Do you remember when you created your first video game or arcade and what do you remember about the experience?

My first electronic game development was modifying electromechanical games so they could operate in an amusement park setting where players could win tickets.  The other game I designed strictly in software on a large mainframe that had a video display was the game of Fox and Geese.  It was sometime in the winter of 1967 at the University of Utah.

What are your opinions about today’s generation of video games?  How do you compare them to older, classic games?

I believe the games are graphically fantastic and there are so many that making any judgment has to be on individual games.  There are excellent games out there but there is quite a bit of junk as well.  I’m particularly looking forward to augmented reality.

Did you ever think when you were younger you would be on a Video game Trading card?

No, we only knew of athlete trading cards, and I knew I’d never make one of those.

When did you first meet Walter day and where was it at?

I met Walter at a game convention, possibly at the Smithsonian, I’m not sure.  I loved his passion for the history of games.

When you created the company Chuck E Cheese, did you ever expect it to still be successful today?

Absolutely.  I knew that CEC had the right economics and the right dynamics and would never get old because there are new kids every year.

If you could describe Walter Day in one word, what would that word be and why?

Passionate, because he is.

Are you still involved with gaming today, and what role do you play?

Still doing some designs, some of which will be announced shortly, and working on another big project with my sons.

What is your favorite portable gaming device and why?

My iPad and my cellphone are what I use frequently.  They are easily accessible and have great graphics. We also have an Xbox One and a PS4.  I play on all of them.

Do you prefer PC or Console gaming and why?

PC is better for certain types of games where the mouse and keyboard give more functionality and certain games are better on a touchscreen.  The games available for consoles are particularly interesting, such as Just Dance, which is great for a group.

What games today do you play and what are your favorite genres of games?

I still like games with a puzzle aspect.  Twitch games today are not as fun because my kids can easily beat me.  Reaction times diminish with age.

Out of all the games and systems you help create throughout the years, what would be your favorite and why?

I still have a special place in my heart for Pong, Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede and Tempest, all in their coin op form.  I was involved in the design and fine tuning of them and they all subscribe to my “Simple to learn, impossible to master” credo.

What does it take to be a Video Game creator, and what advice would you give a person today who would like to get into the industry?

Learn Unity and go for it.

Are video games today aimed mainly at children, adolescents or adults?

Everybody.

Do you believe some Video Games are too violent and lead to violence in America today?

Atari had a rule that games could allow shooting at ships, tanks, etc., but not at people.  It sounds so quaint today, but I do believe that gratuitous, anti-social, violent portrayals are not beneficial.

Do you like it when Hollywood makes a movie from the video game?

Yes, I particularly liked “Wreck-it Ralph”.

Who is your favorite video game character of all time and what makes that character special?

Mario…..he’s just so cool, how can you not like him.

Where do you see Video gaming in the next 20 years?

I think augmented reality will take over a large part of the board game market and expand the group game around a table market.  I think geopositioning cellphone games will become more common.

This is one of an ongoing series of articles based on the Walter Day Collection of e-sports/video gaming trading cards – check out more information at thewalterdaycollection.com.

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There is something quietly vertiginous about walking through an exhibition and finding yourself already inside it. Not a self you remember putting there, but a self distributed across objects, images, words; a self that arrived in the museum before you did, and which now looks back at you from behind glass.

This happened to me at Göteborg’s Världskulturmuseet, where the exhibition “A World of Games” includes a display dedicated to the excavation of the Atari landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The photographs shown in that display are mine. My name appears alongside them as do the names of the team of archaeologists that I worked with. Nearby, video interviews with Andrew Reinhard — the archaeologist who led the excavation — play on a monitor. I stood in that gallery for some time, in a museum I had traveled to for reasons only partly connected to this material, trying to decide what I was experiencing. Neither pride, nor estrangement accurately describes the way I feel. The feeling was uncanny in the precise sense: familiar and foreign at once. I just stood there.

I have been thinking about that moment ever since, and about the other moments like it: standing before display cases in Rome, Sheffield, Málaga, Cambridge, and Shanghai, looking at what each museum had gathered to tell this story, trying to understand what the museums are doing with it, what questions the objects raise in their new institutional lives.

On these trips I would text my wife with some version of the same line: “more dig materials at _______.” And I would typically share how flummoxed I was at seeing such attention devoted to the recovered materials at museums the world over. The Atari Burial — as the disposal of the company’s products has come to be known — is even an exhibit at the Video Game Museum of CADPA in Shanghai. My perplexity, I told her, resided in my own skepticism: is this stuff really that important? I mean, sure, we unearthed a myth, hushed the rumors, quelled a legend, and unveiled all that infamous trash to major international media outlets. But…are all the recovered materials – including dirt from the actual pit – really that important to the history of games for museums to devote time, money, energy, and space to display smelly garbage to their visitors as historical artifacts? My wife’s response was blunt, and rather sobering: museums are telling you that the stuff is important. I stood corrected. It seemed best, on reflection, to cast off my skepticism and work to understand what work this stuff is doing in a museum.

 

This installment is my attempt at that understanding, conducted in dialogue with a framework that has long shaped my thinking about video games in museums: Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe’s 2010 essay “The Migration of the Aura, or How to Explore the Original Through Its Facsimiles,” published in Switching Codes (University of Chicago Press). Like the physical appearance of the excavated game cartridges themselves — distorted, smashed, eroded — I will not arrive at tidy conclusions. It is not the cracks in the plastic or the frayed packaging themselves that teach me anything; it is how museums curate that damage, what they choose to make of it, that becomes the object lesson.

Before the Ground Opened

I should establish my position in this story. I am not a neutral observer of the Alamogordo story. I am, in a modest but real sense, one of its authors, and the earliest critical one. My camera never fully recovered from all that sand.

In 2004, I published “Concrete and Clay: The Life and Afterlife of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600” in the journal Design and Culture, an article that took seriously what was then treated primarily as an industry fable: the claim that Atari, facing catastrophic losses after the collapse of the home console market in 1983, had buried millions of unsold cartridges — including unsold quantities of the notorious E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game — in a municipal landfill in southeastern New Mexico[i]. The story had circulated for two decades by then and had acquired in the telling all the features of urban legend: dramatic scale, corporate denial, with a location simply too good to be true — in the same state as Area 51 and the test site for the US’s first nuclear weapon. The persistent legend gave the industry crash a burial site. It made the failure literal, interred. I took it seriously as a cultural object regardless of whether it was literally true, because the rumor was doing real work in how game history was being made and remembered. I then devoted an entire chapter to the burial in Game After (MIT Press, 2014). I wrote about my images of Atari’s trash in Cabinet. I wrote about the culture of the excavation with game studies colleagues in Reconstruction. The team of archaeologists and I wrote about it in The Atlantic. Each venue asked something different of the material and of me, and each piece forced me to understand more precisely what I thought the legend meant. Now having it shown back to me at museums prompts even more considerations.

