The game, originally released in arcades in 1993 was never made available outside of the arcades. The console version will support four-player local beat-em-up action and will feature a new character and expanded soundtrack.

Have you played the original game in the arcades? Will you pick this one up on Steam? Let us know in the comment section below!

The post IREM Announces Ninja Baseball League-Man: Bases Loaded on Steam, Consoles This December appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

In this series, we’ll take a game that was ported to different platforms, pick five, and look at what went right, what maybe went wrong, and how they’re all related. Next up is Nintendo’s classic arcade hit Donkey Kong. We’ll look at the arcade original, the Atari 2600 version, the ColecoVision version, a 2-for-1 for the Commodore 64, and the 1994 Game Boy release.

Donkey Kong – Arcade

Arcade

Shigeru Miyamoto created the original arcade version of Donkey Kong, with veteran engineer Gunpei Yokoi supervising the project for Nintendo, and the reason is somewhat unusual. At the time, Nintendo’s most recent release in North America, Radar Scope, was a technically impressive arcade game that failed to find an audience with American arcade goers. They needed a hit that would utilize the same hardware, and Donkey Kong was the answer.

Originally, the game was conceptualized as a Popeye game, with the sailor saving Olive Oyl from the clutches of the evil Bluto. As the concept evolved, it shifted to a carpenter, Jumpman, saving his girlfriend, “the Lady”, from the top of an under-construction building from the giant ape, Donkey Kong. Of course, Jumpman would later become Mario (and change careers from carpenter to plumber), and “the Lady” would be known as Pauline. Donkey Kong would stick til this very day.

The game takes place over four different levels. Each one is a different configuration of levels, girders, and enemies. The ultimate goal of the first three screens would remain the same: get to the top of the screen and rescue your girlfriend. The fourth screen would change it up. Instead of simply reaching your girlfriend, Jumpman must cross eight rivets. Each disappears when crossed. Removing all eight undermines Donkey Kong’s platform, causing him to fall and temporarily reuniting the couple. Finish the fourth screen, and the cycle starts over.

Donkey Kong became a massive success for Nintendo, not only in Japan but in the US as well. Building the game around a story helped to draw players in. Solid platforming mechanics and a variety of gameplay mechanics kept them plunking quarters in for years.

Donkey Kong – Atari 2600

Atari 2600

It’s easy to make fun of the primitive visuals of the Atari 2600 conversion of Donkey Kong, especially compared to the ColecoVision and Intellivision versions, which were out around the same time. But the real beauty of this version isn’t the look; it’s what went into making this port happen in the first place.

Nintendo gave Coleco the license for Donkey Kong. In turn, they developed versions for the ColecoVision, as well as Mattel’s Intellivision and Atari’s 2600 VCS. Legendary programmer Garry Kitchen, who programmed the ColecoVision version, was the sole developer and programmer for the 2600 version. Kitchen recalls working on it during the summer of 1982 under an extremely short deadline. He had only limited assistance and access to an arcade machine for reference. The cartridge ultimately sold nearly 4 million copies.

Original 2600 cartridges contained only 4KB of space. This was the primary constraint that shaped the game’s design and the sacrifices it required. The detail of all graphic elements had to be turned down. Donkey Kong looks more like a giant orange gingerbread man than a gorilla. But even with the reduction in fidelity, everything is recognizable.

The other major tradeoff was fewer available screens. The 2600 version offered only two of the four original playfields: the initial girder level and the final rivets screen. While the game didn’t have the wide variety of the original, including two different screens instead of simply repeating the first screen over and over gave the game the sense of progression from the arcade original.

Even though it is one of the least faithful translations of the original game, Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600 is one of the most commercially important versions, having sold nearly 4 million copies during the life of the system. It showed that, while the system could not necessarily handle arcade-perfect conversions, it could produce versions that captured the original’s spirit at home.

Donkey Kong – ColecoVision

ColecoVision

If the 2600 version demonstrates compromise, the version developed for the ColecoVision demonstrates aspiration.

It is often thought, since Coleco had their own console to think of when developing Donkey Kong for home systems, that they intentionally sabotaged the other versions, the 2600 version in particular. In reality, the systems’ constraints at the time allowed them to develop a version closer to the arcade original for the ColecoVision than for Atari’s console.

Even though the ColecoVision port looks nearly arcade-perfect on the surface, sacrifices were necessary to bring it home. The Cement Factory level (screen 3 of the arcade game) had to be eliminated to fit the game on a cartridge. And while the graphics are much closer to the arcade version than the 2600, many elements still have reduced detail.

