Grand Theft Auto made him a legend. In July this year workers at Build a Rocket Boy, a video game studio in Edinburgh, were called to an all-staff meeting. Their first ever game, a sci-fi adventure called MindsEye, had been released three weeks earlier - and it had been a total disaster. Critics and players called it broken, buggy, and the worst game of 2025. Addressing staff via video link, the company's boss, Leslie Benzies, assured them there was a plan to get things back on track and said the negativity they'd seen was uncalled for.

Hideo Kojima – the acclaimed video game director who helmed the stealth-action Metal Gear series for decades before founding his own company to make Death Stranding, a supernatural post-apocalyptic delivery game this publication described as "2019's most interesting blockbuster" – is still starstruck, or perhaps awestruck. "George [Miller] is my sensei, my God," he proclaims gleefully. Kojima is visiting Australia for a sold-out chat with Miller, the creator of the Mad Max film franchise, at the Sydney film festival. The two struck up an unlikely but fierce friendship nearly a decade ago, and Kojima says that, as a teenager, the first two Mad Max films inspired him to become a movie director and thus, eventually, a video game maker. At the panel later, Miller is equally effusive, calling Kojima "almost my brother"; the Australian even lent his appearance to a major character in Kojima's latest game, Death Stranding 2. It's actually because of Miller that much of this latest game is set in a heavily fictionalised version of Australia, Kojima jokes.

Following an Xbox Series X/S and PC release this past summer, Immortality, the latest project from Her Story creator Sam Barlow, is now available on Android and iOS via Netflix. Provided you subscribe to the streaming service, you can download the game at no additional charge and experience one of the most highly acclaimed titles of 2022. Like Barlow's past projects, Immortality is a love letter to the full-motion video games of the '90s. You'll need to piece together what happened to her by watching clips from three unreleased films and behind-the-scenes footage. Barlow recruited Allan Scott and Amelia Gray, best known for their work on Queen's Gambit and Mr. Robot, to help write the story of Immortality.

Google wants to make its smart displays more fun. Today, it's adding a handful of new games that you can play with Google Assistant on smart displays like the Nest Hub Max. If you're a trivia fan, you might choose to play Jeopardy! There are also wordplay games, a drawing game and Google's version of an escape-the-room challenge. Google Assistant was already capable of playing a few voice-based games.

After leaving fans breathless with more details about Fallout 76 at E3, game wizards Bethesda pulled a Steve Jobs in Las Vegas with a "one more thing" reveal – a new addition to the Elder Scrolls series. The Elder Scrolls VI (TES6) was revealed during the game studio's presentation via a 30-second teaser and just the right level of fanfare. Following on from the fifth game in the series, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, players are going to get the chance to journey back to the land of Tamriel to once again take up sword, shield and bow to fight for whatever faction or agenda they choose. But what do we know about TES6, and how soon can we start adventuring again? What do we know about Elder Scrolls 6? Bethesda is, of course, remaining tight lipped on any real details connected to this latest edition of the Elder Scrolls series.

There are certain places you'd expect the developers of a well-known military shooter to look for inspiration. What you perhaps don't expect is for the team behind the latest Call of Duty title to count among their influences an elegiac cooperative indie game about the meaning of life. You don't expect them to play Journey. But according to Michael Condrey, co-founder of Sledgehammer Games, the San Francisco studio behind Call of Duty: WWII, that's exactly what they did. The next instalment of Activision's military behemoth takes the action back to the second world war, returning to the origins of the series.

In a landmark achievement for artificial intelligence, a poker bot developed by researchers in Canada and the Czech Republic has defeated several professional players in one-on-one games of no-limit Texas hold'em poker. Perhaps most interestingly, the academics behind the work say their program overcame its human opponents by using an approximation approach that they compare to "gut feeling." "If correct, this is indeed a significant advance in game-playing AI," says Michael Wellman, a professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in game theory and AI. "First, it achieves a major milestone (beating poker professionals) in a game of prominent interest. Second, it brings together several novel ideas, which together support an exciting approach for imperfect-information games."