[game_preservation] National Game Registry Blog

[D. Michelle Hinn]

> Well, history chooses what it wants to remember but also what is

> accessible to remember.  How much material was actually done behind

> closed doors (grad school and research projects in the 50's and 60's)

> and simply lost to time?  It's really up to the people involved with

> it originally to come out with it - like what's happened with PLATO as

> of late.  I'm very interested in some of the games that were written

> by kids in Alan Kay's and Adele Goldberg's early smalltalk days at

> Xerox as well during the mid 70's.  AFAIK, those are the first

> mouse/gui based games.

>

> Yeah, PLATO is really interesting because it is one of these  

> threads that wasn't directly connected to the others. From what I  

> see, there is a lot of influence across platforms (arcade to home  

> console and later home console to handheld; home console to PC and  

> PC to console) but ultimately there's the console/arcade branch and  

> the PC branch (which includes mainframe computers). Text adventures  

> for example don't seem to have had a big impact on console games  

> (their successors, the graphics adventures, did however). And even  

> in the PC branch, there are different things going on that weren't  

> necessarily having a direct impact (PLATO was inside PARC). It's a  

> pretty tangled web...


Plato, of course, has a great history at University of Illinois,  
where I received my PhD. My PhD advisor has a lot of information  
about it and I will contact him to see if he can't add a paragraph or  
so about the games created for that. I *think* I remember him telling  
me about a flight sim that was created that became the beginning of  
Microsoft's flight sim. Don't quote me on that! This thread just  
jogged my memory! :)

Michelle