An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hollywood Reporter: Grab your wagons and oxen, and get ready to ford a river: A movie adaptation of the popular grade school computer game Oregon Trail is in development at Apple. The studio landed the film pitch, still in early development, that has Will Speck and Josh Gordon attached to direct and produce. EGOT winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul will provide original music and produce via their Ampersand production banner. Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the movie will feature a couple of original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie.

The Lucas Bros. (Judas and the Black Messiah) and Max Reisman are set to pen the screenplay about the game that is meant to mimic 19th-century pioneer times, following a covered wagon train heading west. Created in 1971, the game reached cult status among American grade schoolers by the 1990s as one of the first educational computer games allowed in schools -- and for its hilariously dark storylines filled with broken arms, typhoid and dysentery. The film will likely debut on Apple TV+, but details are scarce at the moment.

A commercial military simulation software, originally inspired by Tom Clancy novels, has become an unexpected tool for military training across NATO forces and defense analysts worldwide. Command: Professional Edition, developed by Britain's Slitherine Software, has secured contracts with the U.S. Air Force and British Strategic Command, while Taiwanese analysts use it to war-game potential conflicts with China.

The software's success stems from its vast database of military equipment and capabilities, compiled through contributions from its million-strong user base. Marine Corps University's wargaming director Tim Barrick employs the software to train officers, noting its effectiveness in developing tactical creativity. "These are not simple problems," said Barrick, a retired Marine colonel, told WSJ.

A fascinating excerpt from the report: Command's British publisher, Slitherine Software, stumbled into popularity. The family business got started around 2000 selling retail CD-ROM games like Legion, involving ancient Roman military campaigns. When Defense Department officials in 2016 first contacted Slitherine, which is based in an old house in a leafy London suburb, its father-and-son managers were so stunned they thought the call might be a prank. "Are you taking the piss?" J.D. McNeil, the father, recalled asking near the end of the conversation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this year, we reported on the video game archivists asking for a legal DMCA exemption to share Internet-accessible emulated versions of their physical game collections with researchers. Today, the US Copyright Office announced once again that it was denying that request, forcing researchers to travel to far-flung collections for access to the often-rare physical copies of the games they're seeking.

In announcing its decision, the Register of Copyrights for the Library of Congress sided with the Entertainment Software Association and others who argued that the proposed remote access could serve as a legal loophole for a free-to-access "online arcade" that could harm the market for classic gaming re-releases. This argument resonated with the Copyright Office despite a VGHF study that found 87 percent of those older game titles are currently out of print. "While proponents are correct that some older games will not have a reissue market, they concede there is a 'healthy' market for other reissued games and that the industry has been making 'greater concerted efforts' to reissue games," the Register writes in her decision. "Further, while the Register appreciates that proponents have suggested broad safeguards that could deter recreational uses of video games in some cases, she believes that such requirements are not specific enough to conclude that they would prevent market harms."

A DMCA exemption for remote sharing already exists for non-video-game computer software that is merely "functional," as the Register notes. But the same fair use arguments that allow for that sharing don't apply to video games because they are "often highly expressive in nature," the Register writes. In an odd footnote, the Register also notes that emulation of classic game consoles, while not infringing in its own right, has been "historically associated with piracy," thus "rais[ing] a potential concern" for any emulated remote access to library game catalogs. That footnote paradoxically cites Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) founder and director Frank Cifaldi's 2016 Game Developers Conference talk on the demonization of emulation and its importance to video game preservation. "The moment I became the Joker is when someone in charge of copyright law watched my GDC talk about how it's wrong to associate emulation with piracy and their takeaway was 'emulation is associated with piracy,'" Cifaldi quipped in a social media post.

Microsoft is seeking to boost its video games business with the release of the latest instalment of the Call of Duty franchise on Friday, pushing to increase subscription revenues through the new game to offset falling Xbox console sales. Financial Times: Black Ops 6 is the first of the best-selling series to be launched on the tech giant's Game Pass subscription service. It represents the biggest test of the company's gaming strategy [non-paywalled link] since its $75bn deal to acquire Activision Blizzard -- makers of Call of Duty -- received sign-off from regulators last year. Microsoft hopes that the release will help achieve its target of reaching 110mn Game Pass subscribers by 2030, a substantial rise from 34mn in February this year.