Latour and Lowe offer a concept I want to borrow here: the trajectory. Rather than asking whether any given object is an original or a copy — a question they argue is almost always the wrong one — they propose attending to the whole “catchment area” of a work: the river and all its tributaries, sources, and deltas. “A given work of art,” they write, “should be compared not to any isolated locus but to a river’s catchment, complete with its estuaries, its many tributaries, its dramatic rapids, its many meandering turns and its several hidden sources.” The Alamogordo story, thought through this lens, does not begin with the burial in 1983 or the excavation in 2014 — though for the locals who picked through the landfill at the time, there was no legend to wait for; they had the cartridges in hand. For everyone else, the story begins somewhere in the accumulation of rumors that circulated through game culture in the years between, before anyone put a shovel back in the ground. “Concrete and Clay” was a segment in that trajectory. So was every version of the story that preceded it, and every museum display and ongoing discourse that has followed.

What I want to hold onto, for now, is the implication that my decade of writing about the Alamogordo burial before the excavation took place was not merely prologue. It was part of the trajectory — part of what made the dig legible as a cultural event rather than a municipal curiosity. The rumor needed critical attention before it needed archaeological confirmation.

Going Underground

The excavation took place in April 2014. The city of Alamogordo granted permission for a dig organized by Fuel Entertainment, with documentary filmmaker Zak Penn present and a camera crew in tow — the resulting film, Atari: Game Over, was produced by the entertainment arm of Microsoft’s Xbox, and I appear in it. Penn had interviewed me in New York and invited me to Alamogordo; I came on my own dime. No one was flying me anywhere to discuss a thirty-year-old rumor about garbage. My role at the site was as historian and documentary photographer, a position that shaped how I moved through the event and what I paid attention to.

The cartridges themselves have stayed with me, and I have written about them at length elsewhere. But what I remember just as vividly is the crowd. In a piece I later co-wrote with Judd Ethan Ruggill, Ken S. McAllister, and Carly A. Kocurek for the journal Reconstruction, we noted that people had driven for days to be there — one man told a camera crew he had come twenty-eight hours straight from Oregon, and when asked what he would do if the dig came up empty, replied gravely, “That would be bad.” Others arrived by Greyhound bus and then by taxi from town, which must have made for one of the stranger fares the driver had ever logged. The line to get in stretched for hundreds of people by the time the gates opened, long enough that families set up folding chairs and sent runners to the McDonald’s down the road. There were food trucks — one of them, painted lime green, advertised itself with the tagline “Order Some Disorder” — and a dig-side arcade improvised from a folding table, two old television sets, and a generator humming against the wind. People bought souvenir canteens printed with the excavation’s coordinates and an 8-bit foam sprite of E.T. We signed legally binding releases before we were allowed anywhere near the pit. It had, in other words, all the trappings of a small, temporary community organized around the possibility that a rumor might turn out to be true. We were all there to watch a story become true.

When the first cartridges appeared — dirty, degraded, some smashed, some of them still sealed in blister packs — the crowd reacted with a sound I am still not sure how to describe. It was not just a rousing cheer but something more like release, like the exhaling of a story that had been held thirty years too long. I took photographs throughout. I was thinking, at that moment, primarily about documentation — and about advocating that museums like The Strong National Museum of Play, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Stanford University’s Silicon Valley Archives receive whatever we recovered, if anything was there at all. I was not thinking about Göteborg, or Rome, or Sheffield. I was not thinking about what it would feel like, years later, to stand in a museum and find my images in an exhibit.

The cartridges that came up were not all E.T. The excavation recovered a wide variety of titles — the landfill was not simply an E.T. graveyard, despite what the legend had insisted. The condition of the materials varied considerably. Many were intact enough to be identified but showed clear signs of wear from having been jumbled with other trash underground in a sealed landfill — though at least one cartridge, astonishingly, booted up without trouble when plugged into an Atari 2600 on site. They were, in the most precise sense, excavated objects. Trash cum archaeological objects. They had been in the ground and now they were above ground.

Then they entered another kind of ground: the e-commerce market of eBay.

The Certificate of Authenticity Problem

Here is something that does not appear in the documentary, and that I find myself thinking about every time I stand in front of an Atari burial display at a museum: the City of Alamogordo issued official Certificates of Authenticity to accompany the recovered cartridges. These certificates were designed to distinguish cartridges genuinely recovered from the landfill from the millions of identical cartridges that have been circulating since their production in the 1970s and 80s. That is a reasonable problem to solve: without some authentication mechanism, a dirty E.T. cartridge pulled from a collector’s shelf is visually indistinguishable from one that spent thirty years underground (the latter will just smell worse).

 

The certificates were issued to accompany cartridges sold on eBay. Each listing came with a property tag, the certificate itself, and a pamphlet containing photographs from both the original 1983 dump and the 2014 dig, an authentication package of surprising elaborateness, assembled for a commercial marketplace. Which means that the museums now holding these objects — the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, OXO in Málaga, GAMM in Rome, and others — had to acquire them by bidding against private collectors on eBay. I think about that a lot: a museum, sandwiched between bids, treating a dead company’s garbage like a contested estate sale.

 

This is worth pausing on. The document that confers institutional legitimacy on these objects was produced for a marketplace. Museums became one category of bidder among others. I picture a curator hunched over a laptop at 11 p.m., refreshing a listing.

The Henry Ford Museum received its materials differently: the Henry Ford came directly to the archaeology team. My hard hat from the dig is in the Henry Ford collection, alongside other excavation artifacts including actual dirt from the pit. The Henry Ford’s mandate is American industrial and technological history: its collections include the Rosa Parks bus, the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop, Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory. My hard hat keeps unusual company. That a hard hat from the Alamogordo dig sits in that company is a version of this event that game-specific museums cannot produce, and it is the version that perhaps takes most seriously what the excavation was: a moment in American business and technology history, not just game history.

 

Back to the certificate. Latour and Lowe are useful here, though not in the way one might expect. They argue strenuously against the obsession with pinpointing originals, against the idea that the meaningful question is, “is this the real thing?” The Certificate of Authenticity performs exactly that obsession in bureaucratic form. It is a municipal government’s attempt to freeze the original/copy distinction — to say, officially, this cartridge is from the landfill, and this one is not — at precisely the moment when, as Latour and Lowe would have it, that is the wrong question. The more interesting question is what any given museum does with its version of the object once acquired. The certificate answers a question about provenance. It has nothing to say about meaning.

Still, I do not want to dismiss it entirely. The dirt on these cartridges matters. The wear matters. The time spent underground does as well. The specific history of burial and recovery matters, even if it cannot be read directly from the object without supplementation. The certificate is a clumsy instrument for preserving something Latour and Lowe would recognize as worth preserving: not the object’s claim to be original, but the specific trajectory that brought it here. A cartridge dug out of the Alamogordo dirt and a cartridge that has sat on a collector’s shelf since 1983 are materially the same object; what distinguishes them is everything that happened to each one in between. The problem is that the certificate enlists this distinction in service of a market rather than in service of understanding.

End of Part 1

[i] I did a follow-up piece for the USC journal, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, in 2006 that utilized the phrase “undead media” to address surviving coin-op arcade games. The landfill legend played a role in that article; namely via the account of the landfill shared in D.B. Weiss’s novel Lucky Wander Boy. The funny thing is that I just searched my essay in Vectors entitled, “Ms. Pac-Man: An Elegy for the Undead,” to see how to access it given that the journal was built in Flash. Here’s what Gemini shared: “The irony of the piece is that “Ms. Pac-Man: An Elegy for the Undead” has itself fallen victim to the exact digital obsolescence and “media death” that Raiford Guins wrote about. Because the Vectors Journal interface was built entirely on Adobe Flash, the original interactive format is now broken on modern browsers.” Bravo, Gemini, bravo.

