Matthew Culnane

I’ve long wanted to implement Tufte-esque sidenotes, perhaps the most interesting and useful of the footnote family. This implementation uses CSS anchor positioning and no JavaScript.

Simon Price on the Ramones’ first two London shows, at the Roundhouse and Dingwalls in July 1976, and the case for the band being a lot cleverer than they sounded. He talks to people who were there, including Captain Sensible, whose main memory of Dingwalls is wondering why they hadn’t cut their hair. Price also tidies up some punk folklore: the first song Buzzcocks rehearsed after that Sex Pistols gig in Manchester was ‘Judy Is A Punk’. Morrissey, meanwhile, wrote to Melody Maker that month calling them degenerate no-talents, and was a convert by the following year.

Mardean Isaac on a thousand games of chess played badly on purpose. He doesn’t study openings or review his own games, and rides the chess.com rating see-saw up and down forever, which he recognises as a way of never finding out how good he could be. The essay starts with his father and great-grandfather, detours through Kubrick, and lands on zugzwang: the position where you have to move and every move makes things worse. He also has views on the bishops (untrustworthy) and calls rooks “the chestiest of pieces”.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the franchise, GameSpot spoke to various developers about how Metroid helped define the metroidvania genre. Creators behind hits like Axiom Verge, Ori and Prince of Persia reflect on the series’ pioneering ability gating, atmospheric isolation and intricate level design.

The Ocarina of Time footage Nintendo put out today looks alarmingly like the game I have been describing to people for 28 years rather than the game I played.

Some of that is straightforward. The shops and front rooms in Kokiri Forest, the Castle Town market, the houses in Kakariko: those were never 3D spaces. They were pre-rendered flat images the N64 could hold in memory, with Link and a few pots and villagers composited on top and the camera bolted down so the illusion held. Not rooms so much as photographs of rooms you could walk about inside.

The remake takes the camera off its mount. Link gets a jump button, and he can dive without stopping to put the Iron Boots on. Eiji Aonuma’s phrase for all this is “a faithful interpretation using modern technologies”.

What it does not do is remove the loading screens. Those have been kept deliberately, to preserve something of how the original felt. Or so that’s what they say.

I have been turning that pair of decisions over. A loading screen was always legible as a limit: you knew you were waiting for a machine. The fixed camera was not. It read as a place. So the fidelity here is selective, and the selection runs a particular way: they have preserved the constraint you always noticed and removed the one you never did.

Which is why what is being restored feels like the inference rather than the artefact. In 1998 the machine offered a suggestion of a place and you supplied the rest — the market square behind the camera, the depth the flat image implied, the ledge you assumed you could reach if the game would only let you. Nintendo has now built the version the player’s imagination supplied and given it a price.

Svetlana Boym’s useful line about restorative nostalgia is that it does not think of itself as nostalgia at all, but as truth and tradition. That is the register of the definitive edition, the original mix, the remaster sold as the correction of an error. You have been hearing it wrong; here is what it actually was. This makes a warmer claim than that. It says the memory was right.

The objection, and it is a real one, is that Nintendo needn’t have gone anywhere near my memory to end up here. A free camera is simply how Zelda games are built now, after Breath of the Wild. If the resemblance is a coincidence, it is a coincidence with a cause: a child wondering what was behind the flat wall and a designer with hardware that can finally draw it are answering the same question. Take the limits off and you tend to arrive somewhere similar, whoever you were aiming at. From a trailer I cannot tell the two apart.

There is one useful comparison. A modder called Reonu has spent about a year rebuilding the same pre-rendered areas as real geometry, running on original N64 hardware, and announced it on 16 August, three weeks before the Direct. He has made the opposite choices. The loading screens between the market areas are gone, and the original fixed camera angles are offered as an option. Same game, same operation, reversed judgement about which seams are worth keeping, and only one of the two parties owns anything.

None of that explains the date. Ocarina of Time has come back eight times since November 1998. Master Quest on the GameCube in 2002, the Collector’s Edition in 2003, the iQue Player in China the same year, Wii Virtual Console in 2007, the 3DS remake in 2011, Wii U in 2015, the Switch Online N64 library in 2021, and now Switch 2 on 5 November. Eight returns in 28 years, and the longest it has ever been out of reach is about six.

Every one of those lands on a new machine or a new storefront. None of them lands on a round anniversary—the remake is part of the broader 40th anniversary celebrations for the original Famicom release. Whatever is going on in me while I watch a trailer, the rhythm of the thing belongs to the hardware: the game comes back when a console needs a library, and the Switch 2 needs a library. So 28 years is a measure of how long I have been worth selling to rather than of how long the game was gone.

I will buy it on 5 November. The version I have been carrying since 1998 has had all those years to improve without supervision, and I am curious which of us got it closer.

Oh My Word is a podcast I made with Michael Moruzzi a few years ago: sixteen episodes on Watford FC in the 1990s, a season at a time, with detours into matchdays, fanzines and the man who commentated on it all. It has sat on Spotify and Apple ever since, which is another way of saying it has been unsearchable.

That is what the new site is for. Previously: twenty hours of two people talking about Kevin Phillips and Graham Taylor’s return, and no way to find the bit you half-remember. Every episode now carries its full transcript on the page, each paragraph anchored to its timestamp, so you can send someone the exact minute instead of telling them it is somewhere in the 1996-97 one.

The transcripts were the hard bit. Speech recognition knows little about football and less about Watford: Vicarage Road came back as “Riccarton Road”, Roger ‘Harry’ Willis turned up twice in the same sentence (once was too many), and at one point my agency’s name leaked out of the transcription tool’s account settings and made a stadium announcer into “the Omne Tannoy”. A thousand-odd corrections later, they read… better.

What stayed in is the part I find more interesting. Michael gave Luther Blissett’s last goal as his 168th; the club record is 186. I read out Wimbledon’s scorers and say Robbie Keane, who never played for them, when I meant Robbie Earle. Both are on the tape exactly as written down. Fixing the transcription is the job. Fixing the speaker is somebody else’s.

Some details worth noting:

• Clicking a timestamp seeks the audio and docks a small player, so the transcript stays a transcript instead of turning into a second play button
• A #t-5326 link cues that moment on arrival without autoplaying
• Sixteen text files and one JSON file go in, seventeen pages come out, via a Python script. No framework, no build step
• The design is matchday programme by way of fanzine: Big Shoulders Display over Newsreader, printed on newsprint that is not there

The name is Mike Vince’s. He commentated on Watford for local radio for years and said “oh my word” whenever the afternoon called for it. Episode ten is the best part of an hour with him.