The company has shifted its focus towards its subscription games service as hardware sales have slowed in recent years. Xbox hardware revenue fell 13 per cent year-on-year in Microsoft's fiscal 2024, which ended in June. For the first time this year, subscribers to Game Pass, who can already access a growing library of Xbox titles for as long as they keep paying a monthly fee, will be able to access the latest Call of Duty without having to pay a traditional price of $70 or more for the packaged game. Microsoft is still making the game available to buy on PlayStation, after concerns from regulators during the Activision merger probe that it might make the title exclusive to its own platform.

The first cracks are starting to show in Netflix's push into gaming. The Verge: First reported in Game File and confirmed by Netflix, the streaming company has quietly closed of one of its studios, the first in the three years since the company began its foray into gaming.

According to Game File, the shuttered studio was known as Blue. In 2022, Netflix announced it hired former Overwatch executive producer Chacko Sonny to run the studio. Since then, Blue had brought on a number of game industry veterans with experience working on high profile franchises including Halo and God of War. Reportedly, Blue was developing a multi-platform AAA game for an original IP but was closed before the game could be announced or released.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Fans of literature most likely know Kurt Vonnegut for the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The staunchly anti-war book first resonated with readers during the Vietnam War era, later becoming a staple in high school curricula the world over. When Vonnegut died in 2007 at the age of 84, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest American novelists of all time. But would you believe that he was also an accomplished game designer?

In 1956, following the lukewarm reception of his first novel, Player Piano, Vonnegut was one of the 16 million other World War II veterans struggling to put food on the table. His moneymaking solution at the time was a board game called GHQ, which leveraged his understanding of modern combined arms warfare and distilled it into a simple game played on an eight-by-eight grid. Vonnegut pitched the game relentlessly to publishers all year long according to game designer and NYU faculty member Geoff Engelstein, who recently found those letters sitting in the archives at Indiana University. But the real treasure was an original set of typewritten rules, complete with Vonnegut's own notes in the margins.

With the permission of the Vonnegut estate, Engelstein tells Polygon that he cleaned the original rules up just a little bit, buffed out the dents in GHQ's endgame, and spun up some decent art and graphic design. Now you can purchase the final product, titled Kurt Vonnegut's GHQ: The Lost Board Game, at your local Barnes & Noble -- nearly 70 years after it was created.

Analogue, a retro gaming company, is releasing a hardware-emulated Nintendo 64 console that can play every N64 game in 4K resolution. TechCrunch reports: Analogue, as is its habit, spent years meticulously re-engineering the N64 in FPGA form -- basically, this means that the new 3D console is, in several important ways, indistinguishable from the original hardware. One hundred percent compatibility with the console's game library is the most obvious one, meaning every single N64 cartridge works with this thing. Perhaps the bigger challenge with the N64, as with many other consoles of that era, is how it produces an image.

The N64 put out an analog video signal intended for display on interlaced CRT displays -- something that directly influenced the gameplay and art styles of countless games for the platform. Many retro games simply look bad on modern high-resolution displays not because they are dated or the art is insufficient, but because the display techs are fundamentally different.

To that end, Analogue has built in a native upscaler that, rather than cleaning up and digitizing the analog video output of the original system (as some upscalers do, with varying degrees of success), produces a natively digital, 4K signal with imitation CRT artifacts and scanlines. This is something they pioneered early on and produced several versions of to reproduce accurate phosphors and display modes for the multi-system Analogue Pocket. [...] The result is simply that games ought to look how you remembered them, which is to say probably a sight better than they actually looked. The Analogue 3D is available for pre-order at 8am PDT on October 21. It's priced at $250.

Though native Linux game servers have been scarce over the last two decades, "I've seen people using the Box64 emulator to play x86_64 games on ARM devices," writes Slashdot reader VennStone. "It got me thinking: why not apply this to game servers...?

