Volume 5, Issue 1, December 2015 PDF Version Martin Picard & Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon Université de Montréal / University of Alberta It is safe and true to say that Japan’s contribution to the development of the video game industry is undeniable. Nevertheless, despite the impact of games and franchises such as Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985-), […]

Devin Monnens, Martin Goldberg Abstract Although Spacewar! is credited with inspiring the arcade videogame industry, little is recorded about the game outside its origins. It has been assumed that Spacewar! spread rapidly between computer labs and across computer platforms, but no systematic survey of its actual distribution and use has ever been attempted. Based on […]

Thomas H. Rousse Abstract Warrior, a two-player fighting game released by Vectorbeam/Cinematronics in 1979, represents an early pinnacle of integration between analog and digital displays in the history of arcade gaming and a terminal point for vector monitor technology.  This article examines the business intrigue around Warrior, its adaptation of the “Pepper’s Ghost” optical illusion, […]

Alison Gazzard Abstract This article explores some of the histories of player creativity in the 1980s through the inclusion of early level editors in games. Drawing on Huhtamo’s (2011) media archaeological framework of tracing “alternative histories” the article will trace the histories of level editors in games created for the BBC Micro through the case […]

Jaakko Suominen, Markku Reunanen, Sami Remes Abstract This article deals with the emergence of the retrogaming phenomenon in Finland starting from the 1980s. On the one hand, retrogaming can be considered as the practice of playing and collecting aging hardware and games, and on the other hand, it refers to a wider cultural phenomenon comprising, for example, […]

Colin Sidre Abstract The birth of the French videogame industry, focused on microcomputers, is generally considered to have taken place in 1983, when France shifted from an import industry – importing mainly from the United States – to a creative industry. Distributors and particularly microcomputer retailers, as the first companies established in France, played a […]

Colin Sidre Résumé L’année 1983 est généralement considérée comme celle de la naissance de l’industrie vidéoludique française, autour de la micro-informatique. Elle sanctionne le passage d’une industrie d’importation, essentiellement depuis les États-Unis, à une industrie de création. Les distributeurs et surtout les boutiques de micro-informatique, en tant que premières structures implantées sur le territoire, sont […]

John Szczepaniak Abstract The history of Japanese video games is poorly documented outside of Japan. Writings in English often focus exclusively on console history, specifically with a preference for Nintendo. Despite the Japanese game culture being highly influential on games around the world (and vice versa), there is a scarcity of English-language interviews with Japanese […]

Tristan Donovan Abstract In this keynote address, I provide an overview of the thinking and methodology that underpinned my 2010 book Replay: The History of Video Games. I start by explaining the flaws that I felt existed in previous video game histories and how that informed the key goals I had in mind when researching […]

Jonathan Lessard, Martin Picard, Carl Therrien   In spite of preservation and accessibility issues, the history of video games has become a topic of interest for a growing community of scholars and museum curators around the world. In Digital Play (2003), Stephen Kline, Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford invited us to understand video games […]

Jonathan Lessard, Martin Picard, Carl Therrien   Malgré les problèmes d’accessibilité et de préservation, l’histoire du jeu vidéo est devenue un intérêt de recherche pour une communauté grandissante de chercheur(e)s universitaires et de commissaires à travers le monde. Dans Digital Play (2003), Stephen Kline, Greig de Peuter et Nick Dyer-Witheford nous proposaient de comprendre le […]

Kristin MacDonough New York University   As the History of Games International Conference has demonstrated, the past decade has seen an exponential rise in video game scholarship and preservation as video games edge their way into cultural institutions, most notably libraries, university archives, and museum collections.  Commercially released video games were never intended to be […]

Carl Therrien and Martin Picard Université de Montréal   What is the object of video game history? If we are to believe many of the journalistic accounts published in the last 20 years, the answer to that question appears to be painfully obvious. In his foreword to Roberto Dillon’s The Golden Age of Video Games […]

Henry Lowood Stanford Libraries, Palo Alto   Introduction I have a problem: it’s called preaching to the choir.  Nobody here lacks faith in the history of games, and I can only hope that my talk will not reduce your enthusiasm.  That realization eliminates the need for a homily on the value of historical studies.  Instead, […]

Stephen Kline Simon Fraser University             Section 1: On Writing Video Game History In his sequel to the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, Douglas Adams (1980) described the ideal place where media historians can go for a night out on the town. It is called Milliway’s, the Restaurant at the […]

Jon-Paul Dyson The Strong Museum of Play How should a museum study and preserve the history of video games? The Strong faced that question in 2006 when it began to build its collection of video games and related materials. In tackling this question, The Strong developed approaches that reflect its own particular nature and its […]

Eric Kaltman University of California, Santa Cruz   Introduction The approach here is not a comprehensive history of Sid Meier’s Civilization series. I have little interest in reciting a general account of the series’ development or the early history of its developer Microprose, the company founded by Bill Steele and Sid Meier. My purpose is […]

Mark J. P. Wolf Concordia University, Wisconsin   We present history as narrative to examine cause and effect, action and consequence, and the way these shape the subject of that history.  Without these, what is the point of history? The desire for narrative structure influences research; one looks for connections between events, influences, motivations, shared […]

Simon Dor Université de Montréal   It is quite usual in strategy games to claim that strategies have a history of their own, chess being the canonical example (Murray 2002). The common strategies of a certain game change over time—often called the “metagame”—and can be retraced from a historical perspective. StarCraft II’s (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010-) […]

Conducted by Carl Therrien Carl Therrien: In 2007, the Library of Congress made a significant move to integrate video games in their collection. Through a project set forth by Henry Lowood, ten video games were selected to be part of the “game canon.” New games are now added to the collection more systematically; game publishers […]