At the Game Developers Conference on Friday in San Francisco, Georgia Tech professor and author Ian Bogost talked about the lessons that can be learned by game designers from the iconic Atari 2600.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)
SAN FRANCISCO--If you draw a straight line representing the evolution of video games from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo Wii, one thing is clear: if you don't know your past, you can't know your future.
That was the central lesson of Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost's Friday talk at the Game Developers Conference here, "Learning from the Atari 2600." Essentially, Bogost argued, it's not always necessary to reinvent the wheel; sometimes, instead of being discarded as so much arcane, the discoveries of the past are best adapted for the future.
Bogost and MIT assistant professor Nick Monfort recently published Racing the Beam, a book about the iconic Atari VCS, popularly known as the 2600. So Bogost's talk Friday was clearly drawn from the research for that project. And while his fondness for the 1970s-era video game console was evident, the point he was really trying to make was that the seeds of successful games--especially those enjoyed by large groups of diverse people--have very little to do with the latest and greatest technology and much more to do with mechanics that make for enjoyable shared experiences.
'Racing the Beam,' the new book by Ian Bogost and Nick Monfort, looks at the history and lessons that can be drawn from the Atari 2600.
(Credit: Ian Bogost and Nick Monfort)For Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, a former carnival barker, the bloodlines that led to the 2600 were three things, Bogost argued: the fun-for-the-whole-family excitement of a midway, the shared competition of a game of darts played in a tavern, and the gather-around-the-TV sense of family time afforded by the den. At the same time, Bushnell wanted to repeat the success he'd had with coin-op arcade games like "Pong," but for the home.
What he was after was what Nintendo has also tried to build into its Wii: a feeling that people can have fun doing something together. That's why going to the movies is so much fun, or going out with friends to a bar: because it's something people can do together, in a social space, whether they're competing or not.
And it's about context, Bogost said. You can drink at home, but it's not as fun as doing it in a bar. Or you play pool in your house, but it's not the same thing as doing it with friends at the local tavern. And while no video game system can replicate being out in public, the right mix of game mechanics and tools can allow people to feel like they're in the middle of a social scene, even if they're in their living room.
"That's why Wii Bowling is the best game in the Wii Sports collection," Bogost said. "It really re-creates the experience and context" of real bowling.
"So what we see, I think in the (2600)," Bogost said, "is the adaptation of familiar subjects for familiar spaces."
He talked about the successes and failures of some of the games designed for the 2600, explaining that, for example, the original 2600 Pac-Man game didn't work because its designers didn't do a good job of adapting many of the atmospheric elements of the original arcade version. For example, it was missing the familiar music, as well as the animation of Pac-Man chomping and turning as he made his way around the maze.
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InstantAction is a new service launching Tuesday that offers publishers and game developers a new model for getting their work in front of players, all without having to go through retail outlets. The service is starting with nine games, but it can support nearly any game.
(Credit: InstantAction.com)Game developers looking for a new way to get their work in front of large audiences may soon have a new tool that could allow them to bypass the restrictive and risk-averse world of retailers.
A new service, known as InstantAction, is set to officially launch Tuesday. It aims to free developers, both inside and outside big publishers, from the traditional distribution constraints of selling PC- or console-based games.
The idea behind InstantAction is to provide developers with an end-to-end process for putting their games online, making them browser-based and making it possible for players to easily join their friends' games at any time, without the need for a proprietary service like Microsoft's Xbox Live.
And unlike the growing number of casual games, 2D virtual worlds, and Flash-based virtual-world platforms, InstantAction promises to support complete versions of just about any full-scale, or AAA, game a publisher wants to make available online. Brett Sayler, vice president of technology for InstantAction, said the service offers the first high-quality 3D games on the Web.
While the service's technology could, in theory, support a game like "World of Warcraft" or any number of titles from a publisher like Electronic Arts, it's more likely that, in the early going, at least, the service would be utilized by less-established publishers.
"The people this would likely appeal to are major publishers and game developers who," said Sayler, "are unsatisfied with the gaming-(distribution) options available right now."
Good match for Atari?
As a hypothetical example, Sayler pointed to Atari, which, in its current iteration--wholly owned by Infogrames, it is not the high-flying company it once was--has struggled to find substantial traction with retailers and consumers.
"Atari is a well-known brand with good (titles)," Sayler said, "fighting a losing battle at retail."
Working with InstantAction, Sayler said, still speaking hypothetically, Atari could make some or all of its games available to consumers via the Web in a matter of months, bypassing big-box retailers and game-centric franchises in the process and, therefore, being able to concentrate more on building its games.
