OhMeadhbha month ago
Very cool.
Rather than be a jerk and talk about why there are so few references to the text and early graphics games from the 60s and 70s, maybe I'll have to pitch the VGHF people on a blog post and book and software collection focused on the 60s-70s era of computer gaming.
I was introduced to computers (and computer gaming) in the mid-70s, just immediately before the "trinity" microcomputers hit the market in '77. Our school district in North Texas had access to an HP mainframe (HP-2000?) to teach advanced kids BASIC. Part of my early education involved tearing apart the text-oriented BASIC versions of Hammurabi, Hunt the Wumpus and Star Trek. They would hardly be called "games" today. My dad had business contacts at UIUC and they were infamous for giving ANYONE a PLATO account, so I learned about the friendly orange glow and social computing in "the data center in the corn field." Anyone who played rogue or PLATO/EMPIRE could see where the industry was going by 1980.
And the sad bit is we've lost most of the people who developed these games in the 60s and 70s. I think I'll pitch the idea of a small collection of David Ahl books, DECUS games tapes and an interview or two with a few of the remaining coders.
Give me a +1 if you're hip to the old text based games, often coded in BASIC and played on microcomputers.
eleverivena month ago
PLATO, Rogue, Hammurabi, Star Trek, Wumpus - these games weren’t just early experiments, they set the groundwork for so much of what came after
HideousKojimaa month ago
My dad recalls playing Star Trek at Berkeley in the 70's, and they used a teletype because whatever computer lab he played it in didn't have any terminals with monitors yet.
eleverivena month ago
Early gaming had such a great mix of limitations and creativity. In a way I miss it
crtasma month ago
If they're somehow not already in touch I'm sure the authors of https://if50.textories.com/ and https://www.filfre.net/ would give some great input.
ForOldHacka month ago
Ahem +1.
I am hip to two generations of text based games, and HP 2000B. We programmed roulette on B.U.S.D, Berkeley Unified School District. Got the David Ahl books, but did not have access to the DECUS games tapes. ( Now I find that David Ahl was working at DEC, got canned, and then started Creative Computing )
Add Life, and Lunar Lander.
Later in college, we had IBM PCs, Monochrome, so ... we found both Rogue, and went over to Berkeley, and met Michael, and Glenn. We also had Empire, converted from Fortran, to the PC. and... Nethack. We wanted to get Nethack running on Xenix... blew up the whole machine twice...
And of corse HHGTTG. Hitch Hikers guide to the galaxy. Over at Egghead, the sales guy had solved most of it, and told us about the really hardest parts. Now, the entire Infocomm library runs in a web browser.
Soon, my roommate got an Amiga, and a modem.
brendoelfrendoa month ago
This is a great project. Phil Salvador and Travis Brown, who were working on this, and founder Frank Cifaldi, are all great people. They have a podcast, the Video Game History Hour, where they discuss topics related to video game preservation (recently back after a roughly year long hiatus), if you want to here the people who work there talk about what they do and some of the challenges they face. This has been a long time coming, and the work they did with Cyan on the Myst collection in particular is nothing short of incredible. They had access to basically everything, and it was a huge effort to digitize all of the documents and VHS recordings to (hopefully) archive them long-term. This website is freely accessible, but the VGHF is a non-profit, so kick them a donation if you can and want to see more work like this!
ranger_dangera month ago
> great people
Frank is regularly involved with some bizarre drama. He likes to take credit for stuff him and his crew had no part in. Once he even demanded that Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony revoke THQ Nordic's publishing license all because they did an AMA on a site he didn't like. There's plenty more but this is not the appropriate venue.
brendoelfrendoa month ago
"A site he didn't like," aka 8Chan. He was not alone in pointing out that THQ's choice of venue was, at best, poorly researched, and that they should try to distance themselves from the 8Chan community. Don't try to hide the nature of the complaint behind the "this isn't the correct venue for this conversation" defense, because I think it's important context.
OhMeadhbha month ago
That's a great resource! Thanks! I loved the episode about Margo Comstock. I remember bumping into her and the Softalk staff at a trade show in the 80s.
eleverivena month ago
Such people are very inspiring and motivating.
boogieknitea month ago
i found ep 7 with Gary Kitchen pretty inspiring. hes a little full of himself but he certainly has the hackers mentality and i find his frankness (ugh pun) kicks my butt into gear
Scudsa month ago
that's one ep that sticks out in my mind - hardware hacking to dump a 2600 cartridge and build homebrew development hardware and then reverse engineering to figure out what's what.
