Long in the tooth

[prog]

Reading the most recent post on Play This Thing, where the writer (not G. C.) refers to the relatively recent Knytt as being the first freeware game they ever downloaded, reminds me of a small discussion I attended at last month's GameLoop. It was about game visuals, and most of the handful of attendees were actively employed as artists for modern video games.

Two things happened there that neatly confirmed the fact that I have moved into a new age demographic among game-players. The first was when the discussion's leader said "I'm going to date myself here, but..." followed by an allusion to Sonic the Hedgehog. This is a game that was published as I was starting college, so I don't automatically consider it a very old game, even though our prickly blue friend is old enough to vote now.

The second occurred when I casually mentioned the art style of arcade game cabinets as part of a larger point, while I was participating in the discussion. Nobody in the room knew was I was talking about - they may have been lifelong gamers, but it was well before their time! They all gazed at me like tell us about the war, grandpa, so I felt obliged to pull together a tiny art-history lesson about it. If you're at all familiar with my recent video projects you can correctly imagine that I took some enjoyment out of this.

Honestly, I'm kind of grinny about this realization, especially since I'm setting myself up to dive deeper into independent game journalism (c.f., c.f.). Having an air of experience isn't at all a bad thing!

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

The arcade game era was almost as short-lived as disco. Say 1979 to 1984?

[prog.livejournal.com]

That was about the peak of its physical presence, yep. I'd see an argument in pushing its end-date to 1986, just so it dovetails better with the landing of the Nintendo Entertainment System on U.S. shores - the beginning of the end for arcades. (They got an extra couple years' lease on life by the American game console market crashing around 1983-84.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Though you'll see little arcade areas in bowling alleys and airports to this day that have a couple of shooters and driving games and a DDR or something, so it's not entirely dead. Certainly not what it was then.

[mr-choronzon.livejournal.com]

Arcade cabinet art is so weird. It ranks up with 70's prog rock album covers for sheer wtf-but-still-mass-market value.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think part of it was that back in the heyday, the game graphics themselves were so primitive, and the gameplay so simple and devoid of long story arcs, that they provided no real constraint on the cabinet art. Nobody expected the cabinet to look much like the game or possess much in the way of narrative coherence, so it was this free flight of fancy. Atari cartridge box art and pinball table art were similar.

Remember how Atari 2600 game manuals used to make up some kind of weird little story to explain what was supposed to be happening in the game? That was kind of the same thing in prose.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

On high school math team trips, I would wander into the enormous bleeping wonderland that was the arcade outside of Penn State University. 1985, 1986? I didn't play the games. Watching was cheaper.

It was the full-scale, multi-room, wall-to-wall cabinet experience. I don't think it occurred to me, even later, that that stuff *ended*. I mean, there were always a few arcade cabinets here and there, right? Through college. In turnpike rest stops. I assumed that if I went back to Penn State, it would all still be there.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

In the early '80's there were at least three video arcades within three blocks of where I'm sitting right now, and they were all PACKED.

Today there are zero--I think the last one closed in '87.

Nothing ever quite ends, but there was a definite phase transition.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Sheesh, they still make new arcade games, e.g. Guitar Hero.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Of course they still make coin-op games. But 1980s arcade culture has gone the way of disco culture, simply because arcades are no longer where one goes when one simply wishes to play video games.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And the cabinet art on that Guitar Hero isn't so interesting, because it just looks like the box art of the home version, which looks more or less like the game graphics themselves. In the Seventies and Eighties it wasn't like that at all.

[cnoocy]

Have you ever been to Salem Willows? I suspect you'd find it fascinating.