One of the biggest reasons that the ColecoVision version was so successful was that it was included as a pack-in game for every ColecoVision system sold. Many credit the bundle with helping drive early hardware sales. While Atari could claim that they had a version of Donkey Kong, Coleco was able to show that they had a game that actually looked the part, and a system that could provide that experience at home.

Donkey Kong – C64 (Ocean)

Commodore 64

Donkey Kong on the king of 8-bit computers is a tale of two developers. While Coleco owned the rights to home console conversions, Atari bought the rights to home computer ports. They created the Atarisoft label specifically for these types of arcade conversions.

In 1983, they released the first version of Donkey Kong for the C64 in North America. Without the same space constraints as the home console versions, Atari could include all four screens in the C64 conversion. The graphics, while nearly as detailed as the arcade version, were stretched from the original’s vertical orientation to fill the entire home computer screen. The 64’s advanced sound capabilities allowed programmers to produce sounds and music that, while obvious versions of the originals, were recognizably Commodore creations.

Three years later, publisher Ocean commissioned a new version of the game for European users, developed by Arcana Software Design. In the three years since the original’s release, developers had gotten better at creating arcade ports closer to the originals, and users had come to expect much more sophisticated versions. Ocean’s version also included all four screens. The graphics were redesigned to look closer to the originals, while the playfield had been compressed to more closely emulate the arcade’s vertical orientation.

Comparatively, the Atarisoft version is generally seen as a slightly slower, more precise gameplay experience, while the Ocean version is mechanically closer to the arcade original but sacrifices some of the Atarisoft version’s smoothness. Both versions are worthy entries in the compendium and should be experienced by any 8-bit computer fans.

Donkey Kong – Game Boy

Game Boy

This is the true wildcard of Donkey Kong conversions. Released in 1994, Donkey Kong on the original Game Boy starts out as a standard but impressive version of the arcade original. Once you make it through the fourth screen, instead of starting over at the first screen again, after Donkey Kong grabs Pauline and exits the top of the screen, Mario follows. Then the actual game begins.

It turns out the original four levels were merely an introduction to the actual game, which consists of 97 levels that, while borrowing their mechanical vocabulary from Donkey Kong, turn the game into a modern puzzle platformer. Mario must find the key on each level and unlock the exit to the next.

Mario gains a number of new abilities here, like backflips, handstands, wire swings, and the ability to carry and throw objects. The backflip and side-somersault ideas are particularly notable because similar moves would later appear in Super Mario 64.

The level mechanics are expansive. Enemies can be stood on, thrown, and used to help Mario reach otherwise inaccessible areas. Some stages let Mario temporarily create ladders, platforms, and springs to move around the level. Mastery of these tools will be important to completing each level. While retrieving the key may be easy, getting both Mario and the key to the exit may be another challenge altogether. You can drop the key temporarily and pick it up again, but if you leave it alone for too long, it will return to its starting place, and you’ll need to backtrack to get it again.

Donkey Kong for the Game Boy is also notable as the first game to support the Super Game Boy adapter for the SNES. When used with the SGB, it gains specially assigned color palettes and presentation enhancements designed specifically for television play.

Unlike arcade Donkey Kong, which is fundamentally an endless score challenge, the Game Boy version is a substantial adventure and therefore includes multiple save slots. This illustrates how much game design had advanced in the 13 years since the original’s release.

The post One Game, Five Systems – Donkey Kong 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.

Neo Geo Pocket Color

But, in October of 1998, arcade publisher SNK decided to throw its hat into the handheld ring. They were known in home arcade circles as the company that produced the most expensive home console of its time, which played the exact same games found in arcades because the hardware was nearly identical. They made further inroads into the home scene with the release of the Neo Geo CD system, which drastically reduced the entry cost over the original cartridge-based system.

Seeking to bring their arcade identity to the handheld market, SNK released the initial black-and-white Neo Geo Pocket in Japan. Focused on fighting, sports, and puzzle games, the initial release lineup consisted of titles such as King of Fighters R-1, Pocket Tennis, and Puzzle Link. Unfortunately, just a week before the Neo Geo Pocket’s release, Nintendo released its new Game Boy Color, which made the Pocket seem dated before it was even in gamers’ hands.

To their credit, SNK responded very quickly, and in March of 1999, just six short months after the original release, it debuted the Neo Geo Pocket Color. This system sported a reflective color TFT screen and full backward compatibility with the original black-and-white games.

