It's the year 2025, and we have not one, but two new Barcode Battler decks. What a time to be alive!

Created by industry veteran Keith Webb of Tanukii Studios, who Nintendo Life interviewed about his DSi title Go! Go! Kokopolo, this new deck is a serious attempt to create a fun and engaging game which leverages the unique aspects of the hardware.

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The launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America is one of gaming's greatest success stories.

At the time of its original test market release in October 1985, the market for video game consoles in North America was considered to be dead, with memories still strong among retailers of the video game crash that had occurred just two years prior.

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By her own admission, Leslie Swan isn't a very good self-promoter, but she needn't worry as her credits do a great job of getting across her credentials for her.

Over her 28 years at Nintendo, she has been credited on dozens of games as a localization manager, working on pretty much all the mainline Zelda titles from Majora's Mask to Majora's Mask 3D, in addition to games like Animal Crossing, and WarioWare.

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Final Fantasy IX celebrated its 25th anniversary earlier this year, having originally released in Japan on July 7th, 2000.

Developed as the last mainline entry on the original PlayStation, the critically acclaimed turn-based RPG proved to be a landmark title in the legendary series, taking the series back to its medieval roots to pay tribute to what had come before.

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While Championship Manager and Football Manager might be considered the giants of the soccer management genre, Kevin Toms deserves his place in history for creating the original Football Manager franchise all the way back in 1982.

The first title effectively created the entire genre, and is fondly remembered by many who owned home computer in the '80s. Toms revived the series for smartphones as Football Star* Manager in 2016, and launched a Kickstater in 2022 to fund the development of a new title.

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The Sinclair ZX Spectrum is perhaps the most famous home computer to come out of the British Isles.

Launched in 1982, it is credited with creating an entire generation of designers, artists and developers, and continues to attract adoration and attention more than 40 years later – as evidenced by the amazing success of the recent Spectrum Next crowdfunding campaign.

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In the world of video game music, Hitoshi Sakimoto holds a truly unique position.

He began his career in composition at the tender age of 16, and in the 40 years which have passed, he has scored over 400 different video games, with titles such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Radiant Silvergun, Valkyria Chronicles, Final Fantasy XII, Dragon's Crown, Soukyugurentai and many more to his name.

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We recently reported on the fact that Supercell – famous for its smartphone games – had teamed up with a bunch of former EMAP journalists to create Super Cellphone Gamer, a promotional magazine based on the legendary Mean Machines, one of the UK's best-selling multi-format publications, which first launched back in 1990.

It's no exaggeration to say that I owe my career to Mean Machines and the people who made it; the magazine was a tremendous influence on me as a young gamer, and effectively shaped my gaming tastes at a very early age – as was no doubt the case with thousands of other British kids.

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Initially getting his start back in the mid-80s, the LA-based producer, designer, and project lead Antonio "Tony" Barnes has been making games for almost four decades now.

During that time, he has understandably managed to be involved with the creation of a lot of great games, having worked at a wide variety of companies such as Electronic Arts, Crystal Dynamics, The Collective, and Double Helix.

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There are few British video game developers (still working today) who can claim to have quite as interesting or as impressive a career as the Llamasoft founder Jeff Minter.

For the last four decades, he has endured all manner of incidents and setbacks the industry has thrown at him — and, through all that, has managed to stay remarkably true to himself, building exactly the kinds of experiences he wants, without compromise or defeat.

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One of the formative figures of video games is Tomohiro Nishikado. Known for creating the arcade game smash hit Space Invaders, I caught up with him about his long and storied career.

“I was born in Osaka, in a place called Kishiwada, and I spent most of my young life there until I moved to Tokyo when I was 18, when I went to university. My father ran a business related to the making and maintenance of craftsmen's tools. So when I was growing up, I could always find spare materials and tools to make things.

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If you've ever been lucky enough to visit the historic UK city of York, then there's a good chance you've visited the excellent Sore Thumb Retro Games, an independent store packed to the rafters with video games, anime products, vintage toys and much, much more.

As a regular visitor to the city, I've been popping in multiple times each year and on a recent trip, store owner Lee Cunningham mentioned that Sore Thumb is getting its very own video game—and if that wasn't cool enough, it's been coded by the 13-year-old David Carter.

