At last, Shrek has come to Minecraft, but only for the next few days

Late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata oversaw the launch of the DS and Wii, helping to usher in the company's modern era. In a recently unearthed 2004 interview, Iwata explained the philosophy that led to the creation of those two systems, and with the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that this all informed the last 20 years of Nintendo.

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2024 has begun favorably for CD Projekt RED as the Polish game developer announced yesterday that Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty sold over five million units across all platforms, following the previous benchmark of 4.3 million units from late November.

Ready Player One is a story about desperate people seeking escape from a collapsing society within the confines of a predatory digital world run by ultra-rich oligarchs who will do anything, including committing mass murder, in order to protect their positions of wealth and power. And now a company called Futureverse is teaming up with Warner Bros Discovery and author Ernest Cline to bring that particular Torment Nexus to life with the creation of the Readyverse, which aims to «to bring the promise of the open metaverse depicted in Cline’s Ready Player One novel and the blockbuster film adaptation into a tangible reality.»

A lawsuit filed in the Manhattan federal court last week by the New York Times claims that the defendants—Microsoft and OpenAI—have used millions of its articles to train and create its large language models (LLMs) and other products. The Times is seeking damages in realms of billions of dollars, though it doesn't give a specific number.

Jason Blum's Blumhouse and James Wan's Atomic Monster, two of the biggest horror production companies in Hollywood, have officially merged. 

Elon Musk's X Corp. lost its effort in court to block a California law that seeks to control toxic posts on social media by requiring companies to disclose their content-moderation polices. In an eight-page ruling Thursday, a federal judge in Sacramento rejected arguments by the company formerly known as Twitter that the measure violates the free-speech rights of social media platforms. The ruling comes after Musk ignited a firestorm in November by endorsing antisemitic posts on his platform. X Corp. Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino scrambled to contain the fallout after major advertisers like Sony, Discovery, Apple and CBS stopped or paused spending on the site.

It was a comeback year for the world's wealthiest. The combined net worth of the 500 richest people surged by $1.5 trillion in 2023, fully rebounding from the $1.4 trillion lost the year prior, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Once again, their fortunes were closely correlated to the performance of tech stocks, which rose to fresh records this year despite recession fears, lingering inflation, lofty interest rates, and geopolitical turmoil. Tech billionaires saw their wealth grow by 48% or $658 billion, propelled by intense hype around artificial intelligence. No one did better than Elon Musk, who recaptured the title of world's richest person from French luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault. The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer netted an additional $95.4 billion through Thursday's close, bolstered by the success of Tesla and SpaceX, after losing $138 billion in 2022. His net worth is now more than $50 billion above Arnault's after a global slowdown in demand for luxury goods dented shares of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE.

Lawrence Sullivan, also known as the Florida Joker, has issued a "final warning" to Rockstar Games and is demanding $5 million for the parody of him in the GTA 6 reveal trailer.

South Park: Snow Day received a new trailer yesterday, offering a better look at the game and its charming PvE content before closing out with a release date. Currently, the launch is slated for March 26, 2024, so we've still got a few months to go before we can enjoy what this enchanting take on South Park has to offer. 

GTA 6 fans are so desperate for new footage or any crumb of information that they've resorted to using braille on the bullet holes in a car to try and decipher the date of the next trailer.

Wordle was a lockdown phenomenon: one of those games that, merits aside, simply landed at the right time. I've kicked the habit now but like pretty much everyone else I had a Wordle phase with the family WhatsApp group and, yes, when I'm nearly out of chances I have gone running to my six-letter friend Google. Wordle's enormous popularity was such that, in January 2022, the New York Times purchased the game from creator Josh Wardle for a sum «in the low seven figures.»