Preserving Games

Archiving the Creation Processes of the Video Game Industry

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Tag: videogame

Book Review: Racing the Beam

12 February, 2010 (12:01) | Literature Review | By: walker

Montfort, N., & Bogost, I. (2009). Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Platform Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Just want to give a brief rundown on a really great read I’ve come across. MIT has started a “Platform Studies” series of books where the idea is to examine a platform and its technologies […]

What Went Wrong? A Survey of Problems in Game Development

19 October, 2009 (20:48) | Literature Review | By: walker

Fábio Petrillo et al., “What went wrong? A survey of problems in game development,” Computers in Entertainment 7, no. 1 (2, 2009): 1-22. This February 2009 article from the Computer in Entertainment magazine of ACM takes a look at the game industry and compares its difficulties to the larger software industry. Specifically the authors analyze […]

Space Invaders

2 June, 2009 (11:01) | Emulation and Vintage Gameplay | By: walker

Space Invaders is iconic. You need only look at UT’s own Videogame Archive logo to get a feel for the pervasiveness of its visuals and the sort of shorthand it’s become for videogames in general. Back in 1977 game developer Toshihiro Nishikado began work on Space Invaders, creating by hand the hardware necessary to programming the […]

Are Videogames Art?

6 April, 2009 (13:41) | Literature Review | By: TimA

John Lancaster recently published an essay in “The London Review of Books” titled “Is it Art?”.  The essay considers the position of videogames in global culture and asks the question: should videogames, which have surpassed music and video sales in the United Kingdom, be considered a form of art?  This is a huge and difficult […]

Not-So-Sensible World of Soccer

23 February, 2009 (12:43) | Emulation and Vintage Gameplay | By: admin

My experiences playing Warcraft reminded me of a time when games were simpler, and I enjoyed reliving those memories.  Sensible World of Soccer, on the other hand, reminded me that, when it comes to sports games, added complexity is a necessity that is sometimes taken for granted by younger players like myself.  To get right […]

Warcraft – Army of Four

23 February, 2009 (10:22) | Emulation and Vintage Gameplay | By: admin

Of the many games that Blizzard created for the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo franchises, the only one that seems to have been all but forgotten by the company is the original Warcraft.  On Blizzard’s official website, the company features detailed web pages for their games dating back to Diablo and Warcraft II, but there is […]

Playing Mario on a Keyboard

5 February, 2009 (11:58) | Emulation and Vintage Gameplay | By: TimA

Twenty three years after Super Mario Brothers was released in the United States, emulated versions of the game are available for download on numerous websites.  Playing Mario on a keyboard,  however, is not the most intuitive way to play the game.  As the actual Nintendo Entertainment Systems can not be preserved indefinitely, how does one […]

Spacewar!

26 January, 2009 (13:57) | Emulation and Vintage Gameplay | By: TimA

Spacewar! is arguably the first videogame ever created. It was released in 1962 on the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processing) computer which had marked a massive shift in the philosophy of computer design when it was released just three years earlier in 1959. For today’s gamer, Spacewar! seems rather simple. There are two spaceships. Each player […]

Doom: 15 Years Later

13 January, 2009 (21:00) | Emulation and Vintage Gameplay | By: admin

In 2007, Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, presented a video game canon in order to encourage initial preservation efforts by the Library of Congress.  On this list of ten important video games is the 1993 DOS-based game Doom, and rightly so.  Doom is one of the earliest, […]

Preservation and Emulation – A Guide to Installing “Ultima 1: The First Age of Darkness”

12 December, 2008 (01:11) | Emulation and Vintage Gameplay | By: TimA

An important method to preserve videogame content, and all content contained in electronic records for that matter, is emulation.  In order to access many DOS-based videogames, for example, one must download a DOS emulator.  These emulators are now widely available on the Internet and videogames that are no longer playable on modern operating systems can […]