NGPC – SNK vs Capcom

The NGPC featured some truly amazing portable versions of SNK’s biggest arcade franchises, including Samurai Shodown, King of Fighters, Fatal Fury, Metal Slug, and Puzzle Bobble. They made the smart decision not to simply try to squeeze the arcade title into a portable screen, as many other publishers had done on both the Game Boy and Sega’s Game Gear. They fully embraced the unique advantages of their portable hardware and reengineered the titles into portable versions that, for the most part, exist only on this system.

SNK also managed to get a couple of third parties on board with the portable, with the release of Mega Man: Battle and Fighters, two versions of the card battler SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighter’s Clash, and the “VS” series fighter SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium. They even scored an exclusive game starring Sega’s mascot, Sonic, with Sonic the Hedgehog: Pocket Adventures.

In June 1999, the Neo Geo Pocket Color was finally released to the North American market, finding retail space in stores like Toys “R” Us, Electronics Boutique, Software Etc., and Babbage’s. While it was never able to match the success of Nintendo’s devices in the West, it did offer a unique alternative that many gamers were willing to give a chance.

The specs of the NGPC were impressive. Its main CPU was a Toshiba TLCS-900/H 16-bit processor at 6.144 MHz, with a Z80 used for sound. The reflective TFT-format LCD had a 160×152 resolution, a 4,096-color palette, and 146 simultaneous colors. SNK also claimed roughly 40 hours of battery life from two AA batteries, which was excellent for a color handheld of the period, and between 10 and 20 hours more than the Game Boy Color on the same number of batteries.

NGP – Samurai Shodown

Probably the most unique feature of the Pocket, and the one thing that most of us remember and long to appear on subsequent handhelds, was the control scheme. It featured a control stick, two action buttons, and an option button that was repurposed in many ways in different games, from simply pausing the game to selecting weapons. That sounds pretty standard, but the miniature control stick was truly unique. It utilized a series of four microswitches that provided a vers satisfying “click” when you moved the stick in any direction. The controller was particularly well-suited to the fighting games that appeared on the system, with special moves remarkably easy to pull off, especially compared to the inferior d-pad controls of other handheld consoles.

The system accumulated a total library of 82 games released in Japan, including the 9 titles initially released for the black-and-white system. Of the 73 Color titles, 31 were released in the North American market. Fortunately, the system was not region-locked, so gamers could play Japanese imports without technical issues. Games such as Cool Boarders Pocket and Fantastic Night Dreams: Cotton depended very little on knowledge of Japanese to navigate and were easy for non-Japanese speakers to pick up and play, while the extensive range of RPG and simulation titles released in Japan remained largely out of reach.

Interestingly, while many will assume that Nintendo and, more importantly, Pokémon, were responsible for the eventual failure of the New Geo Pocket Color, that was only part of it. Yes, unfortunately, SNK launched a monochrome system at exactly the wrong time, on the heels of the Game Boy Color’s release. Even with the relatively quick turnaround in releasing the color iteration of the hardware, they had already lost significant momentum in the marketplace to Nintendo. But even by 2000, the system was showing progress, with titles being shown as late as the 2000 E3 Showcase. SNK knew they wouldn’t be able to knock Nintendo out of the top spot, but they were satisfied with the market share they had captured by then.

NGPC – Sonic the Hedgehog: Pocket Adventure

Unfortunately, SNK’s corporate situation was deteriorating. Japanese pachinko manufacturer Aruze acquired SNK in January 2000, largely for its intellectual property, and they gave little support to SNK’s video game business. Aruze subsequently shut down SNK’s operations outside Japan, cutting off the Western NGPC business just as it was beginning to develop retail traction. In June of 2000, US and Canadian distribution of the system and games was officially shut down. Retailers quickly liquidated remaining stock. SNK Japan released titles until 2001, when the system was officially retired.

Like many failed handheld consoles of the 80s and 90s, the New Geo Pocket Color lives on in the used marketplace. Mod kits exist that let you add rechargeable batteries, USB-C power, and even a fully lit IPS color screen to your system, giving it a truly modern feel while still retaining what makes it a classic system: the games and the controls. If you’re not able to get hold of a used system and games, you are still able to experience many of the best of these games with the two NGPC game collections that were released for the Nintendo Switch and Windows.

I love this system. I managed to snag one shortly after it was released in North America, and I was really rooting for it, especially having seen my previous favorite handheld, the Atari Lynx, fail miserably. Unfortunately, success was not in the cards, but it still holds an honored place in my personal collection.

