By day, many of them are tech support staff, website programmers, university students and, well, nerds. But, by night, these modern-day Peter Parkers turn into deadly street fighters, ancient creatures, and master swordsmen, all with the touch of a button on a customized joystick controller. The group of about 30 men who attend the weekly fighting-games marathon at A & C Games at Spadina and Bloor all have one thing in common—they’re hooked on dated, glitchy video games filled with primitive graphics and catchy melodies.

Much like vinyl records and vintage clothing in recent years, retro video games have come back in style. The market for collectible Mario, Donkey Kong, and other vintage games in Toronto is booming as the kids who once loved these games turn into adults with disposable income. This community of mostly twentysomethings will happily pay hundreds of dollars to buy back their favourite childhood games.

“It’s definitely a pop-culture thing right now,” says Gar Wan Toy, co-owner of A & C Games, a store that buys and sells retro games. “A lot of nostalgia comes back. When you hear the music, you remember, ‘Oh, I used to play this game’ and you get this good feeling—you feel happy all of a sudden.”

If that’s the case, retro gamers in Toronto must be feeling very happy of late.  Stores like A & C Games are abundant in the city, with Gamerama near Yonge and Eglinton, Game Shack near Yonge and Dundas, three separate Game Centre locations spread out across the city, and the recently opened Game Mania near Keele and Bloor. These stores, and many others, coexist with eBay, Craigslist, and other online shops as well as online game emulators—i.e., replica files—that can be legally downloaded to a computer or game console for less than the price of a physical copy (or illegally for free).

“We have loyalty from our customers that a lot of corporate places don’t,” says Jeff Eidelman, manager of Gamerama, where the 1991 Super Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past sells for about $50. “Customers want to support the little guys.”

The stores are also thriving because the classic feel of old games on their proper systems make downloads less desirable, says Wan Toy.

“When you download it, it’s an emulation of the game. Maybe certain little things, little details like the graphics, look a little blurrier or the graphics might look a little different—that actually gets to people,” says Wan Toy.  “Playing games with a real N64 controller, there’s nothing like it. You can’t mimic it with a Wii-mote.”

A Facebook poll by Xbox suggests that what Wan Toy says is true. In just seven minutes, more than 1,000 respondents indicated that they would rather buy a physical copy of a game, while just 84 said they would prefer to download it via Xbox’s Games on Demand.

“I think a lot of this attachment to things that are retro is to guard against a hyper-electronic age where things can be lost really quickly,” says Tonya Davidson, an assistant sociology professor at Ryerson University whose areas of interest include public memory and popular culture.  “Playing a new game 30 years ago meant you were on the avant-garde of gaming, now people play that same game in a sort of an ironic, tongue-in-cheek kind of way.”

Some bars in Toronto have also embraced the fun of retro games. Both Handlebar in Kensington Market and The Bar With No Name near High Park have introduced vintage game nights in the last year. Patrons can’t get enough.

“It seems to go well with the bar—it’s absolutely a very popular night,” says Patrick McGann, owner of The Bar With No Name. His bar has held a biweekly vintage game night for the past eight months featuring classic Nintendo 64 games such as GoldenEye007 and Super Smash Bros. “People definitely like playing the old games, especially when they have a chance to win a free pitcher.”

The barflies may be onto something—for A & C’s Wan Toy, the popularity of such theme nights support his declaration that retro games are more fun than today’s games.

“A lot of people say that they’re better than the current games because back then there were limitations in graphic quality, so they had to use creativity to balance it out,” he says, listing catchier music, funny glitches, and the collectibility of retro games as other reasons gamers as young as 10 buy from his store. His most popular game systems are the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64, which sold for $199 in their heydays. Today’s used versions cost around $100 and $50 respectively, and popular game titles can range from $30 to $70. To Wan Toy, there’s no doubt that the younger generation is making his business grow.

