A subset of male gamers have spent years warning that the transgressive series has been neutered by progressive developers, but the backlash isn’t taking hold.
The Seattle-based video game developer behind the award-winning virtual reality adventure Moss has closed its doors.
The announcement was made via Polyarc Games’ LinkedIn page on Friday afternoon. No specific reason was offered for the studio’s closure.
“After nearly 12 years riding the joyous rollercoaster of emotions that is making video games, our time together has come to an end,” wrote an unnamed Polyarc representative. “Thank you to everyone at Polyarc. Our work is now finished.”
Twenty-nine employees will be dismissed due to the studio’s closure, including co-founders Chris Alderson, Danny Bulla, and CEO Tam Armstrong. Polyarc has posted a list of contact information and profiles for all affected employees, in an attempt to help them line up their next positions.
Polyarc’s first and best-known release was 2018’s Moss, where players helped guide a young mouse named Quill through a fantasy world on a journey to save her uncle. It was followed by 2022’s Moss: Book II, a direct sequel that continued Quill’s story, and the 2025 strategy spin-off Glassbreakers.
Polyarc’s most recent release was this year’s Moss: The Forgotten Relic for PC and console, which collected both Moss games into a single non-VR experience.
Armstrong, Bulla, and Alderson founded Polyarc as a startup in 2015. All three were former employees of Bungie in Bellevue, where they’d all worked in different capacities on Bungie’s online shooter Destiny.
Polyarc’s closure comes almost six months after its announcement in March that it’d had to significantly reduce the size of the company, and almost eight months after a wave of layoffs at Meta that forced a major reduction at Bellevue, Wash.-based VR studio Camouflaj (Republique, Batman: Arkham Shadow).
As noted in January, Meta is perhaps the largest current player in the virtual reality sector, largely off the ubiquity of its standalone Quest headsets. When Meta decided to deemphasize its VR efforts in January, reportedly in favor of wearable computing and AI research, it touched off a negative ripple effect throughout the virtual reality field.
There is a chance that Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame may serve as an effective bailout for the VR sector by reigniting consumer interest, but at time of writing, the Frame has no release date. It’s apparently imminent, as suggested by a big leak in August, but there’s nothing definite. If the Steam Machine’s release in June was any indication, however, we can assume the Steam Frame will launch without warning on some random Tuesday morning in the next two months.
Nintendo has made many game consoles in its long history — one that famously overlaps that of the Ottoman Empire — but only one of them was ever Super. It’s that console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, that [Inkbox] has decided to delve deeply into as he crafts a game in assembly using all the hardware tricks he can.
Hardware tricks he’ll need, given he’s limited to the two 64 kB RAM banks and 3.58 MHz Ricoh 6502-based CPU. Even the 4 MB limit he sets for a historically-accurate homemade cartridge seems positively claustrophobic by modern standards. The game he’s after making is a top-down adventure game a la Zelda, and [Inkbox] gets right into the weeds explaining how the SNES works as he shows his work in this nearly hour long video. If you’re looking for a deep dive into the architecture, along with how it is meant to be used, you could certainly find worse sources. Everything from the different graphics modes to what registers handle sound are covered in this and the previous video in the series.
We can’t help but call out his dedication to open source — the SNES Sound Engine he has put up on GitHub looks like it could be a real asset to anyone else doing this kind of homebrew. The game itself is on itch.io and is pay-what-you-want.
Once upon a time, you had to carefully budget your microcontroller’s resources if you wanted to do something as simple as flash a bunch of LEDs. These days, they’re powerful enough to humiliate the game consoles of yesteryear. [alexkid77] demonstrates this well, having the ESP32-P4 run Tomb Raider.
Now, [alexkid77] hasn’t gone so far as to create a PlayStation emulator on the ESP32 or anything quite like that. Instead, this is a port—and not of the original Tomb Raider release, either. [alexkid77] started with OpenLara—the classic game running in an open-source engine. With the ESP32-P4 having two cores running at 400 MHz each, there was plenty of processing power on tap to run the engine with a software renderer at 320×240, which is hardware scaled up to 1024×600 via the Pixel Processing Accelerator (PPA) built into the chip. There’s also stereo audio with an ES8311 codec hooked up, while input is via a USB HID keyboard.
