Infinite Lives, 1986: Arkanoid
The premise was clear, tried, and true. Break all the blocks. Ten years ago, Breakout (1976) created a hit by putting the Pong (1972) paddle on the bottom of the screen and giving people a crumbling wall to play against for when they couldn’t find a friend.
Imagine if we took everything we’d learned about video game design in the last six years - powerups, level design, destructible interfering enemies, and even a final boss - and applied it on top of an existing breakout hit? Oh, and let’s follow industry trends by making the player a spaceship and putting it in space.
Breakout and Arkanoid also owe a debt to pinball. You keep a ball in play by interacting with it at the bottom of the playing field while aiming for different targets. You get just enough control over the ball to be frustrated when it doesn’t do quite what you want.
Screenshot of Arkanoid. The player controls a suspiciously paddle-looking spaceship in the lower left. Most of the screen shows colorful bricks arranged in a staircase pattern against an abstract green background. One enemy hovers menacingly, a green hollow tetrahedron with a shiny black core.
As common for 1980s games, the canonical version of Arkanoid is the arcade version. With memory measured in kilobytes, the extra power of a dedicated computer designed to play a single manifested as a big difference in quality. The version of Arkanoid I personally grew to love was not the arcade version, but the 1988 DOS port. Two additional years of exponential growth and a game that didn’t push the technical limits allowed for a fairly faithful port to home computers.
By 1986, arcade games were pretty evenly split between not including background music that blared through the ambient din, and a single catchy track for gameplay. Bubble Bobble (1986) and OutRun (1986) are remembered for their iconic background music, while Rampage (1986) and Arkanoid opted for the traditional minimalist approach that emphasized their sound effects.
Arkanoid was so influential that games that used to be called Breakout clones came to be called Arkanoid clones. Its storied brick-breaker battling progeny include the first Touhou game, Highly Responsive to Prayers (1997); FireStriker (1993); and my personal favorite, the arcade game Off the Wall (1991). Its influence eventually faded, with more recent brick-breakers like Odama (2006) and Yoku’s Island Express (2018) drawing inspiration from pinball instead.
Elsewhere in video games, 1986 notably saw the wide US release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo’s rebrand of its Family Computer (Famicom) for overseas audiences. While it successfully sold through the 1985 holiday season, the console was only available in NYC at the time. The NES launched against a remarkably empty playing field. Burned by the 1983 crash, US companies largely saw video games as a fad whose time had passed.
While the NES became the standard bearer for video games in the US in the late 1980s, other countries embraced different ecosystems. Sony’s MSX personal computer saw success in its home country, but came to define that era of games in South Korea, Brazil, and Argentina. In the UK, Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum personal computer became the default game system, while its competitor Amstrad’s CPC found success in France, Spain, and West Germany. 1980s video games were unthinkably balkanized when compared to later eras.
yankee
The mild pejorative yankee first appears in a 1765 American poem, in which it means “person from New England”. During the American Revolution, yankee typically referred to Americans in general. The term’s New England origin influenced its meaning of “northerner” during the American Civil War. Later that century, yankee meant specifically Protestants, as opposed to immigrant Catholics.
The clipped form yank, in evidence since 1778, still means “person from the US” in global English today. The Bronx baseball team New York Highlanders was renamed the New York Yankees in 1913. Their iconic Yankee Stadium was built in 1923. In 1956, Yankee was selected to represent the letter Y in the NATO phonetic alphabet on its creation. Yankee standing for Y was common usage in telephone spelling since 1945. Before that, the word representing Y was typically Yokohama.
The origin of the word yankee is disputed. Historically, it was attributed to a Native American language. A British officer writing in 1789 traces it to Cherokee “eankke”, meaning “slave” or “coward”. An 1822 overview of Native American history and cultures claims the original term was “Yengees”. Today, it is generally agreed that those explanations were false. The likely origin of yankee is the Dutch name Janke, a diminutive of the popular name Jan. The usage of “Yankey” to refer to a nonspecific Dutchman is found as early as the 1680s.