Another advantage that InstantAction offers its partners, Sayler said, is browser-based. Because the games are played--and authenticated--through a Web browser, they are intended to be much harder, if not impossible, to pirate, meaning that publishers can stop worrying about digital rights management. That, said Sayler, is something that has bedeviled PC game makers.
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NeoEdge has created a widget that any site can add that will link to a large library of casual game titles.
(Credit: NeoEdge)NeoEdge, a casual-games-based ad network company whose chairman is Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, launched on Wednesday a system designed to make it easy for Web sites to add a widget that links to its library of games.
The company, which previously built a system that "wraps" ads around casual games like Diner Dash, is now attempting to leverage the huge popularity of such titles by making it simple for any Web site to use its widget and become a front end to its more than 400 games.
Casual games--which can be played in a short period of time and which attract more older users than do core games--often cost $10 or so to play and can bring large revenue streams to sites that host them.
Ty Levine, NeoEdge's vice president of marketing, called the widget a "simple turnkey" for any publisher on the Web to add a casual game channel or link to the NeoEdge library.
There are more than 90 million adults playing casual games today, Levine asserted.
Levine added that Web site owners are free to find ad sponsorships for the widgets they put on their sites and to keep all the revenue from any such deals. Or site owners can adopt a pay-per-download model and share revenue with NeoEdge.
And while NeoEdge could end up with no revenue coming directly from sites' usage of its widget, it's clear that it wins if sites--either large portal sites, small blogs, or social networking services like its launch customer, PerfSpot--drive traffic to its casual-games library.
Note: On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.
Atari, which has gone from a once high-flying video game company to little more than a placeholder brand name owned by another company, announced Thursday that it has been delisted by Nasdaq.
The company, which is now fully owned by games publisher Infogrames, said in a statement that it received a letter on May 7 from Nasdaq "stating that a Nasdaq listing qualifications panel has determined to delist Atari Inc.'s securities from the Nasdaq Global Market and will suspend trading of Atari...shares effective" Friday.
The release also said that Atari plans to appeal the delisting, but that its doing so would not delay the process of having its shares taken off of Nasdaq.
On April 30, Infogrames, which owned 51.4 percent of Atari, announced that it would buy the remaining shares.
All in all, this is an ignominious step in the once-famed Atari's story. In many ways, Atari started the modern video games industry, and in the 1980s it was one of the biggest names in consumer electronics. But over the years, its fortunes fell and more recently, it has been little more than a brand name used by Infogrames.
On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.
Last month, some of Silicon Valley's biggest names showed up at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., for the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64.
What no one I heard mentioned, despite the presence of Pong designer Al Alcorn, was that October marked the 30th anniversary of what may have been an even more influential video game machine, the Atari 2600.
Now, over at GameSpy, Marty Goldberg has spun for us the story of the creation of that iconic console.
The Atari 2600 turned 30 in October. Now, GameSpy is telling the story behind the groundbreaking video game console.
(Credit: Wikipedia)And when I say iconic, I do mean it. After all, who doesn't recognize the 2600's signature joystick, that particularly ugly black thing with the circle of orange around the middle and a bright orange button? See?
Goldberg's story begins in the summer of 1975 with the release of the Sears home version of Pong. From there, Goldberg weaves a tale of the history of the 2600 that begins with the search for the machine's microprocessor and goes on from there.
This is actually a three-part series, and parts two and three have yet to run.
But for anyone with a serious interest in the history of video games and video game technology, this is a must-read.
The Commodore 64 may be the best-selling computer of all time. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., celebrated the C64's 25th anniversary Monday night.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--I don't want to date myself, but when I was in high school, one of the things I remember was that, among the geeks like myself who hung out in the computer lab, a bit of a culture war was under way.
No, it wasn't Macs versus Windows. But Apple was a player in this battle.
In fact, it was the Commodore 64 versus the Apple IIe, and while the school had a collection of Apples in the lab that all of us had to use, those of us who had C64s felt like we we owned the superior computer.
Maybe it was because the machine seemed pluckier. More accessible to the common man. Easier to use. Better looking. Whatever. We knew we were right. Those Apple owners were stuck-up elitists.
I suppose today some people probably feel the same about the Mac versus Windows stand-off, and, well, once again, as a Mac user this time, I'm on the right side of the fence.
But Monday, it was all about the Commodore 64, as hundreds of Silicon Valley's best and brightest came out to the Computer History Museum here to celebrate the machine's 25th anniversary.
