The Video Game History Foundation library opens in early access
gamehistory.org
gamehistory.org
Rather than be a jerk and talk about why there are so few references to the text and early graphics games from the 60s and 70s, maybe I'll have to pitch the VGHF people on a blog post and book and software collection focused on the 60s-70s era of computer gaming.
I was introduced to computers (and computer gaming) in the mid-70s, just immediately before the "trinity" microcomputers hit the market in '77. Our school district in North Texas had access to an HP mainframe (HP-2000?) to teach advanced kids BASIC. Part of my early education involved tearing apart the text-oriented BASIC versions of Hammurabi, Hunt the Wumpus and Star Trek. They would hardly be called "games" today. My dad had business contacts at UIUC and they were infamous for giving ANYONE a PLATO account, so I learned about the friendly orange glow and social computing in "the data center in the corn field." Anyone who played rogue or PLATO/EMPIRE could see where the industry was going by 1980.
And the sad bit is we've lost most of the people who developed these games in the 60s and 70s. I think I'll pitch the idea of a small collection of David Ahl books, DECUS games tapes and an interview or two with a few of the remaining coders.
Give me a +1 if you're hip to the old text based games, often coded in BASIC and played on microcomputers.
I am hip to two generations of text based games, and HP 2000B. We programmed roulette on B.U.S.D, Berkeley Unified School District. Got the David Ahl books, but did not have access to the DECUS games tapes. ( Now I find that David Ahl was working at DEC, got canned, and then started Creative Computing )
Add Life, and Lunar Lander.
Later in college, we had IBM PCs, Monochrome, so ... we found both Rogue, and went over to Berkeley, and met Michael, and Glenn. We also had Empire, converted from Fortran, to the PC. and... Nethack. We wanted to get Nethack running on Xenix... blew up the whole machine twice...
And of corse HHGTTG. Hitch Hikers guide to the galaxy. Over at Egghead, the sales guy had solved most of it, and told us about the really hardest parts. Now, the entire Infocomm library runs in a web browser.
Soon, my roommate got an Amiga, and a modem.
Also the subtle flex of making the Donkey Kong girders on an angle when the 2600 is a 'race the beam' system where each scanline must be computed. Even modern homebrew remakes of Donkey Kong on 2600 have horizontal girders.
Frank is regularly involved with some bizarre drama. He likes to take credit for stuff him and his crew had no part in. Once he even demanded that Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony revoke THQ Nordic's publishing license all because they did an AMA on a site he didn't like. There's plenty more but this is not the appropriate venue.
The website is operational and usable, and will have more content added to it over time. Much like early access games. I wonder what the actual distinction is.
Edit: it's here: https://archive.gamehistory.org/explore
That said, it is of course bizarre that we've gotten to a place where a video game history museum can't have video games for legal reasons. Imagine a museum of paleontology that can show you photos of paleontologists digging but can't show you any dinosaur bones.
Also can recommend for anyone that finds themselves in Frisco, Texas: https://nvmusa.org/
Based on my experience with Vision, I'd be extremely surprised if this OCR system is more accurate and cost effective overall.
For me it seems like this might be yet another example of the sunk cost fallacy.
In his quest to deeply research the evidence, perform interviews with the people involved with Maxis's Business Simulations Division, and document the history of Maxis's long lost SimRefinery, Phil was able to pull off the astronomically unlikely miracle of actually finding someone who had an extremely rare readable floppy disk of it! The articles he wrote tell an amazing story.
A close look at SimRefinery:
https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-analysis/
>Two nights ago, a reader on the tech news site Ars Technica named postbebop uploaded a copy of SimRefinery to the Internet Archive. This is incredibly exciting news, and it’s given us our first chance to take a closer look at the game. SimRefinery was not fully completed by Maxis, and we can learn a lot about the game from the state it was left in. Based on my research, I want to add some context and explain what some of the peculiarities the game might say about its development.
Ep. 11: SimRefinery Simulated by a Refined Phil Salvador:
https://gamehistory.org/ep-11-simrefinery-simulated-by-a-ref...
>Today’s episode features the bizarre origins of SimRefinery as well as other Sim titles which never came to be. Phil Salvador joins the Video Game History Hour to discuss a branch of Maxis, Business Simulations Division, which gives us a glimpse into a path-not-taken, alternate reality where Maxis might have only made a name for themselves in the world of business. A world where powerhouse franchises like SimCity and The Sims never existed. But alas, perhaps we could have had, but now never will have, SimArby’s. </3
SimRefinery Recovered (obscuritory.com):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425041
https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-recovered/
>Never say never! Thanks to a reader on Ars Technica and an anonymous chemical engineer, a working copy of SimRefinery has been successfully recovered.
>Two weeks ago, I published my long-in-the-works article about Maxis Business Simulations, a division of SimCity developer Maxis that made simulation games for businesses. It was the culmination of four years of research, and I’m very proud to share their story.
>One of the games they produced was SimRefinery, an oil refinery simulation for Chevron. Very little was widely known about the game until now, and the article kicked off a wave of interest in SimRefinery that seems to have reached beyond gaming circles. Shortly after the article was published, it was picked up by the tech news site Ars Technica, where one reader, postbebop, reported that they knew a retired chemical engineer who worked at Chevron, who confirmed that he owned a copy of the game. postbebop walked the engineer through the process of reading the data from the original floppy disk, and he was able to create a digital copy.
It has a timeline, magazines, videos, nes guides and a DOS box emulator that you can play the game on. All in about 10 seconds.
> The librarian renewed all existing exemptions except for the exemption for accessible access to video games, for which there was no petition for renewal.
https://www.arl.org/news/librarian-of-congress-expands-dmca-...
There's enough balls being dropped here that multiple organizations with different boards, advisors, and funding models are needed. Kudos to all involved.
Just search for literally any piece of software or media you want, and you will find multiple copies of it uploaded by random people without permission. Petabytes upon petabytes of games, movies, TV shows, software, etc. constantly uploaded 24/7 for years, is all right there out in the open for anyone in the world to download. Want a zip file with every Nintendo game ever made? There's a dozen different scene groups all with their full dumps available right there. Have a favorite TV show? They have every episode of it.
Jason Scott himself has publicly advocated for people to "upload whatever you want and ask questions later" because it's "too difficult" to figure out copyright and their stance is always to just wait until a rightsholder complains before taking anything down.
You can even play Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and thousands more from one click in the browser if downloading the stuff to your hard drive instead of your browser cache is too much trouble.
It's also professionally curated, which means you can trust the scans and metadata to be accurate and consistent. Aside from that, VGHF has a ton of material that archive.org doesn't (donated collections from game industry people[2], magazines that have yet to be scanned by anyone). Much of that isn't in the digital archive yet, but it's coming.
[1] https://archive.gamehistory.org/search?keyword=%22m.c.%20kid... These scans actually turned out to contain early, pre-release mockups of the game still in development, which I've now documented on TCRF. https://tcrf.net/Prerelease:M.C._Kids This whole process took me less than an hour.
That actually would be a topic of particular interest to this community.
Some of the layouts of these enthusiast magazines are so chaotic (looking at you Hardcore Gamefan) that the current technology for parsing text from scans wasn't good enough and they had to develop their own.
(In the spirit of many games that get released these days).