It’s funny to think that it could actually be cheaper and quicker to get Tomb Raider running on an ESP32 and a cheap LCD display versus actually going out to buy a PlayStation and an original game disc. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles in 2026. At least you don’t have to play it on an S3 Verge.
The September update for Amazon’s cloud-based gaming service Luna comes with multiple new features, the most prominent of which is one that will allow up to 7 other players to remotely participate in the same gaming session.
Since its aggressive relaunch earlier this summer, Amazon has pinned its hopes for Luna on multiplayer games and the casual market. Anyone with an active Amazon Prime subscription has access to Luna and can launch it directly from the Prime Video app, which allows them to stream an assortment of video games to their TV, browser, or tablet via Amazon’s cloud servers.
This includes around 60 casual-friendly multiplayer games, designed to be playable by just about anyone of any age as a group activity, and some of which are exclusive to Luna as a platform.
Its newest feature, Remote Play, changes how multiplayer titles work on the service. One player with a Prime subscription can now invite up to 7 other people to participate remotely in a multiplayer Luna game, as long as all 7 of those people have an account on Amazon and a compatible device. This reportedly works with every multiplayer game on Luna, including those that formerly required every player to physically be in the same room.
Two new games have been added to Luna’s library that specifically take advantage of Remote Play. This includes a Luna-exclusive mobile version of Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield’s 2011 board game King of Tokyo, in which players take the role of giant monsters fighting one another in the ruins of Japan.
(Amazon press image)
Other additions to Luna this month include access to two relatively recent games from the French publisher Ubisoft: 2024’s Star Wars: Outlaws and 2023’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the latter of which is set in the universe of James Cameron’s film franchise.
Amazon has not shared user data for Luna since its recent relaunch, so it’s difficult to tell from outside the company how much of an audience it’s been able to build. Luna represents a bet by Amazon that, in the midst of the ongoing component crunch and the related rise in hardware costs, it can build an audience by offering access to popular video games via whatever devices people might already have in their homes.
A few years ago, cloud gaming as a whole was one of the major topics in the games industry, with some analysts going so far as to predict that it was the future of hardware. Instead of purchasing an Xbox or PlayStation in your own home, you’d simply dial into a remote server and stream games to your TV.
That gold rush has largely faded in recent years, as the furor over genAI has stolen some of its thunder, but cloud gaming is still a going concern and a surprisingly competitive market. Luna might be the most accessible option for would-be cloud gamers, as it’s bundled into a subscription that 200 million households already have, but it’s quietly up against giants like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Sony.
Some of the biggest names in the games industry have placed a quiet bet that the “RAMageddon” will quietly push audiences further towards the cloud. As yet, there’s no solid evidence whether or not it’s paid off. Still, if you’re looking to get into video games but missed your window to get a relatively inexpensive computer or console, the cloud might offer you some worthwhile options.
The Black Panther villain’s hairstyle has become a default for Black video game characters because it’s easy to code. Danielle Udogaranya is changing that.
After five years in development, Free Stars: Children of Infinity—the official sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters by the old game's original creators—has released a free public demo. It's a "combat demo" in the style of UQM’s melee mode, where players can assemble a fleet from the game's roster of nearly 40 ships, then match those ships up in head-to-head arcade SpaceWar-style action. The demo can be found on Steam and GOG, and it's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. (Console versions are coming, but they're not yet out.)
Pew pew!
Credit:
Pistol Shrimp Games
I have to present this news with a big disclaimer, though, because I've been part of the Children of Infinity writing team since 2021, working as a volunteer with the Pistol Shrimp Games crew and contributing NPC dialogue and some story bits. As a huge fan of the original games, it's been a dream opportunity. (Because I've been volunteering my time, I'm not financially involved and receive no compensation if you download the demo or, when it's eventually released, buy the full game.)
What's in the demo
Children of Infinity is a space adventure RPG, just like The Ur-Quan Masters (and its direct spiritual predecessors, Starflightand Starflight 2). What's been released today is just one part of the game—the arcade-style "melee" portion, which lets players jump into one-versus-one combat against another player or against a computer-controlled opponent. Each of the ships you can pick has its own maneuvering characteristics, weapons, and special abilities.
