Game Engines
This lightweight, open-source game engine saw a huge surge in popularity in late 2023 following controversial fee announcements by Unity
What is Godot?
This iconic two-tone alert sound effect, accompanied by an exclamation mark appearing over enemy heads, debuted in this 1998 Konami stealth title.
What is Metal Gear Solid?
Eric Barone spent four and a half years working solo under this developer moniker to create the breakout farming sim Stardew Valley
Who is ConcernedApe?
While playtesting Street Fighter II, producer Noritaka Funamizu noticed an input buffer glitch that allowed players to cancel attack animations into each other, accidentally creating this foundational fighting game mechanic
What are Combos?
The most commonly confused name for VGDC
What is the Video Game Design Club?
Valve’s original Source engine was built on top of GoldSrc, which was itself a heavily modified fork of this 1996 id Software engine
What is the Quake engine?
Composer Mick Gordon extensively utilized nine-string guitars, synthesized white noise, and an analog Soviet synthesizer called the Polivoks to craft the heavy industrial metal score for this 2016 FPS reboot
What is DOOM?
This solo developer got his start making horror games on Roblox before breaking Steam records in 2023 with the co-op hit Lethal Company
Who is Zeekerss?
Physics quirks involving uncapped horizontal acceleration and jumping while angled against world geometry birthed strafe-jumping and rocket-jumping in this 1996 shooter
What is Quake?
The name listed on the plaque outside of the Game Lab
What is the Computer Game Science Lab?
Most famous for its appearance in the source code of 1999's Quake III Arena, this clever mathematical algorithm used the magic constant 0x5f3759df to compute 3D lighting vector reflections at high speed
What is Fast Inverse Square Root?
In Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo, this specific percussion layer dynamically fades into the background music whenever Mario mounts Yoshi
What are bongos / steel drums?
Founded by former Infinity Ward heads Vince Zampella and Jason West in 2010, this studio developed Titanfall, Apex Legends, and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
What is Respawn Entertainment?
The hyper-aggressive, vehicular-ramming police AI in the original Grand Theft Auto was accidentally born from a broken route-finding bug in an unreleased prototype game titled this
What is Race’n’Chase?
The year VGDC was founded
What is 2002
Introduced in Unreal Engine 5, this virtualized micropolygon geometry system automatically streams and scales LODs in real time, allowing millions of raw cinematic polygons to render smoothly without baking normal maps
What is Nanite?
This composer rose to indie fame for her award-winning work on the Celeste soundtrack before writing new atmospheric tracks for Minecraft and Chicory: A Colorful Tale.
Who is Lena Raine?
Before being acquired by EA and eventually shut down in 2017, this Redwood Shores studio created the Dead Space franchise and Dante's Inferno
What is Visceral Games?
In the original Pokémon Red and Blue, flying to Cinnabar Island and surfing along its eastern coast after speaking to the Old Man in Viridian City summons this famous blocky glitch entity
What is MissingNo.?
The name of the big red book in the Game Lab
What is 1001 Video Games that You Must Play before You Die?
Hideo Kojima partnered with Guerrilla Games to build Death Stranding using this proprietary engine, originally created for Horizon Zero Dawn
What is Decima Engine?
This Japanese composer wrote the groundbreaking, genre-blending acid-jazz and big-beat soundtrack for 2000's Jet Set Radio before returning for Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
Who is Hideki Naganuma?
Founded in 1999 as a support team for Deus Ex, this Austin and Lyon studio went on to create Dishonored, Prey (2017), and Deathloop
What is the Decima Engine?
In 2005, an infectious debuff cast by Hakkar the Soulflayer in the Zul'Gurub raid leaked into major capital cities via hunter pets, creating this virtual epidemic that real-world epidemiologists later studied to model infectious disease spread
What is the Corrupted Blood Incident?
The year VGDC was founded
What is 2002?