Ana Madrigal, a part-time sales clerk at both A & C Games and Gamerama, is a perfect example. The 17-year-old high school student has been collecting since childhood, and recently spent $400 on the manual and the box—one with no game inside—for the rare Super Nintendo game EarthBound.

“I know it’s a big thing on the hipster scene right now—lots of people who you wouldn’t expect are buying games like Pokémon,” says Madrigal, who estimates her vintage gaming collection is worth about $2,500. “A lot of people really like how accessible these games are in comparison to the games we see today.”

AMC’s The Walking Dead—which made its midseason return on Feb. 10—seemed promising at first. It had everything! Zombies? Go on. Gore? Yes, please. An exploration of pure human evil? Fantastic! The strength of the pilot and the hope that the show would deliver on those promises kept me going for two whole seasons.

Then I realized none of the primary conflicts had any connection to the zombie-apocalypse setting. I quit the show. But all was not lost. I decided to play The Walking Dead video game, and after completing its five parts, I realized
I had come across the rarest  phenomenon: a video game that told a better story than its live-action counterpart.

The Walking Dead game could teach its televised sibling many things—like how to write characters you feel emotionally invested in, for starters. The game’s protagonist, Lee, isn’t just an empty vessel, he’s a guy with a conflicted past.
Lee murdered his wife’s lover, and the consequences of that rash decision take on more weight with every mistake you make in the game. The lingering effects of Lee’s crime underscore the karmic question at the centre of the game, a question given literal expression in the form of the hordes of decaying “walkers”: Can you truly run from the past?

The TV show, however, leaves you frustrated. The characters make absurd, illogical choices, the narrative arcs would be more at home in an episode of Passions, and the writers explore their central thesis (“people are the real monsters!”) with the subtlety of a high-schooler writing about Heart of Darkness for the first time.

This isn’t to say video games are the perfect format for every story, but when every aspect of a video game, from the art design to the gameplay, supports its narrative, the resulting experience has a deeper thematic resonance than you get from any other medium. It’s a rare art that doesn’t talk at you, but rather, speaks through you.

Yes, #IKEAMonkey is soooo Dec. 2012. But local animator Barnabas Wornoff is hoping to keep the meme alive for a few more minutes—first with a line of Munkë t-shirts, and now with a side-scrolling desktop-computer game wherein you must guide Darwin the monkey through what looks like the North York IKEA parking lot on a Sunday afternoon, dodging cars, shopping carts, and old ladies with walkers, all while collecting bananas and enough parts to build his own Billy bookshelf. And throwing poo, of course.

No, really: consider the rest of your workday killed.

When Queasy Games’ Jonathan Mak first decided to team up with artist and co-developer Shaw-Han Liem in 2008, little did they know their collaboration would gradually evolve into a full-fledged video game for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. Back then, Mak had just developed his successful Everyday Shooter project, while Liem was busy producing and performing electronic music under the name I Am Robot and Proud. The duo began working on an audio visualizer for use at live concerts and, with music as their common interest (and with the help of a government grant), they eventually developed the next big experience in Toronto indie gaming.

Sound Shapes is the result of their four-year collaboration. Mak and Liem’s initial idea of creating a game that worked with user-generated musical content mutated into a bigger project, encompassing work from various Toronto and international-based visual artists, developers, and musicians. At its core, Sound Shapes is a new take on the classic 2-D platformer: The player navigates through levels while collecting musical beats; as more beats are collected, the dynamics of the level gradually change and add new dimensions to the background music. Sound Shapes also gives players a reason to finally pick up their PlayStation Vita, a device that has been sorely lacking in innovative titles; the game utilizes the Vita’s features to its maximum potential with stunning but minimalist visuals, a seamless weaving of gameplay and music composition, and a suite of creation tools.

