William Morris Biscuit Set. All images courtesy of Ella Hawkins, shared with permission Dr. Ella Hawkins Reimagines Ancient Artifacts and Prized Objects as Edible Replicas May 31, 2025 Grace Ebert Academic research is notoriously niche and often opaque, but Dr. Ella Hawkins has found a crowd-pleasing way to share her studies. The Birmingham-based artist and design historian translates her interests in Shakespeare performance, costume, and matieral culture into edible replicas. Hawkins bakes batches of cookies that she tops with royal icing. Decorating takes a scholarly turn, as she uses tiny paintbrushes and a mini projector to help trace imagery of William Morris’ ornate floral motifs or coastal scenes from English delftware. Rendering a design on a single cookie can take anywhere between two and four hours, depending on the complexity. Unsurprisingly, minuscule calligraphy and portraits are most demanding. Ancient Greek Pottery Sherds Hawkins first merged baking and her research about a decade ago while studying undergraduate costume design at the University of Warwick. She decided to bake cupcakes based on Shakespeare productions that her class examined. “It felt like a fun way to look back at all the different design styles we’d covered through the year,” she tells Colossal, adding: I carried on decorating cakes and cookies based on costume design through my PhD (mainly as goodies to give out during talks, or as gifts for designers that I interviewed), then branched out and spent lots of time doing cookie versions of other artefacts to keep busy during the pandemic. She has since published an academic book on the topic and is a senior lecturer at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. But she also continues to translate artifacts and prized objects held within museum collections into delicious canvases. There’s a set made in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage, a museum in the country house where John Milton finished his epic Paradise Lost. Anchored by a delicately crosshatched portrait evoking that of the frontispiece, the collection contains typographic titles and signs that appear straight from a 17th-century book. Delftware Tiles Hawkins ventures farther back in history to ancient Greece with a collection of pottery sherds inspired by objects within the Ashmolean Museum. With a bowed surface to mimic a vessel’s curvature, the irregular shapes feature fragments of various motifs and figures to which she applied a sgraffito technique, a Renaissance method of scratching a surface to reveal the layer below. The weathered appearance is the result of blotting a base of pale brown-grey before using a scribe tool to scratch and crack the royal icing coating the surface. She then lined these etchings with a mix of vodka and black food coloring to mimic dirt and wear. (It’s worth taking a look at this process video.) Other than a select few preserved for talks and events, Hawkins assures us that the rest of her cookies are eaten. Find more of her work on her website and Instagram. Medieval Tiles, inspired by The Tristram Tiles, Chertsey, Surrey, England (c. 1260s-70s) Milton’s Cottage Biscuit Set developed in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage Outlander Biscuit Set Elizabethan Gauntlet Biscuit Set Next article

On June 5, after years of rumors and anticipation, Nintendo will finally launch the Nintendo Switch 2 worldwide. Preorders are already mostly sold out with millions of gamers anxiously awaiting Mario Kart World Tour and new on-the-go ports of Street Fighter 6 and Cyberpunk 2077. Of course Nintendo is no stranger to the hardware business, launching more than a dozen consoles and portables since the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). And there have been many ups and downs over the last four decades. When considering which Nintendo system actually had the best launch, we looked at the quality and quantity of games at release, price, as well as the overall impressiveness of the hardware at launch. This retrospective also considers only the North American launches of each system. With that in mind, this is the definitive ranking of all of Nintendo’s console and portable launches since the NES gave the world a red-capped Italian plumber!  