May 31, 2026

Infinite Lives, 1997: Star Fox 64

Fly a series of sorties against impossible odds as an ace fighter pilot with a team of wingmen. It’s a cliched scenario that had been done in a hundred games. Even in three dimensions, as early as Star Wars (1983). But to match the cliche with another, it had never been done as well as this.

Star Fox 64 came bundled with a Rumble Pak, plugging into the N64 controller’s expansion slot to provide force feedback for the first time for a console game. That controller fit your grip like an inverse glove, despite its three-pronged awkwardness. It’s clearer how natural it felt if you compare it to PSX and Saturn controllers. And while your wingmen embodied broad, conveniently animal-coded archetypes, they were memorable, bantered with you as you rescued each other, and fully voiced. All of that combined to create the most immersive experience available on a home console.

Screenshot from Star Fox 64. Fox's starfighter Arwing hovers in the center of the screen over a lush green landscape representing Corneria. In a dialogue box that takes up the bottom of the screen, rabbit wingman Peppy advises Fox to do a barrel roll by pressing Z or R twice. Screenshot from Star Fox 64. Fox’s starfighter Arwing hovers in the center of the screen over a lush green landscape representing Corneria. In a dialogue box that takes up the bottom of the screen, rabbit wingman Peppy advises Fox to do a barrel roll by pressing Z or R twice.

Star Fox 64 wasn’t just an arcade-quality experience you could play at home. You could play through it once in two hours to see a complete story. Or you could dig a little deeper and find three different campaigns that hidden sub-goals took you between. Every level of each campaign also featured strict scoring thresholds that rewarded mastery with medals. It was a calculated echo of the score attacks that defined 1980s shooters.

Nintendo’s Kyoto EAD division created Star Fox 64, including producer Shigeru Miyamoto and composer Koji Kondo. Both industry legends also worked on Star Fox (1993) and would go on to make Ocarina of Time (1998).

One interesting thing Star Fox 64 did was retread its predecessor’s story. It covered the same story beats Star Fox did, but with a level of detail infeasible just four years earlier. Nintendo had actually done the same thing already. EarthBound (1994) retold the same story that Mother (1989) did. The Switch 2 Star Fox (2026) plans to do it again, fleshing out Fox’s origin story with yet more detail and improved gameplay.

Star Fox 64 sits firmly in the rail shooter genre. Rail shooters are games like shoot-em-ups, but you take a set path into the screen, as opposed to right or up. Some early genre influences include Tempest (1981), Space Harrier (1985), and Panzer Dragoon (1995). The genre lost favor after the 1990s, when technological advancements made it cheaper to offer free movement in 3D space. This century, rail shooters are mostly limited to genre mashups such as Rez (2001), Child of Eden (2011), and New Pokémon Snap (2021).

You could describe 1997 as video game series figuring out how they could work in 3D, now that Super Mario 64 (1996) had shown it could be done masterfully. Final Fantasy VII (1997) made the transition masterfully, while GoldenEye 007 (1997) drew in console gamers with a taste of Quake (1996) LAN parties. Contemporary reviews panned Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997) for sticking with outmoded 2D. Sony even declined to market it, concerned the game looked too old-fashioned for the PSX. We only consider it the best-looking game that year in retrospect.

May 21, 2026

blog

The word for the thing you’re reading right now, blog, is first found in 1999 as a clipping of weblog. Some 1999 usages render it as ‘blog to mark the contraction. In spite of the 2001 dot-com crash, the term spread as rapidly as the phenomenon. In 2004, blog was Merriam-Webster’s second ever word of the year. The year before, rival American Dialect Society had highlighted blog as the word “most likely to succeed”.

A person who writes blogs has also been called a blogger since 1999. Blogger.com provided free blog hosting from its 1999 founding through its 2003 acquisition by Google. The sociological concept blogosphere was coined to describe this burgeoning “intellectual cyberspace” in 2002. By analogy, vlog, short for “video log”, first appears in 2002. Vlogs didn’t take off until YouTube provided free video streaming from its 2005 founding through its 2006 acquisition by Google.

Weblog was first used as a word in 1998. Web here is short for World Wide Web, named by Tim Berners-Lee during its 1991 invention. In the 1980s, the virtual world was often called the ‘net (short for Internet (short for inter-network)). When describing cyberspace, 80s and 90s science fiction invented fictional terms suggestive of nets, like matrix, web, and grid. Berners-Lee’s chosen web carried on this tradition. [1]

Screencap from "Making a Stand", a 2005 episode of Arrested Development. A suited, bandanged Tobias, speaking to his lawyer Bob Loblaw and the camera, says the captioned line "Ah, of course. The Bob Loblaw Law Blog." Screencap from “Making a Stand”, a 2005 episode of Arrested Development. A suited, bandanged Tobias, speaking to his lawyer Bob Loblaw and the camera, says the captioned line “Ah, of course. The Bob Loblaw Law Blog.”

