A livestream of a volcano in the Philippines captured a meteor crashing to Earth today. What are the odds?
Mayon Volcano, Location: Albay, Luzon, Philippines
Brothers Richard and David Darling made a hit BMX game for Mastertronic, but they still wanted much more. They set up their own budget games company, returning first to BMXs... and that was a pretty good beginning for Codemasters. New post on BMX Simulator: www.superchartisland.com/bmx-simulator
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From the exp. archive: revisiting Super Mario Bros. via Super Mario Bros. Deluxe on Game Boy Color in 2015, and remembering it's a masterpiece:
Harpo Marx, plugging "Harpo Speaks" as only he can, by gatecrashing his brother's gig on "You Bet Your Life". A textbook "put the leg in someone's hand" moment, doling out books willy-nilly, not a single scene left unstolen, out and done. I love that man dearly. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdFg...
Feud was really good fun and I spent a lot of time playing it although I apparently have a false memory of it being a two player game. Another great article from Super Chart Island.
A new blog post about the history of Nintendo in the UK. It's complicated, probably more complicated than the story of SEGA in the UK.
whereweretheynow.blogspot.com/2026/06/nint... #RetroGaming #RetroComputing #Nintendo
This is a great interview and the chat about The Macra Terror is fascinating. I'm really looking forwards to the main Missing Episodes discussion about The Macra Terror as well.
Brothers have been a recurring theme in the story of the popular games of the 1980s. As games slowly moved from being a thing mostly made by individual people to a thing mostly made by teams, havin…
A new blog post about Mikro-Gen. The Wally Week software house.
whereweretheynow.blogspot.com/2026/05/mikr...
#Amstrad #C64 #ZXSpectrum #RetroGaming #RetroComputing
Michael LaFrance
A really nice explanation of how tape loading worked. It was dead boring waiting for a game to load back in the day but now I'm surprised how relaxing those tape squawks can sound. It's like my version of white noise.
Gauntlet's 4-player dungeon action was a hit for Atari at the arcade, and U.S. Gold on home computers. Several similar games set off suggestions of copying. But when is a clone not a clone?
New post on Gauntlet, Dandy, Druid, a different Dandy, and more...
www.superchartisland.com/gauntlet
🇳🇿 NEW EPISODE! 🇳🇿
Neil Lambess joins Tim to discuss finding 🦁 The Lion 🦁 in 1999, memories of missing episodes on broadcast, and a school screening of The Macra Terror. But what happened to those films? 🦀 🎞️
A fascinating discussion! Shares much appreciated.
Link ⬇️
The August 1987 issue of Spectrum magazine Crash brought back an old feature “after almost three years in the cupboard”: the comparison test. The first one of these had been way back in the second …
In 1983, 16yo programmer John Pickford listed dislikes including "younger brothers who hog his computer". Four years on, John and his brother Ste designed a classic game about feuding wizard brothers which reached UK #1.
New post on Feud and the Pickford Brothers:
www.superchartisland.com/feud
How old school Tape Loading worked.
lemmings.info/how-tape-loa...
In 1983, Virgin Games paid £500 for a ZX Spectrum game called Ghost Town, a text adventure with some limited graphics and a gold rush setting. It was one of its programmer’s earliest published game…