Also the subtle flex of making the Donkey Kong girders on an angle when the 2600 is a 'race the beam' system where each scanline must be computed. Even modern homebrew remakes of Donkey Kong on 2600 have horizontal girders.
pindab0tera month ago
I think it’s both funny and fitting that a video game library opens in ‘early access’. Apart from adding more games over time, I don’t see the distinction between early access and an actual release.
The website is operational and usable, and will have more content added to it over time. Much like early access games. I wonder what the actual distinction is.
taerica month ago
I would assume that they plan to throttle or otherwise keep a limit on number of users. In case things turn out to be harder on the backend than they were expecting. Could also be a fencepost in case they decide to shard users in a different way in the future and need to wipe people's save data?
oneeyedpigeona month ago
I guess, if the analogy is tight, further content would just be "DLC" while moving from early access to a release would involve functional differences.
c420a month ago
Don't forget the loot boxes!
hirako2000a month ago
Precious to public goods. Wasn't obvious to me how to navigate to the digital library.
Edit: it's here: https://archive.gamehistory.org/explore
oneeyedpigeona month ago
Having written for at least one of the magazines they have metadata on, I'm wondering when the full text scans will actually appear. It currently looks like they only have 33 magazines in total, which must be a tiny proportion of their archive.
qingcharlesa month ago
Which mag? I probably have it in my archives.
oneeyedpigeona month ago
Oh, I've got hardcopies of the mag, I'm just after the cachet of seeing it in the archive :) For the record, it's a little-known print publication called Switch Player.
[deleted]a month agocollapsed
CobrastanJorjia month ago
This is really cool. It's a wonderful goal to preserve stuff like this.
That said, it is of course bizarre that we've gotten to a place where a video game history museum can't have video games for legal reasons. Imagine a museum of paleontology that can show you photos of paleontologists digging but can't show you any dinosaur bones.
owlninjaa month ago
So cool! I wonder if I can find the EGM issue where my envelope art was printed? Or should I hold on to that memory, because it may have never even happened!
Also can recommend for anyone that finds themselves in Frisco, Texas: https://nvmusa.org/
Cthulhu_a month ago
It seems to have a pretty complete collection of EGM issues, however the interface isn't the best, it's a generic file / image gallery that shows 20 items at a time instead of a dated index.
hirokio123a month ago
It's like a place straight out of a child's dream. A game’s software might be emulated, but the feeling of playing on a Game Boy back then —the smell, the scenery, the friends of the same age— can never be recreated.
a_t48a month ago
[flagged]
hirokio123a month ago
Hey man, I'm a Japanese speaker, so I use ChatGPT for proofreading expressions. There's no dash in Japanese, so I'm not sure how to use it properly. Sorry if I got it wrong.
pjc50a month ago
I've vouched for it so you should be unflagged. This place is a bit twitchy sometimes.
a_t48a month ago
My apologies - just be careful, your comment seemed only related to the title and not the content of the article, it looked a lot like spam. The dash is fine, don't worry about it.
hirokio123a month ago
Thanks for the advice. You're right—commenting with my own memories and thoughts on a discussion about a game development archive did seem spammy. I'll be more mindful of that in the future. Sorry about that.
a_t48a month ago
Don’t sweat it, it was just a bit nonsequitor.
globalnodea month ago
the ’ and — characters are kinda giveaways, besides the advertising feel of the text, maybe if they were using gpt it was as a translation aide?
hackernews1134a month ago
I use both quite often. The apostrophe from a young age and the em-dash from my locally hosted alternative to grammarly which auto-corrects for me - making it easy to use as it doesn’t exist on my keyboard as a built-in. If it existed on my keyboard, I would use it by default.
(Noticeably absent is the em-dash in this message because my grammarly alternative is a chrome extension and I’m currently responding from my mobile device that does not have it.)
throwing_awaya month ago
I think you meant to use an "en-dash" there -- between "me" and "making".
This whole thing is frustrating because I know all of these language models were trained on reddit and I was an early and frequent commenter. So a lot of my style is also the bot's style.
oneeyedpigeona month ago
I think they meant to use an em-dash, which is this: —. An en-dash is typically used for ranges, e.g. 20–30 miles per hour.
hackernews1134a month ago
Yes I did; an in the second paragraph of my post I explain why I didn’t in this instance.
rouncea month ago
What is the self-hosted grammarly alternative you use?
hackernews1134a month ago
It is called languagetool
hykoa month ago
I use em dashes—chiefly to express parenthetical thoughts—all the time. Sadly, there’s no foolproof system for identifying machine-generated text. Happily, it means one less thing to worry about.