"I thought it would be fun to see if I could build a super low-power Trackmania 2 server using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W."

They dubbed the experiment "Trackberry", and shared all the technical details in a blog post at Interfacing Linux (includinga video). For example, they installed PyEnv so it could create a virtual environment for the PyPlanet server controller. ("That's right, your little Pi Zero 2 W is about to compile some software, slowly....")

But ultimately "it turns out that the A53 can run not only the server but also the server controller, with minimal effort. Five players push one core to around 50% load, while the others handle the database and controller." WHY STOP THERE? There are a gang of x86 Linux servers that could potentially run with Box64. Imagine playing Pirraria, 7 Days to Pi, Counter-Pi 2, Pitorio, and countless others! Granted, you may need a more powerful device than a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. I'll leave that research up to you.

My main takeaway from this experiment? Box64 is straight-up Scandinavian witchcraft and is not to be trifled with. Not even a little bit.

That said, it introduces a compelling option for those of us looking to run dedicated game servers that don't require much in the way of system resources. Under load, TrackBerry averages 2.8 watts and, according to the scientific number digits below, ends up running just under $3.00 a year or $0.25 a month. I find the concept of having a stack of microSD cards, each holding a different game server, neat....

You can see TrackBerry in action every Tuesday and Friday on Twitch...

In response to California's new law targeting "false advertising" of "digital goods," Valve has added the following language to its checkout page: "A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam." Ars Technica reports: California's AB2426 law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Sept. 26, excludes subscription-only services, free games, and digital goods that offer "permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet." Otherwise, sellers of digital goods cannot use the terms "buy, purchase," or related terms that would "confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good." And they must explain, conspicuously, in plain language, that "the digital good is a license" and link to terms and conditions.

Which is what Valve has now added to its cart page before enforcement of these terms was due to start next year. The company has long made it clear, deeper inside its End User License Agreement (EULA), that a purchase is a license, and those licenses cannot be resold, which avoids issues of one's right to resell a game. Now it is something that every user sees on every purchase, however quickly they click-through to get to their download.

Microsoft will offer direct game purchases through its Xbox app for Android starting November, following a U.S. court ruling against Google's app store monopoly. The move allows Microsoft to circumvent Google's revenue cut on in-app purchases and signals renewed focus on mobile gaming, bolstered by its recent $75.4 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Liliputing: The Fedora Asahi Remix GNU/Linux distribution is now shipping with alpha versions of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan graphics drivers that allow you to play some games on Macs with M1 or M2 series processors. But there are a few things to keep in mind. One is that most of the PC games you're likely going to want to play are designed to run on Windows PCs with DirectX drivers and x86 processors. So there's some emulation required to get them to run on Macs with ARM-based processors, a Linux-based operating system, and Vulkan drivers.

Some of the work was also made possible by the folks at Valve, who developed the Proton software that allows many PC games to run on Linux. And during a live demo at XDC 2024, developer Alyssa Rosenzweig demonstrated the Steam game client loading and running on an Apple Silicon Mac running Asahi Linux. For that reason, it takes a lot of RAM -- according to the Asahi team, "most games require 16GB of memory due to emulation overhead." So you're probably not going to be able to do much entry-level gaming on an entry-level Mac with just 8GB of RAM.

Some of the titles that have been confirmed to be playable include Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Control, Portal 2, and Ghostrunner. But there's a difference between playable and smooth. Developers say performance improvements will be required before "newer AAA titles" can run at 60 frames per second or higher. But less demanding games like Hollow Knight should run at full speed.

A new study suggests game piracy costs publishers 19% of revenue on average when digital rights management (DRM) protections are cracked. Research associate William Volckmann at UNC analyzed 86 games using Denuvo DRM on Steam between 2014-2022.

The study, published in Entertainment Computing, found cracks appearing in the first week after release led to 20% revenue loss, dropping to 5% for cracks after six weeks. Volckmann used Steam user reviews and player counts as proxies for sales data.