Sonic on display at the 210 Gallery in Pioneer Square on Sept. 3, as part of a media preview event. (GeekWire Photo / Thomas Wilde)
If you attended the Sunset Market in Seattle’s Pioneer Square on Thursday night, you might’ve noticed that one of the local galleries had been transformed into a shrine to, of all things, Sonic the Hedgehog.
That’s because on Labor Day weekend, Seattle is hosting 35 Years of Speed: The Sonic Art Exhibit. This touring art collection is part of the celebration of the anniversary of the Sonic franchise, which began in 1991 with the original Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Genesis.
Sega commissioned more than 50 pieces for the exhibition, ranging from the iconic to the deliberately comedic. (GeekWire Photo/Thomas Wilde)
The Sonic Art Exhibit features framed concept and box art from the Sonic archives, several pieces by official Sonic artists, and a curated selection of pieces created and submitted by the Sonic fan community, which includes paintings, sketches, and even statuary.
“It’s Sonic’s 35th anniversary, so we’ve been looking at ways to celebrate his legacy,” said Jessica Perri, Sega brand director. “We commissioned 50-plus artists across styles and different mediums, and we also worked with fans who bring their own inspirations to the table. We’re displaying it all here in Seattle over the course of the weekend.”
Perri continued, “We’re really just excited to celebrate Sonic through the lens of art.”
The exhibit features multiple pieces of concept art from the history of the Sonic series, such as a design document for Sonic’s evil robot duplicate Metal Sonic (lower right) and framed boxes from multiple international editions of the original games. (GeekWire Photo/Thomas Wilde)
The game was Sega’s first-party “killer app,” intended to compete directly with the Super Nintendo and its Super Mario franchise. The title character is a blue hedgehog with the power of super-speed, who fights alongside his friends against his nemesis, Dr. Ivo Robotnik.
In the last 35 years, Sonic has appeared in more than 100 video games, which range from some absolute classics to one of the most infamous misfires in the history of the medium.
There have also been multiple lines of merchandise; several animated shows; a successful live-action film series with a fourth entry coming in early 2027; a popular comic book, which is currently published by San Diego-based IDW; and a recent comic crossover with the DC Universe that did well enough to get a sequel. (Trivia: Sonic the Hedgehog is now technically a member of the Justice League.)
35 Years of Speed: The Sonic Art Exhibit is running at Seattle’s 210 Gallery at 301 Occidental Ave. S. from Sept. 4 through Sept. 6 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Admission is free. After its Seattle run, the exhibition will have its final show in Los Angeles later this month.
When the beta arrives next year—15 years after its predecessor—Guild Wars 3 will have a new momentum engine that makes combat in the game feel closer to an action RPG.
Teachally founder Daniel Bernstein is also known in Seattle tech as the founder of Sandlot Games.
Daniel Bernstein spent much of the past decade as an M&A advisor, selling other people’s software companies. This time the company was his own, and he found a buyer in McGraw Hill.
The education publishing giant on Wednesday announced the acquisition of Teachally, a small startup led by Bernstein in Bothell, Wash., that uses AI to help teachers build and customize lessons, assignments and assessments aligned to state standards.
Financial terms weren’t disclosed. The deal has closed, and all five employees have joined McGraw Hill, with Bernstein taking the title of senior advisor for Teachally integration and growth. He declined to say what the company sold for or how much it had raised, but said the outcome was good for him and his investors.
“We didn’t take in a pile of money,” Bernstein said, explaining that the company brought in a small group of angels and was able to stay focused and effective.
The five-person team is spread across three continents: Bernstein and a colleague in the Seattle area, co-founder and CTO Rushil Makkar in Melbourne, Australia, a customer success lead in Arizona and a developer in Ethiopia.
Bernstein is best known in Seattle tech circles for Sandlot Games, the game studio he started in a spare bedroom in Bothell in 2002 and sold to Digital Chocolate in 2011, after developing casual gaming hits including “Cake Mania” and “Tradewinds.” He later founded the mobile game startup UpTap.