The post Versions of a Burial: The Atari Landfill Excavation in Museums, Part 1 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Fancy playing a new Commodore Amiga game that smacks of high quality, is fun to play, and well worth keeping an eye on as developments progress, then this game called ‘Double Baboon Ninja’ by Danlabg is just the game for you. An upcoming Arcade game in which you play as The Double Baboon Ninja’s, and must put a stop to an alien invasion terrorizing the city. To coincide with this news, Saberman has provided some footage from Version 7a which has been made available today.

Here’s the latest. “Baboon City sleeps beneath its neon glow…Until an alien invasion turns its citizens into mindless blobs. Hope remains.Two warriors emerge from the shadows. The Double Baboon Ninja strike back!”

Technical notes

• AGA chipset
• 2MB of CHIP
• 68020 with Fast RAM should be sufficient
• Supports one or two button controllers

Credits :

• Graphics & Code by Dan
• Music by Robyn
• PTplayer by Frank Wille

Links :1) Source 

The post DOUBLE BABOON NINJA – This upcoming Arcade game by Danlabg for the Amiga looks fab [Version 7a UPDATE] appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Frisco feels new. Shiny and new. Always expanding, always under construction, always trying to ease the commute south to the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area with creature comforts like a downtown revitalization project, new parking garages, a training facility for the Dallas Cowboys and Toyota Stadium home to the MLS side, FC Dallas.

My journey to Tampere from Helsinki proved a little more exciting. To my sheer delight, trains in Finland offer an entire coach for pets! I missed my two Swedish Vallhunds, Abba and Pontus, which prompted me to spend two hours in a coach with seating areas that resemble cots. Dogs stretch out at greater leisure than humans who ride upright while their canine companion sprawl before a window view. Looking down the aisle, I spot dogs lying on the floor, sitting in seats, walking and wagging their tails in the aisle, and snoozing blissfully on their seats. Big dogs. Little dogs. Black dogs. White dogs. None in hats. None driving around in cars. If P.D. Eastman wrote about Finland, the title of his lovely book would be Train, Dog. Train!

Tampere is the regional capital of Pirkanmaa and the area’s cultural center. I swapped a coach full of canines for a museum full of those magical trolls indigenous to Finland, Moomin! My hotel was next door to Tampere’s Moomin Museum. Walking around the city after ages spent in the museum admiring Tove Jansson’s creations, I was somewhat disappointed to learn that the people of Tampere aren’t nicknamed “Little Mys” or “Snufkins” after the inhabitants of Moominvalley. Instead, Tampere’s industrial past earned its residents the nickname, “Manse,” due to the city being dubbed, the “Manchester of the North”. And like the city in the north of England, Tampere has its own version of black pudding known as, mustamakkara. I spied (and avoided) these blood-dark shiny skinned sausage at the Tampereen Kauppahalli. With architectural roots in the late 19^th century, it’s the largest market hall in Scandinavia.

One city enjoys an abundance of freshwater lakes; the other resides in “Tornado Alley.” One is regarded as the sauna capital of the world, the other feels like a sauna during long summer months.

Such differences and distance do not however preclude similarities. The Finnish Museum of Games and the National Videogame Museum are, I discovered, museums nested within other museums. They remind me of Matryoshka dolls, or “Russian Dolls,” as they are commonly called. Their charm resides in what the object-in-an-object reveals. An outer shell-like layer is opened and removed. Inside a smaller figure appears. The dolls decrease in size with each layer removed until the tiniest figure in the series cannot be opened. Unveiling ends not in any reduced hierarchy – from important to least important – but in the demonstration of correlated relations, forms, and meanings. Macro and micro scales are displayed as interdependent.

The Finnish Museum of Games lives inside Museokeskus Vapriikki. Located in a former factory building, the museum center is now home to a natural history museum, stone museum, the Finnish Hockey Museum, the Finnish Postal Museum, among other exhibition spaces.

The National Video Game Museum resides within the city of Frisco’s Discovery Center sharing space with TrainTopia, the Museum of the American Railroad; Sci-Tech, a hands-on, interactive science museum; and the Frisco Public Library.

Removing this layer of the Finnish Museum of Games reveals a museum devoted to the history of games within a specific, regional context: game development, industry, and the culture of game play within the Nordic country. Finland, after all, gave the world Angry Birds and Max Payne, and is currently home to over two-hundred game developer studios.

Removing this layer of the National Videogame Museum reveals a museum that offers its visitors a more general, non-regionally specific approach to the history of video games. Although its mission is not “the history of video games in the US,” it flirts with regional context: an appeal to place takes the form of a recreated teenager’s bedroom decorated with sports pendants for the Dallas Cowboys, Texas Rangers and a “Another Student for Reagan-Bush 84” sticker to affirm Texas’s longstanding “Red State” status to visitors—mixing a period of time, place, and politics with play.

Inside both museums, I walk through a variety of different exhibits. Tampere treats visitors to recreated bedroom/living room spaces, displays of games developed in Finland, a magnificent timeline of game consoles that reminds me of a “family tree,” and an arcade space. Displays on Finnish games include title cards, descriptions of the game’s significance in Finnish and English, interactive game play, and audio interviews with developers.

 

In Frisco, I pass through exhibits devoted to hardware timelines, 3^rd party software developers, in-game easter eggs, handhelds and portable games, PC gaming, video games translated into table-top games, an innovative temporary exhibit on representation of North American indigenous groups in games, and an arcade space. Title cards aren’t in Spanish. The museum was founded by three super-collectors of video games, and it shows: display cases are packed with game artifacts, many rare, and many only available to view in Frisco.

Inside the museums, amongst their various exhibits, it felt to me like I bumped up against another layer, one completely unexpected, unassuming, and amazing. Tampere and Friso recreate independent game shops. Each museum stages micro-historical scenes that slip passed the grand history of games, adding specific weight, physical evidence, to transformative events dotting timelines. Written accounts along with museum exhibitions on the history of games are partial to privileging founders, inventors, developers, companies, and, of course, celebrated hard and software titles. The quickest Wikipedia search reveals how easily the past is chopped up into increments of time determined by binary digits (e.g. eras of 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit…). New hardware ushers in emergent eras that structure how the past is valued and how history is often composed. That is, what counts as significant for history. Independent game stores aren’t Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony. They aren’t the Marios or Master Chiefs of the past…or present. In Tampere and Frisco independent game stores are given relevance. A recreated game shop reduces the scale of game history to the molecular unit of retail sales, the once common point of purchasing a game as a face-to-face social, public experience.

Deep inside the Finnish Museum of Games, when walking past the exhibit for Supreme Snowboarding, the first Finnish game to sell over a million copies, I turn a corner to enter a retro game shop. Nintendo character plushies like Yoshi and Toad, software titles for the Sega Dreamcast, PS2, and N64, Gameboys galore, along with controllers for the N64, Gamecube, PS2, and Dreamcast cram the shop’s shelves from floor to ceiling. Games are displayed in their original packaging. A boxed Microsoft Xbox and Sony PS2 sit like crowning gems atop these stocked shelves. Near the register – yes, there’s even a register in the exhibit – glass display cases contain loose NES cartridges of Metal Gear, Dr. Mario, and Metroid, showcasing the resale market for secondhand games at these shops.

