Project, which he calls “a tribute to the foundational and beloved 8bit classic Temple of Apshai (1979).”

Old School Gamer Magazine: How did this project begin?

Van: I guess it began in spirit with the original Temple of Apshai by Automated Solutions in 1979, that I loved as a kid on the Apple ][+ and later C64. That credit goes to the great Jim W. Connelly of game dev legend. Hope to meet him someday, so I can thank him personally.

Fast-forwarding to today, Webshai began a few months ago as a Claude AI experiment in design-driven development. Im a life-long old-school career programmer, but the sudden and recent AI revolution has made code-writing skills obsolete. I’ve been “vibe-coding” as the kids call it now, on another much larger project when I needed a break.

Ive always wanted to pay homage to the classics that inspired me, so I wrote every note and observation about old Apshai that I could think of, into a design doc to see how well Claude could execute purely on a detailed vision. It was an experiment in new alternative workflows.

Old School Gamer Magazine: What makes it special?

Van: Originally I intended to make no enhancements, just a functional clone written from scratch for the web. But web accessibility is the first point-in-favor, I suppose. The most fundamental change. Just browse and go – no signup, no download, no friction.

Also, it’s genuinely roguelike – people abuse that term today, to the point that they clearly don’t know (or dont care) what it even means. But Webshai is the real deal (largely because Im also in love with Nethack, the direct descendant of the original Rogue). Instead of the original 4 static levels of Apshai (or 12, if you include the also-great Upper Reaches and Curse of Ra sequels), Webshai has a procedural level generator.  I defined 7 tiers with their own visual themes, tile sets, and monsters, 4 levels per tier, for 28 levels total.  Each level larger with more rooms than the level before it.

And even that was an arbitrary cap. With more art, I could offer 100 levels. 1,000 levels. I will, if I get enough players to justify more development.

And these are generated for each user, uniquely. No two users will see the same dungeon.

And yet yours wont change, so you can still memorize YOUR levels (NetHack is a cold-hearted bitch on that issue – new game? WHOLE new dungeon again!) same as we did when playing the original.

Otherwise, it’s primarily a nostalgia play.

Lastly, all my games are web-based. I love the ease of accessibility and delivery for the players – just browse and go. No bloated 50 gazillion derpabyte download to install.

And no risk of malware in those binaries – a problem occurring with increasing frequency, particularly in the low-budget indie market.

Don’t get me wrong, I have an embarrassingly large and venerable library of purchased games on Steam. Steam is, generally speaking, fabulous. But I wont even download indie games from Steam until the binary has been vetted by others.  And I *do not* install binaries from Itch. No hate, I applaud what they’re trying to do, but I do not trust their content creators.

And I don’t build Windows binaries. I bear an admittedly pathological hatred for Microsoft in general, and Windows in particular, both as a user and a developer. The Web is my rejection of all-things Microsoft, and of Apple as well. They work overtime to control us, limit our options, and force us into their walled gardens. The web is freedom.

Old School Gamer Magazine: Who’s the core audience?

Van: Well so far, nobody. Figure in an era of global virality, if you cant earn a following via simple word-of-mouth popularity, you’re doing something wrong. You either stand out, or you die.  Blending in,is not an option.

So thus far, I have no players. But I only dropped the open beta of Webshai maybe a week ago. Now Im looking for my first players.

Old School Gamer Magazine: Who are you trying to reach?

Van: The only crowd that I expect will really care – us 40-something/50-something old timers. To the kids these days, the old games just look primitive. Which is fair – they ARE primitive. But if you grew up on Apshai, you were left wanting more. At least I was.

Old School Gamer Magazine: Why does the preservation and homage of this era of games mean something to you?

Van: Two reasons, I think:

1 I was there, I lived it, these are the relics of my formative years, and represent some of the best times. Many a survivor of the torments of childhood, emerges from that battlefield with a guiding light. Something that led them through the darkness. For me, gaming was an HUGE part of that.

2 Those were the frontier days. The developers from that era, didn’t have game engines. They didn’t even have utility libraries. Often they didn’t even have pixels! And there were definitely no standards, no patterns. We didn’t even use the WASD UI pattern for steering yet! So what they made, was raw. It was feral. It was almost random.

And it was ground-breaking. Those early devs went out into the frontier, the wild, and they built.. whatever, whatever they could with whatever they had! And they built a whole new world and a new industry, and invited us to follow, to join them in something they called “home computer gaming” – when us users were still barely learning what a “home computer” even meant!

Old School Gamer Magazine: Why is this all important to you?

Van: That’s a surprisingly important and heavy question. Why do we game? Of what value is it? Sometimes I wonder if what I do – I was an off-and-on big-studio game dev for 35 years – is even meaningful, or just a waste of time. With all that’s wrong in the world, what do I contribute? Video games? That’s it?!

I don’t farm to grow food. I don’t build homes. I don’t heal the sick. All I do is provide entertainment.

Then I remember that 2nd grader, just 8 years old, introduced for the first time to Temple of Apshai, and I remember how a world of magic and fantasy and adventure and wonder opened up before me like an endless landscape.

And I remember, we aren’t just animals. We need more than food and shelter and our health. We need entertainment. And specifically, entertainment that challenges. That invites us to explore. 

Interactive entertainment is the next level, beyond books and movies (both of which I still cherish). Interactive entertainment let’s us be the hero, instead of some Hollywood actor having all the fun. It’s the ultimate storytelling, because we get to *tell OUR story*. Not have someone else’s story told to us, whilst we imagine ourselves as the protagonist.

And Ive done this – trying to design games, build games, and empower people to tell THEIR stories – since I was a little kid. Even before computer gaming, when tabletop D&D was all the rage.

Old School Gamer Magazine: Anything else you’d like to add?

Van: Credit where credit is due:

Half the sound FX in Webshai, were done working with Claude AI tuning programmable oscillators by ear to recreate the classic C64 sound.  The other half, was my sound artist/musician girlfriend Elisa Berlin of Noise Complaint (and who has a boss cameo in level 4 of the Catacombs tier).

The sprites were all generated on PixelLab.ai – I can’t draw a decent circle to save my life.

Tile art, all procedurally generated by Claude.

Likewise, the code was written entirely by Claude AI. I only take credit for the design and architecture of that code. Ive been developing for the web for the last 25 years, with 15 of those in Javascript.  This would have taken me AT LEAST 6 months to build by hand, but with AI it took just 6 weeks. Though admittedly it became a very back-and-forth process after the initial generative pass. Anyone who thinks using AI for game dev is equivalent to pushing some magickal do-it-all-for-me button, should try that sometime.

The post Old School Gamer Magazine Exclusive: Inside new C64 Temple of Webshai Project appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

There’s one type of genre that I loved playing in the arcades and more so on my home console, and that is the shoot em up genre! You know the type, enemy waves coming at you at all sides, your ship blasting across the landscape with adrenaline flowing as you try to survive and wipe them out. Well there’s one such game that I have fond memories of, and that was Namco’s 1982 vertical scrolling arcade shoot em up game Xevious. A game that I not only played and loved back on the Amstrad CPC, but it was one of those games that I also have fond memories of playing with my dad when I was a kid. So why is this game getting a mention? Well, read on and find out for more ;).

• Programming & SFX: Nemo
• Graphics & Design: Richard Gatineau (alias TotO)
• Music Tools: Julien Nevo (alias Targhan)

The post Xevious 128k – Arcade classic Xevious gets a 128k edition for the Amstrad CPC via Easter Egg appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Did you know at the time when Pac-Man fever was released, that it would be such a smash hit?

No not at all. We were just hoping it would get played locally and help our jingle business.  When we were in L.A. doing some TV shows we were driving through Beverly Hills when our song came on the radio. We looked at each other and laughed when Gary said, “Not bad for a couple of guys from Akron.”

Where did you meet your partner Gary Garcia?

Gary and I met in junior high school in Akron, Ohio. We played in several local bands including The Outlaws and The Rogues.

What was the first song or album you created together? 

The first song we ever recorded together was called “Gotta Hear The Beat.” with the artist name Animal Jack. It was meant to be a joke aimed at the record business, but it received radio play and ended up being released on 3 different record labels.

What is your favorite kind of music today and how do you compare music to the 1980’s?

I lean towards pop, rock, blues, and R&B but pretty much most music if it’s good no matter what genre. I’ve even grown to love some opera music. I don’t really compare today’s music with the 80’s. Music evolves, and styles change and I’m cool with that.

What are some of your other favorite songs you have created?

I liked two cuts we did on Steve Carlisle (singer on WKRP In Cincinnati) called Don’t Hang Up and You Told A Lie. I especially love the adaption we did for the Footprints in The Sand poem. But I think my favorite was E.T. I Love You. It was an emotional song with beautiful music and words. Unfortunately, it got caught up in record company politics and licensing issues that cut short its successful release.

Do you remember your first video game / arcade you played and what do you remember about it?

First video game I played was Pong. We were playing in an Atlanta hotel bar. I remember thinking how cool and different it was.

If you can design your own video game, what would it be about and who would be the main character?

Actually, we are working on a mobile game right now which I am not at liberty to reveal. Keep checking our website for details when it will be released. www.bucknergarcia.com.

What are your opinions about today’s generation of video games?

