Stories about legendary video game development

01

Spacewar!

MIT students in 1962 built the first true multiplayer game on a PDP-1 they were forbidden to use unsupervised — a $120,000 machine whose gravity physics were debugged by future computing legends at 3 a.m.

02

Atari video game burial

Designed in five and a half weeks by one man, 3.5 million unsold cartridges were buried under concrete in an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill — a corporate burial that became an urban legend confirmed by excavation in 2014.

03

Manic Miner

Matthew Smith coded Manic Miner alone at 17, released it in 1983, earned enough to vanish from society entirely — disappearing to Amsterdam for years before resurfacing at a 2002 retro convention, visibly rattled.

04

Mortal Kombat (1992 video game)

Ed Boon hid the fatality system inside Mortal Kombat's code as an undocumented secret, only revealing it after the arcade build was certified — his bosses at Midway never approved it before it hit machines.

05

Night Trap

In December 1993, Night Trap was held up in a US Senate hearing alongside Mortal Kombat; Senator Joe Lieberman called it filth, and within a year the ESRB existed, rating every game sold in America.

06

Earthbound

Shigesato Itoi — Japan's most beloved copywriter, not a game developer — wrote EarthBound's final boss sequence while suffering a breakdown, drawing from a childhood trauma of accidentally watching a murder film.

07

Doom (1993 video game)

id Software built Doom in a rented suite above a pizza shop in Mesquite, Texas, in 1993 — John Carmack's renderer was so fast it broke every benchmark tool the team tried to measure it with.

08

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

After playing his own game and feeling like a villain, Richard Garriott scrapped Ultima III's kill-everything model and invented a new goal: becoming a moral exemplar across eight virtues, with no final boss to slay.

09

Pac-Man (Atari 2600 video game)

Tod Frye had five weeks to port Pac-Man to the Atari 2600 — constrained to a 4KB cartridge — and shipped a version so degraded that 12 million units moved but consumer trust in Atari never recovered.

10

Ico

Fumito Ueda pinned a single photograph of a boy and girl holding hands to his office wall, then spent four years at Sony Japan building an entire game backward from that image — with no combat, no inventory, just the grip.