Guides, history and buying advice for people who actually play games
Video Game Sources Editorial Team 
The save game evolved from nothing at all — arcade machines simply reset when you lost — into passwords, then battery-backed cartridges, then memory cards, then hard drives, and now cloud saves that follow a player across devices. Each step removed a limit on how long a game could ask players to commit to it. … Read more
Classic games were hard largely because of money and hardware, not just design taste. Arcades needed players to lose quickly so they’d feed in more coins, and home cartridges had so little memory that developers stretched short games out by making them punishing, with few or no save points to soften the blow. Why did … Read more
Online multiplayer became normal through a slow stack of small fixes: home internet got fast and cheap enough to matter, consoles built networking into the hardware instead of treating it as an accessory, and developers stopped seeing “play with strangers” as a niche feature and started building whole games around it. No single moment caused … Read more
The shift from cartridges to discs mainly changed three things: how much data a game could hold, how long it took to actually start playing, and how cheap it was to manufacture and pirate. Discs made bigger, more cinematic games possible, but they traded near-instant loading for waiting screens and made games far easier to … Read more
Games moved from 2D to 3D quickly because the hardware finally became cheap enough to do it, and once one major console proved 3D worked, every competitor and publisher had to follow or look outdated. It was less a single invention and more several pressures — technical, commercial and competitive — arriving at the same … Read more
Arcades shaped modern games by forcing designers to make experiences that grabbed attention in seconds, ended in minutes, and rewarded skill immediately. That pressure created the genre templates, difficulty curves, scoring systems, and even monetization habits that console and PC games still use decades later. What made arcade games different from home games? Arcade games … Read more
The video game crash of 1983 happened because the market was flooded with far more games and consoles than players actually wanted, many of them rushed out and poorly made, while home computers offered a more flexible alternative for the same money. Retailers lost confidence, shelf space dried up, and companies collapsed within a couple … Read more
The real discount periods cluster around a handful of predictable moments: the end-of-year holiday sales, a mid-year summer sale, and the days around major storefront anniversaries. Prices creep down gradually the rest of the year, but the deepest cuts on big-name titles almost always land in those windows. What is the single biggest sale period … Read more
For most people, a good ergonomic office chair is the better long-term investment. Gaming chairs win on looks and branding, but many rely on thin padding and limited adjustability. A properly adjustable office or “task” chair usually supports posture better over long sessions, especially past the first year of ownership. That said, “worth it” depends … Read more
A remaster takes the original game’s assets, code and design and polishes them — sharper visuals, smoother performance, sometimes updated controls — without rebuilding the game itself. A remake tears the game down and rebuilds it largely from scratch, often changing levels, mechanics, art style or story details along the way. The gap between them … Read more
About what you read here. Everything on Video Game Sources is general information and our own editorial opinion. We research carefully and we say when the evidence is unclear, but we can be wrong, things change, and no article can know your particular situation. Please do your own research and make your own judgement rather than treating anything here as the final word. Prices, products and specifications around games and gaming hardware change constantly, and what suits one person will not suit another. Check current details yourself, and where a decision involves real money, safety or something you cannot undo, it is worth confirming with the manufacturer or retailer before you act.