Classic Gaming Expo! Check it out!
Today's blog entry is one that has a great amount of personal meaning for me. I have just attended the first day of the Classic Gaming Expo being held at the San Jose Convention Center in CA and wanted to share some personal thoughts. This is the 7th year that the event has been held, and it is my first time attending the show. It is one of the most intimate conferenced I have attended and you get a real sense of fellowship here. The people attending, the vendors selling and the speakers speaking are all hear to celebrate history and the important role the video games industry has played in the computer industry overall. I would so far as to say that, without video games, there would be no computer industry as we know it today. PERIOD.
It was the imagination of a generation of early computer pioneers and their will to see their creative visions come to life that first spurred the industry. The early companies like Atari were companies formed by friends who had a passion for creating new experiences and chose the bit and the chip as their medium. They did not know you couldn't do “that” with computers. You can't just throw a jumble of components together and change the world. It's not what the marketing research shows! Focus groups tell “us” that you are wrong! It's all about the marketing and the name, not the value of the experience! We know...we have the degrees in marketing and it's what our text books tell us.
Well, thank heavens that the bright and creative talents of the pioneers like Nolan Bushnell, Steve Wozniac, Al Alcorn, Howard Scott Warshaw, Ed Rotberg, Trip Hawkins and countless others that chose to ignore what the research showed and just followed their passion. Through their vision, passion and belief in their work they have thrilled us, made us sweat, lose sleep, laugh, scream and, in my case anyway, cause me to never have a decent lunch during middle school as all of my money went into their creative works down at the local arcade.
Programming video games is directly responsible for my role in the computer industry today. I remember the Christmas that I first unwrapped the Commodore VIC-20 that awaited me that morning. Cracking open the box, connecting it to my 12” black and white television, opening up the BASIC book that accompanied the system and watched my school grades decline steadily as I sought to learn everything that VIC-20 could teach me. Through the VIC-20, I found worlds to explore, enemies to fight, races to win, stories to tell, space ships to fly and problems to solve. The most important thing that the VIC-20 gave a 12 year old boy was CONTROL.
At a time in a young boy's life where one has very little control: you are told when to get up, go to bed, what to eat, to go to school, etc., the computer gave ME control. I could be anything I wanted to be, make the system do what I wanted it to do. Tell the stories I wanted to be told. Fight the fights. Win the race. Be the hero. That sense of power and control for a child who has very little was liberating. Understanding the system was just one long, drawn out puzzle waiting for me to solve and master. As any of you who program know, there is almost no better feeling than waking up at 2:30am with the solution to a problem and having it work. (Well, ok. Not the BEST feeling, but you know what I mean) The effects of those experiences with the VIC-20 shaped me and my future.
I am sure that many of you reading this who program or play games have experienced a profound moment that changed you in some small way. Or, perhaps, changed the course of your life. I owe a lot of who I became to the creation of the personal computer, the accessibility of them and the power of video games. We all owe a debt to this industry, the pioneers who had the courage to start it, and the creativity that captured the collective imaginations of us all.
So, without further ado, allow me to take you on a stroll down memory lane.......
