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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Game On exhibition at the Science Museum, London.

  
 
+am
23:33 / 23.12.06
Has anyone been to this exhibition? I feel like taking a trip to London (albeit only an hour away) just to see it, £8.50 entrance fee be damned! As a child of the "Commodore Amiga" generation the opportunity to play these old skool ganes on the hardware they were designed upon makes me strangely excited, not to mention the crazy next0gen machines. I hope 120 playable games can't be too wrong. I was a pretty avid gamer yet with pretty idiosyncratic taste in my youth, and have always maintained an interest in the world of teh videogamez (currently playing Baldur's Gate II for the first time and will cry when it ends). It seems the exhibition may touch on the philosophy and wider impact of videogame culture, i hope.. I'm sorry if this post reads like a summary, which it does, but if anyone has gone I'd appreciate their opinons. I mean if they're exhibiting The Secret of Monkey Island as a playable game they must be doing something right...

Of course this holiday season certainly isn't the best time to go (you must pre-book a ticket to play EITHER the Wii or the Playstation 3 and there is 1.5 hours "loitering" time or something) but its open till February sometime.

Here is the link:

here!
 
 
Sylvia
03:40 / 24.12.06
I feel like taking a trip to London (albeit only an hour away) just to see it, £8.50 entrance fee be damned!

+am: As someone who lives a CONTINENT away, and would have to spend thousands of dollars to fly, eat and stay in London for even a few days, I say go. Go and enjoy yourself in my stead and the stead of all the gamers living across the Atlantic!

I mean, you'd get the chance to play the first videogame EVER invented. Space War! Made in 1962! How cool is that? (I like how at the very beginning of the hobby's roots, it's a sci-fi game)

currently playing Baldur's Gate II for the first time and will cry when it ends

Man I envy you. Baldur's Gate II is one of the most enjoyable, most epic PC RPGs I have ever played. There's a surprising amount of depth to it in places and it's hands down the best game ever developed for the Forgotten Realms setting period. (If you haven't tried Planescape: Torment yet I can't recommend it enough. Try it after you've finished up BG2.)
 
 
Closed for Business Time
09:55 / 27.12.06
I went about 6 weeks ago. Highly recommended! It did seem to focus more on older (pre-90's) games, which I thought was ace - being myself of the vic16/c64/a500 generation. Just be sure to make it early in the day if ya wanna get your paws on the games without too much of a wait. The highlight for me was the first Star Wars arcade machine where you sorta sit inside an X-wing cockpit blasting away at TIE-fighters and Death-star ventilation shafts. YIHAAAAAA!!!
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:15 / 27.12.06
There's another recent thread on this here - linked for tidiness. Might as well keep this as the active one, so I'll put the other forwards for locking.
 
 
GogMickGog
16:49 / 27.12.06
I went a few weeks back and had a smashing 6 player game of 'mega bomberman', all projected up on a big screen. I also realised that I am shit at those dance machines.

I would highly recommend it.
 
 
+am
09:40 / 28.12.06
Sozza, didn't see the other thread, but rest assured I looked to see if there was one. Not particularly well though, it seems.

As someone who lives a CONTINENT away, and would have to spend thousands of dollars to fly, eat and stay in London for even a few days, I say go. Go and enjoy yourself in my stead and the stead of all the gamers living across the Atlantic!

This is most inspiring. I MUST go now!

From what almost everyone has said this sounds like great fun, albeit more geared towards playing some excellent games on their original machines than a particularly incisive commentary on computer games and their role/place in society. Preaching to the converted perhaps, but I'm not complaining.

(Sylvia- Yeah BG2 is amazing. Such brilliant, mature, involving writing, and the fighting is pretty fun too. Have played Planescape:Torment to near its conclusion but its started crashing an unbearable amount. Enough of my threadrot, perhaps I should start a new thread on this topic (or find an already exisiting one!). I could rhyme "Gate" with "great"!)
 
 
Twig the Wonder Kid
14:57 / 13.03.07
Hey hey. I posted on my blog a few months back about the joys of a) Elite and b) the original Star Wars arcade machine, both of which I got to play for the first time in 20 years or so at Game On, and which had me gushing with nostalgia. I was hoping it might find others similarly inspired, but no, I was talking to an empty room again.

