It’s so cute seeing major outlets describe the Internet over a decade ago.

(via The High Definite)

This montage of death scenes and animations from classic arcade games should push your nostalgia button, but also ends up being a somewhat hauntingly beautiful video due to the chiptunes version of what seems to be the Gary Jules version of the Tears for Fears version of “Mad World,” which you may remember from your college dorm viewing party of Donnie Darko. Head on past the break to see a larger, prettier version of the video, and make sure your sound is on.

Nowadays, piracy protection usually focuses on prevention rather than punishment, but back in The Day, before technology allowed constant Internet connections and horrible, system-degrading mechanisms, developers had to get creative with piracy protection. The above video shows one instance of how EarthBound, known as Mother in Japan, got clever and sneakily evil with their protection: At the boss fight with Giygas, the game freezes and forces the player to reset, and when they return to the saves menu, they discover the game erased their save file, causing them to lose all of their progress. EarthBound games are oldies, so the piracy protection focused on checking if the game was using a cartridge copier. At least back then, one could find humor in the ways developers dealt with piracy; now it’s all constant Internet connections and registry edits.

(via reddit)

You know that back when you were playing The Legend of Zelda, you wondered, “What was really going on with Link? And Zelda? Was it … like … weird for them?” Obviously, John Hughes knew the teenage mind the best in the ’80s and early ’90s, so why wouldn’t he have taken a crack at video game fan fiction? So here, in glorious VHS quality, is what that trailer would look like.

“I gave her my heart … she gave me … a jar.”

(Joystiq)

Ahhhh, tapes. Glorious, vintage cassette tapes. I remember the transition from tapes to CDs, then desperately trying to figure out songs that didn’t exist on a small, tangible data organizer. (What exactly was I supposed to do with this thumb drive? … What?) My best guy friend in high school made me a “Sunny Seventeen” mix tape for my birthday that year, complete with a hand cover. (Thanks, Terence.) We would record songs off the radio when our favorite songs came on, as if we’d never hear them again, satisfied with missing the first part of the song and losing the second part of the song to station IDs and annoying DJs. But alas — ’tis the end of an era. Tape decks in cars are no more.

Council of Elrond recuts are sooooo 2002, but it was the slack-jawed look on Boromir’s face that really did it for us.

Also dwarves are awesome.

(via Geeks Are Sexy.)

In a modern era where a team of gamers (LoadingReadyRun) spend almost six straight days playing and webcasting the most boring game in the world (Desert Bus) and at the end of it raise more than $200,000 to give toys, games, books, and craft supplies to sick kids (Child’s Play), it’s good to remember that things have not always been so.

Which is not to say that gamers haven’t always had the same percentage of righteous and generous individuals, but just that the internet has not been available, and the young medium was even younger.  But that didn’t keep a few individuals from marching down to their arcade on January 2nd, 1981 and playing Asteroids until they’d raised enough money to pay for a local teen’s gravestone.

BoingBoing has unearthed a 1982 video featuring raw footage of Bill Murray, complaining (comedically) about dumb technological advancements of the early 1980s like digital watches (“People have hands, I think watches should have hands”), talking dashboards in cars (“I would put my foot right through that dashboard”), and robots (“R2-D2…he was funny, he was cute, he’s a fine, fine actor”).

Posted on YouTube user ExcentricPT’s channel, the above video tells the story of the Nativity with the use of modern day technology, including Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Wikipedia, and most of the rest of the big boys. The Three Wise Men must be the envy of Foursquare users, being able to check-in at the birth of Christ.

(ExcentricPT via Geeks are Sexy)

John Graham-Cumming is currently collecting funds to use Charles Babbage‘s original blueprints to finally build his unfinished masterpiece: an entirely clockwork programmable computer that was conceived in 1837.

Charles Babbage was a visionary thinker of the 1800′s who had a lot of great ideas (like calculating mathematics by mechanical means)… but no funding. He never managed to get a completed prototype of any of his computers made during his lifetime. Since his death, there have been at least two working Difference Engines constructed. However, the Difference Engine was basically a normal calculator, and could perform only basic mathematical functions.

Graham-Cumming is looking to make a working model of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which was actually a programmable computer. The graphic calculator version of the Difference Engine, if you will.