Click on the photos for a larger picture
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The Atari VCS (2600) |
Atari 2800 (2600 in Asia) |
Testing kiosk for Atari peripherals |
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Repackaged Atari 2600 (smaller) |
Various 2600 controllers including the “JoyBoard”! |
Ah! The Starpath Supercharger that allowed games that were stored on cassettes to be played on a 2600. |
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The Imagic Previewer store kiosk for 2600 games. |
Atari 5200 Supersystem and the prototype System X, successor to the 5200. |
“Puppy Pong” and several prototype Pong system boards. |
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3 oldies! The 2XL Robot that played games on 8-Track tapes, 2 player Combat and the Coleco Telstar Arcade. |
2 products from Nolan Bushnell's Axiom robotics company: The Petster and the Andy |
Various “Game and Watch” LCD games from Nintendo |
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THE HOLY GRAIL OF SYSTEMS! The Adventure Vision. If anyone has one of these to get rid of, e-mail me at chris.melissinos@sun.com! |
Several LCD hand held game systems. |
Some more hand held LCD systems. |
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The greatest LCD games ever made. The Coleco arcade systems. Hell yeah! |
Ok, here's a good one. Atari actually invented the Hologram and held the patents. The Cosmos is an unreleased system that used Holographic overlays on an LCD background. Cool :) |
The Atari Video Music. The product of a designer who was stoned at the time of invention. Atari sold 70 units. |
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This is the box that started it all. Ralph Baer's “Brown Box” system that he designed while at Magnavox. Patents were filed in 1967 and was the the original “Pong” system. |
The Magnavox Odyssey home system. 1971. Pong game play. |
Atari 65EXP. Portable Atari XP computer. |
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Atari 1450XLD dual drive computer. |
Atari 1200XLS with external expansion unit. |
Coleco ADAM! Computer built on top of the Colecovision. Phttth! |
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Colecovision and various accessories. Finally! The REAL arcade experience at home. |
Magnavox Odyssey2 game system. Really cool for it's time. |
Fairchild Channel F
game system. |
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Bally Astrocade game
system. |
Emerson Arcadia 2001 game console and German version. |
Mattel Aquarius computer system. Built on the Intellivision core system. |
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Ah! The Intellivision game console. Games for intelligent people. |
Nintendo's Famicombox hotel game system (you know, those game controllers hooked up to your hotel room tv). |
Sharp branded Nintendo Famicom game console. |
Various Nintendo game controllers. |
Nintendo's
R.O.B. |
American version of the Nintendo Famicom: the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) |
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Nintendo made Pong clones. |
Nintendo's SatellaView satellite module for the Super Famicom. |
NeoGeo game console. $200+ games? Yes. Best fighting game console ever made? Yes! |
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Sega Master System. Better than NES but TERRIBLE marketing and support. |
Sega Genesis retail kiosk unit. |
Debug Sega Genesis/Sega CD system. |
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The never manufactured Sega “Neptune”. A Sega Genesis and Sega 32X rolled into one. |
Phillips LaserActive game system. $1600 laser disk system that could play Sega Genesis games. Hmmmm.... |
Nintendo's VirtualBoy. Burn your red cones out of your eyeballs. |
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NEC's TurboGrafx 16 game console with the TG-16 CD-ROM attachment. AWESOME system. |
The world's best selling computer, the Commodore 64 and a prototype model. |
The Commodore SuperPET! |
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System schematics for the Vectrex game system. Build your own! |
Prototype for the color Vectrex. |
Innards of the standard Vectrex. |
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Look! Raiden is kicking ass! |
8-Bit Weapon is an AWESOME little band doing video game theme song remixes and live performances. Check them out HERE! |
The game console
that single handedly rebuilt the video game industry |
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Various “Fanzines” |
Atari 2600 VCS store kiosk. |
Me and Seth Sternberger (AKA Naughtyboy) from 8-Bit Weapon. |
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Ah, the political correctness of the 80's! |
Me trying on the VERY RARE Vectrex color 3D glasses. |
Vectrex color 3D glasses close up. |
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A portable Atari 2600 VCS made by Ben Heckendorn. Check out his fan build portables HERE! |
Me and my buddy Seamus Blackley of Xbox fame. |
8-Bit Weapon rocking the conference! |
Posted by madsax on August 22, 2004 at 03:58 PM EDT #
Ahhh - the Gold old Days(tm)... Ive spend endless days and nights infront of my C64, IRQ routines, assembler programming, switcing disc. Laughing at the amiga guys coz they had a blitter and whats the fun in that. (its gotta be hard to be phun :-) )
I think the first "laptop" I ever saw was the portable c64 (with built-in screen though small and ugly). You could carry it over your shoulder and it was the size of a quite large bag.
BTW: theres a meeting in London with the good old c64 guys once a year...
Posted by Lars Borup on August 26, 2004 at 02:42 PM EDT #