just a guy

In-game ads don't make games cheap or free for a couple reasons. First, in-game advertising only comprises about 10% of the profit for the game. That means it wouldn't be nearly enough money to make the game free. Second, it takes a team of people four years to make a game, which is double the amount of time the average game took a just a few years ago. And yet the prices of games haven't doubled, in fact they've stayed pretty stable for almost 20 years. That extra cash has to come from somewhere.

lol @ periodic puns

Someone beat me to it, but the text next to the image translates as "LEONID POSITION." Leonids are a meteor shower that can be seen every year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid

Also, some text in the background running vertically below the constantly changing letters translates as follows:
BY BDCD WORDS
THEYWEREMADE

That last bit sounds rather ominous...

What? Nobody is going to mention the Gravis Pad?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravis_PC_GamePad

It's interesting to note that many controllers use the Red-Yellow-Green-Blue colors for the buttons, but no two companies put the colors in the same positions. I wonder if that is intentional.

Mission in Snowdriftland didn't really "mysteriously vanish," the site had a note that it would only be available until January 15.

This happened to me at a GameStop also. Thing was, it was a gift for my brother, so now I had to explain that the chumps at the store assured me the game was new despite the opened package that would say otherwise. Might not be such a big deal if I was keeping the game, but it looks shitty when it's a gift. I should have gone somewhere else, but I was in a bit of a hurry.

@24 & 28:
If you go frame by frame through the part where they flash through the still scenes quickly, you'll see that there is one scene that is cel shaded. It's easier to do that with the downloaded hi-def version that you can get here:
http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=4564

@48: True, Tennis for Two came before Spacewar, but it wasn't an early version of Pong. It may have *inspired* Pong, but the gameplay was different. Also, they were developed independently by different people. And I agree with Ralph Baer in the link in comment #49; Tennis for Two isn't really a video game because it was played on an oscilliscope.

Also, I was mistaken in my previous comment, it was Spacewar that made the list and not Pong.

You guys obviously don't know your video game history. Spacewar predated Pong by almost a decade, and had more complex graphics and gameplay to boot. However, Pong was produced for a mass audience and introduced people to home consoles, which is probably why it's on the list.

@10: Tetris is on the list because it pretty much created the casual puzzle genre. It reached unprecedented mainstream appeal.

In general, it's easy to track the evolution of video games throughout history, but it's difficult to pinpoint specific games that shifted paradigms or created genres. These guys have a difficult feat to accomplish.

Also, "duct *taped* together" (messed it up twice in the first paragraph) and *Telltale* in the penultimate paragraph.