An alternate form of weave, web has been the term for the object a spider weaves since before English existed. In the 1880s, we first see webbing metaphorically referring to a woven net. The food web describing species interdependence is from the 1930s. The 1994 coinage webcam generalized from “camera you can view on the web” to any camera connected to a personal computer. This is like the generalization of the 2004 coinage podcast, except that while we still use the web, we do not still use iPods.

Meanwhile, we’re not actually sure where log comes from. Log and its sibling-or-twin clog both start appearing in the late 1300s to describe felled trees. One wild guess is that clog is an onomatopoeia for the sound that a tree makes when you fell it, with log a derived clipping or regionalism. Clog eventually lost its original meaning of “log” to its relative, but not before generalizing in the 1400s to also mean either “wooden shoe” or “log attached to a prisoner to impede escape”, like today’s metaphorical ball-and-chain. The “impedance” meaning generalized to anything that slowed something down in the 1500s, then specifically gunk that impedes the passage of something in the 1740s.

Unlike its relative, log kept its original meaning of “log” to this day. It also started referring to a piece of wood for measuring a ship’s speed in the 1570s. To gauge your speed on the open ocean without any landmarks, you would throw the log overboard, wait a short time, estimate how far away it was, and reel it back in. By 1700, the thing you would record all the measurements in was called a log book. In 1825, we start seeing logbook clipped to just log, now meaning “journal”. Influenced by subsequent work-related usages like work log, logsheet, and change log, late 1900s programmers often called their journals “logs”. Specifically, American programmer Jorn Barger used this sense when he called his public journal a “Web log” in 1997. As its URL included “weblog”, American designer Peter Merholz facetiously rebracketed it as “we blog” in 1999, coining the term blog.

[1] Uncertain about the difference between the web and the internet and too afraid to ask at this point? I got you. The internet is the invisible utility grid that connects every computer in the world to every other computer. The web is the portion of that grid that you can access with any web browser and the right URL or search term.

May 16, 2026

AV Club Classic – Tom Breihan’s The Popcorn Champs

For decades, the AV Club has fostered and hosted great entertainment journalism. So I find myself willing to forgive its organizational lapses. A recent annoyance is the removal of subcategories, making it difficult to read series that don’t have their own landing page.

As I compiled my list of inspirations for my Infinite Lives article series, which is half Tom Breihan by volume, I noticed how difficult it was to find his excellent 2019-2021 articles on the history of blockbusters, The Popcorn Champs. I also discovered The Avocado’s landing page addressing this problem with his earlier series A History of Violence. A small act of Internet archiving kindness that quietly makes the world a better place. Huh, that seems like something I could spend a little effort on too. So, without further ado:

The Popcorn Champs looks back at the highest grossing movie in America from every year since 1960. In tracing the evolution of blockbuster cinema, maybe we can answer a question Hollywood has been asking itself for more than a century: What do people want to see?

May 12, 2026

Infinite Lives, 1980: Rogue

Explore a deep dungeon of infinite possibilities where danger and treasure lurk around every corner. The dungeon is generated anew every time you play, so no two games will be the same. Discover troves of mysterious potions, scrolls, and wands that could be your salvation, or bear a horrible curse. The dangers are real enough to keep things tense. If you die in the game, your character is dead, with no undos, restore states, or load games. Time to roll up a new one.

Screenshot from Rogue, which uses white on black text to approximate a top-down view of a dungeon level. The player, marked with an @, stands in a room connected to other rooms through dark tunnels denoted #, beside a staircase indicated by a %. Screenshot from Rogue, which uses white on black text to approximate a top-down view of a dungeon level. The player, marked with an @, stands in a room connected to other rooms through dark tunnels denoted #, beside a staircase indicated by a %.

I have to confess, Rogue is the entry among these 50 I’m the least enthusiastic about. It was in fact popular and influential. Dennis Ritchie, co-inventor of Unix and C, joked that Rogue was the biggest waste of CPU cycles in history. But if you try to play it today, unlike its next-door neighbors Asteroids (1979) and Donkey Kong (1981), it’s difficult to learn and not very fun. Rogue’s distant descendant Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (2006) does everything it set out to do, but better, besides just being easier to pick up and play. And you don’t have to look far to find a direct descendant that’s less obtuse but still influential enough to establish its own subgenre, such as Diablo (1997), NetHack (1987), Mystery Dungeon (1993), or Spelunky (2008).

So why did I choose to write about Rogue over another video game from 1980? Consider my second choice, Pac-Man. I run into all of the same issues with Pac-Man. It’s hard to overstate how popular and influential it was. It singlehandedly got everyone making and playing maze games like Rally-X (1980) and chase games like Dig Dug (1982). But its bootleg romhack Ms. Pac-Man (1982) is both ubiquitous and better in every way. And I’m young enough that my introduction to the series as a kid was Jr. Pac-Man (1983). I’ve enjoyed my time with Pac-Man’s descendants, but the game itself leaves me lukewarm.