Nintendo has a new piece of game hardware coming in 2024. It's not the Switch 2, it's the Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo, a new motion-sensing alarm clock that will rouse you from sleep with the sounds of video games like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and more. Polygon adds: The $99.99 alarm clock includes 35 wake-up "scenes" from Nintendo Switch games. Users will "experience immersive sounds and music" from those scenes, which are styled to match Nintendo's franchises. Alarmo will also track users' sleep and motion; Records will keep track of how much you move around, similar to the Pokemon Go Plus Plus sleep tracker that Nintendo released for Pokemon Go/Pokemon Sleep (and the long-promised, but seemingly abandoned QOL project).

Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo will feature various alarm settings, Nintendo said in a news release. The clock's Steady Mode features an alarm that will gradually get more intense the longer you stay in bed. Gentle Mode offers "a more consistent intensity level." And Button Mode is a classic snooze button mode, where you've gotta smack Alarmo to shut it up. Nintendo's new interactive, motion-sensing alarm clock also features "sleepy sounds" -- soothing music that will hopefully lull you to sleep at night.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Months ago, 13-year-old Willis "Blue Scuti" Gibson became the first person to "beat" NES Tetris, crashing the game after a 1,511-line, 157-level performance. Over the weekend, 16-year-old Michael "dogplayingtetris" Artiaga became the first to reach an even more impressive plateau in the game, looping past Level 255 and instantly rolling the game all the way back to the ultra-slow Level 0. It took Artiaga a bit over 80 minutes and a full 3,300 cleared lines to finally achieve the game's first near-mythical "rebirth" live in front of hundreds of Twitch viewers. And after a bit of celebration and recovery on the low levels, Artiaga managed to keep his rolled-over game going for another 40 minutes, finally topping out after a total of 4,216 lines and a record 29.4 million points.

Artiaga's record does come with a small asterisk since he used a version of the game that was modified to avoid the crashes that stopped Blue Scuti's historic run. Still, NES Tetris' first-ever level rollover is a monumental achievement and a testament to just how far competitive classic Tetris has come in a short time.

Investment firm Hindenburg Research claims Roblox is "consistently overstating the amount of people on its platform by 25 percent to 42 percent or more." The Verge reports: Roblox, which went public in 2021, reported having 79.5 million daily active users in its most recent earnings report. However, Hindenburg claims Roblox "intentionally conflates" actual people with daily users, as that number could also include alt accounts and bots. The research alleges that Roblox can separate alt accounts from single users, even though the company's disclosure says daily active users "are not a measure of unique individuals accessing Roblox."

Hindenburg is an activist short-selling firm that infamously publishes research when it says it's identified something shady about a business, allowing it to make a profit as its share value declines. One example is from 2020, when Hindenburg accused the EV startup Nikola of fraud. Subsequently, an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) resulted in a four-year prison sentence for its founder, Trevor Milton. [...] The firm also claims Roblox isn't doing enough to protect children on the platform, alleging its "in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech." Roblox shares dipped following the release of the report. Desiree Fish, Roblox's chief communications officer, said in a statement: "We totally reject the claims made in the report. The financial claims made by Hindenburg Research are simply misleading. The authors are, admittedly short sellers and have an agenda irrespective of the substance of Roblox's business model and results. Over the past four quarters our bookings, the amount of cash receipts, have grown over 22% from $780.7 million in Q2 2023 to $955.2 million in Q2 2024. Over the same time, cash provided by operating activities have totaled $646.3 million, free cash flow was $440.3 million, and we have guided to even higher numbers for fiscal 2024. An examination of our GAAP balance sheet and our GAAP cash flow statement makes that clear. The focus on cash bookings and cash flow are themes that we have focused on consistently with investors dating back to our days as a private company. The author made no attempt to highlight any of that because the positive facts simply don't support their agenda."

Fourteen years after it debuted on PS3 and Xbox 360, and endless rumors later, Red Dead Redemption is finally coming to PC. From a report: It will hit the Rockstar Store, Steam and the Epic Games Store on October 29 with the Undead Nightmare standalone expansion included. Developer Double Eleven helped Rockstar with the port, which has many of the bells and whistles you'd come to expect from a PC version of a classic. Rockstar says RDR will run at up to 144Hz (no unlocked framerates, sadly) in a native 4K resolution if you have capable hardware. There's support for HDR 10 along with Ultrawide (21:9) and Super Ultrawide (32:9) monitors. You'll be able to play with a keyboard and mouse too.

