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Good morning, videogames. We did it. We made it through the first week of Brendy's paternity leave and Jank did not immediately crumble. Sure, you might save some empathy for Brendy and his partner, exhausted as they no doubt are, but Jonty and I are the true casualties here. We are the Timon and Pumbaa of Jank, our trio's down to two, and the blog won't fill itself. Let's lift the log of the internet and see if we can find some slimy yet satisfying writing about videogames underneath.

I remember following the Nakatomi Plaza mod for Half-Life way back when, but had completely forgotten that it got turned into a full retail game, and had never connected that its developers went on to make the modern MechWarriors. Rick Lane tells the story for PC Gamer, which includes plenty of twists and turns.

Holtslander, however, says that he called Fox Interactive, and that the plan was not to persuade them to let the modders make a Die Hard game, but simply to allow them to use the assets they'd created to make something else. "I got connected to somebody there and I started my

Good morning, videogames. I'm a few hours late posting this today because, frankly, I was too tired last night to face putting it together. I am doing it now, on Sunday, squeezed between familial appointments. You may be doing similarly as you read this, a collection of fine writing about videogames from across the past week.

Over at Ars Technica, Kyle Orland spoke to some of the players who bought into and lost money on Legacy, Molyneux and 22cans' short-lived web3 game.

In addition to Molyneux’s usual game design bluster, though, was a newfound enthusiasm for the idea of making money from simply playing a game. “And because it’s a blockchain game, you earn,” Molyneux said at Galaverse, leaning on the last word for emphasis. “For a game designer, imagine how exciting it is to know that a game design that you’ve been working on, people will be earning money with it!”

MindsEye developers Build A Rocket Boy said that the game's DLC would contain real "evidence" of sabotage committed against them and their game. For Polygon, Giovanni Colantonio went looking.

Like MindsEye itself, all of this is painfully stupid. Blacklisted is a petty

Good morning, videogames. Sometimes, especially in the quiet weeks, I'll include articles in The Lie-In that aren't exemplary works of prose, but which I still hope have some broader worthwhile point or which might generate an interesting discussion. All the same, let's see if I can manage to avoid accidentally linking to something AI-generated this week, eh?

Abram Buehner laments people playing Tomodachi Life for the benefit of the algorithm rather than for their friends. I'm not sure I believe there's any wrong way to play Nintendo's madlibs 'em up, but this is about a subculture that otherwise hasn't come across my social media feed.

That didn’t go over well. The breathless replies argued that to put your real friends into the game was to cross a social boundary, to subject them to the vulgar, wild sandbox of Living the Dream. Of course, I’m paraphrasing, since the actual replies were more along the lines of “I’m not putting my IRL friends into the yaoi simulator lmao.” To believe this is to assume Tomodachi Life must be a site of depravity, and that your loved ones are undoubtedly sucked

Good morning, videogames. I read less than normal this past week, which I will pin on my being busy, but I still have several worthy articles for you. And then I reached deep into the recesses of my memory to hoist out something old and forgotten, alongside a little sermon. Read on.

I wrote something recently - here, I guess? - about loving Gamespy's pre-release developer diaries for the original Black & White, which were written by the team themselves. For Eurogamer, Lewis Gordon interviewed some of those original developers about the creation of the game's creature AI. I would not trust Molyneux's self-mythology, and yet I delight in reading anything about this particular game. A conundrum.

The creature, which set Evans on a trajectory from the Lionhead office in Guildford to the rarefied corridors of Google DeepMind in London, began as just a few simple scribblings by Molyneux on a piece of A4 paper. "I thought, let's do a game with an AI agent in it," says Molyneux, toking intermittently on a vape from the office of his current studio, 22Cans. "We wanted to explore the idea of morality, and focus that morality through this