Queasy Games’ Sound Shapes is a true representation of the fresh ideas Toronto has to offer to the international gaming industry—but, in case you’re still hesitant about investing your time and money, here are five reasons why you should:

1. It’s essentially a video-game mixtape: The game’s campaign features worlds called “albums” that were designed by different visual artists with music composed by various musicians. This keeps the game fresh, as each album has its own distinct look and sound. In one album, Toronto’s Jim Guthrie reunites with Superbrothers to create a series of levels that look strikingly similar to their previous project, Sword and Sworcery EP. In another, North Carolina–based indie developer* PixelJam designs the aesthetics while electro producer Deadmau5 provides the jam. Other featured artists include Toronto-based studio Pyramid Attack and Beck.

2. It speaks to the composer in all of us: Mak and Liem realized early on in the development process that they wanted to create a game where creating music seems less intimidating. Sound Shapes‘ level editor speaks directly to that desire: Players can customize their own levels using the game’s easy-to-use creation tools, and even compose their own music using the provided beats and instruments.

3. It reaches out to a new audience and goes beyond mainstream gaming norms: It’s only after the player beats the game that Sound Shapes truly shines. Completing the campaign unlocks two modes—Death Mode and Beat School—and gives players the chance to earn 32 Trophies. Death Mode is made up of intense challenges with the objective of collecting a certain number of items in a given time; in Beat School, players use their ears to match the recreated beats on screen. This was created in the hope of inspiring less musically inclined gamers to use the level editor and create their own music. “With the help of the government grants, we can take that money and create new and interesting experiences that aren’t part of mainstream gaming, but could eventually become that,” says Mak.

4. It’s a cross-platform title: For $14.99, players can use the game on their PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Vita, while cloud syncing makes it easy to collaborate using both platforms. “You get two copies that can interact with each other,” says Liem. “If you start making a level on your PS3, you can take it and put in on your Vita and continue working on it.” Players can also sync both devices to share their campaign on both copies. (At the same time, this feature could be viewed as a liability for the Vita; if the game was a Vita exclusive, it could have helped promote hardware sales.)

5. Players can share their creations within the game’s community: Sound Shapes gives users the ability to share their level creations with the greater community, and Mak is eager to see what users come up with in the level editor. “I don’t think we created [the game] for a certain demographic,” says Mak. “Our hope is that people who are sort of afraid of writing music, or who think that it’s some magical talent that you are born with can consider diving into this game and be like, ‘Wait a minute maybe I can write music too.’”
CORRECTION, AUGUST 13, 2012: The original version of this article mistakenly stated PixelJam was based out of Toronto when it is, in fact, based in North Carolina.

The west end of Front Street was not a friendly place for evil arch-villain types last weekend. Hordes of caped crusaders and sundry avengers descended on the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for ComiCon, where they sought autographs, scored swag and, of course, showed off their finest superhero attire.

It’s one thing for your average male gamer to ogle two women getting it on, but it’s another thing altogether to ask the typical straight dude to engage in a romance with another virtual male—even if that man is made of pixels. This is exactly what BioWare—the makers of the 2011 fantasy role-playing game Dragon Age 2—discovered when a staunchly vanilla gamer found himself on the receiving end of some unsolicited homoerotism.

From the moment that it was technically viable, sex has appeared in videogames. In the early ’80s, when gaming technology evolved from simply racking up high scores to inviting players to engage with coherent storylines, sex was used to increase the stakes and overall drive of the narrative, in addition to providing cheap thrills.

Why score an arbitrary number when you can defeat the villain and score a babe? Whether mildly romantic (Mario saving the princess in exchange for a kiss) or downright smutty (Leisure Suit Larry feverishly hunting for a shag), videogames offered standard fantasy fulfillment for mainstream guys.

But more recently, developers have taken things a little further by allowing romantic relationships that might appeal to a wider variety of players, something that doesn’t always sit well with more traditional fans. In the case of Dragon Age 2, said perturbed gamer posted a critique on the company’s message boards arguing that BioWare wasn’t catering to its core demographic: “the straight male gamer.” Not surprisingly, this caused ripples not only in the gaming community, but also on myriad LGBT-oriented forums.

