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Some might think the men who wrote what is credited as the first video game ever, Tennis for Two, might regret not patenting his work. If they did, however, the United States government would have owned that patent. And it's fascinating to consider the Department of Energy as a founding investor in the multibillion-dollar video gaming industry of present times.
In a move that seems designed to provide Chinese historians with even more ways to torture their poor students (I know at least one thing I'm forcing my sections to do next quarter), IBM and the Palace Museum have teamed up to offer a virtual, immersive, and interactive version of the Forbidden Palace of Beijing. In contrast to the more typical 3D 'tours' that abound, the "Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time" is sort of Second Life meets the Qing dynasty and eunuchs (minus advertising, a virtual economy, and sex). It's running like a snail on my computer, but is certainly a very neat idea — and in the future, we'll perhaps being seeing more creative uses of virtual worlds for 'cultural' purposes? Full release after the jump:
I meant to post this interesting little history lesson on controller mapping since the NES a few weeks ago, but an ill-fated department camping trip to the wilds of SoCal got in the way; Matthew Gallant of the aptly named 'Quixotic Engineer' takes us down memory lane and on a flying tour of the evolution of various controllers:
As the cultural impact of gaming becomes more apparent to societies where the hobby was once considered as something only children and 'older children' participate in, groups are understandably taking steps to help preserve the rich legacy of video game culture. To that end, academics at Nottingham Trent University have moved to form the United Kingdom's First National Videogame Archive in order to preserve not only consoles, games, and code, but a wide range of items from across the industry that represent gaming's impact on the UK.
Dr James Newman, from Nottingham Trent University's Centre for Contemporary Play, said: "The National Videogame Archive is an important resource for preserving elements of our national cultural heritage. We don't just want to create a virtual museum full of code or screenshots that you could see online. The archive will really get to grips with what is a very creative, social and productive culture."
The National Videogame Archive will be housed at the National Media Museum in Bradford, and will be launched at this year's GameCity 3 festival in Nottingham.
Video game retailers cleaning out an old warehouse in the Rashidia area of Dubai stumbled across video gaming's Pandora's Box - a sealed crate containing 100 Nintendo Virtual Boy systems, intact in their original packaging. The fact that 100 pieces of stock could have been misplaced like this serves as a solid representation of how little people cared for the poor VB.
"This product was just left years ago and nobody knew it was in stock," said Vijay Chandrabota, the purchasing manager for Geekay Games in Dubai. "For me, it was dead stock. I didn't even know that this Virtual Boy existed until we found it."
It sounds like the plot for an Indiana Jones movie, doesn't it? A crate found in a dusty warehouse, with ancient horrors lurking within. Gives me shivers. I'm surprised no faces were melted in the course of the discovery. Of course as a collector I'd still maim any one of you for a chance at have a Virtual Boy in a sealed box, but it had better be one damn tight seal.
Nintendo's 'worst' console wins some new admirers [The National Newspaper]
Yesterday, we mentioned the fact that game designers often walk a fine line when figuring out how best to dangle a nice, looty carrot in front of their audience; somewhat on the same subject (loot!), Roger Travis goes back to the Iliad and even further to illustrate some ancient roots of the same thing we see in modern MMOs: grinding, loot, and boss battles, oh my! And really, even that squad you're running end game content with harkens back to an older group of 'heroes':
I've really been enjoying the posts over at the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection blog, even though it has one of the worst titles I've ever seen. Up recently was a look back at some of the licensed goods in the collection, including this box of the 'Nintendo Cereal System.' And yes, they tried some of the 20 year old cereal before gutting the box to save it for posterity. Eric Kaltman mentions some of the challenges that come along with attempting to preserve these bits of game culture:
Working through the collections provides some rather weird challenges to the discipline of library science. An entire segment of the collection is devoted to items termed as realia, basically commercial products tied to video game concepts or characters. They don't fit on shelves very well, and the exact means of how to preserve these detritus of commercial culture are fraught with an internal debate about their validity to humanity. I think everything should be remembered or recorded fastidiously, but then again I get a thrill out of looking at old Nintendo marketing crud, and I work in a library. That said, these items make my inner child awaken anew and crave some tasty morsels of the past.
I hope we can expect to see more of this sort of stuff — it's fun seeing what librarians at Stanford have decided to add to the collection. Though I would be curious to learn the acquisition backstory — was the cereal just hanging out in someone's personal collection? Two decade old overstock at Ralston Purina?
Errant Nintendo Licensing: Parties, Cereal, and School [How They Got Game]
Horrible Histories is a series of best selling edumacational books that do their best to make learning history fun by focusing on all the most gory, blood-curdling details.
Historical strategy specialists Slitherine — who, confusingly, have nothing to do with that other best selling children's book series — have signed a deal with Scholastic books to create a series of games based on the books and bring them to the PC, Nintendo Wii and DS.
The books lean heavily towards British and European history (well, we have so much more of it) with titles like The Rotten Romans and The Terrible Tudors but former colonies haven't been forgotten with titles such as Revolting Revolutionaries and Westward Wow.
SLITHERINE ANNOUNCES HISTORY WITH ALL THE NASTY BITS LEFT IN [Slitherine]
Have time to waste on this lovely August Saturday? If you do, there's an appallingly expansive look at the history of Atari's early years (19 pages, plus one for citations) over at Gamasutra. This is actually a companion piece to the first Atari retrospective, which looked at the years from '71 to '77 (also clocking in at a mere 20 pages). It's stuffed with quotes, so the length isn't simply 'and then ... and then ... and then ....' Steve Fulton describes this period as one of the most exciting for Atari:
