The latest Video Game Deep Cuts, picking the smartest longform video game articles and videos of the week, looks at Mario speedrunning, the state of 'indiepocalypse', & why it's hard to make games. ...

Here's a nice bit of news to cap off your week: Game dev Adriel Wallick proposed to longtime partner (and fellow dev) Rami Ismail today while they were playing Destiny together. He said yes. ...

Family and friends set up The Jory Prum Scholarship for Sounds that Redefine Normal to honor the memory of the acclaimed video game audio engineer and sound designer. ...

The scholarship will cover tuition for three students over the next six years, starting in Fall 2017. ...

"What if I pulled out the core balance and fairness of chess, and just threw in a lot of random pieces very haphazardly? My friend joked that that would be really bad chess, and the name stuck." ...

"What if I pulled out the core balance and fairness of chess, and just threw in a lot of random pieces very haphazardly? My friend joked that that would be really bad chess, and the name stuck." ...

Slime Rancher dev Nick Popovich shares a snippet of a nice fan letter from a mother who says a love for Slime Rancher inspired her dyslexic son to develop his writing and problem-solving skills. ...

Through a partnership with GameStop, IndieBox is gearing up to sell a selection of popular indie games physically in stores with limited-run steelbooks. ...

The 2014 Nidhogg was a minimalist duel between two monochromatic stick figures. The sequel adds more graphical detail and more weapons, but tries to maintain the accessible simplicity of the original. ...

"The reality is, left to our own devices, we as developers would never ship a game," Naughty Dog co-director Bruce Straley tells Vice in a new feature on why it's so dang hard to make video games. ...