Welcome to the Extraordinary Things wing of the Shacknews 2023 Hall of Fame class. We define "extraordinary thing" as something directly or indirectly related to video games that influenced or spoke to some facet of the industry. Some entiries include Further Reading sections where you'll find features and other stories that further illuminate this year's inductees.
When you're finished, use the Table of Contents at the bottom of the page to visit other areas of the Shacknews Hall of Fame Class of 2023.
Unreal, released in 1998, was a landmark FPS. It boasted graphics that sparked heated debate between fans of id Software’s latest tech and new devotees of Epic’s magic, featured more creative weapons than id’s staple shotgun-chaingun-rocket-launcher lineup, and told a story throughout gorgeous interior and exterior environments.
As impressed as fans and developers were by the inaugural Unreal, it’s remembered more today as the vessel that contained the Unreal Engine, perhaps the most prolific engine in use today. Unreal’s iterations have powered some of the industry’s biggest triple-A titles, and many indies. Its robust toolset allows developers to create games of any type and style, not just fast-paced first-person shooters.
Epic’s Unreal engine grew so popular that the Unreal series itself has faded into the background. Despite its relative obscurity, the symbiosis between the engine and the franchise ensures that Unreal lives on in every game fueled by its cutting-edge features.
Nintendo’s Game Boy was as good as dead by 1998. The monochrome handheld had a good run, but technology had moved on. Then Pokemon Red and Blue hit shelves, and the Game Boy once again became the world’s must-have console. The core gameplay look (exploring, finding and training Pokemon to evolve them into stronger forms, and pitting them against Gym Masters to become the greatest Pokemon trainer in the land) was engrossing, but it was also diverse enough that players got hooked on different elements. Some, for instance, would capture Pokemon and form emotional bonds with them. Instead of evolving Pikachu into Raichu, for instance, players would capture two: one to evolve, and the other to keep as Pikachu, their friend and companion.
Pokemon transformed into a phenomenon. More video games followed, as did toys, apparel, feature films, and a long-running animated series. In the games, your trainer had your name, but lacked personality; they were just an avatar for you to navigate the world and collect pocket monsters. In the series, Ash Ketchum was an energetic and positive trainer determined to “catch ‘em all.” He never did, but what he achieved was arguably more important. His Pokemon fought for him, and became his friends, teaching him (and the millions of kids watching) that there was more to the expanding Pokemon universe than hoarding and battling their favorite characters.
Pokemon was a mix of role-playing game, collect-a-thon, and virtual pet. As Pokemania swept the world following the release of the Game Boy titles in 1998, Nintendo created spin-off titles for the Nintendo 64. One was Pokemon Snap, an on-rails “shooter” that replaced guns with Pokeballs and a camera. The Pokemon Stadium games were collections of mini-games built around the core mode of pitting Pokemon against each other in the turn-based battle structure of the mainline games. Then there was Hey You, Pikachu!, turning the world’s most popular Pokemon into a virtual pet, and teaching a bittersweet lesson.
The game shipped with the Nintendo 64 VRU (Voice Recognition Unit), an attachment that lets you communicate with Pikachu, by far the most popular pocket monster in the 200+ catalog at that time. After befriending a wild Pika, you spend 365 days teaching it to communicate with you and engaging in activities such as playing and exploring. The most memorable event, however, is bittersweet. At the end of the game, you realize you owe it to your friend to release him back into the wild so he can rejoin his kind. You take Pikachu into the woods and say “Goodbye” until he walks away and vanishes into the wild.
Players have bonded with Pokemon for decades by finding and training them in battle. But the connection you form in Hey You, Pikachu is arguably the most emotional in the franchise, and teaches players to enjoy time with our friends and family while they last.
On modern gaming devices, connecting with other players is as simple as sharing online IDs with friends or hopping into lobbies with strangers. Playing multiplayer on Game Boy was more involved. First, you had to connect two handhelds with a Link Cable. Second, each player needed to insert the same game into their Game Boy. Finally, you had to power on at the same time.
Nintendo kept the process as simple as possible by including a Link Cable with every Game Boy. The cable was used sporadically with games like Tetris and the original Mortal Kombat, but rose to prominence with the release of Pokemon. The Red and Blue versions of Pokemon contained many of the same creatures, but some were exclusive to each cartridge. The only way to catch ‘em all was to connect the Link Cable with other players and trade. It’s a relic now, but for many players, it was an introduction to the type of connectivity possible in gaming.