The exhibition is closed now (I'm a little late to the party here, sorry), but that doesn't mean we can't still talk about retro games. Does it?

Back in the 80s the computer game industry (if it could be called an 'industry') was so much more interesting and experimental than it is today. In the eighties, when I was an eager young consumer of the new home computing revolution, the hardware was very limited, but the originality and creativity of the programmers, forced to wring every last drop of performance out of their primitive kit, more than made up for it. It was this spirit that built the industry, yet this now seems completely forgotten.

A key feature of the 80s computer industry was that games were usually conceived, designed and delivered by one, maybe two people, it was a time of programmer auteurs. Now games are almost always the work of teams, which means they tend to be slicker in production, but less adventurous in concept.

In the days of Spectrums and Commodores it was never a case of either driving game or third person shooter.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:49 / 13.03.07
I think it's too easy to make that generalisation, Twig, and it's not entirely true. The increased size of professioonal teams and the big bucks nature of the business nowadays certainly leads to a kind of defensive stance from publishers and developers, possibly more so than it used to, but you're ignoring the very real prospect of digital distribution reversing the trend. That's actually happening right now, to a small extent, with games available for purchase over the Internet or through other online services - Steam, Xbox Live, the PS3 Store. I can only see it becoming more important in the near future as more people gain more knowledge about what's available freely or at a (relatively) small cost direct from the developers.

Your post also ignores the endless waves of not just copycat games, but full-on rip-offs - sometimes down to the code - that helped destroy the entire western videogames market in the early '80s and continued to have a presence throughout the rebirth of the industry when the home computers started to fill the gap. I don't know how many different versions of Defender, Space Invaders or Pac-Man I've played over the years, all exactly the same as each other bar visual quality and name, or how many 2D platformers that had little to distinguish themseleves from each other.

Where I think you can make a solid argument about there being a different approach from the main players in the industry nowadays compared to twenty, twenty-five years ago is on the topic of visual realism. The limited nature of the hardware available at the time meant that you couldn't get anything even close to a convincing recreation of reality in visual terms, so developers either had to settle for abstract visions of the real world or else abandon reality altogether and create their own reallities or sod it all off and go for the surreal. Or both.

So what you got were lots of games that all still manage to look very unique and are memorable on that basis. And that's what you don't tend to get now, because the hardware gives people the opportunity to try and take on blockbuster movies at their own game and put the audience into the middle of something immediately recognisable.

I'd also be wary of making statements about a current lack of artistic vision when compared to days of yore. It's impossible to tell how much of the look of something like Manic Miner (to pluck an entirely random name out of the air) was determined by the restrictive capabilities of the host machines and how much of it by pure artistic inspiration.

Ack. Meandering post again.
 
 
Twig the Wonder Kid
20:17 / 13.03.07
No, you're right Dupre. It's not the black and white 'old games good, new games bad' I might have implied. My point is simply that there was a spirit of creative endevour that existed in the early days of computer games, that seems to have been lost.

And true, there was also a spirit of entrepreneurial piss-taking of the time too, as there often are with emerging commercial fields, which accounts for all the Defender clones. But bear in mind that genres were still emerging too, so the multiple spins on PacMan, Space Invaders etc were only rip-offs in the same way as you can say Halo is a rip-off of Doom.

I can't say I'm very well qualified to talk on the state of current gaming, because I don't play consoles much. But I do write games - I (along with everyone else and their uncle) make Flash stuff for the web, which is a field still mainly driven by novelty, much like it was in the Spectrum/Commodore days. And I value novelty as a concept far above hi-fidelity.

But your point about web distribution is a good one. What the modern consoles have been lacking in recent years, which early home computing had at the forefront, was accessible programming. When you turned on your ZX Spectrum you were greeted with a cursor, it was a machine to be programmed, not played. You didn't need a license from Sinclair to write your first game. The XBox and Playstation don't offer that invitation, although this is changing now too, particularly with Microsoft's XNA kit.
 
  
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