The fact that this ultra nerdy videogame was even mentioned on such forums is a sign of how integral gaming is to popular culture. Clearly, “dudebro” is no longer the sole demographic. This shift is most likely connected to the rise of community games like The Sims and World of Warcraft, and casual gaming systems like Wii, both of which cater to a variety of players. Videogames are evolving to be more user-friendly in their inclusiveness and maturity—especially when it comes to sex and sexuality.

A reasonable starting point in charting the history of sex in North American videogames would be the 1982 Atari dud, Custer’s Revenge, a tasteless turkey in which players controlled the iconic general, who sported nothing but boots, a bandana, a cavalry hat and a full-on erection. The goal was to dodge arrows in order to reach the other side of the screen to hump a nude Native American woman tied to a cactus. When the NES first debuted here, two years after the North American videogame crash of 1983, Nintendo of America took the opposite approach and implemented a series of strict guidelines that developers had to adhere to. No licenced title could feature swearing, graphic violence or religion, and Custer’s Revenge–level depictions of sex were replaced with squeaky-clean romance.

Outside of the innocuous world of Nintendo, games for Sega and other consoles were experimenting with far more taboo depictions of sex in order to profit from this hole in the market. Sega constantly mocked Nintendo’s G-rated status, asserting that Nintendo was for boys and Sega was for men. Today, most game developers aren’t avoiding Custer’s Revenge–style depraved depictions of sex entirely—Grand Theft Auto is particularly hardcore—but some are starting to embrace it as less of a shock tactic and more of a legit narrative device. We’re gradually seeing characters with relatable morals and desires.

Like today’s popular teen TV dramas aimed at young and impressionable audiences, videogames are beginning to introduce well-rounded, non-stereotypical queer/gender-variant characters to cater to their increasingly open-minded audience. In doing so, titles like Dragon Age 2 are gently encouraging gamers to shift their values and morals—not just with respect to their avatars, but perhaps also in real life. Providing dudebros with the “opportunity” to get it on with other dudebros may actually present a chance to help shift macho homophobic attitudes.

If it’s any comfort, that Dragon Age 2 hater received a lot flack from men and women, gay and straight. And happily, BioWare made it clear the company has no time for such intolerance: “We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention…and the person who says that the only way to please them is to restrict options for others is the one who deserves it least.” The future of gaming looks a lot brighter than it did 30 years ago.

The key difference between buying a used game on eBay and trading a game with someone in your neighbourhood is that the latter is free. Well, almost—you’ll have to swap out one of your own games in return, but that seems like a fair trade, right?

That’s the root philosophy of Waygoz. Essentially a social network for gamers, the Toronto-based start-up allows users to connect, interact and swap videogames with people in their neighbourhood. Since the website’s launch last November, Waygoz has gained thousands of users in Toronto through word-of-mouth and social media alone.

“Waygoz basically replaces [the idea of] in store trade-ins with higher-value used-game swapping on our site,” says Waygoz co-founder Jean-Paul Rehr, who had previously worked in the videogame-distribution business for 10 years. “Videogames as physical products are going to, if not completely disappear, pretty much be replaced by digital downloads over the course of the next five to 10 years. We have embarked, with Waygoz, upon a transformation business to move towards digital products. The first step is to begin building relationships with consumers.”

The name “Waygoz” is a play on the Spanish word for games—juegos—spelled out phonetically in English. “It’s pretty hard to find decent URLs with [the word] ‘game’ in it anymore, so we decided to brainstorm cross-language,” Rehr says.

Though the industry experienced a slowdown last summer, videogames are still big business—in 2009, they generated $60 billion in revenue, and that figure is expected to rise to over $70 billion by 2015. However, Rehr says publishers are frustrated that they cannot take part in the lucrative used-game resale market. It’s a well-known fact that retailers like GameStop thrive on resales; the company saw a 12 per cent boost in used-videogame sales last year.

