Chopping virtual grass is a video game trope as old as it is satisfying – but where did it come from, and why does it keep growing?

Jessica used to come for tea on Tuesdays, and all she wanted to do was cut grass. Every week, we’d click The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’s miniature disc into my GameCube and she’d ready her sword. Because she was a couple of years younger than me, she couldn’t encounter a ChuChu or a Bokoblin without dying, so instead she’d spend hours slicing at virtual greenery.

At the time, I found it a little annoying. In hindsight, I understand that Jessica was simply following in the footsteps of our ancestors. Grass-cutting has been a mainstay of video games for decades. From 1983’s lawnmower sim Hover Bovver to Minecraft in 2009, numerous games have invited us to take a blade to the blades, and we can’t seem to stop ourselves from doing it. Why is the mechanic so prevalent?

The ‘next gen’ consoles of 2013 invented high-definition gaming and cleared the way for streaming – but a decade on, what did they get wrong?

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It was at this point 10 years ago that the future began. I am referring to the almost simultaneous launch of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles in late 2013. These machines ushered in the era of universal high-definition gaming. They brought us into the cloud computing era, allowing games such as Forza Horizon and Titanfall to perform complex maths remotely, freeing up your processor for other tasks. They forged ahead into game streaming, allowing us to play retro games across broadband connections, and recognised the growing importance of sharing gameplay, including functions that made it easier to record and broadcast gaming experiences across social media and Twitch.

It was an exciting time, but looking back, a lot of mistakes were made. Microsoft fell on its face with its awful Xbox One debut event in Redmond, talking up the machine’s TV services and laying out a vision of an always-online console with digital-first software, seemingly destroying the idea of sharing and reselling our games. Although Microsoft was correct that digital downloads would soon dominate and that fast broadband connections would become almost universal among gamers, it was all too much, too soon.

Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox; The Station/Thunderful Games
Westworld meets Dungeon Keeper in this characterful city-builder, where you design the perfect town for a population of robots

I’m building a farm for robocows, which will be made into roboburgers to feed a population of steam-powered humanoid robots. None of this makes sense, but who cares. Games in this charming robopunk series have always placed characterful quirkiness above realism, and they’re all the better for it.

SteamWorld has a history of swapping genres, with the steambots going from space shootouts in one game to fantasy role-playing in the next. This time around we’re served a hybrid of city-builder and dungeon-crawler. Initially you’re tasked with building a settlement for your steambots in a wild west-style desert, setting up production chains in a style reminiscent of The Settlers. A forester produces logs, which are processed by a lumber mill to make boards, which are then used to make buildings, and so on.

I hoped the cat-herding for a family gaming night would be worth it to enjoy one of the most soothing games ever. But the bricks did not line up

My whole family is under one roof again, after my son Charlie’s flirtation with university was halted by a combination of shady landlord and disappointing levels of partying. As a responsible parent, I should have persuaded him to stay, but 3,000 miles was a hell of a distance to be from the one member of the family who both a) can legally drink and b) wants to go drinking with me. I designate our first Saturday night together a Family Game Night.

“There’s a multi-player Tetris on PlayStation Plus,” I suggest, “That could be fun!”

Limited Run Games; PC, PS4/5, Switch, Xbox
The cult retro label has curated and updated a series of digital dino fossils for modern players and fans of the movie franchise who missed out first time round

For a period during the mid-1990s, it was ruled that no blockbuster movie was really complete until it had also been translated into a rock hard platformer or run-and-gun arcade adventure, seemingly designed to enrage and frustrate children everywhere. Disney’s wildly uncompromising Aladdin and Lion King tie-ins were shining examples as were Probe Software’s challenging Robocop 3 and Alien 3 titles.

But veteran Manchester-based publisher Ocean was also a key purveyor. The company spent the 1980s churning out TV and movie games such as Miami Vice, Top Gun and Highlander, but its Jurassic Park titles were among its most ambitious creations and this new collection from cult retro label Limited Run Games brings its NES, SNES and Game Boy translations of the 1993 film together, while also including sequel Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues and two Mega Drive tie-ins created by Bluesky Software: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition. That’s seven chunks of nostalgic dino chaos.