1890 trading card distributed as an advertisement for Kinney Tobacco Company. Illustration of a stereotypical Yankee, a portly fair-skinned man with slicked-back straw-colored thinning hair and mutton chops. He wears a vest over a plaid buttoned shirt.
The Dutch given name Jan owes its popularity to its prominence in the Bible. In Dutch translations, John the Baptist, John the Apostle, and his Gospels of John all bear the name Jan. In the original Greek, his name is rendered Ἰωάννης (Iōánnēs). Iōánnēs was a popular Jewish given name 2100-2400 years ago. It appears in the Old Testament as יוֹחָנָן (Yôḥānān), meaning “God has been gracious”.
Unsurprisingly, John and its local equivalents has been a popular name across Christendom and Islam for thousands of years. Some names that are also John are Ian (Scottish), Ivan (Russian), Jovan (Croatian), Yahya (Arabic), Giannis (Greek), Giovanni (Italian), Jean (French), Johan (Dutch), Hans (German), Sean or Shane (Irish), João (Portugese), Juan (Spanish), and Evan (Welsh). Some common women’s names that originated from John and friends are Joan, Joanna, Jane, Janet, Janice, Jean, and Jeanne. Jack used to be an English nickname for John, but has since split off into its own separate name.
Surprisingly, the given name Jon is unrelated to John. It is short for Jonathan, which is admittedly also a Biblical name of Hebrew origin that begins with יהוה (YHWH).
sterno
The stove-in-a-can sterno has become a genericized brand name long since its 1915 debut. In 1893, Brooklynite Sigmund Sternau founded a company that became known for its portable heating devices. Their signature product, Sterno Canned Heat, was a commercially successful application of an alcohol jellification process developed in 1900. Its catchy name was recycled from an earlier product that had been given the rhyming name .
-o was also a productive casual suffix in the 1910s. Some contemporary constructions include bucko, kiddo, wino, ammo, and memo. The Marx Brothers (Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo, and Zeppo) became famous in the 1910s.
Sterno Canned Heat is essentially a candle made of jellied denatured alcohol instead of wax, packing several hours of fuel into a convenient container. Today, its most common uses are heating for buffet chafing dishes (from French chauffer, meaning “to make warm”; -eur is the French masculine agent suffix, as seen in saboteur or entrepreneur) and a portable stove for outdoors cooking.
Sternau is a German surname that’s likely based on a place name. “Stern” means “star”, and the -au suffix is often found in meadow and river names.
Late 1910s photo of the NYC storefront at 27th St and 5th Ave. The second floor of the busy storefront is labeled Birdsey-Somers Co. and filled with an advertising display for Sterno Canned Heat and metalware, sold by S. Sternau & Co. The first floor is occupied by Louis Berg, Tailor, while La Reine (The Queen) Corsets takes up the third.
The process of adding poison to alcohol in order to make it unsafe for consumption is called denaturing. Denaturing has no other purpose besides discouraging consumption. Drinking alcohol is heavily taxed in most localities, so products that include alcohol but are not intended for drinking, like mouthwash, denature it to lower prices. In 1915, this involved adding the poisonous blinding additive methanol. Today, in addition to methanol, denatured alcohol usually includes an extremely bitter additive like denatonium, and an emetic like ipecac.
During Prohibition in the US (1920-1933), many people did not let poisonousness or blindness stop them from drinking Sterno and other denatured alcohols. Mississippi blues guitarist Tommy Johnson immortalized this desperation in song. His 1928 hit Canned Heat Blues features the refrain “Crying, canned heat, mama, sure, Lord, killing me.”
Thirty years later, LA blues rock band Canned Heat named themselves after Johnson’s song in 1965. They got big enough to play at Woodstock. Thirty years after that, London acid jazz band Jamiroquai named a 1999 hit single after the blues band. Jamiroquai’s Canned Heat notably featured in the 2004 hit comedy movie Napoleon Dynamite.