I think many are too violent, but the technical/graphics effects are amazing.

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

As I previously mentioned, yes, I do think some of them are too violent. Whether that contributes to the violence in this country or not I don’t know but I do think they can desensitize kids towards violence. On the other hand, when I was a kid, we played army and shot each other up with toy guns quite convincingly but it didn’t turn us into mass murderers, so I think there is a lot more to the violence then just kids playing video games.

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

No never! I was humbled by it and grateful to Walter for including me.

Have you ever received any media coverage for your appearance on the Trading Card?  If so where?

Not so far but fans love the cards. I always have a few with me at personal appearances to autograph and hand out.

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

I met Walter in 2014 at The Southern Fried Game Room Expo in Atlanta. He presented me with a cool poster that is framed and hanging on my office wall along with several others.

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

Kind.

What is your favorite movie you have created music for and why?

Wreck It Ralph. To sit in a theatre and see your name in the credits of a Disney movie is beyond words

When writing the Pac-Man Fever song, were there other versions before the final result?

Yes, there was a set of original lyrics that we ended up not using. I wish I had saved them but other than a few minor changes the chorus remained consistent from the beginning.

How much did you play Pac-Man back in the day and is it still a favorite of yours?

I played it a lot in 1981 and 1982 but slacked off as time when on. I have never been really big on video games. Gary was into them more than me and was better at them although because we were both very competitive anytime we played against each other it could get crazy.

You have written other video game music on the Pac-Man soundtrack, other than Pac-Man Fever, which one was your favorite?

I loved Donkey Kong and Froggy’s Lament, but my favorite is Ode to A Centipede

If you could own one arcade game or pinball game, what would it be and why? 

Asteroids. Love the action and SFX.

What does it take to be a successful musician today?

Practice, patience, persistence with a little talent and a lot of luck.

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

The only video game I play consistently is Solitaire on my phone. My favorite game is Backgammon

What was your favorite decade from the past and why?  60’s, 70’s? 80’s 90’s?

I would have to say the 80’s for the obvious reason but the 70’s would be a close runner up. My least favorite was the 90’s.

Who is your favorite video game character, other than Pac-Man, and what makes that character special?

I like Ralph (from Wreck-It Ralph). He’s a nice guy with a good heart and hasn’t shot anybody

What springs to mind when you hear the term ‘Video Games’?

I think mostly of the classic games although I do like to play some of the games on my mobile phone like Angry Birds.

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

I continue to write pop songs because I love to do it, but I have been working on some Contemporary Christian music too lately that I like a lot.

Where do you see the music industry in the next 20 years? 

I really don’t know. I guess it will be up to the robots.

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

I think the sky is the limit. I hope the entertainment value increases but not the violence.

www.bucknergarcia.com

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.

The post Video Game Trading Card Spotlight – Jerry Buckner appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Players know what a lightsaber should sound like and how an X-wing should move.

The earliest Star Wars games had none of that inherited design language.

During the franchise’s first decade in video games, there was no accepted formula. Star Wars could be a text adventure, a survival shooter, a vector-graphics cockpit ride, a lightsaber duel reduced to two floating shapes or a Japanese platform game where Darth Vader transformed into a scorpion.

Before Lucasfilm Games became the central creative force behind interactive Star Wars, publishers treated the license less like a unified game universe and more like a box of expensive toys.

Everyone grabbed a different piece.

The results were inconsistent, occasionally baffling and often brilliant.

The Star Wars Game That Wasn’t Star Wars

The story starts before the first officially licensed Star Wars video game.

In 1979, Lance Micklus created Dog Star Adventure for the TRS-80. As Old School Gamer’s feature on Dog Star Adventure and the foundation of text-based gaming explains, Micklus published the game’s source code in SoftSide magazine.

The legal camouflage was not subtle.

Princess Leia became Princess Leya. Darth Vader became General Doom. The Death Star became the Dog Star. Players explored the station through typed commands, rescued the princess and dealt with obstacles including a robot fussy enough to reject a cold hamburger.

It was clearly Star Wars with the labels peeled off, but it also showed how quickly the film had entered the imagination of early computer users.

There was no official design template to follow. A programmer saw Star Wars, understood that computers could support a different kind of adventure and built one entirely from text.

Publishing the source code made the game even more significant. Other programmers could study and alter it.

The first important Star Wars-inspired computer game was something people could type in, inspect and rebuild.

That feels appropriate for an era when software itself was still being invented in public.

Parker Brothers Finds Hoth

The first officially licensed Star Wars video game arrived in 1982.

Parker Brothers chose The Empire Strikes Back for the Atari 2600 and reduced the Battle of Hoth to its cleanest mechanical idea: fly left and right, shoot approaching AT-ATs and delay the destruction of Echo Base.

It sounds brutally limited, because it was.

It was also exactly the kind of limitation that produced strong Atari games.

Rex Bradford’s design had no room for dialogue or cinematic detail. The walkers were blocky mechanical beasts that required repeated hits, gradually changing color as they absorbed damage.

The player could not win the war. The goal was to survive and hold the line.

Old School Gamer’s Atari 2600 Encyclopedia entry on The Empire Strikes Back captures why it worked. The controls were responsive, the challenge was immediate and the image of a snowspeeder attacking an AT-AT remained recognizable after being squeezed through the Atari 2600.

That game established a pattern early Star Wars titles would follow repeatedly.

They rarely recreated an entire film. They selected one scene, vehicle or visual idea and built an arcade loop around it.

A Lightsaber Game Without Sword Fighting

Parker Brothers followed with two very different releases in 1983.

Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle placed the Millennium Falcon against TIE fighters and the unfinished second Death Star.

Jedi Arena went smaller.

Inspired by Luke’s training aboard the Millennium Falcon, it turned lightsaber practice into a competitive Atari 2600 game. Two players controlled training remotes indirectly, deflecting energy bolts toward an opponent’s shield.

It was the first Star Wars video game built around lightsabers, yet it contained almost nothing modern players would identify as lightsaber combat. There were no combos, dramatic duels or dismemberment settings waiting to upset somebody.

There were two abstract figures, a floating remote and a great deal of confusion.

That is not an insult. It is the point.

The designers were experimenting with how one small element from the films might function using a joystick and one button.

Sometimes that produced a classic.

Sometimes it produced Jedi Arena.

Atari Builds the Cockpit

Then Atari’s 1983 arcade game changed the scale of the fantasy.

Designed by Mike Hally and developed from an earlier prototype called Warp Speed, Star Wars used glowing color vector graphics and a flight yoke to place players inside an X-wing.

The game moved through TIE fighter combat, a surface attack and the trench run.

For the first time, a Star Wars game did not merely reference a scene. It tried to recreate the sensation of being inside it.

The cabinet mattered almost as much as the software.

The sit-down version enclosed the player in the machine. The yoke, digitized voices and bright vector display did the rest.

For a few expensive minutes, the player was the pilot.

Atari followed it with Return of the Jedi in 1984, switching from first-person vectors to an isometric raster perspective. In 1985, The Empire Strikes Back returned to vector graphics as a conversion kit for existing cabinets.

Even Atari could not settle on one way to represent the trilogy.

Depending on the game, Star Wars was a cockpit simulation, an isometric obstacle course or an upgrade installed inside yesterday’s arcade machine.

One Arcade Game, Many Home Experiences

The arcade cabinet created another problem: how do you bring that experience home?

The answer depended entirely on which home the game entered.

Versions appeared across consoles and home computers with wildly different capabilities. Some preserved the vector presentation. Others rebuilt the action around the hardware.

By the late 1980s, conversions had appeared on systems including the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga.

The title on the box could be identical while the experience inside differed sharply.

A licensed game was not one fixed product delivered across standardized hardware. It was a family of related interpretations, sometimes connected mainly by packaging, music and optimism.

A child playing Star Wars on an Atari 2600, a Commodore 64 owner loading a cassette and an arcade visitor sitting inside the vector cockpit could all say they had played “the Star Wars game.”

They were describing very different memories.

The Game Lucasfilm Never Released

Not every experiment reached store shelves.

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: Ewok Adventure was developed for the Atari 2600 but cancelled before release. The player controlled an Ewok on a hang glider, dropping rocks on Imperial forces and attacking the base on Endor.

The controls became its undoing.

Programmer Larry Gelberg wanted the glider to dive, climb and catch thermals realistically. Marketing wanted something simpler. Gelberg refused, and the game was shelved.

Old School Gamer’s article on Ewok Adventure tells the story of the surviving prototypes and the disagreement that killed the release.

The game reveals a tension running through the entire decade.

Should a Star Wars game simulate the thing shown on screen, or simply make that thing easy and exciting to control?

Developers are still arguing about that.

They just use more expensive PowerPoint presentations now.

Namco Sends Luke Somewhere Else Entirely

If the Western Star Wars games were inconsistent, Namco’s 1987 Famicom release proved the license could become even stranger in a different market.

Released only in Japan, Namco’s Star Wars was a side-scrolling platformer that borrowed from the film without feeling obligated to remain there.

Luke visited planets that were not part of his journey in A New Hope. Darth Vader appeared repeatedly through bizarre impostors capable of transforming into a scorpion and a shark.

It is difficult to imagine that surviving a modern licensing approval meeting.

