Collecting
How to Spot Fake and Reproduction Retro Games Before You Buy
How to tell original retro games from reproductions and counterfeits: labels, screws, shells, circuit boards, chips, weight, boxes and too-good-to-be-true deals.
Martin Calloway
Martin Calloway is the pen name of the small independent editorial team behind The Front Page Wire.
Console History
Sega vs. Nintendo: The 16-Bit Console War Explained
The Sega vs. Nintendo rivalry of the 16-bit era: Genesis Does What Nintendon't, Tom Kalinske's Sonic strategy, blast processing, Mortal Kombat and how it ended.
Landmark Games
Super Mario Bros. (1985): The History and Legacy of a Landmark Game
How Super Mario Bros. came together in 1985: Mario's arcade roots, Miyamoto and Tezuka's design, World 1-1 as a tutorial, Koji Kondo's music and its legacy.
Arcade Era
Pong and the Birth of Atari: How a Tennis Game Started an Industry
How Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney and Allan Alcorn turned a simple tennis game into Atari's first hit, plus the Odyssey patent fight and Home Pong.
Console History
The Nintendo Entertainment System: How the NES Revived Home Gaming
How Nintendo's Famicom became the NES: the 1983 Japanese launch, the VCR-style redesign, R.O.B. as a toy-store strategy, licensing rules and the launch games.
Preservation
Is Emulation Legal? What Copyright Law and Court Cases Actually Say
Emulators versus game files and BIOS code: what Sony v. Connectix and Sony v. Bleem decided, why sharing ROMs is infringement, and why backups are murky.
Collecting
How to Start Collecting Retro Games: A Practical Beginner’s Guide
A practical guide to starting a retro game collection: choosing a focus, where to buy, condition terms like loose and CIB, budgeting and beginner mistakes.
Arcade Era
The Golden Age of Arcade Games: How Coin-Op Machines Took Over the World
How Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and friends built the late-1970s arcade boom, why it faded, and how fighting games revived arcades.
Console History
The Video Game Crash of 1983: What Happened and Why It Mattered
Why the North American console market collapsed between 1983 and 1985, what caused it, and how the crash shaped Nintendo's careful launch of the NES.
Console History
Video Game Console Generations Explained: From the Odyssey to the Modern Era
How console generations are counted, from the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey to the PS5 and Switch 2, with the key machines and technical shifts of each era.