Many of the countless “Doom clones” that followed id Software’s pop culture smash adhered to the weapon canon that id had established: pistol, shotgun, chaingun, and rocket launcher. The best of the bunch splintered off from there, offering players more experimental weapons that complemented their standard fare. Turok 2’s Cerebral Bore is one of the most memorable.
Sporting a circular shape, the Cerebral Bore fired a homing projectile that drilled into a target’s skull and exploded in their brains. The resulting death was one of the most brutal of the golden era of first-person shooters in the 1990s, especially considering Turok 2 was exclusive Nintendo’s largely family friendly N64 console. Turok’s Cerebral Bore made appearances in future Turok games, but it also influenced popular culture. A death metal band that formed in Glasgow, Scotland, named themselves after it, and it holds prime positions on many lists tallying the best weapons in FPS games.
Unlike PNG and certain other file formats for images, the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is relatively crude. That ended up working in its favor and deserves credit for making it even more prolific today than it was after its introduction in 1987. CompuServe, a now-defunct internet service provider, created it as a color image format that replaced their black-and-white format. It used a type of data compression that allowed larger GIFs to be downloaded quickly even on slower modems.
GIFs became especially popular as a form of self-expression once they were used to hold animations: It’s become a sort of game to find animated GIFs from a favorite TV show, movie, or video game that symbolize how you’re feeling and share it on social media or group chats. Some types of online expression have been largely overtaken by evolved forms, such as the transition from text-based emoticons to animated emoji graphics. The GIF shows no signs of slowing down, in part because even the most high-quality, lengthy animations are still relatively compact and thus easy to share.
Before E3, Nintendo hosted its own trade show in Japan from 1989 to 2001. Picture a convention hall filled with developers, publishers, and journalists, all focused on debuting and previewing hardware and software designed by and for Nintendo. Several planforms launched there, beginning with the Super Famicom (SNES in the west) and extending through the Nintendo 64, the 64 disk drive (DD) that never made its way to the States, the Game Boy Advance, and the GameCube.
Software made a big splash, too. Numerous games in Nintendo’s Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Pokemon franchises were rolled out at Space World. Other exhibits, such as nonplayable demos for Super Mario 128 and a video depicting a realistic Link and Ganandorf clashing in battle, were shown at Space World before vanishing forever. Nintendo now uses its Direct videos to make announcements, but Nintendo fans able to attend hold fond memories of the energy and excitement on display at Space World.
The Tokyo Game Show (TGS) started in 1996, one year after E3, as Japan’s own tradeshow dedicated to video games. Its founder, the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association (CESA), held two shows a year until 2002. Whether one show or two, each TGS featured a General Exhibition Area where publishers and developers could show off upcoming products both brand-new and upcoming.
TGS had more variety than early E3. Attendees found everything from hardware and software to furniture and tournaments. One exhibition was dedicated to up-and-coming developers from Asia, while vendors sold merchandise in other areas. E3’s highest attendance occurred in 2018, when over 60,000 attendees converged on the Los Angeles Convention Center. That same year, the Tokyo Game Show’s attendance peaked at an astounding 298,690. Unlike E3, which was canceled permanently in 2023, TGS is still going, with its next event planned for September 2024.
Street Fighter 2 revolutionized fighting games, gave arcades a new lease on life (for a few more years), and has claimed its spot as one of the most influential video games of all time. Its soundtrack is just as legendary, and one theme stands above the rest.
Guile’s music is the perfect backdrop for his stage, a real American hero fighting in front of a jet with a bunch of his Army buddies cheering him on. It’s also the perfect backdrop for virtually any dramatic scene in any movie, ever. And for cats doing cute things on the Internet. And for bombshell paternity test reveals on Maury Povich. And for recording the voiceover for this entry in the 2023 Shacknews Hall of Fame.
It’s the perfect backdrop for everything, really. That’s why “Guile’s theme goes with everything” might be the most accurate and applicable meme of all time.
The ‘90s were a colorful decade, and companies like Nintendo and Apple popularized combining translucency and color. That fusion gave us some of the most memorable plastic electronics of all time, from the “Atomic Purple” Nintendo 64 console whose translucent control deck and controller let you see their inner workings, to iMac computers that added a dash of color to sterile white offices.
The see-through fun didn’t stop there. Companies manufactured colorful translucent televisions, telephones, mobile phones, and alarm clocks, just to name a few. But Nintendo was the most prolific. The company’s N64 and Game Boy hardware came in nearly every color you could think of, and of course, many of the models were transparent to boot. It might seem like overkill today, but having lots of colorful (and see-through) choices was a way to let consumers express themselves through their devices.
