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Press Start: True Detective, DayZ, the return of a legend, and a lot of fireworks

By Owen S. Good

Previously ... on Polygon: Reddit melted down. HoloLens blew up. The International took in $15 million on its way to Seattle next month. And a politician who raked in a bunch of money is going to jail for it.

That's an action-packed week, but it's not everything that happened in our corner of the world. Welcome back to Press Start, a recap of the week in games and gaming culture to get you ready for the one ahead.

Last Week in Five Stories




  1. How misfortune and a bit of luck led to the discovery of the fabled Nintendo Play Station

    Dan Diebold woke up to a hangover and a lot of emails Friday morning, all of them asking about a series of pictures he posted on Reddit of what seemed to be the unicorn of gaming history: a prototype of the never released Nintendo Play Station.





  2. This game is made out of suffering

    Sam Coster's health kept deteriorating. Then it was confirmed. T-Cell Rich, Large B-Cell Lymphoma, stage 4b cancer. He wanted to think about something else, anything else. He turned his mind to the endless runner he was trying to make, but it only depressed him more. He thought, "If I am going to die, I want to make something other than yet another endless runner." Last week, the Coster brothers submitted Crashlands to Steam. It was greenlit within two days.





  3. Beyond DayZ: Dean Hall on Early Access, self-funding, and the next big thing

    Dean Hall was on stage at Microsoft's E3 press conference this year to unveil a name and a teaser for his new studio's brand new game, Ion. But despite his role in helping Microsoft announce their own Early Access-style initiative with Xbox Game Preview, the native New Zealander who made his name as the brain behind the wildly successful DayZ hasn't gone full corporate yet.





  4. Let's start over with True Detective's confusing Season 2 opener

    True Detective's second season is two things: depressing and confusing. If it were a video game, its difficulty would be set to hard. Or extra-hard. Or double-extra-super-pro-n0-n00bz-allowed-hardcore-xtreme. Its morose density isn't necessarily bad thing. It's just challenging, emotionally and cognitively.





  5. Mother Russia Bleeds confuses gross and exploitative for bizarre and gritty

    By looks alone, Mother Russia Bleeds could be a cousin of Hotline Miami, another series published by Devolver Digital. But while Hotline Miami pokes at deeper questions of violence and the enjoyment we get from it, Mother Russia Bleeds revels in it with seemingly little regard for the victims of that virtual violence.


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