I speak of the little games that come with operating systems–Windows Solitaire being the most obvious example–and it’s time they got their day in the sun. Benj Edwards has rounded up twenty of them, including ones you’ve played (I still miss Windows Reversi) and ones I suspect you’ve never heard about (Gorillas?).

View The Great Operating System Games slideshow.

Here’s a look at notable games that have shipped with OSes through the ages–including ones written by a few of the most famous programmers of all time.

Regarding Mario’s origins, it’s common knowledge among game fans that legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto created him for 1981′s Donkey Kong arcade game. But few know that Nintendo borrowed Mario’s name and Italian heritage from a real man.

That man’s name is Mario Segale, and he’s not a plumber. He’s a wealthy real estate developer in Tukwila, Washington.  Segale unwittingly stepped into video game history by renting out a warehouse that served as Nintendo’s U.S. headquarters in the early 1980s. At that time, a financially struggling Nintendo of America (NOA) was preparing the U.S. launch of Donkey Kong. Legend has it that NOA President Minoru Arakawa noticed physical similarities between Donkey Kong’s short, dark-haired protagonist and the landlord. So the crew at NOA nicknamed the character Mario, and it stuck.

Of Mario Obscured

Knowing the story above, it’s natural for video game enthusiasts to be curious about Segale. Does he look anything like Nintendo’s famous mascot? How does he feel about inspiring key traits of a cartoon video game character? We’ve been largely unable to answer those questions. Segale himself is hard to reach.  Partly because of his association with Nintendo’s character–which friends and colleagues say he doesn’t appreciate–Segale stays quiet. Very quiet. His profile is so low, in fact, that you are about to see the first picture of him ever published on the Internet.

I’ve attempted to make contact with Segale a few times over the years, but all my queries have remained unanswered. In the course of researching the man, I’ve instead come in contact with a few associates of Segale who are willing to discuss Segale on condition of anonymity. Revealing their names might jeopardize their relationships with Segale, and I’m not keen to do that. The stakes are too low to be ruining lives over a tangential figure in video game history.

Tangential or not, we still want to see him — and here he is. This photo of Mario Segale appeared in the 1952 Pirates’ Log, the annual yearbook of Highline High School in Burien, Washington. It is Segale’s senior year photograph, and it was accompanied by the quote: “The hum of his car’s motor was his symphony.”

I’ve checked with people who personally know Segale, and they confirmed that the young man seen in the picture above is indeed the same Mario Segale that lent his name to Nintendo’s mascot. Assuming he was 18 years old in 1952, that would put Segale at about 76 today. A recent Seattle Times article cites Segale’s age as 75, so that, in combination with the school’s location and personal testimony, confirm this is who we think it is.

But who is he, really?

On Mario, the Man

Over the past four years, I’ve learned some tidbits from friends and associates of Mario Segale. Nothing too deep–just little things here or there that form an interesting picture of the man. First of all, Segale is an avid duck hunter who rarely misses a season. No joke. Memories of the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge might be floating through your head right now, and I don’t blame you: it’s a very entertaining coincidence.

If there’s one thing that’s consistent about the man, it’s his aversion to publicity. Below, I’ve quoted some thoughts on Segale’s secretive nature from someone close to him. From everything I know about the man (which is admittedly not very much), this explains him well:

Mario is, as you know, very private, also very Italian. He values loyalty, respect and trust. Mario has a close knit family circle. From my understanding, Mario wants nothing to do with being related to the “Super Mario” character in fear it might interfere with his business, financial, political and private relationships…Obviously from his standpoint it wouldn’t benefit him and could possibly publicize him.

In some respects, the author is correct about Segale’s concerns: his relationship to Nintendo’s character does publicize him. After all, Exhibit A is the article you’re reading now. But I’ve not felt too bad probing lightly into Segale’s character: he gets significantly more scrutiny as a developer in the Seattle Times, which has been covering his adventures in real estate for decades.

In fact, the Times recently examined the serious side of Segale more closely in an article that overviews his current development projects in the Tukwila area. Chief among them is “Tukwila South,” a 500 acre expanse of commercial land Segale has been buying up for decades and is now preparing to turn into an enormous office park. The article goes into Segale’s business and political background far more than a video game journalist would typically care to explore (including a list of all the gravel pits he owns–seriously), further reinforcing my point.

Here’s another e-mail I received from a close associate. This one mentions Segale’s appearance with some delight:

Mario values his privacy over money, which is why he hasn’t accepted any for being “Mario.” He’s just a normal, wealthy (self-made), semi-grumpy old man. :) But we thought we’d let you know that he is really not particularly fascinating! You would probably be disappointed if you ever saw him. He doesn’t even wear coveralls! But he is not too tall and he does wear suspenders.

Suspenders? I’m beginning to see how Arakawa might think he resembled Miyamoto’s video game character if they were a regular part of Segale’s wardrobe. But this description left me wondering: does Segale ever wear a mustache? To find out, I checked with one of my contacts. According to him, Segale did not wear a mustache from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. He’s unsure of Segale’s ‘stache status before or after that.