A Nintendo Switch modder has entered a legal battle against Nintendo without legal representation, Torrent Freak reports. Ryan Daly, alleged owner of Modded Hardware, denied all allegations in a lawsuit filed by Nintendo in July. Nintendo claims Modded Hardware offers hardware and firmware for creating and playing pirated games, as well as providing customers with pirated Nintendo titles.

The company filed suit after Daly allegedly ignored warnings to cease operations in March and May 2024. Daly's court response denies wrongdoing and ownership of the business. His defenses include fair use, invalid copyrights, and unjust enrichment. The Modded Hardware website is now password-protected.

Along with 343 Industries now becoming Halo Studios, future Halo games will be developed using Unreal Engine 5. The Verge's Tom Warren reports: Halo moving to Unreal Engine 5 is being positioned as the first step of a transformation for Halo Studios to change its technology, structure, processes, and even culture. "We're not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games," says Pierre Hintze, studio head at Halo Studios. The team building Halo will move from the studio's Slipspace Engine to Unreal, after the proprietary engine it built for Halo Infinite became difficult to use and strained development. Halo Studios has had to dedicate a lot of staff to developing the Slipspace Engine, and parts of it are almost 25 years old.

"One of the primary things we're interested in is growing and expanding our world so players have more to interact with and more to experience," says Chris Matthews, art director at Halo Studios. "Nanite and Lumen [Unreal's rendering and lighting technologies] offer us an opportunity to do that in a way that the industry hasn't seen before. As artists, it's incredibly exciting to do that work." Halo Studios isn't committing to any release dates or new Halo game announcements just yet, but the team has been building some examples of Halo running in Unreal. Dubbed Project Foundry, the work is "neither a game nor a tech demo," but more of a research, development, and training tool. It's also the foundation for how the studio is changing up the way it builds Halo games.

Project Foundry has been built as if it was a shipping game so that a bunch of it can appear in Halo games in the future. "It's fair to say that our intent is that the majority of what we showcased in Foundry is expected to be in projects which we are building, or future projects," says Hintze. Project Foundry includes more detailed landscapes for Halo biomes, as well as foliage levels we haven't seen in Halo games in the past. Master Chief's armor has even been remodeled in this footage [...]. Halo Studios is now working on multiple Halo games, while the Slipstream Engine will continue to power Halo Infinite. "We had a disproportionate focus on trying to create the conditions to be successful in servicing Halo Infinite," says Hintze. "[But switching to Unreal] allows us to put all the focus on making multiple new experiences at the highest quality possible."

Nintendo has convinced Ryujinx's lead developer to shut down the project. According to The Verge, the Switch emulator's download page is empty and its GitHub is gone. The Verge reports: "Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of," writes developer and moderator ripinperiperi on Discord. "While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is." The rest of ripinperiperi's message is a eulogy for the project, including a pair of videos showing the Ryujinx team's progress on iOS and Android ports of the Nintendo Switch emulator, among other core changes -- ones that will now presumably never ship.

Nintendo would not confirm or deny to The Verge that it made a deal with the developer. Instead, Nintendo spokesperson Eddie Garcia mysteriously pointed me to the Entertainment Software Association's head of public affairs Aubrey Quinn -- who said she couldn't speak on behalf of Nintendo.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Somehow, Nintendo's NES Classic Edition console is already almost eight years old, while the Super Nintendo Classic Edition is about to turn seven. That's apparently old enough for Nintendo to announce that the Japanese versions of the consoles -- the Nintendo Classic Mini Family Computer and the Nintendo Classic Mini Super Famicom -- will no longer be eligible for repair once Nintendo Japan's current stock of parts runs out.

That doesn't mean that if you wake up tomorrow morning with a mini Famicom that won't boot you're out of luck. Nintendo Japan will continue to accept repairs but is warning users that it doesn't have a definitive timeline for how long that will be the case.