This is the golden age of video games
Earlier this month, I read a more equivocal take about the golden age of a different medium entirely. The ensuing discussion helped crystallize an inkling I’ve been accumulating over the past few years: This is the golden age of video games.
What exactly do I mean by golden age? Let’s see what people mean when they talk about golden ages in other media. I probably mean something like that.
- The golden age of film is the 1930s.
- The golden age of television, then called Peak TV, is the late 2000s and 2010s.
- The golden age of rock is the late 1960s and 1970s.
- The golden age of arcades is the 1980s.
- The Golden Age of comic books is the 1940s and early 1950s. It’s the only one of these people typically capitalize.
One thing common to all of these eras is that we judge them on their works. We don’t consider how exploitative or soul-crushingly grinding it might have been to work in those mediums at that time. While the AAA game industry may be a hellscape of crunch and layoffs, and the indie gaming environment may be a rigged idealists’ lottery, that isn’t evident in the results.
1940 cover of issue 2 of comic book Whiz Comics. Captain Marvel, a superhero with a red costume featuring a yellow lightning bolt emblem on his chest, throws a car into a wall. The label “Gangway for Captain Marvel!” appears in the lower-right.
Living through a golden age doesn’t feel like anything in particular. In the 2010s we talked enthusiastically about how good specific TV shows were, but rarely about the overall environment. It’s not apparent when you’re in the middle of something special until you look at it in retrospect.
If you compare an original PlayStation game to a PS2 game, it’s immediately obvious which is which. This is much less true when you look at a PS4 game and a PS5 game. You could put any obscure game from the last ten years in front of me and claim that it came out yesterday, and I’d be hard-pressed to disagree.
This recent technological plateau coincides with the maturation of game design as a field. Many early games include lots of jank and mechanics that worked by chance, not design. Copying known good mechanics worked well for decades, but struggled to generalize. Instead, games from the past ten years are typically designed from the ground up through prototyping and iteration. They tend to play noticeably differently and feel more natural as a result.
A third background thread is video games shedding their perpetual hangup around being taken seriously as a medium. The scent of desperation is gone. One sign of this is the rise of prestige video game adaptations like Arcane, Fallout, and The Last of Us. Another factor was the 2020 pandemic and its enforced isolation leading a wider selection of people to look into video games. It’s finally unremarkable when sitting US senators play video games; it’s just another hobby like golfing or going to the movies.
You might object the 1980s and early 1990s should be the golden age of video games, aligning it with arcade games, and we should call this decade a silver age or a renaissance. It’s a solid argument. I’d claim that comparing Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda to Super Mario Odyssey or Tears of the Kingdom is like comparing apples and oranges. They’re different kinds of things, in the same way that 10-minute silent films are different from 90-minute talkies. You can, and people do, still make and appreciate 10-minute silent films. But they’re fundamentally different things.
I actually see a lot of parallels between the early history of film and the early history of video games. The 1900s and 1910s saw many pioneers create art worth appreciating and remembering despite straining against technical constraints. I feel a sense of awe and wonder when I think of people exploring a protean medium, rife with possibility, communally discovering its unique strengths. I feel the same way about the 1980s and 1990s in video games.
When I think about the maturation of film as a medium, it seems to have required sound, but not color. Video games will likely see innovations on the scale of color film in the future, but that doesn’t preclude game design from being the factor that pushed them over the threshold into maturity.
As a first approximation, let’s bound this era as the late 2010s and 2020s. It aligns with the 10-15 years we see in other media. That’s my case future hobbyists will describe it as the golden age of video games.
