I more or less accidentally picked up the latest issue of video game magazine Continue the day after it was released. Turns out I did good.

Besides the all-important photo spread/game-centric interview with trackback queen MANABE Kawori (眞鍋かをり, and it's apparently her first glasses-clad magazine photo shoot, if that's your thing), there are neato interviews with (and slightly more subdued photos of) grizzled game-making legends like SAKAGUCHI "Final Fantasy" Hironobu (坂口博信) and NISHIKADO "no Wikipedia entry, even though he fucking invented fucking Space Invaders, people" Tomohiro (西角友宏). Ahem.

Everyone who cares knows by now that in the golden age of video gaming (generally defined as ending just before the person currently reminiscing pubesced) the line between "rival" and "teacher" was blurred and companies would liberally borrow from each other... well, uh, kind of like today, I guess. But it was different! Somehow! Quit harshing my buzz.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, everyone knows this, but it's still interesting to hear these guys talk about how they "learnt a lot", while coding Final Fantasy, from the way the Ultima series organised its plain-text save data (Sakaguchi)... or that Space Invaders was partly inspired by Breakout, specifically by Breakout's theme of punching through a wall composed of many smaller objects and advancing to a new stage (Nishikado)... or that their favorite game growing up was Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom (whoops, that was Manabe).

Oh, yeah, and they also talk about upcoming projects, for folks who aren't living in the past and all.