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Sunday Comics: Dead Island If you can steel yourself for a post-modern jumble of space exploration and robotic sing-song, Upside Down Cake’s “Star Strike” offers a neat walk through Atari antiquity. Some of these games certainly deserve the homage.
Futurama meets classic RPG Chrono Trigger in this great piece by artist Tom Preston.
It’s Wednesday night. You have no date, a two-litre bottle of Shasta, your all-Rush mixtape, and, now, this impossibly good Space Invaders clone built on Futurama’s epic “Raiders of the Lost Arcade” vignette from the third season of Futurama.
Last week a trademark was filed for Simpsons and Futurama creator Matt Groening’s Life in Hell comic strip for, among other things, a potential video game.
Writers from 15 televison sitcoms, including The Simpsons, Futurama and Family Guy, have signed on with Machinima.com to 15 original episodic comedy pilots for the online network using video games.
Continuing their look at Futurama’s obsession with gaming culture, Wired’s Chris Baker has today shed a little light on the story behind the naming of Dr. Zoidberg. Turns out series creator David X. Cohen was a gigantic nerd when he was younger, and loved playing arcade puzzler Qix. So much so that he went and coded his own Qix clone, and called it Zoid. And he loved Zoid so much that when Futurama needed a name for its alien doctor, he and Matt Groening settled on Zoidberg. So, there you go. Videogames & Futurama, Part 2: How Zoidberg Got His Name From a Game [Wired]
Wired’s Game|Life posted a fond tribute to Futurama’s ubergaming episode Raiders of the Lost Arcade. Most of the piece runs through the show’s various jokes (for instance, I never knew that Q*Bert had a line that, when played backwards, translates to “Where can a guy get some pants around here?”). David Cohen, co-creator of Futurama also reveals: I wrote ‘Raiders of the Lost Arcade…The origin of that idea was a whole movie about aliens invading earth in the exact pattern of Space Invaders. I had high hopes, but the feature idea got chopped down to five minutes.
While we love the episode, we’d also enjoy travelling to a parallel universe and seeing Cohen’s original vision on screen. Hit the link for an article that will make you dust off that Futurama DVD set for another go (just make sure you have a 2-liter of Shasta and a Rush mixtape in the ready). Video Games & Futurama: Part 1, Raiders of the Lost Arcade [gamelife]