That brings us to what Segale actually thinks about this whole thing.  The only Segale quote about this topic we have on record comes from a 1993 Seattle Times article. I quote:

So what does Segale think of his name being used for a game that has sold more than 100 million copies and made Nintendo one of the world’s most profitable companies, not to mention the Super Mario Bros. movie just released?

“You might say I’m still waiting for my royalty checks,” he quips.

As far as I know, Segale has not spoken on record to any member of the media on any topic since that time.

It all works via a $199.95 box (which goes on sale today) and adapters you plug into your computer to let you connect gamepads, and Spawn says it’ll work with any game for the consoles it supports. It worked well in the demo–which isn’t a given, since several TechCrunch50 debutantes haven’t–and if it does what it’s supposed to, it’s going to be cool. Spawn says that games look good and there’s virtually no latency on home networks and only a tiny bit over the Internet, but even the impressively-engineered SlingBox sometimes has trouble dealing with chokey real-world Internet connections. I’ll believe it when I play it.

Even if it performs as advertised, it is, of course, another box to buy and install. Wouldn’t it be nifty if this feature was built into consoles–or if Spawn and Sling teamed up to sell one box that did both games and TV?

Thinking about the prospect of a computer taking on Alex Trebek, metaphorical buzzer in hand, led me to the conclusion that game shows in general aren’t a bad Turing Test-like gauge of artificial intelligence. They require knowledge–okay, only a little of it in many cases, but some. They’ve got a social component, by definition. They involve thinking on one’s feet, or the simulation thereof.

So how might a really well-programmed supercomputer fare at other famous game shows of the present and (mostly) past?

Wheel of Fortune. On one hand, the game that keeps Pat Sajak and Vanna White off the streets is a mind-numbingly simple pattern-matching exercise–a computer that had indexed a few million phrases, names, and titles might be eerily good at guessing correctly with only a few letters in place, and I suspect that there’s a definitive vowel-buying strategy that could be rendered in code. On the other hand, the “Fortune” in the game’s name indicates that there’s a large component of luck in the spinning wheel.

What’s My Line? Jeopardy requires knowledge of facts of all sorts; this game is narrowly focused on the single task of guessing a person’s profession. That might make it a more manageable challenge. But the whole point of the show was that the jobs in question were odd and unexpected, and sometimes unique. I’d still be impressed if a computer was more adept at correctly guessing that someone managed, say, a girdle factory than the eerily skillful Bennett Cerf was. (This is all assuming that the computer would take the place of one of the celebrities on the panel, rather than one of the contestants attempting to win money–computers, by and large, don’t have interesting and amusing professions.)

To Tell the Truth. I always think of this game as an inferior clone of What’s My Line. But I think it would be far harder for a computer to do well at, since it involves asking three people questions, then determining which one is truthful based not only on the accuracy of his or her questions, but also on psychological factors such as whether the person looks shifty and duplicitous. Of course, maybe a computer could cheat by relying on a humongous image database of photos of most everyone in the country, plus some really good face-recognition software.

The Dating Game. Programming a computer to play as Bachelor or Bachelorette number one, two, or three would be, essentially, programming it for a well-defined version of the Turing Test. If I were IBM, I’d digitize thousands of old episodes of the show, perform speech-to-text conversion on all the questions ever posed (“Bachelor number two, if you were an amusement park ride…”) and use it them to gain some sort of understanding of the parameters of the Dating Game universe.

The Newlywed Game. Like The Dating Game, this one involves goofy Chuck Barris questions. Unlike the Dating Game, it requires intimate knowledge of another human being, plus an understanding of that person’s psyche. Bottom line: A computer may never be able to play this game competently until computers are able to marry people. And sleep in the same beds as them. And use some sort of infrared system to determine if they hog the covers.

Let’s Make a Deal. Like Blackjack, the show that made Monty Hall famous involves a gigantic dose of luck, but it’s possible to improve your chances via an understanding of the odds. In fact, the “Monty Hall Problem” has provided fodder for discussion by professional and amateur logicians for years. I suspect a computer could play this game better than a human, especially since it could blithely ignore the mind games that Monty Hall played on contestants. Also, the show sometimes used pricing games similar to The Price is Right, and a computer with a database of prices for consumer products could presumably win such contests every single time. On the other hand, you only got to play Let’s Make a Deal if Monty Hall picked you out of the audience, and I’m not sure if a supercomputer could fit in a theater seat at all, let alone don a funny costume.

The Price is Right. See Let’s Make a Deal. Give a computer a comprehensive price database, and it might force Goodson-Todman Productions into bankruptcy, even though games such as Plinko have a high component of luck to them.

Family Feud. Like What’s My Line, this game has well-defined parameters that would lend themselves well to play by a computer. Presumably it would be possible to program the notion that “apple pie” is a more likely response to “name a dessert you’d take on a picnic” than “baked alaska” is. Mostly, I’m just trying to deal with the concept of Richard Dawson smooching a bunch of computers.