Hidden Pikmin, secret Mario logos and mad merch … the world of Mario has been brilliantly reconstructed in real life, letting me live out a fantasy decades in the making

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I’ve always written about the intersection of games and real life – that’s where the interesting stories are often found – but rarely do I get the opportunity to do so quite so literally as I have this week. Yesterday I visited the Universal Studios theme park in Osaka, where the world of Mario has been reconstructed in the real world. You walk through a green warp pipe and, when you come out the other side, through Princess Peach’s castle, you emerge into a primary-coloured, crowded Mario-scape, all green grass, yellow blocks and brown brick, with critters moving back and forth across banks of question-mark blocks and the yawning maw of Bowser’s Castle across the way.

My jaw dropped. I’ve been dying to see this Nintendo theme park since it opened, but I wasn’t prepared for how impactful it would be to walk into a physical manifestation of my eight-year-old self’s dreams. Super Mario World is constructed in such a way that you can’t see the outside world when you’re in there, helping you to disappear into the fantasy.

How the Streets of Rage and Etrian Odyssey composer was inspired by disco, city pop, and slyly recording music from arcade cabinets

From the urban warzones of Shinobi and Streets of Rage to the high fantasy realms of Ys and Etrian Odyssey, Japanese composer Yuzo Koshiro has seen (and heard) it all. His engineering wizardry helped establish video game music as a force to be reckoned with, alongside its cinematic and televisual siblings. His foresight allowed him to retain the rights to his own music, in an industry that’s often keen on prising the art from the artist. In so many ways, and across so many disciplines, Koshiro has always been ahead of his time.

And it all began with him secretly recording the music from his favourite games in arcades. “When I was a teenager, spending time at amusement arcades, game developers would only release a few video game titles in a year,” he explains. “However, each game had its own distinct electronic sound that set them apart, creating an immersive atmosphere in the arcade halls.” Koshiro – and many other Japanese game music enthusiasts of the era, he says – would go to a game centre with a tape recorder in hand, so he could thumb the cassette into a player at home and listen to the music whenever he wanted.

Not content with a billion fans, The Pokémon Company’s COO Takato Utsunomiya talks about his plan to catch the rest of humanity – and for the far-reaching franchise to outlive us all

When Satoshi Tajiri was a child, he developed a fascination with insects. Growing up in the greater Tokyo suburb of Machida, he’d spend summer days peeling back plants and scouring the undergrowth for creepy crawlies, carefully adding each new insect to his collection. This eyebrow-raising hobby earned him the playground nickname “Mr Bug” from his teasing classmates, but Tajiri had the last laugh. After all, it was this formative obsession that inspired his crowning achievement – Pokémon.

Thirty-three years later, that first duo of ambitious Game Boy games has blossomed into the world’s highest-grossing media franchise, beating behemoths such as Star Wars and Marvel. Tajiri took a step back from his cutesy creation in 2012, and his developer Game Freak is now part of a larger Pokémon Company – whose COO, Takato Utsunomiya, now sits in front of me in Yokohama.

The award-winning author on smuggling games past her strict parents, finding comfort in alternative worlds and why the art form remains a source of freedom and inspiration

• Carmen Maria Machado: ‘The cultural baggage around gaming has shifted’

In my first memory of the medium, I am standing behind Eric and he has black hair. His mother couldn’t have watched me more than a handful of times in my childhood, but I can visualise the living room vestibule where we are standing as clearly as if it’s my own house. I’m probably seven. It must be around 1993. I remember that Eric is playing Super Mario Bros, but only because my little brother’s name is Mario and I make the connection with confusion. Eric offers to let me play, once, and I hold the controller like the alien object it is. I try to move Mario and somehow die immediately. Eric takes the controller back and keeps going. I watch. I am always watching. I was not allowed to play video games as a kid. My mother was scornful of them, talked about them the way she talked about all television that wasn’t PBS. (Only bad parents, she said, allowed their kids’ brains to rot that way.) It would never be allowed in our house. In her house, she clarified. By the time my brother came along – and got old enough to want, and ask for, such things – she had relaxed on this point, for reasons unknown. For him, anyway. My bad parents gifted him a Game Boy for some holiday; later, a PS2. Sometimes I borrowed the Game Boy and took it to the bathroom and played Pokémon all night. And sometimes he let me play alongside him. But it never lasted very long. I wasn’t any good. I didn’t feel a rhythm when I played; I had no intuitive sense of the process. It did not feel like reading or writing. It felt like being asked to perform a dance I’d never heard of.