13. Virtual Boy Since entering the video game market in the 1970s, Nintendo has rarely encountered a massive failure, but it’s hard to see the Virtual Boy as anything but a colossal misstep, albeit an ambitious one. A home VR system in the mid-‘90s was literally decades ahead of its time, but nothing about it was really consumer friendly. Despite being marketed as a Game Boy successor, the Virtual Boy wasn’t really portable, and at home, it required a table to play. And while the black and white monochrome screen was fine for the original Game Boy, the Virtual Boy’s red and black monochrome display was known to just cause headaches. As for the launch games, they were aggressively… okay? Mario’s Tennis is a perfectly competent, if barebones, tennis game. Meanwhile Teleroboxer was an interesting, just not terribly compelling Punch-Out!! successor. But even if the games were decent, the controller, a god-awful monstrosity mixing the worst aspects of the SNES and N64 controllers, didn’t do these titles any favors. The launch price, equivalent to around $370 USD in 2025 dollars, was the final nail in the Virtual Boy’s coffin, and Nintendo quietly discontinued the console a year after release. 12. Wii U The Wii U is Nintendo’s worst selling console by a large margin, and the problems really were evident from the beginning. The tablet controller was an interesting idea but just not as engaging or innovative as the Wii’s motion controls. Nintendo really banked on Nintendo Land showcasing what the system could do and banked on it being their next Wii Sports, but it ended up just showing how limited the new console really was. And while Mario games have historically been system sellers, New Super Mario Bros. U was largely a rehash of its Wii predecessor, just with HD graphics. It’s a fine platformer, but a surprisingly average Mario game. Beyond that, the launch lineup was largely made up of third party ports, some of which had been available on other consoles for years at that point. It’s easy to see why so many people were confused about whether the Wii U was a new console or an upgrade of the Wii, and why so many of those who understood what it was ended up skipping it, even if the $300 launch price was competitive. 11. Game Boy Color If we were looking at the entire history of Nintendo consoles, the Game Boy Color would certainly rank higher, but Nintendo just didn’t put much effort into its launch, likely because Nintendo absolutely dominated the handheld gaming market at the time. They didn’t have to work very hard to sell this thing. They knew the players would show up. The highlight of the Game Boy Color’s launch in 1998 was Game & Watch Gallery 2, a color collection of the old handheld titles Nintendo made in the ‘80s. It actually was a very good showcase of the GBC’s better color graphics, but it wasn’t the type of game that had much staying power. The other launch titles, Pocket Bomberman, Centipede, and Tetris DX, a colorized version of the original Game Boy’s Tetris launch title, were similarly serviceable but largely forgettable, because seriously, who was dying to play a colorized version of Game Boy Tetris at that point? But at $79.95, the launch price was right, and the GBC quickly built an impressive library of exclusives. 10. Nintendo 3DS When the 3DS was first revealed in 2010, its glasses-free stereoscopic 3D generated an immense amount of buzz. Sadly, a botched launch promptly killed a lot of that momentum. Nintendo’s first party offerings were all oddly disappointing. Pilotwings had been a solid launch series in the past, but Pilotwings Resort lacked a lot of content compared to its predecessors. Steel Diver was an interesting submarine sim that just didn’t quite click. And Nintendogs + Cats, well… it was more Nintendogs for whatever that’s worth. The launch lineup wasn’t all disappointments, however. Street Fighter IV 3D Edition and Rayman 3D were excellent ports of console games, and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars remains an underrated gem of a tactics game. But arguably the biggest knock against the 3DS was its price. The handheld launched at $250, a price that many gamers balked at. Nintendo was forced to cut the price to $170 just a few months later. Early adopters were compensated with a collection of 20 NES and GBA games, but so many unnecessary missteps left a bad taste in the mouths of many Nintendo fans, and it seems like the 3DS never quite reached its full potential. 9. Nintendo 64 I remember first playing Super Mario 64 in a Toys ‘R Us in 1996 before the U.S. launch and being absolutely blown away. I had never used an analog controller before that let me control how fast or slow my character on screen moved. There had been plenty of 3D platformers prior to that point, but Mario’s first 3D outing truly felt like a giant leap forward for gaming thanks to its silky smooth controls and innovative open world gameplay. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! The problem with N64’s launch is that there just wasn’t much else to it. It only launched in the U.S. with Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64, which was another excellent showcase for what the console could do, but once you played through those games, new releases were sparse, and expensive, an issue that would continue to plague the console for its entire lifespan. The N64 certainly had quality games, it just could never get much quantity. And while the $250 launch price was reasonable, it was only $50 cheaper than a PlayStation at the time, and given that the PS1 had a much larger library, and its games tended to be cheaper, it’s easy to see why Sony’s console outsold Nintendo’s by a large margin in the late ‘90s. 8. Nintendo DS Nintendo didn’t really seem to know what the DS was supposed to be at first. Seemingly rushed to market in late 2004 to get ahead of the imminent Sony PSP launch, the DS was initially marketed as a “third pillar” system that would sit on shelves alongside the GameCube and Game Boy Advance, though it quickly elbowed the GBA out of the handheld space.  That wasn’t exactly thanks to a great launch lineup though. Super Mario 64 DSFeel the Magic: XY/XX was a weird and wonderful minigame showcase of the handheld’s new features, but it had little mass market appeal. And while games like Madden NFL 2005, Spider-Man 2, and Urbz: Sims in the City were all perfectly serviceable, none of them were on par with their console counterparts. But at $150, the DS was $100 cheaper than the PSP, and that easily helped it become a bestseller.  7. Nintendo Switch  In 2025 the Switch is an undisputed massive success, but its launch in 2017 was very much a mixed bag. First the good: the hardware, though underpowered compared to competitors, is fantastic. Being able to seamlessly switch between playing games on a TV and on the go is a wonderful innovation. The Switch feels great in your hands, and the Joy-Cons still offer some of the best feedback of any controller on the market. It was clear that the system had massive potential from the start, and the $300 launch price undercut both Sony and Microsoft. But the launch lineup was the definition of a one trick pony. Yes, The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild was an instant classic and absolutely deserves to be in the conversation of the greatest games of all time. But beyond that, how many people even remember the Switch’s other launch games? 1-2 Switch is a lame minigame collection. Super Bomberman R had potential as a launch exclusive, but turned out to be a middling entry in the long running franchise. And ports of Just Dance 2017 and Skylanders: Imaginators weren’t exactly moving systems. Still, the success of the Nintendo Switch makes a really good case that all a console needs to be successful is a great design and one killer app. 6. Game Boy When it launched in 1989, the Game Boy was woefully underpowered and lacked the color screen of competitors like the Sega Game Gear and Atari Lynx. It didn’t really matter though. First Nintendo understood that less power meant longer battery life, which is still about the most important feature for portable gaming. More importantly, the Game Boy had a secret weapon: Tetris.  The classic puzzler was a pack-in title for the Game Boy at launch, the equivalent of giving the first hit away for free to get gamers hooked. At $89.99, the launch bundle was an absolute steal. Along with Tetris, Super Mario Land was a quirky and unique take on the Mario series that was well worth checking out, while ports of Tennis and Baseball from the NES library kept people hooked as the Game Boy gained momentum.  5. GameCube The GameCube launch is both better and worse than you remember it. While the console was kind of knocked for not having any truly great exclusives at launch, the exclusives that were released have actually aged rather well. This was a system where you could pick up Luigi’s Mansion, Wave Race: Blue Storm, Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, and Super Monkey Ball at launch, all fantastic titles that weren’t available anywhere else. And while it launched three days after the original Xbox, it was also $100 cheaper. Admittedly, the third-party offerings were a bit slim, but Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3Crazy Taxi with the all important arcade soundtrack that’d been missing from more recent releases. But those ports also showed off the GameCube’s biggest weakness: there was really nothing different about these versions if you already owned them elsewhere. It’s not surprising then that after this generation, Nintendo started looking toward new gimmicks to sell consoles instead of just pushing graphics technology to its limits. 