Bernstein spent the following decade on the other side of deals, as a software M&A advisor at Corum Group and then at his own firm, Hemisphere Partners, which ran Teachally’s sale.
Teachally raised a small round from local angels about nine months ago, and later opted to try an M&A process. An edtech M&A specialist representing the company approached a small group of potential buyers, and Bernstein said he hit it off immediately with McGraw Hill over a shared view of what curriculum and instruction should look like in the age of AI.
Teachally focuses on teachers rather than students, developing technology for what the industry calls high-quality instructional materials, or HQIM, which is the standards-aligned curriculum that many states and districts have pushed schools to adopt.
The startup was working with about eight school districts at the time of the sale — fully commercialized, Bernstein said, but “still very much an early stage company.” It was named a top edtech product for curriculum and instruction by District Administration magazine in January.
Bernstein said he had to learn an entirely new industry after two decades in games. The M&A work helped: he’d taken other edtech companies to market before building one.
Teachally itself started as something else. The company was founded as EZ Reward, maker of EZ Stickerbook, a digital sticker chart teachers used to reward students and message parents. Bernstein pivoted the company about three years ago to focus on AI for teachers.
McGraw Hill, which went public last year and reported $2.1 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year, said the deal will let it develop and localize K-12 curriculum faster and put AI tools in front of teachers already using its content.
“This acquisition provides a great opportunity to accelerate our AI strategy in ways that directly support educators and strengthen how we develop and deliver our K–12 products globally,” said Jana Thompson, interim president of the company’s School group, in the announcement.
Teachally is now live as a McGraw Hill product, with its own page on the company’s site.
Bernstein said it’s a second exit both for him and for some of the angels who have backed him along the way. “It’s a good Seattle story once again,” he said.
Want to feel the heat of nearby fire, explosions, or radiation? Or even just the gentle warmth and breeze of a sunny day in the wasteland? If you said yes, you’re in luck because [GingasVR] created an immersive heat mod and wind mod for the VR version of Fallout 4 that leverages economical smart outlets and game scripting to do just that.
The heart of this hack lies in gluing two things that don’t normally go together. In this case [GingasVR] uses a bit of game scripting to control TP-Link HS100 or HS110 Smart Plugs, allowing virtual events to control things in the real world. An ordinary fan in a smart plug creates wind on demand, and heat comes from a 250 watt infrared heat lamp aimed toward the player. For heat, an IR lamp is the way to go because it’s highly directional, can be quickly cycled on and off, and responds rapidly.
The range of immersive effects opened up by this is pretty compelling. Sunny weather yields a gentle glow of warmth, but nearby explosions cause a short full-blast flash of heat. The heat of fires also grows and fades with proximity. This being Fallout, [GingasVR] ensured local radiation has an effect on the heat level as well. Want to see it in action? She briefly explains around the 3:20 mark in this video.
Using ordinary appliances and smart plugs controlled from within VR to modify environmental effects is clever, and we like that it’s entirely nondestructive. The scripting mod for the game doesn’t overwrite any game files, and the hardware used requires no modifications.
A massive 12TB archive of old Steam2 content has surfaced online, apparently containing nearly every version of games uploaded to Valve's servers between 2003 and 2013, including unreleased prototypes, playtest builds, and cut content. Early discoveries include deleted Portal 2 material, files tied to Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and beta builds of games like Left 4 Dead 2, CS: GO, Spore, and Dragon Age: Origins. Researchers claim much of the material was once accessible through an unsecured public API. Ars Technica reports: The reason this weekend's leaked content cuts off abruptly in 2013 is because that's when Valve updated its content distribution system from "Steam2" to the current SteamPipe system. In moving from a proprietary file distribution format to standard HTTP file trees, the new system removed various update approval bottlenecks on Valve's end and streamlined update and patch downloads so they only reflected file differentials.