Yet the game makes sense within the Famicom market of the time. Platform action was familiar, recognizable characters mattered and strict cinematic accuracy was less important than producing something that worked as a Nintendo game.

Old School Gamer’s history of the Nintendo Famicom shows how quickly the system became home to major franchises and arcade-style adaptations. Namco reshaped Star Wars for that environment.

The result was not the film in cartridge form.

It was Star Wars translated into the language of Japanese 8-bit design, with all the mutations that apparently required.

Before There Was a LucasArts Style

Lucasfilm founded its own games group in 1982, but initially built its reputation through original projects including Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractalus! and Maniac Mansion.

Star Wars continued to pass between outside publishers and developers.

That created a strange situation. The company making some of the most inventive games of the 1980s was not yet defining what a Star Wars video game should be.

Old School Gamer’s feature on Lucasfilm Games looks at the studio that would eventually become inseparable from interactive Star Wars.

The transition happened gradually.

The 1991 Star Wars game for the Famicom and NES involved Lucasfilm Games and Beam Software, while other versions reached the Game Boy, Master System and Game Gear.

The Master System’s unusual life outside North America and Japan meant that even this newer generation arrived differently depending on where players lived. In one market, the console was disappearing. Somewhere else, it still felt like a discovery.

Then the identity sharpened.

Super Star Wars arrived in 1992. Star Wars: X-Wing followed in 1993.

The games began to feel less like isolated experiments and more like pieces of a growing interactive universe.

LucasArts had not eliminated variation.

But it increasingly became the center of gravity.

The Wild Years Still Matter

The first decade of Star Wars gaming has no tidy progression from primitive to sophisticated.

Dog Star Adventure did things Atari cartridges could not. Parker Brothers found elegant loops inside individual movie scenes. Atari’s arcade team created a cockpit fantasy so convincing that later technology did not automatically make it obsolete.

Namco produced something only Namco in 1987 could have produced.

Some games were excellent.

Some were painful.

Some were barely Star Wars at all once the box art was removed.

Together, they show a famous license before it had learned to police its own identity.

Modern Star Wars games inherit a library of sounds, interfaces, genres and design expectations. The early developers inherited three films, a pile of merchandise and a question nobody had answered:

What exactly should a Star Wars game let the player do?

The complete list of every Star Wars video game ever made now stretches across arcades, computers, consoles, handhelds, mobile devices and virtual reality.

Looking back at its chaotic beginning makes one thing clear.

Star Wars did not enter gaming through one perfect adaptation.

It arrived as text, vectors, cartridges, cassettes, cancelled prototypes and several versions of Darth Vader that probably should not have been sharks.

Before LucasArts took control, nobody knew the rules.

That was the fun of it.

Author Bio

Søren Kamper is the editor of Star Wars: Gaming, an independent site documenting the history of Star Wars video games, from unofficial experiments and early arcade releases to LucasArts classics, modern titles and fan projects.

The post Before LucasArts Took Control: The Wild First Decade of Star Wars Games appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

It’s time to have an Amiga party as throughout the Commodore Amiga Facebook they are celebrating  the ‘International Amiga Day 2026’ for May 31st, which celebrates over 30 years of Amiga fun! The retro community want to keep the Commodore Amiga name alive and what better way to do that than an anniversary to the day dedicated to that great system with all the games being played, and hardware being used from the A500 to the A1200, to the CD32 to the A4000. If you lived during that era of gaming then it was one of the greatest moments in our retro history.

In 2014 when the party came to be, it turned out to be a global event with people from all around the world turning on their retro systems either to play them once more from their childhood or just to give them a new look with a mod or retrobright. However with fantastic news came sadness as the original creator Dragon “Gyu” Gyorgy sadly passed away at the beginning of 2015. He was both a friend to me and to many others, so with this news, lets not just celebrate the Amiga but celebrate the great Dragon Gyorgy who was the inspiration behind the original Amiga day.

On Amiga Day do any of the following Amiga activities:

• – You must switch on at least 1 Amiga computer.
• – You must run at least 1 Amiga game (emulator is accepted).
• – You must „whiten” a yellowed Amiga.
• – You must give your non-working Amiga to a technician, who can make a working machine out of the non-working ones. Lather on the reborn working Amiga must be donated.
• – In case you are a technician you must make at least one Amiga working from non-working Amigas.
• – If you have an Amiga T-Shirt, you must wear it.
• – If none of the above you can make a photo of yourself with an Amiga and share it with your friends on any social networks.
• – Or whatever Amiga related activity you like…

The post International Amiga Day – The day has come to celebrate the Amiga! appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

With over 60,000 games confirmed in its archive, the future of the database remains uncertain. Although the Berlin Senate and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media supported the ICS with €1.5 million- that initial round of funding was completed at the end of April 2026. The Senate’s Economics Senator Franziska Giffey warned as well that future funding was not guaranteed.

The ICS, now without future funding, has various steps it could take to preserving the collection, which would, or could include getting a physical space for the collection, but would need long-term funding for that as well, which the German Federal Ministry of Research believed was far from a slam dunk from attaining as well.

According to the ICS‘s official website, the future of the project is in serious jeopardy:

“The demise of ICS is very regrettable from our perspective – even though we understand the political reasons. We remain convinced that, as with other media, preserving games as a cultural medium is a public responsibility. We hope that this will be implemented in some other form in the future. Not only will the insights and preliminary work of ICS be helpful in this regard, but all shareholders are also available individually as partners.”

What do you think of the news in the wake of Sony’s decision to stop releasing physical games in 2028? Sound off in the comment section below.

The post Germany’s Video Game Preservation Project Loses Public Funding appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

When I visited M05’s Musée Du Jeu Vidéo and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France during my university’s spring break in March 2026, I decided to visit London for the day. The urge to see the Design Museum’s “Wes Anderson: The Archives” and “Blitz: The Club that Shaped the 80s” was just too great. Paris can wait.

With my return booked for the last Eurostar train of the day, I had time for a quick visit to Waterstones near Russell Square. This branch’s proximity to UCL, Birkbeck University of London, and SOAS makes its fiction, history, and philosophy sections particularly rich. Plus, it’s a short stroll to St. Pancras for the return leg of my day trip.

Approaching the till with a fistful of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer crime novels – I wanted Penguin covers not easily available in the States – I saw, out of the corner of my eye Andreas Bernard’s Same Player Shoots Again: A Biography of the Pinball Machine. The title sprang at me like a kick-out mechanism on a pinball playfield. The word “biography” I know very well having devoted an entire book – Game After – to the lifecycle and afterlife cycle of video games. Bernard mixes, as I hope he would, his own biography with the pinball machines he experienced growing up in Munich and on holidays with his family or girlfriend.

Happening upon something one enjoys in public places – in my case Bernard’s short book, in his case pinball machines in cities and at seaside spots – is a circumstance very much at the heart of his deft blend of memoir with cultural history. Bernard reflects upon what we might call the “faded ubiquity” of pinball machines; how their once prevalent, everyday status has long expired. “Wasn’t my love of pinball,” Bernard writes, “always somehow related to the casual availability of these games? They were simply there, in bars and restaurants, public pools and bowling alleys, in the lobbies of movie theaters and in arcades; and if I didn’t search for them as systematically as Stefan and I once did on our Friday excursions, then you would discover them by pure chance.”

This self-reflection of Bernard’s relationship to pinball machines is shared late in the book after he stumbles upon an annual pinball tournament. Although the warehouse-size tournament offers an extraordinary number of machines – some known well by Bernard, others new to him – the sheer abundance of restored, well-maintained machines available to play lacked something in his estimation: they lacked the public ordinariness that he and his childhood friend once revered whether in the form of well-traversed pubs to play a favorite pinball machine like the Harlem Globetrotters or the “casual availability” enjoyed across everyday places where slipping in a coin was habitual, even routine.

The contrast accounted for by Bernard when describing the annual pinball tournament is between what-was-once-common and what is now mostly experienced through the efforts of connoisseurs, collectors, and enthusiast communities. It’s a move from the ordinary to the extra-ordinary, from the quotidian to the quixotic.

Bernard’s writing on the subject resonates with my observations on the exhibition of coin-op video games at annual events and in museums where I too can’t shake the feeling that something is missing in both contexts. Take for example California Extreme, the “Classic Arcade Games Show”. Each July at the Santa Clara Convention Center hundreds of coin-op machines are exhibited and set to free play. A weekend pass costs about $70 for which one gets to play in a crowded, sweaty convention site in the summer that always seems to reek of armpits and farts no matter how many electric fans are deployed.

 

What bugs me about these places (other than the smell) and that I’ve never quite managed to put into words finally materialized with Bernard’s use of the term, “promiscuity.” An event like California Extreme (I will add Brookefield, Illinois’s Galloping Ghost Arcade and the likes of Krakow’s Muzeum Gier Wideo and Budapest’s Flippermúzeum, where visitors pay by the hour to play a wealth of coin-op machines) offers more games than I would’ve ever experienced at any arcade to memory.

This characteristic alone stands in stark contrast to quarter sinking in days gone by. At these types of places today, we are spoiled for choice. The games work, technicians are readily available, unlike when you’d have to wait for an operator to repair or replace a machine. Game play is housed under rather ideal and diligently managed circumstances. Machines are cared for well. They are respected by players. We are surrounded by more fully functioning machines than we could ever seek out in our daily jaunts across familiar urban or suburban terrains.