But I still enjoyed it. I enjoyed the sense of being lost; the clarity of solving a puzzle; the pleasure of turning a corner into some new wonder. (It also cannot be denied that the fact that it was being discouraged – at all, and along gendered lines – made it that much more appealing.) I enjoyed it so much that when we eventually got a computer – I was 12, almost 13 – I took my babysitting and birthday money to Electronics Boutique in the Lehigh Valley Mall. Drunk with power – my parents didn’t quite understand that computer games were simply video games on the computer, and had not had the foresight to discourage it – I bought 3-D Dinosaur Adventure (came with its own 3D glasses!); Myst (iconic); Theme Park (when you went bankrupt, a cutscene showed your businessman protagonist jumping off a ledge in the reflection of a family photo on his desk); a series called Eagle Eye Mysteries (Encyclopedia Brown by way of the Boxcar Children); a historical mystery called Titanic: Adventure Out of Time; Oregon Trail (needs no introduction; I always started the game as a doctor and packed a harmonica and was notorious for misfiring my gun and injuring someone in my wagon party). In the college dorms, I lived next to a room of seasoned gamers, who played so much Halo 2 that I am certain the sound of its gunfire would put me to sleep at this very moment. The gamers, who became dear friends, patiently tried to help me play several times, but I found myself utterly unable to aim or shoot and would stand in a corner and fire maniacally at the walls until the scrimmage mercifully ended. Later, when a few of us moved into a house together, I got hooked on the Elder Scrolls game Oblivion and played as a fistfighting cat-person; I spent so much time on it I began to dream that I was my Khajiit self, running around the Cyrodiil landscape coldcocking every random character who crossed my path.

The Bluey TV show has blossomed into a cultural phenomenon, not least because of its frank, empathic take on parenting. But how to replicate that in a children’s video game?

Following Peppa Pig’s capable reign as the most bearable option for overwhelmed parents looking for respite from the gaudy assault that is preschooler TV, a family of Australian dogs has set a new standard for what kids’ shows can offer grownups. That family are the Heelers, stars of the tremendously popular children’s animated sitcom Bluey – at one point Australia’s most watched television programme, and more popular than Succession in the US.

Sharp, funny, beautiful and poignant, Bluey is focused on the misadventures inherent in life aged six and under; but also, it frankly reflects the parenting experience. For half its audience, its most touching moments are those where canine mum and dad, Chilli and Bandit, juggle the stress and pride of watching their offspring learn a life lesson, or joke with one another when their parenting isn’t quite on point.

Considering the success of Ludo Studio’s creation, a video game adaptation was inevitable. Getting that right would mean trying to make something primarily for youngsters, that was also a game about parenting. The task fell to Spanish studio Artax, working with UK publisher Outright, previously known for games based on the merchandising-industrial complex that is Paw Patrol.

“You can see the parents in Bluey as almost perfect parents, but they’re very real too, with the flaws we all have,” says Vincent Grogan, an Outright production director – and parent – who has spent months steeped in Bluey lore. “They are so full of play, and these great ideas for play. And I really think watching Bluey has helped me be a better parent. Bluey is a show about playing together as a family, so we started to consider how we could do all that in a kids’ game. And that really began with Ludo and the BBC.”

A relationship with the animation studio behind Bluey and the broadcaster that co-commissioned it granted Artax and Outright the opportunity to bring on the voice talent behind Chilli and Bandit, and secure access to Ludo’s artwork and materials.

“We had regular calls with people from the team that have worked on the show from all different aspects, including visual design, which let us scope out and recreate the house,” says Grogan. “Dan Brumm, the sound designer for the show, provided the sound effects. He also plays Uncle Stripe, so we gained that too. And we have Joff Bush’s Bluey music … we and Artax really immersed ourselves in the show.”

This painstaking reproduction of one of the earliest and most beloved games consoles is light on games, but heavy on nostalgic kick

The Atari 2600 is, for a certain generation of gamers, the most nostalgia-igniting console ever made. From its wood veneer fascia to its chunky carts and the legendary CX40 joystick, the machine evokes the very dawn of the games industry, before Sony, Microsoft or even Nintendo arrived to dominate it all. Even for those of us never fortunate enough to own one, the image of it was everywhere, from Grattan catalogues and comic book adverts, to TV programmes and movies such as ET, Electric Dreams and Gremlins. It was a machine that brought seminal arcade experiences to 30m homes around the world.