Publicly accessible early versions of some games released before this SteamPipe transition had been considered lost content by archivists, no longer accessible from Valve itself and living on only as local downloads on aging machines. Apparently all that content wasn't as lost as many thought, though. Longtime Valve watcher and data miner Gabe Follower (previously) wrote on social media this weekend that he had "verified that everything in Steam2 Teraleak was obtained via a publicly accessible [API] endpoint. It's Valve's fault..." Spanish-language Valve streamer and analyst Scolcer also said on social media (via machine translation) that the teraleak was "obtained from a site that was 100% accessible to the public. It was there for everyone to download. No passwords. Nothing. Hidden in plain sight, but with no protection whatsoever."
What's unclear right now if that API and publicly available Steam2 server content were accessed recently or if this weekend's leak represents content that was privately archived before the 2013 server transition and is just now being made public. "It could more-so be a collection of different people that knew about it and accumulated whatever people had downloaded back then into this massive archive," said The One Epicplayer, a moderator on the Valve Cut Content (VCC) Discord, which has long followed Valve betas and leaks. "I haven't been filled in on the full details but my suspicion is that these depot [files] were downloaded a long time ago and sat in a private collection," CrazyBubba, another VCC Discord moderator, told Ars. "There were a lot of leaks a few years back and many folks hoarded files for years. ... historically there have been issues with people lording content over other members."
A readme file included with the leak offers "warm n good wishes to all hoarders who had stuff from this collection" and encourages users to mirror and share it as widely as possible. On the VCC Discord, a user purporting to be the original uploader of the teraleak (who offered screenshots of a 22TB server upload log among their evidence) wrote that "getting this out really took a significant amount of effort from me and I would like it if it didn't go to waste."
In May Chess.com "quietly launched" a free educational poker site named Gambit, reports The Verge, where players can learn the game and improve an Elo-like rating without risking real money. And next Chess.com will expand into more classic games, including go, backgammon, and mahjong:
Like Gambit, Chess.com is developing Elo-style rating systems for these games, as well. [Chess.com's chief growth officer, Albert Cheng] didn't say when the new sites will launch but that "development is moving quite rapidly" on them, using the same playbook he used for Gambit... He and one other employee took Gambit from prototype to launch within a year, partly with help from AI, mainly for coding tasks. "I think the biggest advantage that it's provided is essentially being able to read our existing codebase and our design system and apply consistent patterns to how we develop Chess.com over to a different platform and do so quickly," Cheng said.... "Just because code is easier to write doesn't mean that you just let it run on its own, but it certainly is a superpower in getting things off the ground."
Cheng also said the version of Gambit that's live at the time of writing has "zero or close to zero" AI-created assets, which were used in early prototypes.
According to Cheng, without help from AI, getting another site up and running would have required a bigger team or "would have been a lot more disruptive to the status quo of building and growing Chess." Now that a "small, scrappy" team can get a new platform off the ground much faster, it's opened the door for Chess.com to dip into more games, starting with poker.
The poker site already has 75,000 members, according to a blog post Friday — and they've already played nearly 20 million hands and completed 100,000 lessons. The site is now holding a daily poker tournament, and on Monday will broadcast the event with live commentary on their Twitch and YouTube channels.
The introduction of optical media in the form of CDs meant a revolution in the world of gaming consoles, escaping the restrictions of a few dozen MB of storage and instead offering a theoretically infinite amount of storage through the miracle and tedium of swapping discs. After the SNES narrowly escaped getting a CD add-on and the N64 doubled down on cartridges, we can now at least get an impression of what it’d be like if the Nintendo Entertainment System had been gifted a CD add-on back in the 1980s, courtesy of a project by [Throaty Mumbo].
The NES future we could have had.
There’s also an accompanying video containing typical hijinks and a demonstration of this system. Initially [Throaty Mumbo] was going to make a SNES CD add-on to match that console’s initial prototype, but doing it for the NES seemed more fun. Obviously, since the NES is quite limited hardware-wise it was always going to be a struggle, even if the original front-loading NES conveniently has a mostly unused expansion slot.
On the custom PCB there is an RP2350B microcontroller that mediates between an Everdrive N8 Pro cartridge and an IDE CD drive, along with a PCM5102 audio DAC. The expansion port is hereby used to receive the audio samples on its audio mix input pin, along with power. After boot the game ROM is read off the CD by the MCU and streamed over USB to the Everdrive.
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