Bernard’s claim of promiscuity isn’t down to availability and choice alone but reflects how we play. He notes rightly that the temptation to easily “switch from one game to the next after the first hint of disappointment” reduces the demands of endurance, the struggle with a specific machine when others were not around. One or two coin-op machines at a bar, restaurant, or convenience store demand our attention, our grind and determination, requires all our skill, whereas at California Extreme, especially when costs are abstracted by an admission fee, the risks are much lower, the act of play seemingly apathetic.

If I’m not satisfied with game play, I can abruptly stop playing an active game, move on, leave behind lives, play something else. I’ve approached so many machines with their game play abandoned, lives wasted, or an avatar simply waiting for someone to push its button. This blasé attitude I find peculiar. Are players disinterested? Is their game-play sensibility dulled by utter availability, overwhelming choice, overstimulation? Are they aware that their play time is finite as they scramble to play as many machines as possible? Promiscuity as in “playing around” is certainly on show. The thought of leaving a game would’ve never crossed my mind once a quarter was dropped (then again, I don’t like to leave behind a drop of alcohol in a glass either). The dropped quarter signaled commitment. It bought space and time in front of a particular machine. Devotion kept a player there.

Such promiscuity is an experience alien to my coin-op game play from the 70s to 90s. Yet, it’s a common occurrence I’ve observed at California Extreme’s “annual celebration.” There I always feel that I “dabble” in game play unlike the committed relationships that I built in my youth when playing say, a Moon Patrol or Star Castles machine located between the entrance and the check-out area of my local Safeway. There and then I played differently.

I played what was available and if hooked, I played a lot knowing that a newer machine would replace one of these I enjoyed if its earnings fell short. To me it felt like each drop of a quarter was an insurance policy on the lifespan of a particular game that I liked and my ability to have it at my fingertips for a prolonged duration. Coin-op machines weren’t just interactive objects but destinations; their graphically adorned heft constituted a place, a material coordinate for hanging out with friends after school, to pass time, shoplift candy, compete, or try for a personal top score. The utilitarian function of Safeway didn’t matter then. I wasn’t there to buy groceries. Only the store’s threshold where the games resided mattered.

With Bernard’s help, what becomes apparent to me is that annual events like California Extreme can return vintage machines, even renew our game play with them, but the idiosyncratic social experience of public places of play isn’t included in the admission, it’s irrelevant to the bounty of games on hand.

Considering that coin-op machines were designed and manufactured for public places, gained their notoriety – for good or bad – in everyday places as public amusements, and that the industry’s profit potential resided in each new public location – read, market – accessed, this situation of interactive artifacts stripped of their environments poses a unique challenge to museums. The conversation starter is whether ordinary, historical public play – play that was once so definitive to establishing the new phenomenon of video games across diverse public places – can be exhibited or conveyed to museum visitors?

Bernard heaps on more details when he describes the physical location of pinball machines in the bars and cafes of his youth: they had to be discovered inside a place unlike the prominent display of machines he’d encounter at “brightly lit arcades” typically, he notes, located by train stations. A pinball machine in a bar, Bernard shares, resided in “out-of-the-way places: in a narrow hallway in the back, where the restrooms and cigarette machine were located …”.

Far too often the cultural memory of public game play privileges the nostalgic scene of an arcade over, drawing from my own biography, a Ms. Pac Man machine tucked into a corner at a laundromat, Star Castles at a Safeway next to gumball and stamp machines, Frogger and Crazy Climber by the restrooms, pay phone, and cigarette machine at a restaurant, or a Slurpee shared alongside Defender at my local 7-Eleven where magazines like Soldier of Fortune once romanticized mercenary adventures in Angola and Uganda for boys.

“Street locations” like bars, restaurants, convenience stores, grocery stores, and laundromats elude game museums. There are attempts – earnest ones I should stress – at museums where an arcade space is assembled and made accessible to visitors. Such spaces are often separated from a museum’s other exhibits. Curated rooms are common, distinguished by lower lighting, interior decoration, and machines clustered or lined up tightly, side-by-side to signal arrangements and configurations once common at arcades. Or a specific exhibition space is delimited from surrounding exhibitions within the museum. Typically coin-ops will line walls, or their bulk will create rows facing inward, away from console or PC displays.

 

 

 

 

 

Such efforts, unfortunately, only reimagine one public place where coin-op machines resided. I’ve yet to see a recreation of a pizzeria with a Space Invaders in the corner, or a bar with a cocktail table coin-op (water marks included), or a bus station, or a billiards hall, or even 7-Eleven. Museums do a good job showing their visitors one slice of life, one institution of public game play: an imaginary arcade with no history, no specific location. In these instances, the reimagined arcade’s history, its location, its public is that of the museum. These aren’t historical recreations of any actual, local arcade, but a projection of a generalized social space exhibited as “an arcade.” (The closest that I’ve observed to anchoring a recreation to actual arcades is the Game On 2.0 exhibition in Edinburgh: a title card with QR code references local arcades like Sega Park, University Arcades, and Nobles Amusements.)

Can other public spaces be reimagined in museums? Can Bernard’s bars and cafes of Munich be reconstructed and exhibited at Berlin’s Computerspielmuseum? Let’s say that a local pizzeria in Rochester had a Space Invaders in its corner. Could that establishment be recreated at The Strong to help show that public game play wasn’t only in the form of arcade game play; and that the banality of everyday spaces was transformed by game play. Or, what if a bowling alley game room from the late 70s is recreated complete with its “18 and older” sign, worn billiard tables, cheap pitchers of shitty lite beer, cigarette machines, ashtrays, and rancid cigarette smoke piped in for authentic ambiance? Sounds gross by today’s standards. But such dank places of coin-op game play are part of the history of games, once a financial lifeline for the coin-op amusement industry and popular location of game play across daily life, sticky patina and all.

Sure, I treasure the memory of sneaking into a bowling alley’s age-restricted areas but my personal recollection of Bernard’s subject in his short book exceeds nostalgic accounts to warrant sustained considerations at museums where period rooms that exhibit the domestication of video game consoles in the home and reimagined arcades are already prevalent.

Bars, cafes, restaurants, convenience stores, and bowling alleys are examples of ordinary places where people played. These are diverse places of play where diverse people played: are people who played in bars the same as those who played in arcades, or are those who played a quick game of Phoenix while waiting for a thin-crust pizza to reach their table at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor the same type of player feeding quarters into a Gorf at a smoke-filled bowling alley? Public places of play are tapestries of different experiences, each place a window into the historical integration of technology into people’s everyday life and emergent patterns of living with games.

Street locations or simply ordinary, everyday places evidence the pervasive qualities of coin-op game play more than a place like the arcade dedicated to game play. At street locations coin-op machines marked everyday topographies in their “simply there” status. At arcades, games were confined, contained in shopping malls or devoted buildings without any plodding along to discover a machine at a window, near a toilet, in a basement, or nestled in the back corner of daily life’s common cracks and crevices.

Arcades were intentionally designed to display games; their thresholds bathed in excitement to tempt would-be players to enter. Coin-op machines at street locations had to contend with an existing interior, co-mingle with other objects, spaces, and services. These scenes demonstrate how existing public establishments situated coin-op machines into their interior spaces, ambiance, clientele, and financials; how a business adapted to and accommodated a public technology for amusement. (A common cry upon immediately entering a restaurant or once seated at a table was, “can I have a quarter.” My urge to check out the games superseded food. The place’s primary service rendered secondary.)

The challenge for a museum is ordinariness itself. That’s why reimagined arcade spaces have become synecdochical for the history of public game play. Because coin-op game play wasn’t restricted to a single place, because the industry wouldn’t have thrived as it did without skirting singular locations, this history isn’t easily contained, or better yet, installed and displayed. Still, to fully represent the social and economic experiences and situations of game history necessitates the combo of Space Invaders at a pizzeria… in a museum.

The post Museum Games #6 Space Evaders, Or How Ordinary Public Places of Coin-Op Play Challenge Museums appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

I landed in Vigo, but my luggage didn’t. At Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport my lone carry-on gorged the steel jaws of an Iberia Air Lines baggage sizer stationed like a vigilant sentry at the boarding gate. Common carry-on luggage size, I learned, doesn’t translate universally on all domestic flights.

I reluctantly checked my bag. Something I would never do on a 16-day research bender bopping across Spanish and Swiss cities. One night here, two nights there. Go. Go. Go. The fear of lost luggage looms like a thundercloud. My seatbelt clicked to an exhale of FUUuuuucccckkkk.

Luckily, it wasn’t lost. Neither however was it on the same flight as me.

“A súa equipaxe estará noutro voo desde Madrid,” an Iberia Air Lines representative explained to me.

I typed into my iPhone for translation. “On another flight,” Google translator spat out.

“Which one from Madrid?”

“Non o sabemos. Entregarémolo no teu hotel mañá pola mañá,” the representative replied.

“Mañá?” oh, “mañana,” more of a murmur to myself for comprehension.