For concrete examples of golden age works, let’s look at influential video games. Here’s four contemporary games that struck on something so resonant they inspired entire genres:
- PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (2017)
- Slay the Spire (2019)
- Vampire Survivors (2021)
- Balatro (2024)
The other side of influence is uniqueness. Painfully novel games that shouldn’t exist, created through an unreasonable amount of effort, now regarded as unrepeatable masterpieces. Here’s eight contemporary singular video games:
- Outer Wilds (2019)
- Baba is You (2019)
- Disco Elysium (2019)
- Inscryption (2021)
- Tunic (2022)
- UFO 50 (2024)
- Caves of Qud (2024)
- Blue Prince (2025)
Neither of those lists is even the list of the best games! These are just lists of games that were often copied, and games that were uncopyable. I leave the list of the best games of the last ten years as an exercise for the reader.
varsity
The level of competitiveness varsity was first applied to sports in 1891. Varsity is a clipping of univarsity, a regional pronunciation of university found in slang since the 1700s. The institution for higher education university was borrowed into English from Norman French université around 1300. Université is a direct descendant of Classical Latin ūniversitās, through Old French universitei and Medieval Latin universitas. Its Latin roots are ūni, meaning “one”; versus, meaning “turned” (later borrowed into English meaning “facing”, then “against”); and tās, a noun-forming suffix akin to the “ity” in “ability”. A thing turned into one. Classical Latin ūniversitās means “the whole” or “the entirety of”, as in the later borrowing universe.
How did a word that originally meant “the entirety of” come to mean a specific kind of institution for higher learning? The answer lies in the institution’s medieval European origins. Centers of higher learning have flourished since the Iron Age. The words we use to describe them today include the generic term school,
Madrasa (مدرسة) is the generic word for “school” in Arabic, derived from the root for learning D-R-S. Vihara (विहार) roughly means “monastery” in Sanskrit, though its original meaning was “inn” or “recreational center” 2300 years ago. Xué (學) is the generic word for “study” or “school” in Chinese, derived from a root meaning “awaken” or “gain awareness”. Academy (Ἀκαδημία) was the name of the person who owned the grounds the first academy was built on. Lyceum (Λύκειον) was an epithet of Apollo from a root meaning “light”, which came to represent a particular statue of Apollo, then the building where the statue stood. The Museum (Μουσεῖον) was a specific shrine dedicated to the muses.
In this context, it’s easier to place the university as the Christian equivalent of a madrasa or vihara. The first universities were cathedral schools or monastic schools before they became something different. The 1088 University of Bologna, 1096 University of Oxford, and 1150 University of Paris were officially certified as something different after a 1231 papal bull that established the university as distinct from the church. Its students nevertheless enjoyed clerical immunity to prosecution under civil law.
The oldest universities were not called that until the 1200s, as a short form of the phrase universitas magistrorum or universitas scholarium, meaning “encompassing all teachers” or “encompassing all schools”.
1497 illuminated illustration of students enrolling in the University of Bologna. Six long-haired students in green and red caps and robes stand outside, surrounding a desk and throne bearing the university seal. A robed person sitting in the throne writes in an open book.
500 years later, when English scholars sought to bring these traditions to North America, they felt their initial efforts were too feeble to warrant the term “university”. They used the word for a single department instead, college. The nine colleges established within the Thirteen Colonies were Harvard College in 1636, the College of William & Mary in 1693, the Collegiate School (now Yale) in 1701, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in 1746, King’s College (now Columbia) in 1754, the College of Philadelphia (now Penn) in 1740, the College of Rhode Island (now Brown) in 1764, Queen’s College (now Rutgers) in 1766, and Dartmouth College in 1769. Huh, why aren’t William & Mary and Rutgers grouped with the other seven today?
College became the English word for a single university department around 1400, through another borrowing from French. French college is directly descended from Classical Latin collēgium. Its Latin roots are con, meaning “with”; lēgō, meaning “appointed”; and ium, a noun-forming suffix. People appointed together. That makes sense; it’s the same root as colleague. So a college was a society of colleagues working toward the same goal. Or perhaps fellows.
In any case, in US English college stuck as the generic term for tertiary education, even as university accreditations became common in the late 1800s. So varsity sports became the term for intercollegiate competition. Junior varsity enters usage in 1902.