 

The exhibit is convincing. Maybe too convincing. I found myself wondering, if these items are for sale. The register’s cables connected to a power source, a service bell, and monitor all conspire to trick me that this is more than a recreation, that it’s an actual shop deep within the museum. I’m not alone in this observation. Outi Penninkangas, a researcher at the museum, also finds the exhibit, a little “too authentic” for visitors. Do they try to purchase items in the exhibit?

 

The Finnish Museum of Games values the space of retail in its documentation of Finnish game history. The examples of titles shared above and below were not developed in Finland, of course. Their inclusion concretely evidences the general popularity of games and game play in Finland. A global industry stocks these retail shelves. While the museum’s mission is to document, collect, exhibit games developed in Finland it doesn’t do so to the exclusion of hardware and software titles popular the world over. Regional emphasis is neither an attempt to exclusively celebrate Finnish game development, nor a push to elevate its status. Rather, the Finnish Museum of Games serves as a conduit channeling Finnish developers into a global economy of games. How Finland has contributed to and shaped the global market and culture of games is the lesson on display.

 

The retail exhibit also accounts for the social experience of purchasing game-related products. On the one hand, I witness the increased popularity of shops – be it in Tokyo, Riga, Tampere, or your city – that specialize in collectible, out-of-print games. A desire for “former-gen” displaces the immediacy of “next-gen” in these niche markets. On the other hand, I’m also reminded that many places associated with retail sales of entertainment media have shuttered over the last 30 years.

Porno-theaters with their noisy projector and sticky video booths went flaccid.

Video stores degenerated like magnetic tape.

Book shops avoid the shredder thanks to lavender lattes and laptops.

Music stores refrain from playing their final note thanks to the vinyl revival.

The independent game shop is already on the list of antiquated media, passe social spaces. But here, in Tampere, an exhibit in a museum, demonstrates that the history of games – the history of games in Finland – includes the social space of consumption, where players could demo games on a display kiosk for the Dreamcast, discuss new games with shop assistants, visit a shop with friends. It proved a highlight, a destination, a place meaningful in the social and economic ecology of games. This increasing absence Outi identifies as a major emphasis for the museum’s recreation. These were places where people, he explains, “could ‘touch’ games, discuss with [a] shopkeeper, meet other players and for example rent consoles.”

Today “storefronts” no longer mean “bricks and mortar.” Digital distribution be it Steam, Amazon Luna Cloud Gaming, Apple Arcade, or Xbox Game Pass, removes the physical storage medium of an optical disc altogether thus making any visit to a shop superfluous. These shops provided services (e.g. rentals), social community, and tactile experiences with games. Like handling a videocassette box to learn more about a potential rental, I reached for the copy of Rez for Dreamcast as I only ever played the PS2 version. I felt the urge to touch PaRappaTheRapper 2 along with many other titles remembered fondly or never known.

The finite dimensions of the retail shop drew me to these products. Just being surrounded by this stuff stoked the desire to touch as Outi intended. The packaged container is a flattened form on screens today when previewing downloadable titles on Xbox Game Pass. The intimacy of those lumbering packed shelves at arm’s length is foreign to cloud gaming or absurd when browsing a staggering “14,928” titles (the number shown when I last checked) available on the Xbox Store. Such selection is overwhelming, a solitary experience. It’s far from closeness, hardly communal.

The Finnish Museum of Games’ exhibit maintains a social space, like so many public places, that is shrinking. Its real object of history is not necessarily the enormous amount of preserved stuff lining shelves or even the register fooling me but us, the visitors, who pass through this space: a subject enveloped within a once familiar setting recreated to enact social practices. Our presence reenacting the social space brings meaning to the recreation. We are the display.

Frisco’s version of a retail space shoulders an entirely different social. It offers a microlevel experiential scene of the recession that impacted the US game industry in the mid-1980s when billions of dollars were lost. The factors causing the downward spiral are many: market saturation of third-party titles vying for the pacesetter Atari VCS’s cartridge slot, reduced retail prices of game cartridges due to increased competition, shifts away from popular action-oriented arcade ports to more narrative driven games, hardware expansion components that allowed other systems (e.g. Intellivision) to run Atari VCS cartridges, and in the case of Atari Inc. poor business decisions, over production, and challenges to quality control.

Like the factors that contributed to the recession, historical coverage of the so-called “great video game crash of 1983” is encyclopedic. Absent from any account of the recession with its trail of bankruptcies is the microlevel effect: how the crash played out in the space of retail.

Frisco’s recreation is of an independent shop specializing in video game merchandize – not a division in a department store or aisle in a toy store. The checkout desk complete with cash register fronts the shop’s inventory. Behind it, shelves of boxed original game cartridges point to companies producing titles for their hardware (e.g. Atari, Mattel, Coleco). These same shelves also showcase the tide of third-party titles flooding the market in the early 1980s. Shelves and vintage in-store advertisements display products from fly-by-night companies like Apollo, M-Network, Data Age, US Games. A “Store Closing, Everything Must Go” banner hangs beneath a shelf supporting examples of the various competing consoles on the market at the time of the recession: Intellivision, Odyssey 2, Vectrex, ColecoVision, Atari 5200, Arcadia 2001. A retail display case becomes a resource to help visitors gain even more insight into specific factors linked to the crash. Title cards like “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” “Can I Return This Game,” and “Emerson Arcadia 2001” attest to quality control issues that stymied the market.

 

In its testament to the time, one display speaks even louder than the “Store Closing” banner. A run-of-the-mill “Clearance Sale Everything Must Go” sign is affixed to a wire basket. The basket is chock full of games at deeply discounted prices. First-party and third-party games alike rest in the remainder bin. Good games, Atari’s Missile Command, and not-so-good games, UA Ltd’s Cat Trax for the Atari VCS, are tossed into the basket’s pile of disarrayed packages. Vibrant hues of red, yellow, green, blue, orange, purple once designed to get the heart racing flatline here. Like a countdown to industry Armageddon, price tags show the steep discounts: $9.99, $7.99, 99¢. This wire basket testifies that the recession didn’t play favorites. Titles by Atari, Mattel, Activision, Imagic, Parker Brothers, and Vidtec amass like sludge.

 

For many around at the time and not directly connected to the industry, this wire basket is familiar. Different perspectives on an all too prevalent narrative. Where today we might say, “crash,” yesteryear shouted “cheap games!” Frisco tells not just the common industry centered narrative, but of entrepreneurial ventures (small business ownership of an independent game shop) and the assorted experience of consumers who may have delighted in those .99¢ bargains. What’s to lose when in 1983 you can take a chance on a Pac-Man derivative like Lock ‘n’ Chase for about the same price as an orange sherbet push pop from an ice cream truck?

 

Tampere and Frisco reduce the scale, remove layers, of the larger histories accounted for at each museum. They zoom in on the microworlds of retail experiences, present an often overlooked node in the game industry network and stage events minor in the historical coverage of games predicated on development and products. Here’s a counter-exhibit to all the ones filled with game products that greet us behind glass at museums, the recreation of a slowly dying space that we ourselves enliven.