Going down the list of the games released in 1980, I run into a similar lack of direct experience. I’ve played 20 minutes of Zork. Maybe 20 minutes of Missile Command. A few enjoyable hours of Rally-X, but not enough to wax poetic about it. Heiankyo Alien, Adventure, and Mystery House are all notable, but I’ve only read about or watched playthroughs of them. All told, the two hours I’ve actually spent with Rogue combine with my passion for its successors to render it the best option regardless. This particular year really runs up against my one game a year constraint. Getting a sense of what was going on with video games in 1980 still probably outweighs my lukewarm opinion of Rogue itself.

It is, however, possible to overstate Rogue’s influence on video games. Because it pre-dates all its notable siblings, it’s easy to claim Rogue as the originator of game tropes like experience levels and magic items. But those all stem from its main influence, 1974 tabletop sensation Dungeons & Dragons. When its fellow D&D descendants Wizardry (1981), Ultima (1981), Might and Magic (1986), Dragon Quest (1986), or Final Fantasy (1987) used those tropes, they weren’t copying Rogue; they were copying D&D. Rogue considered D&D’s six attributes and concluded the only one worth modeling was strength. It has to settle for merely naming the roguelike (and later roguelite) genres in addition to its admittedly gigantic influence.

Rogue’s monochrome text graphics imply the only way to tell different enemies apart is which capital letter they are. So I leave you with Rogue’s complete 26-monster bestiary, lifted wholesale from the 1977 D&D Monster Manual: giant Ant, Bat, Centaur, Dragon, floating Eye, violet Fungi, Gnome, Hobgoblin, Invisible stalker, Jackal, Kobold, Leprechaun, Mimic, Nymph, Orc, Purple worm, Quasit, Rust monster, Snake, Troll, Umber hulk, Vampire, Wraith, Xorn, Yeti, Zombie.

May 7, 2026

tycoon

The business magnate tycoon is first seen in 1857 as a transliteration of the Japanese honorific 大君 (taikun). It was a term of respect for the shogun of Japan, indicating that while he was neither the emperor, nor of imperial lineage, he was nonetheless the head of state. In 1861, US Cabinet members started jokingly referring to President Lincoln as the Tycoon. Tycoon’s meaning generalized to any important person in business during the late 1800s.

大君 has an exceptionally long history. It was the Japanese shogun’s diplomatic title for over 250 years, until the shogunate’s dissolution in 1868. Tokugawa Hidetada, the shogun from 1605-1623, first chose the title as a rebuke to Chinese imperialism. For over a thousand years, East Asian rulers had deferred to China under the custom of 外王内帝, “Emperor at home, king abroad”. Under this system, domestically rulers could style themselves 帝 (dì), meaning “emperor”, but internationally they had to be called 王 (wáng), meaning “king”, in deference to the Emperor of China (皇帝) ruling above them all. Tokugawa chose to be called “not emperor” to thumb his nose at the practice, while not actually asking to be crushed by the Ming military.

Japanese Empress Kogyoku (ruling 642-661) was the first recorded monarch to use the title 大君 over the customary 天皇 (tennō), signifying that she was not a direct descendant of the legendary emperors. This echoes the title’s c. 800 BCE usage in the 易經 (I Ching; Yijing in modern transliteration), also denoting a ruler without any imperial lineage.

1863 photo of Abraham Lincoln. The iconic black-and-white photograph features Lincoln staring directly at the camera. The texture of his skin looks strangely overemphasized, typical of many photos from the 1860s. 1863 photo of Abraham Lincoln. The iconic black-and-white photograph features Lincoln staring directly at the camera. The texture of his skin looks strangely overemphasized, typical of many photos from the 1860s.

The names describing Gilded Age robber barons like Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Charles Schwab[1] have a pleasing diversity of origin. Tycoon is from Japanese. Magnate is from Latin magnātēs, meaning “great man”. Baron is from Norman French barun, meaning “baron”. Mogul is from Iranian Persian مغول (moġul), meaning “Mongol”. That is, people from Mongolia, specifically the rulers of the Mughal Empire, people rich and powerful enough to construct the Taj Mahal.

The video game genre tycoon games where you manage a business are named after Railroad Tycoon (1990). The genre actually predates video games, with notable early examples The Sumerian Game (1964) and M.U.L.E. (1983), but didn’t get its current name until the 1990s. The most notable tycoon game series with tycoon in its name is RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999).

There’s also an unrelated card game called “Tycoon”, although I learned it as the drinking game “Asshole” in the 1990s. Some other English variants include “President”, “Tichu”, and “The Great Dalmuti”. They seem to all be ultimately based on a card game invented in Shanghai in the 1950s called 争上游 (Zhēng Shàngyóu), meaning “Struggling Upstream”. A more recent popularity bump can be attributed to Japanese variant 大富豪 (Daifugō), meaning “Grand Millionaire”, appearing in the 2004 translation of the manga フルーツバスケット (Fruits Basket).

[1] Apparently the most effective way to obliterate a famous billionaire from history is the emergence of an unrelated famous billionaire who happens to have the same name.