harvey, a dark knight who steers warships through the sky for the Kingdom of Baron. The game opens not with a hero's triumph but with a crime: the Red Wings, Cecil's own…
- Final Fantasy VIFinal Fantasy VI arrived in Japanese homes on the 2nd of April, 1994, carrying a premise that broke from every rule the series had established. Where earlier installments placed players in medieval kingdoms, this game opened with…
- Space InvadersSpace Invaders arrived in Japanese arcades in July 1978, and within months the country was running out of places to put the machines. Pachinko parlors and bowling alleys were the first to adopt it when amusement arcade owners passed. Then…
- Bravely DefaultBravely Default arrived on the 11th of October 2012, on Nintendo 3DS shelves in Japan and promptly sold 141,529 units in its first week alone, with a sell-through rate above 85%. That debut was strikingly higher than the sales of its…