Oscar nominated actor Michael Clarke Duncan passed away earlier today. The 54 year-old died from complications from a heart attack he had earlier this summer. Duncan is best known for his roles in The Green Mile, Armageddon, and Talladega Nights—among many, many other films.

The actor did more than movie work. Blessed with powerful pipes, Duncan was also a voice actor, lending his vocal talents to an array of video games as well as cartoons. One of his first roles was actually in a 1995 adventure game.

After establishing himself as a Hollywood actor, Duncan continued to work in games. He voiced the character of Atlas in God of War II, Benjamin in the first Saints Row, a crime lord in survival horror game The Suffering: Ties That Bind, the character of Ygori in fantasy game Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone, and SEAL Operative Wardog in tactical shooter SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs. Other games he did voice work for include first-person-shooter Soldier of Fortune and Star Trek Klingon Academy.

One of his first professional acting gigs, however, was appearing as a security guard in Panic in the Park, with BayWatch star and Playboy Playmate Erika Eleniak. The PC adventure game had Erika play a set of twins—one evil, one not—in a potboiler about an old amusement park. You can see Duncan's debut in the gallery above as well as clip from God of War II.

Whether it was a cheesy PC adventure game or a big Hollywood production, Duncan's work was engaging, spirited, and often funny as well as moving. He will be missed.

Paul Steed, an artist whose video game career spanned design, publishing and even console development, died unexpectedly, according to The Jace Hall Show. Steed was perhaps best known for work on Wing Commander and Quake and also for controversies arising in his time ad id Software.

Steed was most recently the executive creative director of Exigent, a 3D art company he founded. Prior to that, he had worked for publishers such as Atari and Electronic Arts, with Microsoft on the Xbox 360, and at id. He got his start at Origin Systems as an illustrator for the Wing Commander series and had credits on other games such as Privateer and Strike Commander.

At id, he worked on Quake and Quake II. According to John Carmack, id's co-founder, in 2000 Steed was fired (over Carmack's objection) in retaliation for his insistence on working on what would become Doom 3, a project then opposed by two of the firm's co-owners. Steed also was notorious for releasing the "Crackwhore" player skin for Quake II, a model apparently intended as a tribute to a clan by that name but controversial for its name and appearance. Steed also was noteworthy for giving the keynote speech of Game Developers Conference 2008.

Jace Hall called Steed "a close friend" and "simply one of the first cutting edge low-poly 3D modelers to ever exist in the industry." The circumstances of Steed's passing are unknown. Steed is survived by his wife and children.

Goodbye Paul Steed [Wing Commander Combat Information Center]

Quake, Video Game Industry Legend Paul Steed has Passed Away [The Jace Hall Show]

Image via Wing Commander Combat Information Center

In May of 2006, months before I started writing for Kotaku, my then girlfriend and I went to the pet store to buy her a kitten. There were cages filled with various mewling beasts, fluffy, bright-eyed animals eager to find a good home. And then there was Rande. I didn't like him at all.

A tuxedo cat wearing a black Batman mask with eyes like obsidian, the kitten my girlfriend chose was, in my opinion, a little freak. For the first two weeks after we brought him home he'd sit in the corner of the living room while I played video games, his eyes melding so perfectly with his black fur I couldn't tell if he was staring or not. It was unnerving.

Over time we bonded, and soon he was following me around our apartment. If I sat down he was on me, digging his razor-sharp claws into my legs lovingly. If I was at my desk he was under it, curled up around my feet. When my girlfriend and I parted ways he stayed, and for the past five years he's been my constant companion.

He's been a part of Kotaku as well. He first appeared in 2007, when I attemped to photograph a copy of Pokemon Snap for an article and he decided it was his. He's shown up in unboxings, he's helped me review food for Snacktaku, and he's put up with incredible amounts of shit for the sake of your entertainment.