Now it is back as the 2600+, in a mini format, with HDMI connectivity for modern TVs and a cartridge slot that will play not just newly manufactured carts, but most of the original 2600 and later 7800 titles. Perhaps even more than the mini consoles from Sega, Sony and Nintendo, it captures the technical and aesthetic features of the original machine. As well as two joystick ports (which allow you to plug in the original pads, if you have any that still work), the console has switches to select game difficulty, as well as reset and choose game modes, and you can opt between colour and black and white graphics – all features from the original 2600 models. You even get a reproduction of that wooden front panel. Fans of the original will get a rush of memories with every flick of the power switch and jab at the fire button.

In this week’s newsletter: It has been a decade since Rockstar’s last instalment of its close-to-the-bone satire of the US underworld. But will it have the same resonance in a post-truth world?

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Last week, Rockstar revealed in a blogpost that the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 would debut in early December. This sent everyone into paroxysms, particularly publisher Take-Two’s shareholders, who enjoyed a nice little bump in their theoretical wealth. Meanwhile, delirious fans are attempting to use the moon to predict the game’s release date.

Let’s remember that Rockstar hasn’t actually revealed a game: it just announced the reveal of a game. But that game is Grand Theft Auto, so that was enough to make it the biggest news of the month.

Hare’s new opus Sociable Soccer 24 aims to bring the joys of arcade-style football games to a new generation of players and consoles

For a sports video game to have any sort of life even a couple of years after release is rare nowadays. But when I meet Jon Hare, the genial, garrulous co-founder of Britsoft powerhouse Sensible Software (and one of Norwich City’s biggest fans) at Bafta in London, he invites me to a forthcoming event where enthusiasts will gather to play and celebrate his game Sensible Soccer – which was originally released for the Commodore Amiga in 1992.

Sensible Soccer exerted tremendous influence at that time, helping to put football games on the map in an age before Fifa, and it has demonstrated unfeasible longevity. But Hare, now head of Tower Studios, is initially keen to talk about something else: the imminent release of his newest game, Sociable Soccer 24, out this week on PC and a little later on consoles.

PlayStation, Xbox, PC; Sledgehammer Games/Activision
Call of Duty’s developers are clearly struggling to fit this sprawling game into the business plan devised for them, but for now they are still managing

Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Call of Duty series has always been a game of two halves. The first: a cinematic dash through several chaptered set-pieces. You inhabit the action hero – cannons to the left of them, flame-throwers to the right – diving through checkpoints en route to a denouement involving Nazis, nuclear weapons or space lasers, depending on the era in which the game is set. The second: Call of Duty rendered not as a film but as a sport, a merry-go-round of endlessly cycling competitive matches played in teams of friends or strangers, vying to be the first team, or individual, to snipe or spray their way to the top of the scoreboard.

Modern Warfare III builds on this fundamental template. On the first count, it’s something of a disappointment: a campaign of broadly lacklustre missions, for which, reportedly, the team did not have sufficient time (the story was to be set in Mexico, until Activision executives allegedly told the development team to re-orient and re-brand the game). A different story emerges from the inferno of the game’s multiplayer modes, however, which revive some of the series’ best-loved maps, introduce a slew of new locations, add finessing tweaks to your character’s movement, and combine this with a revamped system of weapon attachments that encourages players to craft a tool to suit their preferred play style.

CEO to testify in antitrust trial as Fortnite maker says tech giant stopped rivals from launching their own stores

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai is set to testify Tuesday as a witness in the antitrust trial between the company he leads and Fortnite developer Epic Games, which has accused the internet search giant of abusive, monopolistic practices enacted through its app store. The trial could force Google to alter the business and distribution model of its Google Play store, which controls the vast majority of app downloads for Android phones.

Epic is alleging that Google “illegally monopolized the Android app distribution market” to stifle consumer choice, extract fees from developers and stop rival companies from launching their own app stores. Google has denied any wrongdoing, arguing that its dominance over Android downloads is the result of successful business practices and competition with Apple’s app store. It is also countersuing Epic for breach of contract.

Huge numbers for films based on Super Mario and Five Nights at Freddy’s have led to news of a Zelda adaptation, suggesting a new lease of life for a once-loathed genre

When Nintendo announced via Twitter/X that Shigeru Miyamoto had been working for years on a live-action The Legend of Zelda movie with the producer Avi Arad, I immediately felt a little queasy. Not because I’d just browsed Arad’s production credits, which really do run the gamut, but because like most adults who love video games, I grew up in the era of game movies so unbelievably dreadful that I still sometimes think angry thoughts about them when I’m trying to get to sleep.