The possibility of having to wait until tomorrow for my luggage didn’t jive with my tight schedule. So, I spent an expensive day taxiing back and forth between my hotel to Aeropuerto do Vigo desperately awaiting the arrival of my luggage on the next, or next, or the one after that flight from Madrid. This journey repeated so much that I even enjoyed the same taxi driver twice! Ola de novo, meu amigo. My bag eventually showed up around 7:00 p.m.

This inconvenience dampened my research spirit. I typically arrive early on the scene: buzzing from a rich blend of excitement and espresso. Step one: drop my bag at the hotel. Step two: hit the pavement. Step three: lose thy self in reveries. A city is charted on foot a full day before I visit the museum that lured me to its location. Walking allows me to observe how museums and other tourist destinations fit into a city’s cultural kaleidoscope.

In Vigo, that plan went pear-shaped. I missed the Museo do Mar de Galicia and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. Regrettably, I never enjoyed the opportunity to drink in maritime history with a contemporary art chaser. Estrella Galicia meu amigo, the day’s only solace.

With sorrows drowned, fresh clothes welcomed upon my skin, a new day awaits. Outside my hotel the briny redolence of the Ría de Vigo bellows with seagulls as I wait for… another taxi. Relieved that this journey isn’t along the now familiar route to an airport, I’m off to the Museo Do Videoxogo (or MUVi for short) located in Cangas across Vigo Bay.

Snaking along the bay I spy a fleet of bateas, raft-like platforms for mussel farming. They crowd the bay, like a mighty armada at anchor. Thousands of mussels cultivate on thick ropes suspended from each platform. Here’s a safe bet: Galician gastronomy attracts tourists to the Ciudad De Vigo, in the province of Pontevedra, northwest Spain more than a video game museum way on the other side of the bay. Airlift MUVi to a more touristy location, I think to myself on the drive over. That would make a perfect pairing for a delicious welcome to Vigo: mussels and a museum of video games.

I arrived in Cagnas intentionally early. I like to “case the joint,” observe a museum at its location; see what’s around it, see if its video game theme extends to a café, restaurant, or retail shop. This often happens like in Sheffield where the National Videogame Museum is a short walk to the Extra Life Gaming Lounge. Strawberry & Skittles shakes galore.

MUVi doesn’t benefit from a direct companion unless you consider a hairdresser, fruteria, and a home furnishing store pertinent to the history of video games. The museum slots into retail spaces beneath an apartment block with a cool Candy Land inspired graffiti mural on one side and crappy graffiti tags on the other, like the word “sempiterno” spraypainted in blue. It translates to “everlasting.” Fitting that this word appears adjacent to a museum devoted to extending the life of video games.

Standing outside awaiting my tour guide, I remark to myself that MUVi’s giant window certainly surprises passers-by shopping for bananas. We can clearly glimpse a wealth of game-related artifacts.

 

Galo Martínez, one of the co-founders of the Fundación Museo do Videoxogo de Galicia, arrives amidst my reflection on bananas and video games. Other members of MUVi’s team turn up shortly after. Because MUVi is only open on Saturdays I had to arrange a special visit on a Thursday to adhere to my travel dates. This meant that my preference for visiting museums unannounced was blown. Don’t get me wrong, I remain grateful to Galo and his crew. Only I like to encounter a museum like any other visitor not as one writing about the museum visited. I fear special treatment that may prevent me from observing collections as others do. Plus, I suffer from a romantic personality: I like to think that I’m undercover, clandestinely gathering vital intel.

After introductions, we move inside. My initial observations from outside the window prove correct: artifacts in the museum’s main gallery are exhibited with care, a mindfulness of their arrangement expressed with a certain solitude so visitors can contemplate these games as museum artifacts. Game consoles are displayed upon matte white modular shelving units with each individual console – be it a Sega SG-1000 or Nintendo Super Famicon – granted space, top lit, and accompanied with title cards as expected.

Beyond the gallery, I witness other spaces devoted to interactive exhibits of computer, console, and coin-op machines. This, I’ve come to recognize, is an established convention in game museology: a mixture of playable hardware with non-playable hardware presented as artifacts. Hands-on. Hands-off.

I won’t say any more about these other spaces and collections here. That thread will be picked up later, in another installment. I’m rushing you through MUVi’s exhibits to arrive at a certain room that still seizes my attention.

The tour group ascends a short staircase. Two small rooms await. We crowd into the closest one dedicated to Galician game developer, Álex González Quintana, responsible for a game called, The Wall. It’s the first documented commercial game developed in the region. The room is minimally adorned, bathed in gallery white; intentionally modest to reduce distractions while affording maximum attention to select objects. This form of curation is quieting. Items that document game development include a cassette tape of The Wall, MSX 64K cartridge version, monitor displaying a playable game, tablet to scroll through for information on the game and its preservation at MUVi, along with a watchable interview that MUVi conducted with the developer. Wall labels accompanying these objects share the themes that explain this small exhibition’s mission: the documentation of local game development, public education, and preservation practices. Like MUVi’s gallery, objects in the small room are specified. They don’t compete with one another for our attention. Each is pedestaled. The cassette tape version of The Wall is displayed within a glass cube for protection.

 

Locked in conversation with Galo about the history of Galician games, I’m struck by a stark contrast as we step closer to the neighboring room. Peering inside this other small room, all those niceties of curation I witnessed next-door are abandoned.

No gallery white walls.

No pedestals showcase specific objects.

No object dons labels.

No premier game or developer resides at the center of this room.

It is cluttered instead with, what looks like, anonymous stuff you’d find in a teenager’s room circa mid-1980s or early 1990s. Caught off guard, I quickly go from calm and contemplative to feeling overwhelmed, spurred on by a vortex of things: all this mad stuff surrounding me, screaming out for my attention all at once.

 

My guided tour prompts the question of whether I am privy to a space off-limits to the public? One reserved only for team members to kick back, play games, watch TV, listen to music, or as a bed might suggest, have a nap during a slow day at the office cuddled up warmly in a Streets of Rage II duvet. It feels like I’m trespassing into a private domestic scene, familiar but not my own. I enter hesitantly: unsure where and how to step within this chaos, unsure what to look at, unsure if this room is part of the museum, or something else entirely.

My disorientation stems partly from my own ignorance of Galician. A big blue museum label appears right next to the entrance informing visitors of the room’s purpose and content. The museum label explains the transformation of video game play in Galicia from public places (arcades) in the 1970s to domestic settings in the 1980s and 1990s. The space is entitled, Habitación Da Memoria. It translates as a “memory room.” The full description reads as follows:

Na década de 1970, as persoas relacionábanse cos videoxogos principalmente en lugares públicos a través dos Arcades.

In the 1970s, people interacted with video games mainly in public places through the Arcades.

A medida que o seu impacto social medraba, os hábitos e o propio medio foron mudando e consolidando un cambio social no que os títulos comezaron a ser gozados no eido doméstico. Os salóns e posteriormente as habitacións dos foagares normalizaron un ambiente lúdico, vencellando ocio e experimentación coa realidade familiar e social do momento.

As their social impact grew, habits and the environment itself changed and consolidated a social change in which titles began to be enjoyed in the domestic sphere. The living rooms and later the bedrooms of the households normalized a playful atmosphere, linking leisure and experimentation with the family and social reality of the moment.

As décadas dos 80 e os 90 constitúen un periodo crucial na historia dos videoxogos, con enormes transformacións culturais e tecnolóxicas presentes na infancia e na memoria de millóns de xogadores.

The 80s and 90s constitute a crucial period in the history of video games, with enormous cultural and technological transformations present in the childhood and memories of millions of players.

Like other parts of the world, living rooms and eventually bedrooms became spaces where video games grew familiar, naturalized and normalized within everyday habits of play. Habitación Da Memoria is MUVi’s attempt to re-present a domestic scene from the past to its visitors.

Such rooms, what curatorial parlance bills as a “period room,” are staged interior spaces constructed to showcase historical decoration, design, lifestyle, and tastes. They are incredibly common in video game museums. Be it the West v. Soviet Bloc interiors during the Cold War, or a living room setting expressive of when video games first muscled into the home and onto the world’s coffee tables, or an installation of an independent video game store recreated to show the economic slump of the US game industry at the microlevel of retail. Whether it’s in these contexts or recreations of 17^th or 18^th century US or European stately interiors, period rooms often time-capsule a past to immerse visitors in distinct historical moments. They create stories about the past through assemblages of objects that reflect the specific era showcased.

My bewilderment from being unexpectedly stumbling into so much stuff is accompanied by the nagging feeling that I’ve encountered something like this before. I don’t mean this specific room. Or the time period recreated at MUVI that I lived through. Or even yet another period room in yet another video game museum, a common enough occurrence in my travels. No, I feel like I’ve been absorbed by a fertile, dense space elsewhere—in a story about a realer-than-real exhibit of the past.

I’ve long been a reader of science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. His short story, “The Preservation Machine,” inspired my book, Game After which led to this project you’re reading about right now. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was an adaptation of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The first film that I saw with a girlfriend, later to become my partner in passion, was Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut in 1992. We inevitably named our son “Deckard” after the story’s protagonist. And he likes to remind us that we named him after a male lead who shoots an unarmed female replicant in the back. I guess that parent of the year award went elsewhere.

Habitación Da Memoria unlocked a forgotten memory of another short story by Dick titled, “Exhibit Piece.”

