Mason Reed

Mason Reed is a games editor at Arcade Spot, where he looks after the retro side of the catalog. That means the console and handheld libraries — NES, SNES, Game Boy and Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Mega Drive and Genesis, Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS — plus the arcade cabinets and Flash-era classics that sit alongside them. Roughly 5,000 of the games on this site fall under his beat. Mason has been with Arcade Spot since 2011. His job is less about opinions than about verification: does this game load, does it hold its frame rate, do the controls map sensibly to a keyboard, does a save survive a page reload, and is the description on the page an honest account of what you're about to play. Retro games in a browser fail in specific and unglamorous ways, and finding those failures before you do is most of the work. He scores games against Arcade Spot's published rating criteria — the same five weighted measures applied to every title, with the score assigned by the editor who actually played it. On emulated games he scores the version you can play here, not the original cartridge: if a landmark game emulates poorly in a browser, the score reflects the browser version and the review explains the gap. Nostalgia doesn't get a bonus.