2420: Gaming History and Archiving

At the time of writing, the copy of Launchbox on my computer is loaded with over 16,000 games across a number of different platforms ranging from the early days of computing right up until (relatively) recently with some PlayStation 1 titles.

I can happily lose several hours going back through some of these games — particularly those which I used to enjoy when I was young, and which I am now better equipped to fully understand. The advent of the Internet also means that any games which are somewhat obtuse or abstract can be researched easily, which is something we simply didn’t have access to back in the ’80s and early ’90s — many of the games we had on home computer platforms in particular were copies of questionable origin and consequently didn’t have any instructions included, and as such you had to either figure out how to do things yourself or already know how the game worked.

Games were often simpler back then, of course, although there are plenty of examples of titles that pushed their hardware to the limits in an attempt to simulate something with a reasonable degree of accuracy — Sublogic’s Flight Simulator II on the Atari 8-bit springs to mind, as does MicroProse’s submarine simulation Silent Service on the same platform. Even among the simpler titles, though, there are plenty of games whose abstract goals aren’t necessarily very clear, or there might be a few hidden controls on the keyboard the game doesn’t explicitly tell you about — we were in the age of both “joysticks with one button” and “games without tutorials” at this point, remember.

Playing these old games always gets me to thinking, though. While there are a number of websites out there cataloguing and in some cases even hosting dumps of these old games, is anyone doing anything more than saying “this game came out in 19xx, it was released on [platforms]?” Is anyone approaching the subject with a bit more of an eye to historical interpretation, rather than just plain cataloguing and archiving?

Some people out there probably are already, but I feel like it’s time I added my unique perspective to the mix. I feel like this every time I have a conversation with someone where I have the opportunity to bring up games like Star Raiders II and Final Legacy. I want to do something about it.

I’m currently determining the best way to go about it, but I’m very interested in the idea of some sort of project to highlight and explore noteworthy games from history — particularly those on more (relatively) obscure platforms such as the Atari 8-bit and ST. Whether this takes the form of a website, a book (or several books), a series of videos or all of the above is something I haven’t quite determined yet, but while I have some time on my hands it would be something for me to sink my teeth into and keep me occupied, much like MoeGamer has been.

I have some thinking to do, it seems!