Still, despite the success of this business model, Rehr sees the market differently. “When gamers trade-in at stores like GameStop and EB Games, they trade a couple of games plus they have to pay cash [to upgrade to a new title]. We say ‘keep the used games separate from the new games.’”

With Waygoz, users create customized profile lists to let people in their neighbourhood know what games they have, what they want and what they’re willing to trade. In contrast to websites like Facebook that reinforce existing offline friendships, users on Waygoz mostly interact with complete strangers. “Waygoz is one of those breeds of social networks that is really about bringing strangers together with common interests,” he says.

Even with its rising popularity, Waygoz is still in beta mode for a number of reasons. Gamers worldwide can sign up for the site and create a profile, but Rehr says that the “swapping” aspect of the site is currently reserved for Toronto users. “We wanted to test out our technology and make sure that the swapping works well before unleashing it to the world,” he says.

As is the case with most websites that require users to meet up offline, there’s a perceived risk of “stranger danger.” Some users may feel uncomfortable meeting up with people they don’t know, while others might be too lazy to actually go out and trade their games (#speakingfromexperience). To combat this, the site requires users to meet up in public places like Starbucks or Tim Hortons to swap their games. “Because we’re located in Toronto, we can identify users’ needs and concerns,” Rehr says.

Waygoz also recently implemented a Twitter-esque social feature called “The Stream,” where all the conversations happen. Gamers can share videos, pictures and articles.

The site is expected to expand their swapping service across North America in early spring.

There was a time when videogames sounded less than symphonic. Before popular franchises adopted movie-calibre music, players were treated to a barrage of gritty bleeps and blorps that were largely cued to increase tension. The music in Space Invaders would get faster as the aliens came closer, for instance, or the Super Mario Bros. theme would speed up just as the level’s timer was about to expire. Those compositions might sound a bit primitive to a more refined ear, but today, we look back on that era with warm, fuzzy, nostalgic affection and wonder if maybe we didn’t appreciate the unassuming, endlessly looping ditties enough at the time.

Given the bare-bones nature of the medium’s earliest tunes, it may come as a surprise that classical musicians are turning to videogames for inspiration. Since 2005, a concert series called Video Games Live—which features international orchestras performing old and new video-game music alongside game footage and synchronized lighting effects—has been touring worldwide to sold-out crowds. And this month, the London Philharmonic Orchestra released The Greatest Video Game Music, an album made up of reinterpreted songs from old-school classics (Super Mario Bros.), cutting-edge blockbusters (Call of Duty) and even popular apps (Angry Birds). The covers span the spectrum from eight-bit to Dolby mixes and beyond, but the most memorable ones are from the first-generation Nintendo age—perhaps surprisingly, they’re great for more than just ironic reasons.

As much as consumers want their games to look and sound as revolutionary as possible, that impulse often comes with a reactionary nostalgia. The better technology gets, the more some consumers will feel compelled to regress to simpler times—hence the modern-day success of vinyl and the Hipstamatic app. As gaming has lost its innocence, indie developers and online marketplaces like the Wii’s Virtual Console have been working to revive the quaint qualities that made games (and their soundtracks) so unique. A similar retro romanticism has inspired musicians to give vintage videogame consoles a new life.

Some savvy tunesmiths have repurposed old gaming tools as musical instruments, which they use to create original compositions. This new genre, “chiptune,” emerged out of a shared nostalgia for the rudimentary chirps of eight-bit games. During Toronto’s last Nuit Blanche extravaganza, the TIFF Bell Lightbox held an all-nighter of live chiptune bands playing alongside game clips that were projected onto a big screen. Further proof of chiptunes’ snowballing popularity can be seen by visiting the music-sharing website eight-bit Collective (8bc.org), which has over 30,000 members.

This isn’t to say that advances in videogame music haven’t upgraded the actual gaming experience. Back in the day, Mario’s accelerating soundtrack was the acme of immersive integration. It’s still highly entertaining to listen to those tinny tunes, but there’s also an element of silliness that doesn’t jive with today’s more mature content. If these sonic backdrops once suited the goofy, fantastic nature of games, now they strive for pulse-pounding realism and heart-tugging drama, because that’s how gaming has evolved in terms of narrative, visuals and gameplay.

