When game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers first encountered Tetris at the 1988 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, he immediately knew it was special. "It was just the perfect game," he recalls. "It looked so simple, so rudimentary, but I wanted to play it again and again and again … There was no other game demo that ever did that to me." Rogers is now co-owner of the Tetris Company, which manages and licenses the Tetris brand. Over the past 30 years, he has become almost as famous as the game itself. The escapades surrounding his deal to buy its distribution rights from Russian agency Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) were dramatised in an Apple TV film starring Taron Egerton.

Traditionally, visitors to Kyoto in October come for momijigari, the turning of the autumn leaves in the city's picturesque parks. This autumn, however, there is a new draw: a Nintendo museum. The new attraction, which opens on Wednesday, is best described as a chapel of video game nostalgia. Upstairs, Nintendo's many video game consoles, from 1983's Famicom through 1996's Nintendo 64 to 2017's Switch, are displayed reverently alongside their most famous games. On the back wall, visitors can also peer at toys, playing cards and other artefacts from the Japanese company's pre-video-game history, stretching back to its founding as a hanafuda playing card manufacturer in 1889.

You can tell a Nintendo game not just from its feel – the satisfying swish of Link's sword in the Zelda games, the weight of Mario's jump – but by its look. They are bright, energetic, characterful. In Splatoon, the game-maker's most recent hit series, the shooter is reimagined as teams of transforming squids splattering arenas in glossy paint. Mario's red cap and blue overalls, originally designed to create a recognisable character with just a few pixels for 1981's arcade hit Donkey Kong, is now a stylistic signature – Nintendo's logo is the same shade of red. When you look into the company's department store outlets in Japan, a dozen colourful characters stare back at you from reams of merch: Animal Crossing cookware, Super Mario gloves, Zelda wallets and ties, Pikmin vases.

Link is moving from Hyrule to Hollywood. Coming off the $1.3 billion success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Nintendo announced Wednesday that it's working on a live-action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda. The video game developer said that although it "will take time" until the movie hits theaters, it will be helmed by Maze Runner director Wes Ball and be co-financed by Sony. The news sent gamers on a dream-casting spree, and signaled the next big step in Nintendo's quest to evolve from a video game company into a full-blown entertainment empire. The Legend of Zelda is one of Nintendo's oldest and most beloved franchises, where a silent, twinky hero named Link battles the forces of evil (usually a maladjusted guy named Gannon/dorf) with the help of princess Zelda.

A live-action film based on the hit game franchise The Legend of Zelda is in development, gaming giant Nintendo confirmed on Wednesday. The film will be directed by Wes Ball, who directed The Maze Runner series and the upcoming Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Shigeru Miyamoto, Legend of Zelda creator and representative director at Nintendo, will produce the film with Avi Arad, producer of films including the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. "I have been working on the live-action film of The Legend of Zelda for many years now with Avi Arad-san, who has produced many mega hit films," Miyamoto said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter. "It will take time until its completion, but I hope you look forward to seeing it."

It was after a particularly grueling session with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that I started to wonder: When did developers stop putting cheats into their games to help the less talented among us get through the tricky bits? When I was a kid, a little bit of Up Down Left Right A and Start together, and a little older, a little / noclip saved me no end of bother. These days, if you look for cheats for any modern game online, the best you'll get is to be sassily told to "git gud." Sorry, a little context: I play games, but I'm not a Gamer, or a Nintendo Person, so in 2023 I resolved to remedy this. So many discussions at work fly past me because while I've heard of Cliff Bleszinski and Hironobu Sakaguchi, I couldn't tell you their oeuvre without Googling.

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. The Super Mario Bros. Movie introduces its namesake duo with a commercial. It's Brooklyn, before they get sucked into the Mushroom Kingdom, and they've made a local TV ad to hawk their plumbing skills. As a filmmaking tool, it's a near-perfect piece of exposition, establishing who the Mario brothers are in mere minutes. Most transmedia properties are about milking intellectual property for fun and profit.

Nintendo's designer Shigeru Miyamoto – one of gaming's earliest superstar creatives, and the mind behind Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda F-Zero and many, many other wonderfully inventive games – has turned 70. Miyamoto, who has had a hand in the development of most Nintendo games and consoles, is the most influential game designer alive. Nintendo is part of the creative marrow of the games industry: there is barely a game developer today who has not played, and been influenced by, Miyamoto. He has worked at Nintendo for 45 years and, since the 1990s, he has been the face of the company. Alongside the late, great former president Satoru Iwata, and the genius hardware designer and Game Boy architect Gunpei Yokoi, he laid the foundations for the company's enduring success, and helped established its fun-first approach to video games.

During Thursday's latest Nintendo Direct event, acclaimed video game designer Miyamoto Shigeru announced that the company's upcoming feature length animation project -- in conjunction with American film studio, Illumination -- now has a firm North American theatrical release date of December 21st, 2022. "Here we go!" Chris Pratt as Mario Anya Taylor-Joy as Peach Charlie Day as Luigi Jack Black as Bowser Keegan-Michael Key as Toad Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong Fred Armisen as Cranky Kong Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek Sebastian Maniscalco as Spike Cameos from Charles Martinet pic.twitter.com/Yio2pql1Jy While release dates for Europe, Japan, and other markets have yet to be revealed, Miyamoto did share the studio's key character casting decisions. Chris Pratt will voice Mario. "He's so cool," Miyamoto commented.

Niantic Labs, the maker of "Pokémon Go," is teaming with Nintendo for a new augmented reality video game based on the spritelike "Pikmin." The game, due to be released later this year, is the first in a new mobile games partnership between the companies announced Monday. They are not strangers, as Niantic developed "Pokémon Go," released in 2016, with The Pokémon Company, which is part-owned by Nintendo. "Pikmin," a 2001 game developed by Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, starred cute colorful plant-inspired creatures you could control. This game will have Pikmin appearing in the real world via AR to "encourage walking and make the activity more enjoyable," the companies said in the announcement.