Last night my wife bundled up the twins to come and pick me up from the airport following my trip to E3 2012, Rande slipped out the door unnoticed. When we got home he was nowhere to be found. I stayed up for hours calling him, and when I finally slept I did so on my front porch, in hopes that I'd wake up with him curled up in my lap.

Around 5:30 AM my brother, who lives close by, called to ask me if Rande was in the house. He had just passed a black and white cat in the middle of the road that had been hit by a car. I ran outside and down the street, and there he was.

I bundled him up and drove out to my mother's house, made him a space with shovel and bare hands, and now he's resting peacefully in a place where they've hopefully got plenty of ice pops and E-Z Cheese.

Rande was a large part of my life, and he was a part of Kotaku as well. I'm glad I got to share him with our readers, and that our best moments are preserved here, where years from now someone will stumble upon a video of a twisted creature shooting ninja stars out of its rear end and experience just a small fraction of the happiness he's brought me over the years.

Sleep well, Rande, you freakishly wonderful cat.

This has been a brutal year for many people's fondest childhood affections. First Star Wars visionary Ralph McQuarrie dies, then French comics legend Moebius passes away, and now we have the sad news that Maurice Sendak, the creator of children's stories such as Where the Wild Things Are, has died at age 83.

Sendak will of course be primarily remembered for the above-mentioned classic (it never ceases to blow my mind it was first published in 1963), but for me, his most lasting contribution was in writing my absolute favourite book as a small child: In the Night Kitchen.

About little more than a boy dreaming about a magic kitchen, where dough becomes fantastic contraptions like aeroplanes, it's been strangely controversial in the US (thanks to the star sometimes showing his naked little butt), but was cherished in my home due to the ridiculously charming story and artwork - also provided by Sendak - which looked good enough to eat.

In a career spanning over 50 years, the Brooklyn-born Sendak would not just write and illustrate children's stories, but also work in books and TV, where he once teamed up with, who else, Jim Henson.

Sendak passed away at his home at age 83 following complications after a recent stroke he suffered.

Fans of his work, or those interested in finding out more about one of the legend's in children's literature, should check out Gregory Maguire's Making Mischief, a recently-released collection of artwork and writings on Sendak's work.

Last June, the brother-in-law of reader Taylor was tragically killed in action while serving in Afghanistan. He had been due in September to return home and join Taylor in getting tattoos.

While he never made it back, Taylor decided to go ahead and get a tattoo done anyway, only now it would be done as a memorial.

Because the pair bonded while playing Final Fantasy XI - "it was the thing that made me see him more as my brother and not just a guy dating my sister" - Taylor got his brother-in-law's character emblazoned across his shoulder, complete with dog tags around the chocobo's neck.

That day we brought home a Commodore 64, my first ever video game system, the device which first kindled my lifelong passion for video games and which, ultimately, has led to who I am and where I am today.

So it's sad to learn today that Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore International, has passed away at the age of 83.

Born in Łódź, Poland in 1928, Tramiel's early life was, like that of fellow video game pioneer Ralph Baer, dominated by the aggression of Nazi Germany. Following Poland's rapid defeat in 1939, he would spend the next six years in German captivity, first working at a garment factory and later as a labourer.

Liberated from his work camp by US infantry, Tramiel would, again like Baer, end up in the US Army, where he specialised in the maintenance of office equipment and typewriters.

This experience enabled him to establish the Commodore Portable Typewriter Company in 1954, and when the typewriter business began to go sour a few years later, he deftly switched both his operations and company name to Commodore Business Machines, Inc., and began producing calculators instead.

Then in 1977 Tramiel was able to switch lanes again, and recognising that the future of home electronics lay in computers, had Commodore (now known as Commodore International) engineer Chuck Peddle come up with the PET (Personal Electronic Transactor), an all-in-one device which was popular in institutions like schools.

Schools alone wouldn't pay the bills, though, and Tramiel's now-famous line "We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes" led to two of Commodore's greatest successes.