Tampere reinvigorates our tactile experiences with game products in a present moment when digital distribution redirects that experience from place to screen. Frisco scales down abstract industry economics to evidence what the recession looked like at the local level of consumption. Neither place appeared out of the ordinary in their heydays. If anything, our visit to the local video game shop was uneventful, habitual, routine, just a familiar part of game culture. Tampere and Frisco dehabituate the habitual treating the recreated game shop as an object lesson to express the loss of social community and physical presence and materially witness economic downtrend. Many layers revealed, many different layers connected.

Tampere returns, restages a social experience as an event, to heighten visitor awareness of the game shop’s disappearance and their once central role in Finland.

Frisco stages the lived experience of the game crash from the ground-level perspective of everyday consumers and small business owners: groups who had the rug pulled out from under them in the mid-1980s. Here the industry crash is played out on the tiled floor of a game shop, on its shelves, and at the bottom of a wire basket

The post Museum Games #2 Staging Microhistory in Tampere & Frisco appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Clear-eyed at last, I found myself cataloguing the differences. Not between Athens and Heraklion, or between riot cops and farmers, but between what I’d been shown and what I’d been denied. The teargas had been indiscriminate — it didn’t care whether you were a protester, a tourist with a rolling suitcase, or a scholar on a research trip to a video game museum. Neither do the barriers that US museums unwittingly erect around game history. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The museums I visited across Europe and Asia had been doing something quietly, without fanfare, that I hadn’t fully registered until I was standing in Tallinn looking at a shelf.

Enter the smaller scale.

What these museums are doing isn’t revolutionary, and they wouldn’t claim otherwise. They chronicle, document, and evidence a general history of games for their visitors — the same broad sweep you’d find at The Strong or the Computer History Museum — while also broadening the historical script to show when and how video games first appeared in their own countries. They address the social, economic, and political conditions that shaped access to games and game play. Where relevant, they surface local game development: developers invisible at the larger scale, absent from US museums unless their name is Shigeru Miyamoto. I don’t regard any of this as a counternarrative, or a disruption to an established timeline (that’s what historians ought to do), or an attempt to win space within capital-H History. The mission is humbler than that, and more effective for it, if not enough to cause a few blushes at US institutions. These museums simply account for the history of video games within both a global and a specific national context. One that isn’t placeless. One that is entirely about experience and access at a particular place. Visitors leave knowing that when the Nintendo GameBoy was out of reach to players in Soviet Bloc countries, the Brick Game handheld became their game history. That’s not a footnote. That is history for people, in those places.

LVL Up! in Tallinn is easy to underestimate. You don’t walk into the tiny space expecting to have your assumptions rearranged. But something stops me near the back of the museum: a top shelf lined with decorative neon Pac-Man monsters, their glow familiar and almost comforting, until I notice what they’re partially obscuring. Propped against them is an Xbox copy of Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019), the detective RPG developed under the lead of Estonian science fiction author Robert Kurvitz. Pac-Man doesn’t disappear. Disco Elysium doesn’t displace it. Both are visible, occupying the same shelf without apology. The arrangement says more about curation than most title cards I’ve read. Elsewhere in the museum other shelves fill in a history that US museums would never think to tell: Kosmonaut, a 1990 DOS game developed by Estonia’s Bluemoon Interactive; Oota Sa! (1984), a Soviet-era clone of Nintendo’s Mickey Mouse Game & Watch title, available here during occupation. The shelf isn’t making an argument. It doesn’t need to.

In Wrocław, the Museum of Games & Computers of the Past Era doesn’t explain the Cold War divide — it exhibits it. A corner of the museum recreates two domestic interiors side by side: one Eastern Bloc, one Western. You don’t need the title cards to witness the difference. The Eastern side announces itself in mustard-yellow wallpaper and a sturdy, utilitarian sideboard — the kind of furniture built to last because it had to, because there wasn’t going to be anything better arriving soon. On it sits a Soviet-manufactured 8-inch portable CRT-TV, a TeleStar 4004 from Mezon Works in Leningrad, running a ball-and-paddle game: a Video Sports Skylark 124, made by the Korean company Sunkyong Ltd. in 1977. Across the corner, the Western side offers an ergonomic office chair pulled close to something that aspires to be a workstation — chrome tubing, black surfaces, Bauhaus-by-way-of-the-1980s. A Commodore 64 sits connected to a Philips color monitor with a playable floppy disk version of Pac-Man from 1983 waiting on screen.

Same corner. Same time-period. Entirely different worlds.

The title card fills in what the objects imply: consumer technologies in Eastern Bloc countries experienced roughly a ten-year lag. Embargoes and price points kept Nintendo Entertainment Systems and Commodore computers out of Polish living rooms while cloned PONG variants graced the sturdier, more practical surfaces on the other side of the curtain. The TVG-10 ball-and-paddle console was Polish game history at a moment when the West had already moved on. I find myself standing in front of the Eastern sideboard thinking about all the objects that populate US museum exhibitions — the Atari VCS, the NES, the Commodore 64 on the other side of this very corner — and how confidently they are presented as the history of games. They are somebody’s history. Just not everybody’s.

A room can do a lot. At the National Museum of Scotland’s hosting of the travelling Game On 2.0 exhibition in 2024, the history of games unfolds much as it does at US museums: the hardware timeline, the software milestones, the coin-ops set to free play. But two rooms pull the exhibition off the universal highway and onto a local road. One reconstructs the social geography of arcade gaming in Edinburgh itself, name-checking actual venues — “Sega Park,” “University Arcades” — that existed in the city. Another devotes itself entirely to Rockstar Games, with Dundee identified as the birthplace of the Grand Theft Auto series and Rockstar North anchored to Edinburgh. The rooms don’t feel like interruptions. They feel like the exhibition finally planting its feet, acknowledging where it is.

In Cangas, near Vigo, MUVI — the Museo Do Videoxogo — goes further. An entire room is given over to the museum’s preservation efforts around Galician game history, and at its center is The Wall, the first commercial video game developed in Galicia. Álex González Quintana was 25 when he made it in 1986 on an MSX microcomputer. He wasn’t trying to launch a company in Vigo. He was trying to learn programming. On display is the first tape copy of The Wall that the software company Erbe pressed into his hands. The game’s adversaries include a mussel, a quiet unhurried nod to the estuaries of Vigo Bay. 7,000 copies sold across Spain. Modest by any commercial measure, but sales aren’t the point. The point is that González Quintana made something specific to a place, from a place. MUVI decided that was worth a room. Worth preserving.

Berlin’s Computerspielmuseum earns its floor space. The “Wall of Hardware” alone — a timeline running from Channel F to Sega Dreamcast — could occupy an afternoon. Spacewar!, Tennis for Two, the Magnavox Odyssey, Computer Space, PONG: the expected landmarks are all present, but the museum keeps expanding the frame. The Ferranti Nimrod (1951) and Noughts and Crosses (1952), both British, appear alongside the American institutional canon. Nam June Paik’s Participation TV (1963) turns up in the commercialization section, a reminder that the impulse to make television interactive wasn’t the exclusive property of Baer, Bushnell, Alcorn, and Dabney. The Computerspielmuseum is generous, inclusive in a way I’ve come to recognize as a quiet rebuke. Then it turns its attention inward.

