Ah February. A month of extremes. On one hand, we have declarations of love and warmth. On the other, we have the soul crushing reality of winter (well, unless you like being snowed in, that is). Whichever side of February you are on, games are a good thing. They are a go-to gift for loved ones and they more than help pass the time.
This month is a little thin because, for whatever reason, not many games seem to have been released in February. Upcoming game developers, fix this. Think about it. Valentine’s Day. Snow Days. This is a great month to release new games.
In the 1980s, there was a pretty gnarly crash for video games, which is what I think adds to the lack of games released into the market that I could find for February in history. Let’s face it. The market was over-saturated. There was just so much happening and so many movies that games tried to work with, like with ET, which I will get back to in July (spoilers!). Yes, we did have a resurgence of games in the later 80s, but most of them were, sadly, not released in February, or at least I couldn’t find much in my research.
Here are some games that were released in history this month.
Shark Jaws.
This one player game was in arcades in 1975. It was a horror game tied in with the movie Jaws. Yes, it was a game about sharks eating people. The problem was that the developers hadn’t secured a license from Universal Pictures for rights. The game was released anyway by getting creative with fonts and the sizing of certain words. The game had a joystick and the player was a deep-sea diver trying to catch small fish while avoiding sharks.
Super Mario Bros. 3.
It’s Mario! Yes Super Mario Bros. 3, which I used to play with my family, was released on February 12, 1990. Once again, Mario and his brother Luigi are trying to save Princess Toadstool. Now, they also face Bowser’s children, Koopalings. They also were given new magical abilities to help them defeat their antagonists, such as flying. In addition to that, they got a rad new world map that I enjoyed. This game comes with a lot of critical accolades and even helped spin off a short lived TV show.
Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game.
Yes, we have jumped a bit. For the 2000s, I wanted to feature a game that I really like. Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game was released February 10, 2015. Yes, just last year this zombie apocalypse themed game started to grace our table tops. It is a tabletop game that puts 2-5 players in a small colony trying to survive after the zombie outbreak. You pick a character and play. The cool twist is that everyone also picks a secret objective as well as trying to cooperate with the other players in surviving. So, is someone acting strangely because they just need to collect gas or are they planning to sabotage and burn the colony down? The only way to know is to play and see how good at bluffing your friends really are.
Happy gaming this month!
