By now you guys should know I'll post anything that involves Bubble Bobble in any way, and it gets a shout out in this montage of the most memorable video games in the history of the industry. Spanning all genres of gameplay from 1972 to 2007, and pulling from several consoles and handhelds, there's easily a hundred different games that were included in the four minute video. So take out your notebooks and get ready to jot down a few time markers of games you don't recognize but want to know more about, and try to help each other figure out which games were which. The one that caught my eye was Out Of This World at 1:40 into the video. It always looked like an intriguing Super Nintendo game to me, but I never got around to playing it. Are there any games you didn't see that you think deserve to be on the list?

Of all the series in the whole game industry, the Final Fantasy games often confuse people the most. I've lost count of how many times I've heard two different people say that Final Fantasy III is their favorite, only to find out they're talking about two entirely different games. Not only does this thirty minute video summarize every Final Fantasy game released so far, it also explains how the Japanese/American release sequences work out chronologically. So if you're the gamer who timidly has to admit they've never played any Final Fantasy games every time a debate breaks out, watch this video and catch up on what you've missed in the last decade.

Those of you who have played the majority of them, which is your favorite? Final Fantasy VII is the one that usually gets the most praise, but almost all of my hardcore FF friends insist that Final Fantasy VI is the best by far. Or are you one of the few that grew obsessed with FFVIII or one of the other less praised titles in the series? Let's get into a fight over something that has nothing to do with next generation topics for a change, which games did you like the most?

We've all played Mario games before, but a lot of gamers still don't know the history behind the hero. Did you know that the original Donkey Kong arcade game was destined to be a Popeye game? Do you know how and why Mario got his specific red and blue dress attire? Do you know how Mario even got his name? What about that Famicom thing - do you know what that is and how it got its name too? I'm sure a lot of you have it memorized and ready to recall from memory on any random day, and I'm right there with you, but if you've never cared enough to go looking for the answers, or are a newcomer to gaming, then the video above will get you started down the yellow rabbit hole. It gets deeper though.

How about Super Mario Brothers 2? Did you know it was literally a different already existing game that Nintendo took and molded to make into a Mario game? Not too surprising though is it - it wasn't a coincidence that Super Mario Bros. 2 was so fucked up. At least we got Shy Guys from it though. The video above goes into detail about all of this, as well as Super Mario Bros. 3's history, then skips past some other Mario games and shows how Super Mario 64 came to life under Shigeru Miyamoto's watch in full 3D graphics. As the game industry began to grow at faster rates, Mario Party and Super Smash Bros were developed and further changed the Mario we know today. Add to that Mario Sunshine's history that wasn't so long ago and we're pretty much caught up. If that still isn't enough Mario for one day, then you can watch the last 30 seconds of credits here.

Class, raise your hand if you bought Gears of War. A's for all of you! Now, do you know anything about the people that made Gears of War? Lecture time, Jimmy hit the lights and turn on the projector for me please. Here's TLB's newest weekly article for you readers: Weekend Reading - a semi-longish post every Friday night that does more than make you laugh or get you horny: it teaches you something. Feel free to suggest other weekly articles you'd like to see. (please say weekly babe, please say weekly babe, please say weekly babe)

Before Gears of War starting curb stomping noob-locusts, they actually started making games not from from those very same burbs - in the basement of Tim Sweeney, Epic Games founder. Sweeney started working on simple shareware games while he was still in college, with his first successful one being just a text game where players moved a smiley face around the screen picking up pennies. I made better games in one math class on my TI-83 calculator back in high school, but back in his day(before the internet) it made him $100 a day.

Before long he made a second game called Jill of the Jungle, which was a Mario knockoff platformer game, but back in 1992 it made him $1000 a day. At this point in Sweeney's life, his main competition was Apogee Software, which is the company responsible for the Castle Wolfenstein and Commander Keen series. platform game like Mario or Sonic. He said it was a pretty basic game for that time frame. It was released in 1992 and it sold even better than his first game, bringing in about $1,000 a day. At the time, Sweeney's big competitor was Apogee Software, which created shareware hits like Castle Wolfenstein and Commander Keen. 

This is when Sweeney said he needed to make his company look legit, and not just 20 dudes in a garage. So he called it Epic MegaGamesand started recruiting external developers who were also building their own games. This is where Cliff Bleszinski (CliffyB) enters the story. CliffyB had created an adventure game called Palace of Deceit using visual BASIC, so he jumped on board. James Schmaltz, maker of Solar Winds and the third best selling shareware game in the 90s: Epic Pinball, also joined. Add a bunch of others and Epic MegaGames had five small teams of one to four people each, with Sweeney helping manage them all. Then Mark Rein joined them to help get their games published, and the rest was history. 

"By 1995 we had five external projects going on. It was clear that the real industry growth was in retail distribution of PC games. Games would have a few million dollars of development funding from a publisher and sell a million or more copies at stores. We looked at Doom and Duke Nukem as the big examples of hit games then." Knowing that they needed their own big hit FPS game, they set out to make what we now all know as Unreal, which was released back in 1995 and helped change the industry forever.