A section devoted to games and gaming in the German Democratic Republic pulls back a curtain that US museums could never open from their side of the wall. An East German programmer speaks on video. Excerpts from a television documentary show young people at the Dresden Data Processing Center, their relationship to programming catching something between fascination and necessity. A surviving BSS 01 — a GDR-manufactured PONG variant that cost half a month’s salary and lived mostly in schools and youth recreation centers — sits behind glass. A playable Polyplay coin-op machine anchors the corner: the only coin-op ever produced in the GDR, found at trade union leisure centers rather than arcades.

One object on display stops me.

The label reads Seifendosen-Pong. Translation: Soap Box Pong.

The BSS 01 was expensive, didn’t sell well, and was discontinued within a few years of its release. Western consoles were effectively inaccessible in the GDR. So someone — described only as a “master craftsman” — built their own. The controllers are soap boxes. The housing for the AY-3-8500 chip is a repurposed food container. Soap Box Pong ran from 1981 to 1984, filling the void left by the BSS 01’s demise.

I stood in front of the peculiar object for a long time.

I keep returning to the teargas in Athens — the chemical pall that descended on everyone equally, tourist and protester and passerby alike, and the cordon of riot cops that forced a different route. Soap Box Pong is what happens when the cordon has been up for decades. Cultural memory isn’t universal: it’s circumstantial, assembled from whatever materials are actually at hand. A “placeless” history of games, the kind confidently displayed at US museums, doesn’t account for the craftsman in East Germany who needed a food container to play PONG. It can’t. It isn’t looking in that direction.

Málaga’s OXO Museo Videojuego operates on different levels — and I mean that in every sense. Level 1 is generous and familiar: seventy years of the medium laid out through hardware, software, handhelds, and coin-ops, with the expected pioneers — Higinbotham, Baer, MIT students, Atari’s earliest iterations — anchoring one end of the timeline. Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Atari hold their usual positions. So do Amiga, Neo-Geo, and Vectrex which is a more inclusive roster than most. But one company profile stops me: DiNamic, presented here as La Primera Compañía De Videojuegos De España. It sits on the same floor as Nintendo and Sega without apology or explanation, as if its presence requires neither. From where OXO stands, a game museum in Spain, this is simply legible storytelling. DiNamic distributed nationally and internationally; it belongs in this company. I recognize Nintendo. I don’t recognize DiNamic. That asymmetry is my problem, not the museum’s.

Level 1 is prologue. One staircase up and the museum becomes something else entirely.

Level 2 belongs to DiNamic. The full title: Exposición Temporal: Dinamic, La Primera Compañía Española de Videojuegos. An entire level devoted to a game company founded by four brothers — Pablo, Víctor, Nacho, and Gaby Ruiz — who built a Spanish games industry more or less from scratch. The exhibition doesn’t treat DiNamic as a footnote to a larger story. It is the story: original packaging art and character concept sketches pinned alongside the finished products; multiple software formats for PC Fútbol laid out to show the reach of a single title; press coverage and advertising charting the company’s public life; personal items from the Ruiz brothers that collapse the distance between institution and family. Interactive stations running Los Justicieros, Narco Police, and Navy Moves keep the games playable rather than merely displayable. I spent nearly two hours on Level 2. I wasn’t being thorough in my research. I was genuinely absorbed.

It’s worth noting that OXO recently opened a second museum in Madrid, where DiNamic was actually based — which means the Málaga exhibition isn’t strictly local in an Andalusian sense. “The local” here operates at national scale: Videojuegos De España. That’s a meaningful distinction. OXO isn’t claiming regional ownership of DiNamic; it’s insisting that Spanish game history belongs in the same room as world game history. Level 1 and Level 2 aren’t in tension. They’re in conversation.

Málaga devotes an entire level to one company. Tampere devotes an entire museum to the proposition that Finnish game history is world game history and then shows it.

Suomen Pelimuseo doesn’t ease you in. The density of home-grown material is immediate and relentless: Painter Boy, the country’s first advergame, produced for paint manufacturer Tikkurila; Uuno Turhapuro Muuttaa Maalle, the first Finnish licensed game based on a domestic film; the Salora Playmaster, Finland’s first ball-and-paddle console, alongside its clone Pip-peli, assembled from Playmaster parts by Salora employees — Google Translate renders Pip-peli as “wiener,” as in a penis, which I choose to believe was intentional. The list keeps going. Star Dust, Sanxion, Shadow Cities, Supreme Snowboarding, Suunnistussumulaattori — and that’s just the S’s. Angry Birds is here too, if you need the landmark. I stopped trying to keep count of games developed in Finland and started simply moving through the space.

What keeps the museum from collapsing into national self-congratulation is its depth of field. Aapeli, the first Finnish digital gaming device, was built by the Mathematics Committee on an ESKO computer in 1955. Chesmac, a chess simulator, is documented as the first commercially published Finnish computer game, in 1979. An early and obscure Tolkien adaptation, LORD, was programmed on a DEC-20 at the Helsinki University of Technology in the early 1980s — years before Tolkien licensing became an industry. The museum doesn’t position this history as exceptional or corrective. It positions it as history, full stop, running alongside non-Finnish hardware and software without apology or hierarchy. My time at Suomen Pelimuseo was long. Genuinely, embarrassingly long.

And then, near the end of it, I found Winner.

Bally’s Winner was the only officially licensed version of Atari’s Pong. It was manufactured in Chicago. I had traveled thousands of miles to finally see and play something originally made a few hours’ drive from where I work. Place matters, Melanie Swalwell tells us. Standing in front of Winner in Tampere, I felt the full weight of that claim settle. Not as an abstraction. As a coin-op machine in Finland that I couldn’t find at home. Winner in Tampere follows me home.

So does the craftsman in East Germany and his soap boxes. So does the mussel in González Quintana’s game, swimming through the estuaries of Vigo Bay on an MSX microcomputer in 1986. These are the things that place makes possible. Placelessness erases them.

The question that travels back with me is the one Laine Nooney framed with surgical precision when contributing her own regional game historical research to Swalwell’s collection: the challenge confronting US game history “isn’t that it has no sense of the local, but that we don’t know how to grasp it.” Nooney was writing to game historians. That difficulty belongs equally to US museums. The local is there. The regional is there. The problem is the reaching.

Some of it is simply geography. The Computer History Museum sits in Mountain View — the same zip code, more or less, as Nutting Associates, whose Computer Space lives in the collection. Atari’s footprint in Los Gatos and Sunnyvale is a short drive. Stanford’s AI Lab, where Bushnell and Dabney first encountered Spacewar!, is close enough to matter. And somewhere in the museum’s storage sits Galaxy Game — built by Computer Recreations in 1971 and installed at Stanford’s Tressider Union, one of the first coin-operated computer games ever made, on the same campus the museum is invoking. The National Videogame Museum in Frisco has id Software’s Dallas-Fort Worth origins within reach — the regional history of DOOM is also a Texas history. Gearbox Studios and 3D Realms are neighbors.

These connections exist. They’re just not fully apparent in the exhibition spaces yet.

