With the holidays just around the corner, this week is bustling with game and console launch activity, as well as one of the most talked about cases of a game journalist being fired -- before the 1up-ocalypse, anyway.
November 29
1972: Atari ships the first coin-operated Pong machines to bars and convenience stores.
2007: Jeff Gerstmann is dismissed as Gamespot's reviews editor. He never spoke publicly about what happened, but speculation was he lost his job because publisher Eidos complained to the website's higher ups over his low score (six out of 10) for Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.
November 30
1993: Kirby's Adventures is released on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I thought Nintendo brought out more than one Kirby game on the NES -- nope, just this one.
1998: Thief: the Dark Project hits the shelves.
1999: Unreal Tournament debuts on the PC. It moved to the PlayStation 2 about a year later and the Dreamcast in 2001.
December 1
1970: Somebody get Jonathan Coulton some cake. Happy birthday!
December 2
2004: The DS launches in Japan. If you're really observant, you might have noticed that last week I said it launched in North America. Well, it did. This is one of the few situations where Nintendo decided to bring a platform out here first. Now if only they'd do that with the 3DS....
2007: Vivendi announces their acquisition of Activision.
December 3
1991: The Philips CD-i is released. This console is most regrettably remembered as the one with those terrible Zelda games on it. You know, these:
1994: The PlayStation is released in Japan.
December 4
2001: Jak and Daxter: the Precursor Legacy is released. I always thought that the competition between Jak and Daxter and Ratchet & Clank was unnecessary, but gamers still fight over which is the better franchise. My response? The one that's still in production....