Amid the arresting bedroom scene, I recall how an aggrieved co-worker ridicules George Miller, an “academician,” who in Dick’s short story constructs a perfect replica of a past age. Miller specializes in the mid-20^th century, like MUVi specializes in the late 20^th century. He loves his work so much that he adopts the mannerism, speech, and even the appearance of an “American businessman of the Eisenhower era” much to the scorn and suspicion of Controller Fleming, a governmental bureaucratic also employed at the History Agency.

Miller develops an “absolutely accurate” reproduction of a three-bedroom California ranch-style suburban home, complete with a sparkling green lawn, pleasing flowerbed, and shiny, new 1954 Buick in the driveway. The interior boasts its own accuracies. A modern sofa, an easy chair, wine-colored carpets, a copper ashtray, assorted magazines on a boomerang modern coffee table, and a chrome and Formica breakfast table.

Dick’s story adds a fantastic twist to an already convincing scene.

One morning, when settled into his desk to research, Miller hears a noise – the sound of laughter – deep inside his version of a period room (well, his is an entire house). Curious, he ventures into his exhibit to discover two teenage boys and a “handsome late thirtyish” woman. An aroma of bacon and hot coffee waft around the breakfast table. To Miller’s astonishment, the boys are his, the stylish woman, his wife. All three are enjoying breakfast together waiting for him to arrive…an improbable husband, a fantastical father whose presence adds further accuracy to his exhibition. Miller’s a “piece” in an exhibit to riff off Dick’s title.

The History Agency exhibit Miller painstakingly constructed becomes his new reality. Incredibly, he’s the architect of his own desire.

When inside his exhibit talking to his “family” he is living in mid-20^th century America, outside he’s back in the 22^nd century: a time-period that Dick depicts as an authoritarian world where children don’t cohabitate with their biological parents and marriage is not permitted. Unlike Miller’s present, he finds his constructed past preferable. The exhibit in Miller’s estimation has, somehow, become a “time-gate” between these two periods of time. When Fleming and History Agency Director Carnap demand that Miller come out of the exhibit, he refuses, preferring to live his life 200 years in the past, or in his own reconstruction of that past. Even threats by Carnap that they’ll demolish the exhibit fail to deter Miller. He vehemently believes that the exhibit is only a “bridge.” He’s traveled beyond the physical confines of his reconstruction.

Dick briefly allows us to believe that Miller bests Director Carnap when the story’s protagonist returns “home.” Expertly researched exhibition props now provide a familiar intimacy with Miller sitting cozily in his easy chair, slippers on his feet, and an “ice cold can of beer” in hand. The next day his morning newspaper displays the less than heartwarming headline, “Russia Reveals Cobalt Bomb Total World Destruction Ahead.” So long slippers. That Bermuda grass won’t be green much longer.

As a fellow “academician,” Miller’s refuge in his life’s work resonates. I too feel the tug of the past when visiting museums. Each artifact is like a little time-gate transporting me back to when placing a quarter on an Asteroids coin-op machine called “next game” and Blondie ruled.

MUVi’s Habitación Da Memoria offered a different sensation removed from the pangs of nostalgia. The answer to my dismay resides less in the past then within the stuff staring at me in the present.

Perhaps noticing that I’ve grown a little quiet, reflecting on what I remembered from Dick’s story, my guides’ eagerness to discuss my reaction to the swathes of stuff shocked me out of my introspection. We enthusiastically started speaking over one another, much as I imagined large clumps of mussels draped on ropes in Vigo’s estuaries.

 

“See that old VCR? That was used in my family’s house,” Galo shared.

Not easy to pick out given the rooms jam-packed contents, I thought.

“Ah, now I see it,” I responded.

A stack of videocassettes rests on top of the vintage machine, providing a lived-with, cluttery effect of VCR ownership. The sight of those rigid plastic cases splayed near the machine once signaled “movie night,” like a ticket torn by a uniformed cinema usher.

Above sits a Sega Genesis connected to a cathode-tube television. Its controller connected by a cord, dangling onto the VCR in an untidy manner as if someone just hastily placed it there, vanished when we walked in.

A Toshiba boombox crowds nearby on the floor. I couldn’t detect the cassette tape queued up, ready at the push of a little plastic silver button to soundtrack the playing of Sonic the Hedgehog.

A Casio keyboard synthesizer takes its rightful place at the foot of the bed cum studio lab. Oh, how I tried to play Tubeway Army’s “Down in the Park” and Japan’s “Life in Tokyo” on mine in my bedroom.

“All the games that you see came from the patron’s collections,” another voice informed. MUVi employs seven staff members, patrons who donate their items to the memory room. There are a lot of games in this room. Handheld devices like the Atari Lynx rests upon a neat row of Sesame Street children’s books. A Sega Game Gear becomes a paperweight atop a pile of magazines. A Gakken Super Cobra enjoys a playdate with assorted action figures. Others handheld games that I don’t recognize fill in the nooks and crannies of the bedroom’s shelving mosaics.

A xenomorph toy figure from Alien, a DeLorean from Back to the Future, He-Man, Ninja Turtles offer even more specimens to enrich the exhibit’s recreated time period.

The bedroom is not entirely given over to entertainment. An Amstrad ALT-3865 X “luggable” laptop computer shares a workspace surface with Spanish language dictionaries, assorted computer magazines, pencils, pens, paper, and a mandatory Walkman for late night study sessions. The bedroom serves many purposes for its imagined inhabitant, and the curated exhibit reveals – revels in – such intimate details.

I’m particularly drawn to the sheer number of magazines and books lining shelves and stacked on the desk. Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks rest alongside The Adventures of Tintin comics.

“The magazines?” I ask. “Are these also from patrons?”

“Yes. We’ve kept these for years. Now they are part of this exhibit,” Galo clarifies.

Select pages from magazines have been removed, tacked onto bedroom walls. The likes of Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, no doubt freed from horror film magazines share pin-up space near Michael Jackson and Madonna. Video game ads and pictures of basketball and football players join the clippings montage. Posters affixed to the middle of magazines – a onetime motivator to purchase an issue – have been carefully pried from their staples so that Indiana Jones, Luke and Yoda in training from The Empire Strikes Back, Ripley of Aliens, even B-Movie goddess Sybil Danning and a promotional image of the television series V adorn these walls in defiance of gallery solemness.

 

This stuff compels me to ask.

“Is Habitación Da Memoria presented as a typical bedroom in Vigo, or one in the broader Pontevedra province?”

I quickly follow-up with, “Whose memories are reflected in this room?”

After being translated into Galician for the benefit of all present, and conversation among the group, the answer to my first question emerges, “no.” Spain’s economic strife of the early 1980s would’ve made this room “lavish,” the space only a few upper middle class families could’ve afforded for their children—kids with their own televisions, VCRs, personal computers, multiple gaming systems, multiple handheld games, boomboxes and hi-fi systems.

This room, I’m told by Galo, is “an ideal room,” not a reality for many kids growing up in Pontevedra during the 1980s. It’s a composite exhibit, collectively composed by all team member’s personal possessions– even stuff from their parents, like the VCR that was originally shared in the family room not in the isolation of a bedroom.

My second question is answered here as well. The memory expressed in this “ideal room” is of a collective nature, not singular. Multi-sourced. Fictional not accurate portrayal. It is no one’s room. But there is enough stuff assembled for visitors to gain a semblance of their own past, reconnect with their own personal experiences of the era.

This revelation captures the sensation that’s accompanied me when hesitantly stepping into the Habitación Da Memoria and, perhaps, why Dick’s “Exhibit Piece” popped back into my mind.

I’ve repeatedly described the period room’s contents as stuff. It’s a fabulously nebulous word, often used to account for a large volume, or a collection of disparate things. MUVi’s stuff in Habitación Da Memoria isn’t erratic, just random things from the 1980s compiled into a room. A coherent ensemble emerges, a comprehensible story shown in fragments. None of this stuff is surrogates or copies of vintage objects but the actual things lived with, handled, looked at, listened to and played with by patrons. Their traces of memory manifest in a dangling wire, a pin-holed poster.

Shared with visitors, all these different media – magazines, books, posters, televisions, boom boxes, synthesizers, portable computers, a Walkman, and, of course, video games – physically shaped an intimacy with technology in the most personal room in a house, the bedroom, reconstructed at MUVi to open an entire universe of experiences.

Museums are good at defamiliarizing objects. An exhibited object removes proximity, places an object out of reach. Cut off, we experience a different relationship with it. A re-created bedroom – in a museum – re-establishes proximity, reinjects intimacy. The scene is familiar even if we didn’t own that same Casio or read Tintin. How the room is arranged suggests less museum objects like those we observed, sequestered outside the “memory room,” than things lived with, played, used, and aged. Perhaps a firm membrane is needed – a room set off from more recognizable and anticipated curatorial conventions where we “look” not “touch” – to remind, or introduce to younger visitors, the physical, tactile, encounters with media.

In this room an imagined teenager lived with media. Lived through media. Video games – despite the museum surrounding this embedded period room – merge into this cohesive whole. Video games, after all, are seldom played in isolation from other forms of media then and today alike. They are part of an entire idiosyncratic network of stuff comingling together. Configured as an ensemble of the past, accuracy matters less than it did for Miller’s exhibit. This time-gate may be compiled from relics of the past, but it transports us only to the present.

