[game_preservation] National Game Registry Blog

[Martin Goldberg]

Devin - unfortunately I find it commonplace and it's a challenge when
trying to document the past.  There's usually a number of issues to
weed through -

a) You're dealing with people's memories of events that happened 25-30
or more years ago.  They're bound to be faulty in some regards.

b) Something incorrect has been told for so long, it's become the
widespread fact (as the similar saying goes).

c) Some have a vested interest in overstating their contributions or
involvement, to the point of playing loose with the facts and
frequently engaging in PR.

As someone currently engaged in writing three books (a two volume set
on Atari Inc. and Atari Corp.'s contributions to the industry, and
another book on the coin industry from it's transition from mech to
video up through their first crash - which btw is in a different cycle
from the home console industry), I can honestly say that's why my
partner and I tend to go by verifiable facts whenever possible.
Engineering logs, corporate documents, etc., and in the case of oral
history we try and cross reference as much as possible.

Look at the case of Ted Dabney, a mystery to many and to most a
complete unknown - all because of Nolan's PR, which tends to rewrite
history in his favor.  Besides tracking Ted down for direct
interviews, we were able to track down other early Atari Inc.
employees to corroborate, and in some cases provide documents from the
time period.

Or our current focus on the home industry crash period (late '82
through late '84), weeding through court documents to correct the
missinformation by RJ Mical regarding the Atari Inc/Amiga/Atari Corp
debacle, or internal projects and research Atari Inc. had been working
on, etc.

The link you just gave is another interesting quandary, as its an
example of "incorrect info being told as truth long enough" just
waiting to happen.  Their statement "50 years since the development of
the first computer game" (which I'm assuming they're referring to
Tennis for Two), repeated often in the article, is of course
incorrect.  You have Claude Shannon's chess program in 1950, Nimrod in
1951, Naughts and Crosses in 1952 (developed right in the authors' own
country at Cambridge), a host of games at MIT on the TX-0 through the
mid to late 50's, etc.  The issue is, people will see the paper and
use it as a reference.  Then someone else will see that paper, and so
on.

Steve Kent's book, Ultimate History of Video Games, is notorious for
that.  It's so often referred to by people doing research, but so full
of incorrect information and inaccuracies, that they get repeated as
fact now.   I do appreciate the work Steve put in to it traveling all
over and conducting interviews and such.  But it seems like very
little fact checking was done.


Marty


On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Devin Monnens <dmonnens at gmail.com> wrote:

> You know, I know this project exists. But I can't find it on the web. You

> would think the LOC would be googleable?

> I did find another survey paper published 2009. They are all researchers

> from the UK:

> http://lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/DiGRA09/Thursday%203%20September/State%20of%20Play%20a.pdf

>

> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 11:12 PM, Martin Goldberg <wgungfu at gmail.com> wrote:

>>

>> Interesting.  Without getting in to their definition of "video game",

>> took a look over some of the info and it's erroneous, which I'm

>> surprised at for the Library of Congress.  Unless the errors were done

>> by the blogger?  For example, the key personnel in both Computer

>> Space, Pong and Breakout.

>>

>> Computer Space was done by Ted Dabney *and* Nolan Bushnell.  Ted did

>> all the major circuitry design (spot generator, etc.), Nolan worked on

>> the finished product after selling it to Nutting.

>>

>> Pong - Ralph didn't create the tennis game it was taken from, that was

>> one of the two people on his game system project, Bill Rusch.

>> Likewise, Al Alcorn was not the "programmer".  The game has no CPU, it

>> was designed in pure TTL logic.  Al would be the "engineer".

>>

>> Breakout - The concept was by Nolan and Steve Bristow.  Likewise,

>> Wozniak only did an early version of Breakout.  Once again, this is a

>> pure logic TTL based game, no coding.  The actual version of Breakout

>> released was engineered at Atari's Cyan labs by Gary Waters.

>>

>>

>> Marty

>>

>>

>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 11:16 PM, Devin Monnens <dmonnens at gmail.com> wrote:

>> > Found this while, as usual, digging for something else. It's a blog

>> > listing

>> > all the games that had as of February been inducted into the LOC

>> > National

>> > Game Registry. Includes a description of each.

>> >

>> > http://thenoisingmachine.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/national-game-registry/

>> >

>> > --

>> > Devin Monnens

>> > www.deserthat.com

>> >

>> > The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

>> >

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>

>

> --

> Devin Monnens

> www.deserthat.com

>

> The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

>

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