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In December 1996, Sony Computer Entertainment published the video game PaRappa the Rapper in Japan – a groundbreaking title about a paper-thin rapping dog on a quest to win the heart of his beloved (a humanoid flower named Sunny Funny).

Developed by NanaOn-Sha – a game company that was founded several years earlier by the Japanese pop star Masaya Matsuura (of the band Psy•s) – the title went on to become a worldwide sleeper hit and has since acquired a passionate fanbase thanks to its charming visuals (designed by the American artist and graphic designer Rodney Greenblat) and its memorable tunes featuring catchy lyrics about everything from learning karate (“Kick! Punch! It's all in the mind”) to needing the restroom.

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Jon Hare is a figure whose name is likely to conjure up warm nostalgic feelings in the hearts of many who grew up playing computer games in the UK in the '80s and '90s.

As one of the co-founders behind the influential software house Sensible Software, he helped design some of the best football games for home computers like Microprose Soccer, Sensible Soccer, and Sensible World of Soccer, as well as a bunch of other non-sports-related titles too, such as Parallax, Wizball, and Cannon Fodder.

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On February 25, 2025, it was announced that the Washington-based developer Monolith Productions would be closing its doors for good, causing a mass outpouring of grief from all corners of the games industry.

Since its formation back in 1994, the developer had built up a large and loyal following in the gaming community, thanks to its work on licensed games like Middle Earth: The Shadow of Mordor, Tron 2.0, and Alien Versus Predator 2, as well as classic first-person shooters like Blood, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, and F.E.A.R.

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The Segagaga director Tetsu "Tez" Okano has had an extraordinary but unconventional career in video games.

As a kid growing up in 1970s Japan, he fell in love with arcade games like Space Invaders and Galaxian but never initially considered that he would be able to make a career for himself in video games. As a result, he put his growing fascination with the burgeoning new industry to one side for a number of years, finishing his education and later going on to land a job with the Japanese publisher Kodansha as a manga artist contributing stories to "Morning" magazine between 1990 and 1991. Very quickly, though, as he has said in the past, he ended up discovering, that the occupation of an manga artist offered very little in the way of job security and decided that he should probably start looking for some more stable employment. Because of this, he soon found himself applying for a job at the arcade company Sega, which he claims was on the search for unusual talent at the time, eventually getting a job at Sega's AM Research & Development No. 3 in 1992.

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When WayForward and Limited Run Games announced that they were planning to resurrect the GBA classic Sigma Star Saga earlier this year for GBA, PC, and modern consoles, it attracted a lot of excitement online — especially among those who had previously played the game growing up.

20 years later, fans of the adventure RPG/shoot 'em-up hybrid were finally being given the perfect reason to revisit the beloved title from the developer of Shantae, with the team not only promising to bring the title to a wide range of platforms but fix a bunch of lingering issues and address decades of feedback.

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Those of you with a love of physical media and retro games will no doubt have heard of the name Limited Run.

Founded in 2015 by Josh Fairhurst and Douglas Bogart, the company started out publishing games created by Fairhurt's Mighty Rabbit studio before transitioning to distributing the titles of other companies. Since then, Limited Run has worked with some of the biggest names in the industry to help create unique physical releases for a wide range of modern and retro formats, and in 2022, the company was acquired by Embracer.

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Katsuya Terada is a Japanese illustrator and artist whose work has spanned many mediums over his impressive four-decade-long career.

Initially starting out in the world of advertising, following his graduation from Tokyo's Asagaya College of Art and Design, he has since gone on to contribute artwork to countless video games, films, TV shows, and manga, developing an art style that is a melting pot of different inspirations, drawing influence from classic manga, old Japanese film posters, and Franco-Belgian comics.

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Julian Rignall is one of the most famous and influential video game journalists of the '80s and '90s, having worked on magazines such as Zzap!64, CVG, Mean Machines and Nintendo Magazine System.

He would later help to establish IGN as one of the leading video game websites in the world, and has also worked for Walmart and GamePro during a career which spans five decades.

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