Here, at MUVi, in December 2024, when I visited, I was reminded not just of my stuff from the past, a cheesy flashback high-pitched to the inflection of, “like, SOOOOO, totally awesome 80s,” but what people did with and to that stuff. Distant practices forgotten, returned, re-presented.

Media today consolidate, converge, squeeze difference onto the same screens compared to what once led separate clunky existences sprawled across bedroom floors. That’s why I felt overwhelmed. I’d forgotten just how discreet media once were.

The clutter of stacked videocassette boxes on a VCR long retired in the age of digital streaming.

Enormous boomboxes a tripping hazard in the era of tiny Beats Studio Pros that hide slyly between sofa cushions.

Synthesizers, a center piece of the bedroom, shrunk to digital audio workstation software apps.

Mounds of paperback books? Storage space on 32G Kindles.

Piles of magazines on shelves? Subscription services with unlimited access across all digital devices.

Posters tacked on walls? Visual effects on social media profiles, or fruit emojis ripe with sexual connotation.

Amidst the clutter, I don’t just see obsolete devices or “dead-tech,” or feel nostalgic about a Sybil Danning poster (though, occasionally I still longingly recall her Valkyrie outfit from the schlocky Battle Beyond the Stars). I’m shown what young people did with this stuff and, perhaps, how similar practices of curating a user space extend to today’s cultural practices with digital devices.

Our intimacy, where teenagers once constructed themselves, is no longer confined to bedrooms, or to the dream that a poster carefully affixed near a bed whispered in deep slumber. Personalizing boring bedroom walls with posters carefully detached from magazines, expressed our “likes,” as do curated content feeds today. Future period rooms (what a glorious contradiction!) will collect, arrange, and exhibit next-gen relics equally estranged from those teens today who never pushed a tack into a wall.

Unlike Miller, I stepped out of this museum’s memory room. It offers no refuge.

I’m as committed as my fellow academician, only my stomach grumbles. I want to sample the Port of Vigo’s froitos do mar before another plane whisks me on my way, hopefully with my carry-on safely stowed above. I say my good-byes to the MUVi team. They’ll turn up in other stories.

My journey back across the bay, catching the bateas fleet at dusk, allows me to take in Habitación Da Memoria’s gesture: the history of games presented in museums isn’t just collecting and exhibiting stuff but a meaningful rapprochement between how people experience and live with games right down to the bedsheets.

The post Museum Games #3 Rapprochement na Habitación da Memoria appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

What Museums Do: Versions

The certificate, in other words, answers the wrong question — but it isn’t alone in that. Every museum holding these materials has to decide what question it’s trying to answer, and that’s where Latour and Lowe become most useful.

They build toward this argument through a more elaborate example: Veronese’s Nozze di Cana, the original of which hangs in the Louvre, displaced from the Venetian refectory for which it was painted by Napoleon’s armies in 1797. When Factum Arte produced a high-resolution facsimile and returned it to Palladio’s refectory on the island of San Giorgio in Venice, something unexpected happened: the copy, restored to its original context — correct lighting, height, architectural relationship — felt more faithful to the painting’s meaning than the original in Paris. The aura, Latour and Lowe argue, had migrated. Their point is not that copies are as good as originals, but that “originality” is not a fixed property of a single object — it is distributed across the whole trajectory of a work’s life, and it can accumulate in unexpected places.

The most clarifying moment in their essay, however, is a more modest analogy: the performance of King Lear. No one walks into a production and asks whether this is the real King Lear, faithfully reproducing some ur-performance that Shakespeare himself staged and that all subsequent versions must answer to. No one asks if this is the original. What audiences ask is whether it is well or badly performed. Each production is a segment in a long trajectory, judged on its own terms as a version, not measured against an inaccessible original. And crucially, a genuinely great production can add something to the work — finding dimensions in it that earlier versions left dormant — making the original richer rather than merely reproducing it.

This is the situation I find myself in, moving from museum to museum. The Alamogordo event is not available in any original form — there is no first performance to which every museum staging must answer, no single excavation any visitor could have witnessed in full. What there were instead, even at the moment of the dig itself, were a rumor stretching back decades, a documentary crew shaping what was filmed, an archaeological team working under time and sandstorm, and a crowd of hundreds each experiencing a different slice of the same Saturday. What is available now are stagings: each institution’s specific choices about what to foreground, what to leave out, what objects to gather, what narratives to build around them. The question I find myself asking in each gallery is not whether the cartridges are authentic (the certificates say they are) but whether this staging does justice to the complexity of what happened. Is it well or badly staged?

Latour and Lowe offer a second way to navigate the same conundrum, one I introduced earlier: the trajectory. Recall, instead of asking whether any given object is an original or a copy, they propose attending to the whole trajectory — the river and all its tributaries. The same logic applies to the Alamogordo event: it is not a fixed thing that museums either faithfully stage or distort. It is an ongoing accumulation of everything that has fed into and followed from the rumor, the excavation, and their long institutional afterlife. Each staging draws on a particular point in that river and works with what it can carry. The question is what it does with what it has.

There is one further dimension the Shakespeare analogy captures that the Veronese argument does not: the Alamogordo excavation was always partly theatrical. The crowd in the desert, the documentary crew, archaeology as spectacle, a digger excavating a thirty-five-foot pit for an audience of hundreds — it was already a performance before any museum staged it. The museums are, in this sense, reviving something that was conceived for an audience from the start. What they are arguing about, whether they know it or not, is how to direct the second act.

Göteborg. “A World of Games” at Världskulturmuseet ran from April 2023 through May 2026 and brought together more than 100 games spanning 4,000 years, from an ancient Egyptian game board called Men through Japanese karuta, Indian Ganjifa cards, chess pieces from China, role-playing games, LARP, arcade machines, and e-sports. The Atari burial sits inside all of that. The Alamogordo cartridges — dirty, cracked, excavated from a New Mexico landfill — share an exhibition with objects that predate them by millennia, from cultures that never heard of Atari and had no stake in the 1983 crash. The juxtaposition is quietly extraordinary: the burial that I once cynically questioned whether anyone should care about appears here as a chapter in the deep history of human play, alongside game boards from ancient Egypt whose rules have been entirely forgotten. Whatever the burial is, Världskulturmuseet has decided it belongs in that company. I stood there longer than the placard warranted.

My photographs appear in the display, credited. Reinhard appears on video. The version Göteborg produces is intellectually ambitious. It reaches not for game industry history but for something closer to anthropology, a long view of play that makes the Atari crash look less like a business story and more like one more episode in the very long history of games appearing, circulating, and disappearing. What it occasionally risks is absorbing the specificity of the event into a frame so broad that the strangeness of the burial itself — the legend, the confirmation, the crowd in the desert — can recede behind the larger argument. That risk seems worth taking. Few institutions have placed the Alamogordo materials in a context that reframes them so thoroughly — here they are not industry artifacts or collector’s items but participants in a conversation about human play that began long before electronics existed.

There is also something the Göteborg display cannot fully account for: the fact that I am standing in it. Latour and Lowe write about the “migration of the aura” — the way auratic presence can detach from one version of a work and reattach to another. Something like this happens when a researcher’s documentary images migrate from the conditions of their making into institutional life. The photographs were made as records on a tempestuous April day in New Mexico. They now function as evidence, as atmosphere, as wall panels in an exhibition about 4,000 years of games. They are doing work I did not assign them, in a context I could not have anticipated.

Rome. GAMM has assembled a particularly expansive and inventive staging of the Alamogordo event. The display cases alone contain multitudes: recovered cartridges (Warlords, Star Raiders, Missile Command, Asteroids) in various states of degradation; trays of actual Alamogordo soil with cartridge fragments still embedded in it; two City of Alamogordo Certificates of Authenticity mounted at the top of the cases like institutional crowns; and the September 1983 newspaper article “Dump here utilized,” by M.E. McQuiddy in the Alamogordo Daily News — the contemporaneous documentation of the burial, published before it had passed into game history.

My photographs appear on screens that walk visitors through details of the excavation; others, from the original 1983 dump — the empty desert site, the machinery at work, workers pouring concrete to prevent theft — are placed throughout the display cases. Reinhard appears on a large overhead screen in a video produced specifically for the museum, identified as being from the Game Museum of Rome Archive.

 

What stopped me entirely were the coin-op cabinets. GAMM has produced three custom arcade machines, branded “E.T. The Fall,” running playable versions of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Pac-Man, and Q*bert on Atari 2600 hardware. The cabinet artwork merges the excavation aesthetic with classic arcade design: sandy desert tones, distressed lettering, the look of something dug up and repurposed. Visitors can play E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial — the game whose burial they have just been reading about — on a cabinet that commemorates its interment. Who wouldn’t want to play the very game whose failure they’re reading about? The game is simultaneously the object of study and the thing you play, the artifact and the experience. GAMM understood that the burial was not just a story about objects but about games, and that the most direct way to display a game is to let people play it.

 

The sheer volume of material GAMM has gathered, and the inventiveness with which it has been deployed, produces a staging of Alamogordo that is dense and strange. In the terms Latour and Lowe borrow from Shakespeare: it is a production that throws everything at the play, and the play holds up.