In 1981, they released the VIC-20, which at the time became the biggest-selling computer of all time. Its success was based on its versatility: it could play games, yes, but it could also be used for more practical purposes like family budgets. At USD$300, it was also "affordable", at least by the standards of the day for such equipment

In 1982, though, they went one better, and released the Commodore 64. It was, for the time, the perfect machine, striking a balance between performance and affordability that would see it sell over 20 million units. To this day it remains the single biggest-selling personal computer system of all time.

What made the C64 so impressive was the way it blew away the competition in terms of both graphics and, more importantly, sound (indeed, the C64's unique architecture means its still a favourite of chiptune artists today). This led to some of the most memorable games of the 1980s appearing on the platform, from Last Ninja to GI Joe, Elite to Little Computer People, Summer Games to Way of the Exploding Fist. And that's before I even get to Cities of Gold, Pirates! and Aztec Challenge.

I adored my system, and its massive catalogue and raw performance meant it survived as our home computer until 1992. Even then, people were trying to make the system relevant, with ports of contemporary games like Street Fighter II.

Tramiel left Commodore in 1984, and in a strange quirk would go on to buy the remains of Atari. It was Tramiel's son Sam, in fact, who oversaw the development of the Atari Jaguar, the company's last important contribution to the home video game market.

A lot of farewells, and as this medium matures we're only going to need to write more of them, end up either sad or, sadder still, acts of discovery as the masses only find out about how important a person was when they pass.

This time, though, I just want to say thank you, Jack. I know you weren't the only person involved in the creation of the C64, but you were the man in charge, and without you I wouldn't be who I am today. So, yeah. Thanks.

Jack Tramiel, a Holocaust survivor and the tech visionary who founded the company that created the legendary Commodore 64 computer, died on Sunday at the age of 83, Forbes reports. We'll have more on Tramiel's great legacy later.

My father knew a guy who knew Bert Sugar.

That's how I wound up working for Bert, as a high school intern and then in my first job as a professional reporter. He was my first editor, my first mentor, my first journalism role model. He passed away yesterday at age 75.

Back when I interned, the people at the post office knew I worked for Bert, because to work for Bert Sugar was to be bathed in cigar smoke. It was to hear the clacking of a typewriter and hear the wheeze of a drinker's laugh as a newsman recounted a great, old story.

To work for Bert at Boxing Illustrated was to learn how it used to be done—and done well.

Bert was a sports-reporting legend, one of the tenured ink-stained wretches on the boxing beat and an eventual member of the Boxing Hall of Fame. He covered the fights. He talked about the fights. At some point he was on your TV, shot from the waist up so you couldn't see his ridiculously loud pants. But you'd see his conservative jacket and tie, the cigar between his fingers and the fedora on his head as he spun some new turn of phrase to explain who was going to knock out whom. Yeah, I got my start with that guy.

He was my first boss in journalism and had nothing to do with the Internet or computers. He was old-school, my stretched tether to the reporters of old: all hard-drinking, fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping characters. All of them were like Bert, I imagined. They'd all met the heavyweight champ, as would I if I was doing it right.

I worked for Bert before I wrote about video games, before I went to journalism school and was filled with righteousness about reporting. The journalism lessons I learned from Bert were about energy and excitement, about always having the enthusiasm to stick to the beat, to always notice the amazing, to laugh in wonder, to want to hear regular people, to want to tell them stories, and to always care about every word of every sentence.

From the day I met Bert, he looked old. But from that same day onward, he seemed so young. He was always hustling to write five different stories, another book and maybe launch a TV series with his buddy Cornell. He wanted to always be busy and to do more and better work. He bounced through the cramped offices of Boxing Illustrated in midtown Manhattan, where my suits acquired the Sugar cigar scent. He told silly jokes (This one sticks out for some reason: "What goes flop-flop-bang? An Amish drive-by shooting."). He was a goof, an entertainer but also a man of knowledge. He was a boxing nut and a baseball one, too. While I worked for him he was proud that his age and the number of books he had written—most of them about those two topics—were nearly equal quantities. (Here are a few, all of them guaranteed to have some cleverly-written and wonderfully-arguable assertions.) For some reason, I told him that I had to get a lot of rest each night. Don't worry, he told me, you need less sleep when you're older. I was inspired, because I wanted to have the kind of energy he had.