The “clear craze” was memorable enough to be included in retro round-ups of ‘90s fads, leaving many consumers wishing electronics of today had more variety.
In the golden age of children’s game shows such as Nickelodeon Guts, Legends of the Hidden Temple, and Double Dare, Nick Arcade was something to appeal to all of the gamers among Nickelodeon’s audience.
Co-designed by James Bethea and Karim Miteff and hosted by Phil Moore, it was easily one of the most intricate and interesting setups among Nick’s live-action lineup. Players wouldn’t just answer trivia questions. They would also engage in numerous video game challenges that utilized original games made for the show with chroma key technology of the time. A lot of kids sat at home dreaming of being on that set. We fantasized of suiting up and engaging in challenges like dodging coconut-throwing monkeys and angry toucans to get bananas and dodging laser-shooting robots to turn off circuit breakers, all to win real cash and prizes.
Nick Arcade even incorporated more popular video games from the market into its contests with the Wizard’s Challenge (renamed Expert’s Challenge after the first season). There, players had mere seconds to beat a specific score or achieve victory in a level. Meanwhile, the other team could wager on whether or not they’d be able to accomplish it. This part of the show was a portal into great games we may or may not have known about from platforms like the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16 and Neo Geo. It was a great way to keep up on games that were coming out.
Nick Arcade was so beloved that in 2015, James Bethea and Karim Miteff attempted a Kickstarter campaign to give it a spiritual successor. Unfortunately, it could not meet its funding goal. However, Nick Arcade still stays with us as one of the best of the best among the greatest era of game shows, and perhaps one of the most formative looks at early video game-focused competitions.
Once upon a time, when Winamp was a solid and highly customizable alternative to Windows Media Player, we also had a wealth of options to create unique visuals to go with our music. Winamp visualizations, like Winamp skins, were another way to personalize your audio experience and make the program truly your own. Various programs provided us with presets and customizable options to create bouncing arrays of colors and waves that would react to the very music we were playing. It was another relic of a bygone time in early PC audio.
There were a number of creators who innovated in the Winamp visualizer space to offer users various options. Plugins like Advanced Visualization Studio in 2000 and MilkDrop in 2001 gave users creative suites to either attach preset visualizers to their music or create unique visualizers of their very own. Even in presets, you were often in for a treat: a delightful cornucopia of color and motion that, if it was working proper, would respond and react to your music.
Advanced Visualization Studio simply created rudimentary designs from several preset tools to add to your music. Shapes could be drawn in color, images could be distorted, and later builds of the plugin even added options for interactivity to the designs. Meanwhile, MilkDrop utilized beat detection to render various images that would blend into each other seamlessly as your music played.
There were many other user-made programs, and even more user-created presets that were crafted for Winamp on the backs of visualization plugins. Winamp would be acquired by Radionomy in 2014 (now the Llama Group) and eventually be turned into a streaming service, but for a long time, it felt like an underground alternative to Windows Media Player. It was one in which users could express themselves however they wanted, and while many will simply remember the Winamp skins, visualizations will always be another huge part of that community freedom.
In an age before animated GIFs took over the internet, there was the Hampsterdance. Considered one of the first internet memes, Hampsterdance first found its home on a GeoCities web page. Anybody who visited would witness rows of animated hamster GIFs as they all danced to a sped-up version of "Whistle-Stop" from Disney's Robin Hood.
Word of mouth would bring more and more visitors to Hampsterdance and it would entertain young people across the internet. It would help pioneer later forms of internet entainment, like "The Badger Song" and other Flash-animated loops. Sadly, not everything lasts forever and the Hampsterdance page eventually disappeared. However, there's more to the story and we encourage everyone to read Leah Collins' long-read on the subject over on the CBC website.
In the meantime, we'll still be bopping our heads to the Hamsterdance 25 years later.
Comic-Con and its many iterations have been a staple of geek culture for several decades. While the last 15 years have seen a lot of "geek culture" become "popular culture," Comic-Con has continued to be the ultimate destination of any entertainment enthusiasts.
With the growth in popularity of comic books and the proliferation of comic book adaptations, Comic-Con has also expanded to include television shows, movies, and games in addition to its namesake medium. To this day, some of the year's biggest entertainment news comes out of comic-con, and the industry's major players save their most crowd-pleasing reveals for the crowds of fans at Comic-Cons San Diego and New York shows.
