The Rocky Mountain Collegian

February 28th, 2007

Game Guy Links Recap Or Man, Atlantis Was Pretty Rad

Yes, links! Amusing ones! The kind of thing that bloggers resort to when short on time and good ideas, which is totally not the case here, except for the time part. Let’s take a look.
A youtube user by the name of fraziergorgehas uploaded a fascinating episode of the PBS series “Enterprise” from the early 80s, which details the design and production of classic Atari 2600 game Atlantis. It includes interviews with the game’s developers at long-defunct game studio Imagic, and there’s a lot of interesting insight into the early days of the game industry.

There’s a great scene in which the entire development staff of Imagic is gathered at a picnic table in front of a lake, an extremely bearded design member waxing rhapsodic about pixelated mother-ships and space aliens, and we realize that this is a brainstorming session for a new game. The episode is separated into 3 parts, and is about 30 minutes altogether: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

-Uh oh, looks like I’m going to have to buy one of these newly announced Video Game Style Guide and Reference Manual’s! Promising to answer my “most pressing questions” when writing about video games, including the thousand-year old “Xbox, XBox or X-box?” I’m inclined not to pass judgment about the value of such a tome, not having read it and all, but my gut reaction is that it’s kind of ridiculously silly. Is there even a standardized body or organization overseeing this kind of thing? It does include a foreword from Dan Hsu of EGM, who famously sorta-savagely-interviewed Microsoft’s Peter Moore. That has to count for something!

-AdventureCon Las Vegas is yet another convention that I can barely fathom actually existing, but it does, and it’s happening this August, so. It’s geared towards people who looooove adventure games (not me, I just really enjoy them), and it’s even going to have Al Lowe as a guest-speaker. His career’s pretty much dead at this point, since the last game he made that garnered any attention at all was Leisure Suit Larry 7 back in 1996, but that seems pretty much besides the point when talking about adventure games in general. Because, y’know. They’re a dead genre. Sounds like fun, though.

-Wrapping up this bevy of links that I assume no one could possibly care about is an article about moving a Virtual On arcade cabinet, which, if you’ve never seen one, well. They’re pretty huge. The article’s hosted over at GameSetWatch, and the author, Ollie Barder, describes the entire process as being a little like building a ship in a bottle: “One of the slightly more difficult aspects of owning an arcade machine is that you sometimes have to move it around. Considering that this particular cabinet weighs nearly half a ton and is pretty sizeable, it doesn’t exactly travel well. Basically, to get the machine anywhere means it has to be completely disassembled and then rebuilt in its new abode.” The article is part of a regular series that Ollie Barder writes about big robots in video games, two things that go together better than Mr. Pibb and Red Vines. Man, that sounds pretty good right about now!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Game Guy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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