The Match Game. Oddly enough, this game may be the easiest one of all the ones here to win for a human–even though a high percentage of the humans who played it in the 1970s performed dismally–but the hardest for a computer. It’s not just that the computer would have to be able to parse sentences such as “Ugly Edna said “I hate Ralph, he asked me for my picture and when I gave it to him he used it as a [BLANK].” It would also have to get puns. And have an appreciation for absurd visual imagery. And have a sense of how six specific celebrities would be likely to respond. (I’ve watched enough reruns on GSN to know that my strategy would have been different if Fannie Flagg had been on the panel than if Joyce Bulifant had been.) Gene Rayburn, Bret Somers, and Charles Nelson Reilly are no longer with us, sadly, so we’ll never know for sure how a 2009 IBM supercomputer might have fared back in 1973 or so. But my guess is that it would have done even worse than most of the flesh-and-blood players. It’s a rare example of a narrowly-defined challenge that’s in some ways trickier for a computer than a broader Turing Test would be.

Okay, that’s enough of that. Do you think IBM’s supercomputer stands a chance of doing to Ken Jennings what Deep Blue did to Kasparov?

View Smallball slideshow.

When it comes to sports simulations, there’s an inverse relationship between realism and charm. The handheld sports games that toy companies cranked out in the early days used a single LED to represent each player, not thousands of polygons, but they had more personality than today’s console titles–and they were plenty addictive, too. This slideshow skews towards baseball (hey, it’s only a week until opening day) and football (unquestionably the most popular handheld-sports sport), and focuses mostly on games from Mattel and Coleco (the major leagues of handheld sports). It celebrates them through patent drawings, packaging photos, and original commercials. If you’d like more–a lot more–of this stuff, check out Rik Morgan’s wonderful www.handheldmuseum.com, where some of the images in this show originated.

Any competition is welcome in my book, so I hope Toys R’ Us’ experiments with buying and selling used games works out. Joystiq confirmed today that the toy giant is trying the idea in “a couple of New York stores,” according to a company rep, not including the Times Square location. Another blogger spotted one of the stores in Nanuet, N.Y.

Details are scarce, because Toys R’ Us doesn’t like talking about its test runs, and at present no one is saying how the rates compare to Gamestop. Still, as Joystiq points out, used game sales account for 42 percent of Gamestop’s profits, and sales are expected to reach $2 billion this year. If another major retailer wants to step in on that turf, so be it. As much as it pains me to buy video games from a toy store (you know, the infantilization thing), I can’t argue with saving a few bucks these days.

For now, I’m selling my games back through Gamefly, the mail-order rental service, which offers solid trade-in rates towards the cost of a subscription. Used game sale prices are also better with the service, to the point that you can buy a game with the money from two used ones and still have some leftover credit. Two used games would rarely, if ever, cover a $55 purchase at Gamestop.

The big takeaway from last year’s success of Mario Kart and Grand Theft Auto is that AAA games don’t have to be introduced in the holiday season to perform well. NPD Group analyst Anita Frazier said as much after her company put out its annual sales figures. “Get some high profile releases out in the first and second quarters,” she suggested.

Mulling over a fairly unsuccessful year, Electronic Arts is coming around to that school of thought. Glen Schofield, General Manager for the EA branch that developed Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge, told Gamesindustry.biz that there were “far too many” games to choose from before the holidays.

“I think that we traditionally thought that people only buy games at Christmas or around holiday time, and now we’re looking back and going, ‘You know what, GTA launched in May; Resident Evil comes out in March’.”

I picked this story up from Destructoid, where one commenter posed a clever theory: Publishers previously had the mindset that video games are just kids’ toys, and children are most likely to get them on Christmas. Personally, I can relate to that. I used to always get a video game on the eighth night of Hannukah, but now I just buy them when they deserve my $60, period. I would have loved to play Left 4 Dead in the summer of 2008, when nothing was going on. It’s still on my backlog now.

Let’s hope other publishers follow suit. With Halo Wars and Resident Evil 5 coming next month, and Street Fighter IV in stores now, it seems that this strategy might already be in play.

Judge Consuelo Callahan said while the games that concerned lawmakers are “unquestionably violent,” there are ways for parents to keep them from children, such as parental blocking features on consoles and the voluntary ESRB labels that appear on every retail game. Further, Callahan dismissed studies that suggest a link between violent games and aggression. None of it establishes or suggests a casual link between playing games and real mental harm, she said, according to the AP.

State Sen. Leland Yee, who wrote the bill, wants the case taken to the Supreme Court, but it’s not known yet how the state’s attorney general will respond.

The original hearing was one of the first stories I wrote about for Technologizer. Fresh-faced, I let out some of my pent-up frustrations with these kinds of laws, which have failed numerous times in the past. In short, sealing off mature video games as “harmful to minors,” along with cigarettes and pornography, can really hurt a medium that does address serious topics in new ways. Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3, while violent, are great examples.

Entertainment Software Association president Michael D. Gallagher called the laws “an exercise in wasting taxpayer money,” which sounds funny given that the trade group is taking some of that money back — Californians were already forced to pay $282,794 to the ESA after the legislation was originally sticken down. Still, the industry does have the right to recoup its legal costs, and when it says a Supreme Court battle would only hurt taxpayers more, the anti-game crusade becomes even tougher to justify.