The Strong is a different case. Rochester isn’t a game development hub, but The Strong has built something the other two institutions haven’t: a place where history happens, where collectors and companies and researchers converge because the archival gravity is strong enough to pull them in. It displays Tennis for Two and maintains connections with Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY — the site of the game’s creation. That story is right there, waiting for a room. And if OXO can devote an entire floor to DiNamic in Málaga — a company with no particular Andalusian connection — The Strong can stage the equivalent: bring the DiNamic exhibition to Rochester. Bring the story of Disco Elysium to Rochester. Build the Eastern Bloc corner. The research collections are already making the case. The question is whether the galleries decide to listen. A museum with a World Video Game Hall of Fame has, after all, made a promise about its scope.

And that promise, it turns out, is being kept elsewhere. Back in Heraklion — where the farmers blocked the taxis and the riot cops blocked the road — the Video Games Museum is developing an exhibition on Law 3037/2002, the now-infamous Greek legislation that attempted to ban electronic games outright as part of a crackdown on illegal gambling, shuttering internet cafés and disrupting everyday play in the early 2000s. Manolis Varouchas, the museum’s Director, describes an exhibition that will use that moment to explore moral panic, public policy, media discourse, and the place of video games in Greek everyday life. In other words, how does a local Greek experience with games stand alongside the more familiar international history of the medium? It hasn’t opened yet. But the fact that it’s being built at all — in Crete, by a museum I nearly couldn’t reach — is its own kind of answer to the question this installment has been asking.

Because here’s what the teargas taught me, and what Soap Box Pong confirmed, and what Winner in Tampere made impossible to ignore: a history without place is a cordon. It marks a perimeter. It tells you there is nothing to see beyond this point, move along, the story ends with the NES, Xbox, and PlayStation. The museums I visited across Europe — in Tallinn, Wrocław, Edinburgh, Vigo, Berlin, Málaga, Tampere — don’t accept that perimeter. They flushed their eyes and looked again. They built rooms for mussels and soap boxes, for a craftsman in East Germany and four brothers in Madrid, for a 25-year-old teaching himself to program on a coast most of their visitors had never thought about, for a ball-and-paddle game cloned from parts in a Leningrad factory, for a Finnish wiener, for a Chicago coin-op that had to travel thousands of miles to find a home.

US museums can do the same. The local is there. They just need to grasp it.

The post Something’s amiss in the US. Part 2 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Yes, distributed on cassette. Not a floppy disk, a cartridge, or a download. A cassette. The same basic kind of tape you might have used to record music off the radio and play in your Walkman.

To load it, you connected a cassette player to the Apple II, rewinded the cassette and pressed play. On the Apple II you typed “LOAD” and let the computer listen. What came out of the tape player was not music, at least not in the normal sense. It was a strange burst of squeals, chirps, and electronic warbling.

Apple II Reference Manual and the game Breakout on cassette

To modern ears, it sounds like a fax machine having a nervous breakdown, but to the Apple II, that sound was code.

Woz, Breakout, and 37 Lines of Code

The Apple II version of Breakout is especially interesting because of who wrote it. Steve Wozniak had already been involved with the original arcade version of Breakout during his Atari days, so seeing him bring the idea home to the Apple II gives the game a special connection to both arcade history and personal computing history.

Even better, the program is wonderfully tiny. The Apple II cassette version of Breakout is only 37 lines of Integer BASIC code. Thirty-seven lines. And it worked on a 4KB Apple II. Not 4MB – 4KB!

Today, that sounds almost ridiculous. A modern game might involve a giant engine, multiple asset folders, online accounts, updates, analytics, and a mountain of code just to show a title screen. Woz’s Breakout was small enough that a person could actually read it, study it, and understand how it worked.

That was part of the fun of early home computers, and the machine did not feel sealed off from you. It invited you in.

Paddle Power

Breakout itself is beautifully simple. You control a paddle at the left side of the screen and bounce a ball into rows of bricks at the right side. Break the bricks, keep the ball in play, and try not to miss.

The Apple II version used paddle controllers, which made perfect sense for this kind of game. Instead of pressing keys, you turned a knob. That gave the game a physical, arcade-like feel. Your hand was directly connected to the motion on the screen.

For a game about timing, angles, and tiny adjustments, that mattered. The paddle made Breakout feel less like typing instructions into a machine and more like actually playing an arcade game at home.

Color on a Home Computer

It may not sound shocking now, but this game was in color, and on an early home computer, that mattered. The Apple II’s color graphics were one of its defining features, and Breakout took advantage of that. Seeing colored bricks on a home computer screen or a TV was exciting. It gave the game personality.

Apple II game Breakout playing on an Apple //e

It also made the Apple II feel different. This was not just a business machine or a hobbyist kit. It could be playful,  visual, and could turn a television or monitor into a little arcade sitting right there on your desk.

Before Game Libraries Were Normal

What is easy to forget now is that there were not a lot of pre-packaged home computer games in those early days. You could not browse a digital store and download whatever caught your eye. Software distribution was still being figured out.

Some programs came on cassette. Later, more came on floppy disks. But many games came from books and magazines as printed listings. For example, see my post: Learning to Code in 1980: A Book, BASIC, and Pure Persistence.

That meant you might buy a magazine, find a game inside, and type the whole thing in yourself – line by line.
If the game did not run, you had to hunt for the mistake. Maybe you typed a zero instead of the letter O. Maybe you missed a colon. Maybe one number was wrong in one line somewhere, and the whole thing fell apart.

It could be frustrating, but it was also part of the experience. You were not just playing games. You were learning how they worked.

A Tiny Program, A Huge Moment

My original Breakout cassette feels like more than just a game. It feels like a snapshot of a moment when home computing was still new, playful, and wide open.

Wozniak’s 37-line Breakout showed what the Apple II could do: color graphics, paddle controls, arcade-style action, and programmable fun right in your own home.

It is primitive only if you compare it to today’s games. Measured by imagination, it is enormous.

Before app stores, cloud saves, patches, and downloads, there was a tape player, a cable, a blinking cursor, and the strange electronic song of a game coming to life.

William W. Winter is the creator of Text Adventure Studio, where you can try your hand at making text adventures with a modern web-based design tool, and you can try it out and make your own text adventures for free at https://textadventurestudio.com. Old School Gamer Magazine readers can sign up for a free account. More articles from William can be found here.

The post Breakout on Cassette: When Apple II Games Came Screeching Out of a Tape Player appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

While many of you probably remember Empire Strikes Back on the C64 which was released back in 1988 by Domark that relied on the heavy vector line graphical environment that so many of us were used to and enjoyed in the Arcades. This version however is a big nod to the classic Atari 2600 version, as a side scrolling shooter pitting a snow speeder against an army of AT-ATs in a bid to protect the rebel base on Hoth from attack!

#MayThe4thBeWithYou, lovely #C64 community! 🕹️#StarWars #Megastyle pic.twitter.com/9h9rYDIiCM

— Chris Stanley (@ScubaChris72) May 4, 2025

Here is what the website says about this fabulous game for the C64 ” 40 years after the Atari and Intellivision games were released, Megastyle is now proud to present to you: The Commodore 64 fan version of the original Parker Brothers game “Empire Strikes Back”. In this version you have to protect the rebels power generators from the walkers – just like in the original Parker Brothers game. Only this time on a Commodore 64 and with 8 levels, new enemies, cut scenes and end sequence. ”

Links :1) Source

The post Empire Strikes Back – A C64 fan version by Megastyle has been released and it looks mighty impressive appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

While they started out focused on hardware access, MECC soon transformed into an educational software publisher. Their most famous educational game has become a household name, and Generation X and Millennials will certainly have heard of and played some of their other titles. Let’s take a look at some of the most influential MECC educational games.

