About "Critical Kate" Willaert

Welcome to MetroidMania, in which I backtrack through the history of platform adventures before Metroid to answer burning questions like:

Was Vampire for the Spectrum computer a Metroidvania?

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“Metroidvania” is a portmanteau of Nintendo’s Metroid and Konami’s Castlevania. But how has its meaning changed over time?

What got its Wikipedia page deleted for almost a decade? 

And why …
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While doing a revision on my long-in-development video on the origin of Carmen Sandiego, I noticed something on the Wikipedia page for “Carmen Sandiego (character)” that I hadn’t noticed before. …
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Last Summer, game developer Digital Eclipse released The Making Of Karateka, a cross between a documentary, an artbook, a museum gallery, and a game collection, that details the story of …
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The X-Men ‘97 logo has a more complex history than you might expect. Although immediately recognizable to longtime fans, this particular variation on the iconic logo wasn’t introduced until 1994 …
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“This isn’t gonna be easy. If those Grid Bugs get us, we’ve had it.”

As the heroes of TRON ride in their Solar Sailer toward the film’s final act, they …
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The year is 1990. Nintendo has just received the latest “Q Ratings” report — a long-running popularity poll that ranks celebrities and fictional characters by weighing their popularity against their …
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In a Half-Life 25th anniversary documentary that launched this weekend, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell paraphrases a decades-old bit of gaming industry wisdom, saying, “Late is just for a little while, …
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Nintendo Of America made its home Redmond, Washington just a little over 40 years ago, but not until after its first big hit. So where were they located when they …
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The reaction to my “Metroid Hidden Influences” video has been amazing. If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch that one first, then come back here. Because this…is the Bonus …
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