Author name: Tetsuo

Former Nintendo President and CEO Satoru Iwata’s classic “Ask Iwata” will be reprinted in paperback in the summer of 2026! This book is published by VIZ Media. The original Japanese version was edited by Hobonichi (ほぼ日). It contains the essence of Iwata’s classic interviews and conversations during his lifetime. It is known as “the book that best understands the soul of Nintendo”.

Shocking news came from the Japanese game industry – Tomonobu Itagaki, the father of “Ninja Gaiden” (Ninja Gaiden) and “Dead or Alive” (DOA / Life and Death Fighting), passed away at the age of 58. After the news was exposed, Katsuhiro Harada, the director of the “Tekken” series who has known him for more than thirty years and is also an old enemy, published a long tribute on X (Twitter). The content was so profound that it was almost like a retrospective of game history.

The masterpiece “Popful Mail” that has been circulated among fans for many years will usher in an unprecedented resurrection! According to the latest news, the version produced by Hunex in 1994 and released on PC Engine Super CD-ROM² is now undergoing a new English dubbing and remastered translation patch, and a public voice campaign has been launched online.

Old players should all know that on the Japanese PC-98 platform in the 1990s, there were many frightening horror adventure games, including breast exposure, nudity, exposure, and even sex! One of the most notorious is “Dead of the Brain 2” produced by FairyTale. Now, this classic bloody adventure launched in 1993 finally has a complete English version!

If you have played “Ridge Racer”, you must know her – Reiko Nagase, the virtual track goddess wearing a racing suit, smiling and waving. She first appeared in the arcade version of “Rave Racer” in 1995. She was not officially named until “Ridge Racer Type 4” in 1998, and quickly became one of Namco’s most representative game characters. She was the earliest virtual idol, even earlier than Miku!

If you’ve played any console, those four familiar buttons in your hand—A, B, X, Y—should have long since become part of your muscle memory. From Super Nintendo to Xbox and even Steam Deck, this arrangement has become a global “standard”, except for Sony PS5. Well, there is another “fish that slipped through the net”, which is SNK NEOGEO, with the handles A, B, C, and D.

In 1995, “WipEout”, an airship racing game with very good graphics at the time, debuted in Europe with the PlayStation, becoming a key tool for Sony to enter the young player market that year! This anti-gravity airship racing game developed by British studio Psygnosis not only became one of the symbols of the early days of PlayStation, but also made the Sega Saturn passive at the time.

The masterpieces of the Game Boy era are being “resurrected” one by one! Brand Newman, a game translator and ROM hacker from France, is working on a DX color version of the Game Boy Color version of Tiny Toon Adventures: Babs’ Big Break.

Sony celebrated the 30th anniversary of the original PlayStation (PS1) last year, and this year marks the 30th anniversary of the console’s official launch in the West. Former SIE Global Studios President Shuhei Yoshida recently accepted an exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz and talked about the history he experienced personally – from the collapse of Nintendo cooperation to the birth of PlayStation.