4. SNES The SNES didn’t launch with a ton of games, but there wasn’t a stinker in the bunch. Of course there was Super Mario World, still arguably the best Mario game ever made. Not only is the design of that game timeless, but the huge graphical upgrade over anything the NES could do quickly justified the upgrade to a new console. Pilotwings and F-Zero, with their revolutionary use of Mode 7 further showed off the power of the system. The $199 launch price (equivalent to around $460 today) was high for the time, but the launch lineup was so good, the price was kind of justified. Even the two games pulling up the rear, Gradius III and an SNES-exclusive version of SimCity were excellent titles worth picking up. But what’s really underrated about the SNES is how much of an improvement the controller was. It was much more ergonomic than the hard rectangle shape of the NES controller, and the addition of X and Y and shoulder buttons made it clear from the get-go that this console was going to open up a lot of new gameplay styles. 3. Game Boy Advance The Game Boy Advance had an all too brief time as Nintendo’s premiere handheld before the DS took the spotlight, but it built an impressive library during its time starting with the launch. The $100 launch price is quite possibly the best of any piece of Nintendo hardware. And the portable had a solid one, two punch out of the gate with F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, an excellent successor to the SNES title, and Super Mario Advance, a full-fledged remake of Super Mario Bros. 2 that remains the best way to experience this classic.  The 15 other titles available at launch included solid ports of games like Rayman and ChuChuRocket!, with the portability of the GBA version arguably making it more preferable to play than its bigger brother on Dreamcast. But for many, the real star of the launch was Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, a technically impressive port that somehow managed to squeeze all of the gameplay of the console version into an isometric view. Before release, many were touting that the GBA was the equivalent of a handheld SNES. These early games showed that it could actually be even better than that. 2. NES By the mid-1980s, console gaming was essentially dead in North America. Atari had killed the market, flooding it with low quality games. It would take an impressive new console, genius marketing, and just a little bit of luck to bring home gaming back from the brink. The NES succeeded at a tough time for video games by trying not to be just another console. It was more of a toy, or “entertainment system,” sold alongside a Zapper light gun and R.O.B., a robot accessory. Gimmicky? Sure, but that was just the opening salvo in Nintendo’s strategy, the Trojan horse to bring consoles back into the living room. Of course, the games needed to be good for the NES to succeed, and Nintendo had that down pat, launching with 17 titles, including Super Mario Bros., Excitebike, Duck Hunt, and Ice Climbers, titles that are iconic to this day. Other titles like Baseball, Tennis, and Pinball were more perfunctory, but good enough to gain the public’s attention and prove that video games weren’t just a fad. Admittedly, the $200 launch price (equivalent to nearly $600 in today’s dollars) was high, though historically similar to many other launch prices for new consoles, and that price point clearly didn’t do much to dissuade prospective buyers. 1. Wii  Twenty years after the NES brought consoles back from the brink, Nintendo’s home console business found itself in a tough spot. Despite good reviews and a respectable library of games, the GameCube had just taken third place in a three-way fight. Clearly, just trying to build the most powerful console wasn’t the key to success. So as Sony and Microsoft turned to HD gaming, Nintendo released a console just slightly more powerful than its predecessor, but with the benefit of motion controls thanks to the Wii-mote. It sounded kinda nuts. Then people played Wii Sports and were immediately hooked. The game was a phenomenon. Not just hardcore gamers wanted to play it, but parents, and even grandparents. The Wii truly brought console gaming to the masses in a way that had previously been unthinkable thanks to an innovative new controller. Oh, and for the hardcore gamers, a little title by the name of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight PrincessExcite TruckTrauma Center: Second Opinion were more than enough to keep the console flying off shelves for years after release, especially because the older technology meant it could be sold substantially cheaper than either the Xbox 360 or the PS3.