Oregon Trail – Apple II

Oregon Trail

The endlessly meme-able historic simulation that put educational gaming, or edutainment, on the map. The development of this game actually predates MECC by a few years. Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger created the first version in 1971 for Rawitsch’s eighth-grade history class. Rawitsch joined MECC in 1974, and the game was added to the MECC system in the mid 70s. In 1985, it became a much larger stand-alone product for the Apple II. What made it important was not just popularity, but form. The Oregon Trail turned history into a decision-driven survival simulation, so students learned through trade-offs, scarcity, geography, and consequences rather than memorization alone. It remained central to MECC for decades and ultimately became the company’s defining cultural artifact.

Word Munchers

Introduced in 1985, Word Munchers was one of the games that proved MECC could make drill-oriented learning feel genuinely playful. It won a Parents’ Choice Gold Award that year. Later deluxe versions expanded it into a broad language arts package covering reading, grammar, vocabulary, phonics, parts of speech, and related word skills. In students’ memories, this is one of the quintessential school lab games because it wrapped language practice in fast, arcade-style pressure, using a gameplay style that vaguely emulated the popular Pac-Man.

Number Munchers – MS-DOS

Number Munchers

This was the math counterpart to MECC’s Word Munches and another of their signature games. Number Munchers was a Parents’ Choice Gold Award winner in 1986, and later one of the company’s first titles to span Apple II, Macintosh, and MS-DOS. In design terms, it distilled arithmetic and number sense into a quick chase format built around factors, equalities, and similar rule recognition, which is exactly why it stuck in so many students’ memories.

Storybook Weaver

This title is important because it reveals a different side of MECC’s educational philosophy. MECC listed Storybook Weaver among its new titles in 1990, then later reintroduced it for Mac and Windows and expanded it into Storybook Weaver Deluxe, which combined it with My Own Stories and added more art and technical features. Instead of teaching through simulation or drill, it emphasized authorship, composition, illustration, and multimedia storytelling. For many students, this was MECC at its most open-ended and creative.

Odell Lake – Apple II

Odell Lake

Odell Lake shows MECC was never only about frontier history and word drills. MECC later grouped it with The Oregon Trail and Number Munchers as one of its “Programs of the Decade,” and Odell Down Under was explicitly marketed as an expanded successor to the “classroom classic” Odell Lake. Its importance lies in the fact that it taught ecology through systems and survival. The game focused on predator-prey relationships, recognition, and environmental consequences rather than on simple question-and-answer prompts.

MECC was responsible for many other titles, including several Oregon Trail sequels. Unfortunately, in the mid-90s, MECC underwent a consolidation and was acquired by SoftKey. In 1996, the company was renamed The Learning Company, and by 1999, it had been shuttered altogether. Today, a variety of companies own the trademarks for MECC’s software library, with Oregon Trail continuing to appear in various forms on many modern platforms.

The post MECC: When Generation X Got to Play Games in School appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

A Toy That Felt Like the Future

Introduced in 1978, the Speak & Spell was one of the earliest consumer products to use digital speech synthesis. It did not play recordings. It generated a computerized version of human speech. Press a button, and the machine talked back. It asked questions, corrected you and felt strangely alive.

That Unmistakable Voice and the Glowing Display

The voice was everything. It was friendly, robotic, nasal, and slightly eerie. Every word sounded clipped and important. When you got an answer right, you seemed pleased. When you got one wrong, it corrected you like a tiny electronic teacher with very little patience. That voice is why I still remember it.

The Speak & Spell also had memorable musical sounds: chirps, beeps, little victory tones, and electronic blips that felt part classroom, part arcade.

Then there was the display. The original 1978 Texas Instruments Speak & Spell featured a vacuum fluorescent display, or VFD, capable of showing 8 alphanumeric characters at once. Those fluorescent letters glowed with a look no modern screen really duplicates. They were simple, bright, and oddly official, like instructions from a tiny command center.

The best I can do at “Old School Gamer” on Speak & Spell

Speak & Math and the Talking Toy Family

The Speak & Spell had sibling devices, including the Speak & Math, which applied the same talking-toy magic to numbers.

The Speak & Math did not become quite as famous, but it had the same futuristic charm: rubbery buttons, electronic sounds, and a voice that made math feel like it belonged in a sci-fi classroom.

E.T. and the Speak & Spell’s Movie Fame

The Speak & Spell’s most famous screen appearance is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. E.T. uses one as part of his homemade communicator to “phone home.” It was the perfect prop. The toy already looked and sounded slightly alien, so of course, an alien would know what to do with it.

That scene helped make the Speak & Spell iconic.

Other Pop-Culture Appearances

The Speak & Spell, or toys inspired by it, kept showing up in pop culture. Pixar gave us Mr. Spell in the Toy Story universe, a clear tribute to the Texas Instruments toy. The device has also been associated with films such as Bride of Chucky and Poltergeist III.

On TV, it appeared more often in documentary or variety contexts, including Modern Marvels and a reported Albert Brooks bit on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Here is Albert Brooks bit on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson

The Speak & Spell in Music

Musicians loved the Speak & Spell because its voice was instantly recognizable and emotionally strange.

One of the clearest examples is “Genetic Engineering” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, where the Speak & Spell sound is directly credited.

You can see that video on YouTube here:
“Genetic Engineering” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

Kraftwerk’s “Home Computer” and “Numbers” live in a similar robotic voice world. Pet Shop Boys’ “Two Divided by Zero” is often linked to the Speak & Math. Other artists, including 808 State, Beck, Dizzee Rascal, and Röyksopp and Robyn, have also been connected to Speak & Spell-style sounds.

Here is “Two Divided by Zero” by the Pet Shop Boys on YouTube.

Circuit Bending

Circuit bending gave the Speak & Spell another life.

People opened the toy, altered its circuits, and turned its already-weird voice into glitches, drones, distortions, and alien noises. What began as an educational device became an experimental instrument.

Circuit benders found the ghost that had always been hiding inside the machine.

The Reboot That Wasn’t Quite the Same

A few years ago, the Speak & Spell was brought back for a new generation. The reboot looked familiar and operated in much the same way: press the buttons, hear the voice, spell the words, get the response. But for anyone who remembered the original, it did not feel quite the same.

The display was far weaker compared with that beautiful old VFD glow, and the whole machine felt lighter and less robust. It was nice to see the Speak & Spell return, but the original had a physical presence the newer version could not fully recreate.

Why It Still Matters

The Speak & Spell taught spelling, but it also taught a generation what digital speech could sound like.

It belonged in backpacks, bedrooms, movies, songs, and experimental music setups. For those of us who had one, it was not just a toy. It was a glowing red voice from the future, asking us to spell.

William W. Winter is the creator of Apple II Adventure Studio, where you can try your hand at making text adventures with a modern web-based design tool. You can try it out and make your own text adventures for free at: https://textadventurestudio.com
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