It was the era of Jean-Claude Van Damme in Street Fighter, of the fascinatingly terrible 1993 Super Mario cyberpunk nightmare starring Bob Hoskins, of Uwe Boll. Like a kicked dog, I am instinctively fearful. The Zelda series has produced several of the most important, acclaimed games of all time, centred on their mute protagonist, Link, and the various eternally retold and remixed myths of the Kingdom of Hyrule and its royal family (that’s Zelda). They are narratively ambiguous, often quite dreamlike, and that works for them. How do you turn that into a gripping movie? Are they going to give Link a voice? A 90s cartoon series turned him into a wisecracking smart-arse and has been relentlessly mocked for it ever since.

Uninventive and a little uncomfortable, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s single-player is little more than a fairground ride – but will its players really care?

Last year, Nintendo cancelled the rerelease of its war-themed strategy game Advance Wars. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine several weeks earlier had made the timing feel tactless to the publisher, despite the game’s sweetly cartoonish aesthetic. No such qualms for Activision, publisher of Modern Warfare 3, the latest entry to the 20-year-old Call of Duty series, which is released on 10 November. Less than a month after the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, and with Russian troops still lodged in Ukrainian territory, the annual blockbuster arrives on shareholder-pleasing schedule, despite featuring several scenes of cinematically framed atrocity, such as the gory ransacking of a crowded football stadium by terrorists disguised as paramedics, and the hijacking and downing of a passenger jet bound for Sochi.

While the series has often flitted between historical settings, including 1940s Europe and the buzzing, bloodied jungles of Vietnam, it is increasingly focused on contemporary battlefields, as the game’s title suggests. As we switch perspectives between the captivating ensemble cast of international supersoldiers who comprise Task Force 141, we’re treated to the latest technologies of elite soldiership. We hear a rodent squeal as a pair of night vision goggles spring to life, feel the kinetic tug of the “ascender” tool as it bites a cable and hoists our character up a lift shaft, and marvel at the murderous silhouette of a hyper-evolved rifle, laden with a camera crew’s worth of arcane attachments.

In this week’s newsletter: Almost 45 million people returned to the battle royale for its throwback event. What does that say about Fortnite’s grip on young gamers?

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Over the weekend, almost 45 million people returned to Fortnite. The beginning of the battle royale shooter’s’s “OG” event saw the map restored to its 2018 state, back before the entire in-game island was memorably sucked into a black hole. Those people played for a combined 102m hours in a single day, an all-time record, according to developer Epic Games. Not bad for a game that has been available for more than six years, and been a topic of playground conversation for half a decade.

Firstly: 44.7 million people! That’s 10 times the number who watched the premiere of The Last of Us, and more people than have ever bought a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s reductive to look at video games purely through the lens of player numbers and revenue – to me it’s the least interesting thing about them – but heck, what a number.

A Bloomberg report gets out in front of the biggest video game announcement of the year, claiming a December trailer for Rockstar’s forthcoming game is imminent

Take-Two and Rockstar Games are to officially announce the next instalment in its Grand Theft Auto series this week, according to a report from Bloomberg citing sources close to the game’s development. A trailer will follow in December, coinciding with developer Rockstar’s 25th anniversary, the report claims.

Much is already known about Grand Theft Auto Six due to an unprecedented leak in 2022, when hours’ worth of in-progress game footage was stolen from Rockstar’s servers, resulting in the conviction of two British teenagers. The developer had previously confirmed in February 2022 that work on the game was “well underway”. The game is set in Vice City, a fictional Miami last seen in 2006’s GTA: Vice City Stories, and will feature the series’ first female protagonist.

When the new Zelda film was announced, fans immediately began debating who should play Ganon, Zelda and Sidon. Here is one big fan’s dream cast

The Legend of Zelda, one of the most successful and beloved gaming franchises of all time, is being made into a live-action film – and with such iconic characters as Link, Princess Zelda, the demonic Ganon and that one superhot half-fish prince everyone was in love earlier in the year, it’s no wonder that the internet has absolutely exploded with people suggesting which actors should play them.

So, we here at the Guardian thought we would put together our own dream cast for the upcoming flick. (And don’t worry, we didn’t quickly decide Tom Holland should play Link like the rest of the world.)