It's hard to believe it's been that long. But I can still remember the day when my dad and I went to the local Long's to pick up my new C64. It was one of the happiest days of high school I can remember.
Over the years, I put that computer through its paces. I played endless games on it. I wrote BASIC programs. I word processed. I connected to my local BBS and illegally downloaded copied games. And so much more. That machine and I were like best friends.
I must not have been the only one because it turns out that the C64 may well be the best-selling computer of all time.
At the 25th anniversary celebration for the Commodore 64 in Mountain View, Calif. Monday night, Commodore founder Jack Tramiel was on hand for a rare public appearance.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)At the celebration Monday night, Commodore founder Jack Tramiel, who was the guest of honor during what I'm told was a very rare public appearance, told the gathered crowd that the C64 sold between 20 million and 30 million units, a staggering number.
So given the presence of luminaries like Tramiel, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Pong designer Al Alcorn and many others, I decided to ask some of them if they agreed that there had been a culture war during the early '80s, with C64, Apple IIe and, to a lesser extent, Atari 800 devotees carving out their sides in a pitched battle of self-righteous geekery.
I got to spend a little time talking with Tramiel and I first asked him what was different about people who bought C64s and those who ponied up for the Apple IIe.
"The only difference was the price," Tramiel said. "Because it seems that in this country, if you sell something cheaper, it couldn't be as good. If it's more expensive, and it's the same product, that must be a better product. That didn't stop me. I still wanted to sell it for a low price. If a person pays three times as much for a computer, he has to be proud of it, because he paid for it."
Fair enough. But does he agree that there was a culture war, maybe even one akin to today's Mac/Windows split?
Not really, Tramiel suggested. In fact, how could there be a culture war when one platform has 95 percent of the users, he asked. Never mind that Mac users are probably infinitely more passionate about their machines than Windows users.
So, since Tramiel didn't buy my premise, I decided to give Wozniak a try.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was on hand at the Computer History Museum to help celebrate the Commodore 64's 25th anniversary.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)Woz didn't seem to buy it either. In fact, his position was that, secretly, most C64 users really fancied themselves Apple IIe users.
"I talked to young people," Woz said, "and a lot of Commodore 64 users (told me they) would have gotten an Apple II if they could afford it."
He added that users felt they could learn more from the Apple's open system, while the C64's closed architecture offered only a cheaper price.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that these two didn't acknowledge the culture war the way I did. After all, they were unabashed partisans. But if you read between the lines of their comments, you can see that I'm right. Tramiel bashed the price of the Apple; Wozniak said everybody really wanted an Apple.
Atari engineer Al Alcorn, who designed 'Pong,' speaking at the 25th anniversary celebration for the Commodore 64.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)But, there was still an evening of celebration at hand, and I decided to press on with checking out the scene.
One thing I hadn't expected was that a lot of former Commodore employees had come out to be with their kind, and to talk to Tramiel, who they mostly hadn't seen in years.
I ended up talking with Bil Herd, who worked for Commodore from 1983 to 1986, and who was the lead designer of the company's consumer group. He said he had designed the Commodore 128, as well as several other of the company's machines.
Herd explained that he had gotten lucky as a high school dropout who just happened to know how electrons worked and had landed his job at Commodore.
He said that he worked his butt off while under Tramiel's tutelage and that one thing he remembered about his time there was, "You learned not to give excuses. You learned to just get it down."
Herd said he had come here Monday from his home in New Jersey just because he wanted a chance to see Tramiel again.
"You just don't get Jack out in public," Herd said.
He began to reminisce about his time at the company and smiled as he recalled how Tramiel had come up with the idea to give consumers $100 off a Commodore 64 if they traded in their existing computer.
"It got thousands of the competition off the street," Herd said. "We had a warehouse full of the competition's (machines)."
And what did they do with those old computers?
"I used a Sinclair as a doorstop," Herd laughed.
Later, the several hundred attendees filed into the museum's auditorium for a panel discussion moderated by New York Times reporter John Markoff.
New York Times reporter John Markoff interviewing Commodore founder Jack Tramiel on stage during the 25th anniversary celebration of the Commodore 64
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)And Markoff seemed to prompt the panelists--Tramiel, Wozniak, former IBM PC developer William Lowe and former Commodore International vice president of technology Adam Chowaniec--to answer the question of whether there might just have been a culture war after all.
Most didn't seem to want to bite.
But then, at last, one final nugget from Tramiel, riffing on the fact that the Apple IIe cost more than three times as much as the Commodore 64: "We made machines for the masses, (Apple) made machines for the classes."
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