With the proper audio equipment, cop car sirens, shotgun blasts and exploding skyscrapers sound as convincing in videogames as they do in action movies. Like those films, games such as Halo supplement their surround-sound effects with equally high-concept music. All the glowing reviews of the Wii’s just-released The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword made mention of its lush music, likely because it’s the first time the franchise has used an orchestra. If you think that’s extreme, the soundtrack of 2007’s Halo 3 featured a 60-piece orchestra and a 24-piece choir.

Many factors have contributed to the new/old videogame music craze, but one stands out. According to a recent survey conducted by the Entertainment Software Association, 50.5 per cent of American households own current-generation game consoles—and that’s not even counting handheld devices, smartphones or last-gen models. Like all of the game-centric kids who grew up to become game-centric musicians, many of today’s parents grew up with videogames. What used to be a childish or geeky pastime is now a legitimate medium enjoyed by almost every demographic, who have myriad different tastes. Angry Birds is no longer just an annoying but strangely addictive app on your smartphone—now it’s on your iTunes playlist, too!

Since videogames and movies began courting in the early ’80s, they’ve shared a generally cringe-worthy relationship. There are exceptions—1997’s Goldeneye (based on the 007 film) is not only the gold standard of movie-based games, it’s also one of the greatest first-person shooters ever. But such triumphs have been few and far between.

There have been slight improvements in the universe of movie-game tie-ins over the last decade, due in no small part to advancements in graphics. To help matters, the producers of many of today’s better adaptations have eased up on the practice of rushing games out of the gate in order to coincide with a film’s premiere. The hotly anticipated new game Batman: Arkham City, for example, came out this week. Like its 2009 precursor, Batman: Arkham Asylum, this installment isn’t narratively affiliated with Christopher Nolan’s movies, the third of which will be in theatres this coming summer. But like Nolan’s interpretation of the Batman story, the Arkham games have struck a chord with a multi-generational audience of filmgoers, gamers and comic-book fans for their gritty take on the franchise.

While things may finally be looking up for certain franchises, history has proven that movies make for lacklustre games. The second movie tie-in game ever released, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, was accused of not just killing Atari, but contributing to the videogame industry crash of ’83. Since then, countless beloved blockbusters have been turned into unplayable cash-grabs.

This losing streak doesn’t begin and end with gaming. In many cases, game-based movies have fared even worse. Anyone who grew up with the NES also grew up with its flagship title, Super Mario Bros. When word got out that Hollywood was embracing the famed franchise, naïve gamers were ecstatic to see a big-screen story about sibling plumbers battling goombas, koopas and a fire-breathing beast named Bowser. Many of us can still recall the air of WTF-ness that filled the theatre as Bob Hoskins (Mario) and John Leguizamo (Luigi) threw down with Dennis Hopper (Bowser).

The nadir of tragic tie-ins came in 1994, when arcade and console brawler Street Fighter was translated into a live-action film that starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, Kylie Minogue and Raul Julia. As if turning a classic game into a lame movie wasn’t shameful enough, a videogame called Street Fighter: The Movie was also released. The notion of playing a lousy game based on a lousy movie based on a groundbreaking game is just too stupid for words.

The give-and-take relationship between the mediums is stronger than ever now—games are becoming more narrative-driven, and big-budget action movies are virtually indistinguishable from big-budget video-games. These developments can be traced back to 1999’s The Matrix, the movie that popularized bullet-time, whereby the heroes could slow down time in order to dodge bullets and mow down loads of bad guys. In 2001, movies and games came full circle with Max Payne, a third-person shooter in which “bullet-time” was an essential part of the gameplay. (For the record, there was a Matrix game. It was terrible.)

