krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
[personal profile] krpalmer
Via The Digital Antiquarian, I picked up a while ago on another weblog looking at old computer games, but with a wider scope encompassing arcades and video game consoles as well and in even more detail. Even if I’ve never owned a game console and became familiar with arcade games through limited-palette knockoffs for our family home computer, the thought of knowing a bit more did interest me. Just as the narrative at “They Create Worlds” was approaching “Pong,” though, the updates there ceased. Then, one day the RSS reader I hadn’t stopped tracking the weblog with through a “just in case” laziness reported a new entry, explaining its author Alexander Smith had converted his work into a genuine book covering far past where he’d left off online. The wrinkle was that he’d gone through an academic publisher (CRC Press, who had brought out a book about the Radio Shack Color Computer some years ago), and the volume was pretty pricy.

A cheapskate at some times, at others I will splurge. It so happened there was one week there weren’t any new manga titles I wanted to buy at the bookstore; aware of how many volumes I sometimes buy in a single week, I started telling myself even an expensive single book might somehow “substitute” until at last I bought a copy of They Create Worlds Volume 1: 1971-1982. The book started earlier than its subtitle had it, with the first chess-playing computer programs. It worked its way through the history of pinball machines and small computers alike in plenty of just-the-facts detail (Dave Ahl and Creative Computing getting mentioned seemed one bit of history I was most pleased to see), although the lack of illustrations could feel a goad to go searching online. I did find myself contrasting the graphical “Spacewar!” of MIT’s “hackers” as a singular achievement compared to simpler BASIC games where input and a good deal of output amounted to typed numbers.

On reaching the enduring trio of packaged “microcomputers” first sold in 1977, I did notice Smith using Brian Bagnall’s Commodore: A Company on the Edge as one of his sources for many “Ibid” references, to the point of seeming to more blandly accept Bagnall’s efforts to find the Commodore PET superior to the Apple II in every detail before having to admit the Radio Shack TRS-80 outsold both of them. Not that long afterwards, describing the original Star Wars to set up the story of “Space Invaders” but only mentioning Marcia Lucas as film editor had me unfortunately suspicious before Smith was mentioning the “self-published” “Secret History of Star Wars” as his sole source; I’ve seen a few too many suggestions that book is a bit too ready to arrange its details to try and divert credit from George Lucas. On a less specific note (revealing in a different way, maybe), I did have an impression of a scattering of proofreading errors.

This volume ended with “The Great Videogame Crash of 1982,” although the details of that may be left waiting for a future volume. “Computer games” had already left off in 1979 more or less still with BASIC programs on cassette tapes, just before the appearance of a good many companies. It might be a while before that next volume appears, but perhaps I should think of that as giving me the chance to save up for it.

July 2025

S M T W T F S
   12345
6 789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 16th, 2025 06:16 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios