Month: July 2026

When you buy a game, do you actually own it? For most players the answer feels obvious, until the day a company switches off a server and the game they paid for simply stops working, forever. That exact scenario has ignited one of the largest consumer movements in the history of gaming, a campaign called Stop Killing Games that has pulled more than a million people, lawmakers across Europe, and the entire games industry into a fight over what ownership really means in the digital age. What began as one frustrated player’s reaction to a single shutdown has grown into…

Decades after a video game ships, long after its developers have moved on and its studio may have closed, a dedicated community of players is still digging through its code, and they are still finding things nobody knew were there. Buried glitches, forgotten shortcuts, and impossible tricks keep surfacing in games old enough to be considered ancient by the standards of the industry. This ongoing excavation is one of the most fascinating and least understood corners of gaming culture, and it sits at the intersection of competition, engineering, and something that genuinely resembles archaeology. The people driving it are speedrunners,…