Movie-based games are showing signs of progress, and it looks as though game-based movies might not be far behind. While the Angry Birds and FarmVille features now in development seem like bad ideas, there are several other adaptations that sound a helluva lot better than a fifth Resident Evil sequel. The most exciting news came when a French press release divulged that Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks were involved in pre-production for a movie based on an upcoming novelization of the popular game Halo. A high-profile collaboration like that could give game-based movies significantly more credibility. None of this has been confirmed, so let’s just pray that Uwe Boll doesn’t step in to adapt this great franchise into an abysmal movie that gets turned into an even worse game.

“I love the Power Glove, it’s so bad” is the famous line from the not-so-famous 1989 film/feature-length Nintendo advertisement, The Wizard, in which Fred Savage and Christian Slater play older brothers to a boy with autism who competes in a high-stakes videogame tournament. The Power Glove and Super Mario Bros. 3 both made their North American debuts in that movie, but only one of these products lived up to the hype, and it wasn’t a wearable glove that barely functioned as a controller.

Gaming accessories have been around for as long as there have been videogame consoles to plug them into. And they’ve always been a mixed bag in terms of user-friendliness, enjoyability and necessity. Even non-gamers are likely familiar with the idea that gaming companies repeatedly try to push excitement for their consoles to the next level by selling consumers on the latest must-have toys.

Despite their rocky history, the past few years have seen a boom in state-of-the-art peripherals like plastic guitars, dance mats and hands-free sensors. As fun as some of these devices may be, many of them are just short-term moneymakers for consoles that have been with us for quite some time now rather than new and improved ways to play. At the end of the day, good gaming seems to always come back to the traditional console-and-controller setup.

The next “next big thing” being hyped is 3-D. And while 3-D movies have yet to make a dent in the home-entertainment market, videogames are starting to adopt the technology. Sony is currently taking pre-orders for its PlayStation-branded 3-D TV (retailing for around $499), which is slated for release in November. In addition to working as a television, it boasts unique 3-D visuals that allow two players to see separate full-screen images of gameplay through their respective pairs of glasses. Sony is hoping that the combination of the 3-D glasses with the PlayStation Move (the system’s motion-sensing controller) will create a lifelike gaming experience unlike anything else.

This is a familiar story that dates back to the 1980s. While Nintendo wasn’t the first system to flirt with accessories, no other brand has offered so many weird and wacky ways to extend gaming. In fact, it was a useless peripheral that jump-started the company and effectively saved the videogame industry.

In 1983, a complete lack of quality control among developers led to a crash in the North American videogame market. Two years later, Nintendo unveiled its debut console: the NES. Recognizing that consumers were turning their backs on the gaming industry, the company bundled the system with the Zapper gun and a one-foot-tall robot named R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy) that spun on an axis and moved plastic gyro discs around. This mascot became the centre of a Trojan-horse marketing strategy that downplayed the gaming elements of the NES and played up the robo-buddy aspect. Thus, electronics stores and toy retailers were selling the NES as both a videogame console and as a toy robot.

It’s now common knowledge that R.O.B. was a lousy hunk of plastic that was designed to work with only two wretched games, but when advertisements touted it as the toy of the future, everyone wanted to get their hands on one. Once players came to their senses and realized how pointless R.O.B. actually was, Nintendo stopped manufacturing it. Lucky for them, by that point the calibre of NES titles had already helped reinstate gaming as one of America’s favourite pastimes.

Videogames are hardly on the verge of any kind of slump (2009 revenue was around $60 billion worldwide). But with the myriad options available for gaming (smartphones, tablets, online), the home console still needs a competitive edge. It remains to be seen whether Sony’s 3-D TV will be the thing that introduces another (literal) dimension to gaming or if it will simply be another passing trend that gets a little more mileage out of the PS3. In fairness, it isn’t trying to reinvent the classic control system—just the visuals. But if there’s anything to be learned from peripheral fads of the past, it’s that success will always come down to the quality of the games and not just how we play them.