Edge May 2023

Along with remarks such as “I still can’t believe you gave it five” (usually delivered quite late at night during a party at Develop, when barriers have lowered somewhat), one of the things we hear from game developers most often is: “I got my first job in the industry after replying to an advert in Edge!” And to be honest, even after all these times, we still get a buzz out of it. How could we not feel good about playing a tiny part in getting someone started in their dream career? It’s the kind of thing that surely motivates Leslie Benzies, formerly one of the linchpins at Rockstar Games, nowadays head of Build A Rocket Boy, a studio with some big ideas. Benzies is on a mission to create…

Everything you need to know about Apple TV+’s Tetris is in a single scene, roughly 20 minutes in. Bullet-Proof Software boss and Tetris licence holder Henk Rogers (played by Taron Egerton) is welcomed into the “inner sanctum” of Nintendo Of America’s Seattle headquarters by then- NOA president Minoru Arakawa (Ken Yamamura) and VP and company lawyer Howard Lincoln (Ben Miles). Rogers is presented with an NDA, and told: “Only ten other people in the world have seen what you’re about to see, and to be honest we don’t trust you.” As a veil lifts, the garrulous salesman is for once struck dumb. Then we see what he’s reacting to, the camera slowly zooming in on Super Mario Land’s title screen. “It’s called,” Lincoln says, pausing for effect, “the Game Boy.”…

Once upon a time, Yves Jacquier was a research engineer at CERN, working on the world’s largest particle detector as part of the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Since 2004, though, he has been at Ubisoft, rising through IT and production services to found La Forge: a crossdisciplinary R&D department with the goal of bridging the gap between academic research and videogame production. Where once we might have expected major game publishers to guard their technical innovations jealously, this is becoming increasingly common practice: Electronic Arts, for example, has its own equivalent called SEED. When La Forge was founded at Ubisoft Montreal in 2016, though, it was among the first of its kind. Last year, the publisher expanded La Forge, introducing teams to its offices in Toronto, Shanghai, Chengdu and Bordeaux.…

When we previously spoke to Denis ‘Remute’ Karimani, in E331, the Hamburg-based producer had just released Technoptimistic, a cartridge album made to play on a Mega Drive. A passionate collector of vintage consoles, videogames had already been an influence on Karimani’s music prior to this – including Play The Game, an album featuring 8- and 16bit themes for imaginary unreleased games – but the release of Technoptimistic was a turning point in his career, he says, from “a vanilla techno artist putting out vinyl records and digital downloads” to what he refers to as “Remute 2.0”. It’s perhaps the logical conclusion of his career to date, then, that he’s now made a game: Decoder, a visual novel based on the cult ’80s German cyberpunk film of the same name, itself…

An image of a dead giant, its flesh rotting and insides oozing out, might not scream ‘wholesome’, even if those insides do look like they’ve been piped out of icing. But the way Ian Zell explains his inspiration is really rather sweet: “Growing up in California, I’ve always loved tromping around in forests and finding interesting bugs, mushrooms, plants and old bones. The feeling of looking under a log or peeking into a hollow tree stump and spotting a rare bug or an old coyote skull is a really unique and strangely joyful feeling for me.” Nature, of course, doesn’t always divide neatly into ‘cute’ and ‘gross’, and that’s what Zell is trying to capture here, with a game he describes as “sort of like Minecraft mixed with the daycare…

“If you’re looking for formal pronouncements on ‘synergy’ and ‘human-centric solutions powering the future’ or whatever then I’m sorry, I can’t do it.” “When game studios patent things that would benefit games as a whole, they hold the entire industry back.” ”I’ve donated my fee to @RedCrossAU’s Ukraine Crisis Appeal to stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine.” “Whenever anyone tells me they plan to make a ‘triple-A’ open-world game with space travel, I try to remind them that Star Citizen has been in development for 13 years…”…