In the classic situation comedy Gilligan’s Island, which deals with seven colorful castaways stranded on an island, there are two versions of the theme song. In the first version, five of the castaways are named, while two of them are filed away under the phrase “and the rest”. The actors playing The Professor and…

The ModRetro Chromatic, a new handheld device that plays all of the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges, will be hiding underneath many a Christmas tree this December, just like the original did back in 1989 with the OG version from Nintendo. While this version is closer to an update of the 1998…

  Having only seen the Pac-Man episode of Secret Level; it was hard to guess what to expect from the Mega Man short. The only real unifying principle of any episode of Secret Level is that engages with some kind of idea from the video game in question. As it turns out, the Mega Man…

Although I first began playing video games on my cousin’s Atari Pong in 1975 and on my friends’ Fairchild Channel F systems in 1976 (both my next-door neighbor and another buddy a mile away had a Channel F – crazy!), the first console I actually owned was a ColecoVision, which I received for Christmas in…

  There’s an old joke about Pac-Man and video games. Everybody knows that video games don’t really influence kids’ behavior. After all, if they were imitating Pac-Man, they’d just be chasing each other around dark mazes, popping pills and listening to repetitive music. Any sort of teleplay that tries to adapt Pac-Man, of course, runs…

Pinball is a hobby that spans generations; one that can bring individuals from all walks of life together. I recently rediscovered this when I innocently walked into the Frank Murray Community Center looking for a backgammon partner. Instead, I met Kelly Kaye, one of the center’s recreation leaders. She introduced me to her father, Keith…