I always called him "Mr. Sugar" because, in 1994, I was a teenager and he was Damon Runyon in the wrong decade. We put Boxing Illustrated together, me, him and a few other folks, with a waxer, sticking each element of a page to cardboard and then sending them out to get some blue-inked proofs. The one time I recall him being angry with me was after I let a messenger take a large envelope stuffed with the boards for the next issue from the office before we'd made a duplicate. If the bike messenger I sent them off with was hit by a bus, our new issue would be lost in the road somewhere, he pointed out. Thank goodness that didn't happen.

Bert made me feel like a reporter, because, not long after he had me fetching coffee and making photocopies, he let me be one. He got me into press row at big fights. He published my first articles that ever appeared in a glossy magazine. He let me know what it was like to have a byline and to know what it's like to have the people who you write about react to your work (the guy who Mike Tyson knocked out in his first fight after prison was none-too-happy with my unflattering pre—fight profile).

I went to college when Boxing Illustrated became Boxing Digest and the Bert Sugar operation became a subsidiary of, believe it or not, a fashion and beauty magazine company. I still worked on Fridays, still got a little bit of time around Mr. Sugar. Bert quickly had a falling out with the magazine's new owner, but before he was gone from Boxing Digest altogether, he temporarily worked in banishment, out of an office where he was most comfortable: the bar at O'Lunney's. He'd send his editing orders back on napkins. That was the Bert Sugar story.

People always wanted to know about the hat. No, I'd never seen him with it off, but his secretary told me the story about some guys who were angry about something Bert wrote and came by the office one day to convey their displeasure. They cut a wire that would have let her call for help and flipped his desk. Amid the commotion she noticed a bald-pated man picking himself up off the ground. That was Bert, she realized. He had taken one in the jaw and had not yet re-affixed his hat.

I figured Bert was the kind of newsman who was pleased that he wrote about someone who wanted to punch him out. A job well done.

Bert liked to tell me that his previous interns had done great things. One of them was a top executive at ABC. The other was Keith Olbermann. He expected me to be great. Ever since, I've been trying hard.

A co-worker was talking about me with Bert once. Bert declared, only after a pause, that I was a "neat kid." That bugged me just a tiny bit. I used to consider it an insufficient assessment. I used to think there was so much more that I wanted to be in Bert's eyes.

Nah.

I'll take being a "neat kid," because, you know what? So were you, Bert. To the end.

Michael Kuehl, a programmer with Resistance developers Insomniac - and who had also worked at Infinity Ward and Electronic Arts - has tragically passed away at the age of 32.

Kuehl was struck by a car while riding his motorcycle, and died from his injuries.

Our thoughts go out to his family and colleagues.

A week ago Star Wars Galaxies closed down for good. Today, the MMO published its official "memory book," a whale of a tome at more than 200 megabytes in PDF form, recalling all of the worlds, races and principal events of the MMO's eight-year run.

Remember the Sullustan, the Ithorian, the Wookiee, the Human and, yes, the Bothan ... and the worlds of Corellia, Dantooine, and Kashyyyk. Remember the Jedi, the the smugglers, the traders and the spies. Remember all the members of the eight Galactic Senates. Remember all those who fought in the great Galactic Civil War or lived in the time of its intrigue.

It's a memorial not so much to a game but to its community and if you were ever a part of it. Have one last long look through the pages of its history, with that soundtrack above as your final accompaniment.

The Force will be with you. Always.

A Thank You to the Star Wars Galaxies Community [Star Wars Galaxies]