Ever since Donald J. Trump was re-elected president, we’ve witnessed a disheartening spectacle: big tech companies bending their knees to him, hoping to get him to kill antitrust actions against them and defend them from European Union rules and fines.  Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder and Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook have all in one way or another shown or declared support for the president’s agenda, especially his opposition to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs. Notably, all four attended his Jan. 20 inauguration and were front and center during the proceedings.  Zuckerberg killed DEI efforts at Meta, abandoned attempts to contain misinformation on his services, makes regular pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, and called then-candidate Trump a “badass” after last year’s assassination attempt. He sounded like nothing so much as Trump himself (while using words of more than one syllable) when he told Joe Rogan on a podcast: “The corporate world is pretty culturally neutered. A culture that celebrates aggression a bit more has its own merits. Masculine energy, I think, is good.” Bezos killed DEI at Amazon. As the owner of The Washington Post he also squashed the newspaper’s endorsement of then-Vice President Kamala Harris last fall, killed a cartoon of tech leaders and Mickey Mouse bowing down to Trump, and ruled that the paper’s editorial and opinion pages will become right-wing, covering only “personal liberty and free markets,” with no opposing viewpoints allowed. Pichai killed off DEI efforts at Google and makes regular visits to see Trump in Florida. Cook is a bit of an outlier — although he attended the inauguration, he didn’t kill DEI at Apple and has made noises about working with Trump on tariff issues. The four companies haven’t gotten anything (yet) for their efforts; legal action against them begun under Trump’s predecessor are proceeding. Google faces being broken up after a judge ruled it illegally monopolized the advertising tech market. Meta is being prosecuted for illegally monopolizing the social media market by buying Instagram and What’s App and could be broken up as well. Amazon has been charged by the FTC with protecting its online retail monopoly by imposing fees on third-party sellers and favoring its own services over theirs. Apple has been sued by the Department of Justice for a variety of antitrust actions in protecting and extending its monopoly in the smartphone market. And while Trump has made statements about EU regulators — the White House last month criticized recent fines against Meta and Apple as a “novel form of economic extortion” — but has done little to get the EU to halt its actions against the companies. Microsoft takes on Trump Meanwhile, Microsoft not only won’t valorize Trump, it’s also pushing back against him. The company has publicly supported its DEI efforts rather than killing them. In December, the company’s Chief Diversity Officer, Lindsay-Rae McIntyr, wrote on LinkedIn that Microsoft’s DEI efforts are vital to the company’s success: “The business case for D&I [diversity and inclusion] is not only a constant, but is stronger than ever, reinforcing our belief that a diverse and inclusive workforce is crucial for innovation and success.” When worries surfaced that Trump might require American tech companies to suspend their cloud operations in Europe, or turn Europeans’ data over to the federal government as part of a trade war, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post that he won’t turn over the data or suspend European cloud operations. In fact, he said the company is expanding them. He also said he would sue the Trump administration to protect them, if necessary.   Two days after that, Microsoft dropped the big law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, which had agreed to give the administration $125 million in free legal work after threats from Trump. Microsoft hired Jenner & Block to take its place — and Jenner & Block sued the Trump administration instead of giving in to it. Microsoft becomes the world’s most valuable company You might expect that after all that, Trump would have publicly attacked Microsoft or used the power of his office to go after the company. So far, that hasn’t happened. And unlike Meta, Apple, Google, and Amazon, Microsoft has thrived since Trump took office.  Its stock price inched up from $434 a share just before Trump’s inauguration past $445 this week, while the share prices of the others have all declined, sometimes significantly. Along the way, Microsoft became the world’s most valuable company, with a market cap approaching $3.3 trillion.  Gauging by the company’s most recent quarterly results, even better times may be ahead. The New York Times had this to say about the results: “Overall, Microsoft’s results showed unexpected strength in its business. Sales surpassed $70 billion, up 13% from the same period a year earlier. Profit rose to $25.8 billion, up 18%. The results far exceeded Wall Street’s expectations. Despite the economic uncertainty, the company predicted more strength ahead, saying revenue would surpass $73 billion in the current quarter.” Not out of the woods yet All that said, Microsoft is being investigated by the feds for possible antitrust violations having to do with AI and cloud computing. That investigation, like the others, wasn’t begun by the Trump administration; it was set in motion during the Biden administration. So far, Microsoft’s actions don’t appear to have had any effect on the suit — or the company. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has shown that it’s possible for a company to maintain its values under Trump and thrive. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta should follow suit.