Cambridge. The Cambridge Computer Centre places the Alamogordo materials within a “Gaming Zone” that frames video games in the context of British computing history and general game history — the E.T. panel sits adjacent to one on Colossal Cave as a precursor to interactive fiction, situating the burial within a longer history of what computers have made possible. The interpretive panel is headed “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial / The Worst Video Game of All Time?” and works through the film, Howard Scott Warshaw’s six-week development deadline, the crash, and the burial, concluding that the 728,000 games buried at Alamogordo marked “the symbolic end of Atari as a video game industry giant.” It also makes space for Warshaw himself, quoting him directly: “It’s awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex.” Even the man blamed for ending an industry gets a punchline.

 

The panel’s built-in touchscreen offers a menu of remarkable range: the E.T. film trailer, the Atari: Game Over documentary trailer, KOB Albuquerque News coverage of the excavation, a dedicated excavation video — and the option to play E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial itself. The regional New Mexico television footage is the detail that arrests me: the most local and least mediated documentation of the event, made available alongside the Microsoft-produced documentary in the same interface. At Cambridge, the burial is visible simultaneously as regional news story, corporate media event, and playable game — and the designer held responsible for it gets to complicate his own reputation in his own words. Cambridge doesn’t resolve the event into a single argument. It puts its diverse components in the same touchscreen menu and lets the visitor sort them out. I spent longer at that touchscreen than I’d like to admit.

Sheffield. The National Video Game Museum holds its Alamogordo materials within a display case that places E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in the company of Football Manager, Fantasy Games, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Batman — a survey of gaming history in which the burial appears as one chapter among many rather than a singular event deserving its own shrine. The label reads simply “The E.T. Incident” and gives the essential facts in a few sentences: Warshaw’s absurdly short development deadline, the poor sales, the fourteen trucks dumped at Alamogordo. It is an economical treatment of the event, and in that economy there is a kind of confidence — this is game history, it belongs here, it does not require special pleading.

 

The cartridge and manual on display are not excavated materials. There is no Certificate of Authenticity, no Alamogordo dirt, no deformed game cartridge. Sheffield represents the burial through a standard retail copy of the game. This is a curatorial decision that turns out to matter considerably, because of what else is in the case. The E.T. manual is inscribed by Howard Scott Warshaw himself — “For Game City & Notgames / The National Videogame Arcade” — with his signature. Sheffield holds a copy of the game signed by its maker, donated directly to the museum. The Certificate of Authenticity authenticated the cartridges’ passage through the earth’s crust. Warshaw’s inscription authenticates something different: the game’s passage through his hands, his own recognition that what he produced belongs in a collection. It is a different segment of the trajectory entirely — not the burial but the making, the designer’s acknowledgment of the museum as a worthy custodian. The dirt on the excavated cartridges speaks to what happened in 1983. Warshaw’s signature speaks to what the game has become since.

Málaga. The OXO Museum has made an architecturally distinctive display decision: a freestanding column in which the Alamogordo materials are stacked vertically, ascending in order of institutional weight. At the base, a bilingual panel on the 1983 crash. Above it, a playable screen running E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Above that, a glass vitrine with purple underlighting containing an excavated Vanguard cartridge — degraded, still bearing its red label, the dirt of New Mexico implicit in its condition. And at the very top, presiding over everything below it, the City of Alamogordo Certificate of Authenticity, framed and elevated like a reliquary card. I didn’t expect to genuflect at a museum display in Málaga, but here we are. The physical hierarchy says something the other institutions leave implicit: the certificate is not supplementary documentation, it is the crown of the display.

 

The certificate itself rewards close attention. It authenticates a Vanguard cartridge, not E.T. — a reminder that the burial encompassed far more than E.T., whatever popular memory had reduced it to. It bears three signatures: Mayor Susie Galea of Alamogordo, Joseph R. Lewandowski as Researcher/Organizer, and Howard Scott Warshaw, signed as Atari Game Engineer. Warshaw co-authenticating the recovered objects is something I keep turning over. The designer whose game became the symbol of the crash, signing certificates that verify the objects of that crash, for museums around the world. His signature on the Sheffield manual speaks to the game’s making. His signature on the Málaga certificate speaks to its burial and recovery. The same hand, two entirely different segments of the trajectory.

The bilingual panel is also worth noting for how it frames the crash within global game history: the American collapse of 1983, it explains, coincided with a “change of scenery” in which the video game revolution continued in Europe through 8-bit microcomputers and in Japan through consoles like the Famicom. The burial was an American ending that was also a global beginning. Málaga, a Spanish museum, makes that point explicitly — and says so on the wall.

Shanghai. The Video Game Museum of CADPA stages a translation of its own, across an ocean and into a country that had no direct stake in the 1983 crash whatsoever. A panel headed “The Great Atari Crash” narrates the collapse in economic terms: the American home video game market peaked at $3.2 billion in 1983 and fell to approximately $100 million by 1985, the causes being overproduction, market saturation, and Atari’s loss of control over third-party developers. Illustrating the panel is one of my photographs: cartridges in the Alamogordo dirt, a Centipede box clearly visible among the debris — used without credit, which I mention only in passing and without grievance; photographs travel, and this one has clearly traveled well. What strikes me more is what the panel’s existence means. China did not experience the 1983 crash. The Atari 2600 was not a presence in Chinese homes. The burial in New Mexico is not part of any living memory here. And yet CADPA, whose ambitions include participation in the global conversation on video game museums, treats the Alamogordo materials as significant enough to document. The burial has become a chapter in world game history, not just US game history. I think of my wife’s response — museums are telling you that the stuff is important — and find it confirmed in the last place I might have expected. My cynicism, it turns out, was parochial.

 

What the Versions Leave Out

Across these institutions, the question that Latour and Lowe arm me against keeps reasserting itself: is this the real thing? The Certificate of Authenticity raises it. The presence of the documentary raises it. The fact that millions of identical cartridges exist raises it. Visitors arrive with it already formed.

The question the objects actually reward is different, however. It is the question of what each staging of Alamogordo, each museum’s specific choices about framing, selection, supplementation, and context, does with the complexity of the event. The cartridges are segments in a trajectory that includes a thirty-year rumor, a series of critical articles, an archaeological excavation organized by a film company, a municipal certificate of authenticity, a commercial marketplace, a hard hat in the Henry Ford, and cultural responses the museums have yet to reckon with: a bootleg toy maker – Special Ed Toys – whose “$999,999.99 or best offer” packaging does sharper critical work on the eBay situation than anything the City of Alamogordo produced, and a French artist, Florent Deloison, who in 2023 made an actual Atari 2600 game in which the player buries E.T. cartridges in the New Mexico desert — the machine burying itself, running on the hardware whose failure prompted the burial. Neither appears in any museum display I have visited. The trajectory keeps moving. The display cases do not.

What I find most instructive, looking across these institutions, is that the stagings sitting least comfortably with me are not the ones that do the least. They are the ones that claim the most while omitting what is genuinely strange about the event. The Alamogordo excavation was not a simple archaeological recovery. It was a media event organized by a corporation, created by a documentary crew, negotiated through municipal government, certified by bureaucratic apparatus, monetized through eBay, and distributed to institutions through a commercial marketplace that museums had to enter as bidders. That is a complicated trajectory. The stagings that acknowledge the complication — that let the strangeness show — seem to me the better ones in Latour and Lowe’s sense: more fecund, more generative, more faithful to what happened.

A Note on Returning

I want to return to the likes of GAMM and OXO, because I have not finished with what I experienced there. Latour and Lowe describe a visitor who enters the Salle de la Joconde and experiences a “terrible cognitive dissonance” on encountering the Veronese in a context entirely wrong for it — wrong lighting, height, relationship to the architectural space for which it was made. The version she saw in Venice, the facsimile in Palladio’s refectory, had been more faithful to the original’s meaning than the original in Paris. The aura had migrated.

I do not want to over claim something similar for my own experience in Göteborg or GAMM. But there is a version of the Alamogordo story that lives in the photographs in those museums — in the specific choices I made about angle and proximity and moment, made by someone who had been writing about this event for a decade before it happened, who came on his own dime, who was there as a historian rather than as a spectator — that is not fully available anywhere else. Not in the documentary, not in the text panels that accompany the cartridges in any of these museums. To find those photographs credited with my name, doing work I did not assign them, is to encounter a version of myself as a segment in a trajectory I am still in the middle of.

I want to keep going back to these places. What I know from the accumulation of these visits is that no single institution has figured out what to do with objects that are simultaneously archaeological, industrial, cultural-historical, legendary, commercially distributed, satirized, and artistically reanimated. Each one has solved part of the problem and deferred the rest. Latour and Lowe note that the Veronese facsimile in Venice paradoxically triggered plans for a new restoration of the original refectory — “a facsimile of a heavily restored original, now in a new location, was causing new elements to be added to an original in its original location that is in part a facsimile of itself. Originality once seemed so simple.” The Alamogordo situation is less elegant but no less recursive: each segment of the trajectory kept generating the next, the rumor begetting the excavation, the excavation begetting its own afterlife, on and on, with no sign of arriving anywhere final. The trajectory is still open. The questions the objects raise do not resolve. I still owe that camera an apology, and I am still working out what I saw — neither debt seems close to settled.

The post Versions of a Burial: The Atari Landfill Excavation in Museums, Part 2 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

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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