[game_preservation] National Game Registry Blog

[Martin Goldberg]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Devin Monnens <dmonnens at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you for the information Marty.

> There's actually two projects I'm working on now.

> 1) A survey of game preservation archives, projects, and initiatives around

> the world (this article came up when I was doing a search).


You can add myself, Curt Vendel, and Karl Morris to that.  We run
archives of industry material.  That includes hardware, software,
corporate documents, etc.



> 2) An article on the development of computer games from the period of

> 1961-1972 and especially why there is so little documentation over a ten

> year period outside of Spacewar (which was extremely popular) and Brown Box

> (when the following 10 year period is chock full of new innovations).


You have to understand the context on this.  Most of what you're
looking for was done behind closed doors in research labs, university
labs, etc. or for a very limited audience during that period.  It
hadn't ventured outside to become a commercial product yet or meet the
general populace.  There's more documentation on Spacewar because it
wound up being included outside of that environment via being used as
a test program by DEC for shipping mainframes, and spread from there.
And even then, you wouldn't of heard of it or Tennis for Two if it
hadn't been for the Magnavox court cases when they were presented as
evidence to try and invalidate Ralph's patents (which they failed on).
 And the brown box?  That's because the development of the devices
that lead to the brown box, and the brown box itself, represent the
video game industry's first patents.

As to why documentation suddenly starts appearing abundantly 1972
onwards: It wasn't until the efforts of the counter culture in the
late 60's and early 70's - to promote the understanding and use of
computer technology amongst the common people - that it started
hitting more of the mainstream.  That's why by '72 you have magazines
like Rolling Stone covering Spacewar and Xerox PARC, in addition to
the Magnavox Odyssey and arcade Pong being unleashed on consumers,
microprocessors starting to enter consumer devices thanks to Intel -
all contributing to a perfect storm of technology on the consumer's
and general populace's conscience.  I.E. it was starting to become
part of the culture and the collective interest.


> I would be very interested in

> seeing what you located and if you know a paper trail I can continue

> following.

>


That's why I'm here and why I joined the project per your request. ;)

As far as the TX-0 and some of the games done there, that (and the
people surrounding it) are covered pretty well in Steven Levy's
seminal book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" (1984).  For
example, it covers the first (that I'm aware of ) networked game play
- when the mischievous bunch of hackers at MIT "hacked" up a hardwired
connection between the TX-0 and another mainframe several rooms over
and got two professors to unwittingly play each other in chess (they
were told it was a chess program they were playing).



> With Steve Kent's book, I find it more interesting regarding not so much

> what the people are saying but what they are not saying. It is very easy in

> that regard to tell what the person is like and how his character shaped the

> industry, even when you can't take what he says as completely true.


An interesting approach.  Do you have an example of some of these
conclusions of what's not being said?



Marty