The post Neo Geo Pocket Color: Arcading Gaming in Your Pocket? 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.

The arcade took 5 years to complete and make ready to play. There were 24,029 Legos used which equaled 170 pounds of Legos
If you add the monitor and other mechanics , the arcade is over 240 pounds total.  Everything from the trackball to the light gun is fully functional as well as the coin slot which you can put a token in and it will count as a credit to paly the game.  It is four player which is incredible and there are over 10,000 loaded games on it.

For the history of this machine click here

The Full story of Lego from the create click here

The post “The Brickade” – Fully Functioning Lego Arcade Machine appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

The Slug Comes to Life

Metal Slug was developed by Nazca Corporation, a creative studio formed by ex-employees of arcade and pachinko manufacturer, Irem. Though not generally known by name, retro gamers should be familiar with some of Irem’s most popular titles, namely the classic beat ’em up, Kung-Fu Master, and the beloved shoot ’em up, R-Type. Unfortunately, Irem ceased creation of video games in 1994, leading several developers to spin off and form Nazca Corporation.

Due to their experience working on other run ‘n gun games like In the Hunt and GunForce II, Nazca Corporation looked to create a new title in the same genre, but one that was a bit more methodical in its pacing. Inspired by the animated films of legendary director Hayao Miyazaki, they focused on hand-drawn visuals, a goofy and comedic vibe, and accessible controls.

At first, Metal Slug mostly put players in control of a bulky tank, battling through several brief but explosive missions. However, after several play tests around Osaka, Japan, the game was completely overhauled. Though the story remained the same, the new version removed the emphasis on tanks, extended the level length, and added more platforming elements.

A Metal Success

When Metal Slug was published by SNK and released in arcades circa 1996, it was met with a somewhat muted response. Though players enjoyed the humor and evocative visuals, they felt the replay value was limited, especially considering the high difficulty and short gameplay length. Still, Metal Slug was massively popular, and work began on ports for several home consoles, including the Neo Geo, Sega Saturn, and Sony PlayStation. At one point, a version for the Game Boy Advance was in development as well, but was ultimately canceled.

A startling success in and out of arcades, it was immediately clear that Nazca Corporation and SNK had a winner on their hands, and it wasn’t long before sequels and spin-offs started to crop up. A direct sequel, Metal Slug 2, was released in 1998, followed by Metal Slug 3 in 2000, which is generally seen as the best entry in the franchise. The series eventually wrapped up in 2008 with the release of Metal Slug 7 on the Nintendo DS, but remakes and spin-offs have continued.

Most recently, a tactical strategy game, Metal Slug Tactics, was released to decent fanfare, but many fans still hold out hope for a Metal Slug 8 sometime soon. Either way, we can look back fondly on the original Metal Slug and Nazca Corporation’s appreciation for run ‘n gun gameplay, as it birthed one of the best arcade staples of the 90s, an action-packed romp that is still just as fun to play today as it was 30 years ago.

The post The Origins of SNK’s Hardest Run ‘n Gun appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

On Friday May 29th, Clear River Games confirmed that they would be rereleasing the classic CAVE shooters Pink Sweets: Ibara Sorekara and Muchi Muchi Pork! on modern consoles. The developer City Connection is responsible for bringing the games to the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch. The shooters originally came out in 2006 and 2007 respectively. They were two of eighteen vertical shooters that CAVE produced in collaboration with AMI for Japanese arcades from 2002-2011.

Why these two specific titles were singled out for this rerelease wasn’t entirely clear. Pink Sweets is the third title in the Ibara series of shooters, but with a much more colorful food inspired palette. Muchi Muchi Pork! is themed around pigs and makes extensive use of a lard system as a core gameplay mechanic. The only apparent commonality between these two titles, as opposed to other CAVE shooters from this time period, is that they were licensed for an Xbox 360 release back in 2011.

The original arcade game modes will be included in this release, although there will also be multiple new arrangements that will make these shooters more accessible to casual fans as well as more difficult for hardcore players seeking a greater challenge. The compilation is set to see a digital release on October 1st on the online Playstation 5 and Nintendo Switch stores. A physical version of the game will be available for purchase starting on October 26th.

The post PinkSweets and Muchi Muchi Pork! Ports Confirmed for Modern Systems appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

Video stores degenerated like magnetic tape.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter the smaller scale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One object on display stops me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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