[deleted]a month agocollapsed
pindab0tera month ago
I often use ’ and –. What's wrong with that?
npsomaratnaa month ago
Correct punctuation marks, you mean?
Humans use them too, you know. I've used the em dash (—) and opening/closing single quote characters (‘’) ever since I read Butterick's Practical Typography.
Cthulhu_a month ago
Do you have keys on your keyboard for those or do you have a key combo or browser addon for them? I tend to stick to basic ascii characters for the most part myself... but part of that is ignorance. I have trouble remembering the euro sign combo on Mac.
globalnodea month ago
fair point, its just not common, thats why i said 'kinda' giveaways.
qingcharlesa month ago
The em-dashes are probably a giveaway. Does any phone automatically insert em-dashes in place of hyphens?
mock-possuma month ago
Yeah - if you double hyphen — iPhone auto corrects to that character. It works for ranges 0–100 too— you can’t really count on proper en-and-em-dash usage to identify llm generated text. Could just be a typography wonk. ;]
eleverivena month ago
This is like a goldmine for researchers, historians, and just anyone curious about how games are made. Hats off to VGHF for making this happen!
musicalea month ago
Unfortunately no DMCA exemption yet.
gqgsa month ago
I wonder how VGHF's OCR compares against something like just using OpenAI Vision.
Based on my experience with Vision, I'd be extremely surprised if this OCR system is more accurate and cost effective overall.
For me it seems like this might be yet another example of the sunk cost fallacy.
DonHopkinsa month ago
Phil Salvador and The Video Game History Foundation do great work (simultaneously serious and fun) and excellent research and compelling writing!
In his quest to deeply research the evidence, perform interviews with the people involved with Maxis's Business Simulations Division, and document the history of Maxis's long lost SimRefinery, Phil was able to pull off the astronomically unlikely miracle of actually finding someone who had an extremely rare readable floppy disk of it! The articles he wrote tell an amazing story.
A close look at SimRefinery:
https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-analysis/
>Two nights ago, a reader on the tech news site Ars Technica named postbebop uploaded a copy of SimRefinery to the Internet Archive. This is incredibly exciting news, and it’s given us our first chance to take a closer look at the game. SimRefinery was not fully completed by Maxis, and we can learn a lot about the game from the state it was left in. Based on my research, I want to add some context and explain what some of the peculiarities the game might say about its development.
Ep. 11: SimRefinery Simulated by a Refined Phil Salvador:
https://gamehistory.org/ep-11-simrefinery-simulated-by-a-ref...
>Today’s episode features the bizarre origins of SimRefinery as well as other Sim titles which never came to be. Phil Salvador joins the Video Game History Hour to discuss a branch of Maxis, Business Simulations Division, which gives us a glimpse into a path-not-taken, alternate reality where Maxis might have only made a name for themselves in the world of business. A world where powerhouse franchises like SimCity and The Sims never existed. But alas, perhaps we could have had, but now never will have, SimArby’s. </3
SimRefinery Recovered (obscuritory.com):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425041
https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-recovered/
>Never say never! Thanks to a reader on Ars Technica and an anonymous chemical engineer, a working copy of SimRefinery has been successfully recovered.
>Two weeks ago, I published my long-in-the-works article about Maxis Business Simulations, a division of SimCity developer Maxis that made simulation games for businesses. It was the culmination of four years of research, and I’m very proud to share their story.
>One of the games they produced was SimRefinery, an oil refinery simulation for Chevron. Very little was widely known about the game until now, and the article kicked off a wave of interest in SimRefinery that seems to have reached beyond gaming circles. Shortly after the article was published, it was picked up by the tech news site Ars Technica, where one reader, postbebop, reported that they knew a retired chemical engineer who worked at Chevron, who confirmed that he owned a copy of the game. postbebop walked the engineer through the process of reading the data from the original floppy disk, and he was able to create a digital copy.
eleverivena month ago
These kinds of niche, often forgotten pieces of game history tell such cool stories. And not just about the games themselves, but about the alternate paths the industry could have taken
EncomLaba month ago
Isn't most of this (plus terabytes more) available on archive.org? I'm not trying to diminish this effort - anything that is done to preserve digital history is to be applauded - just struggling to see what differentiates this.
coldpiea month ago
The big differentiator is the VGHF's archive supports fulltext search, which is huge. For example you can find the first mention of one of my favorite games, M.C. Kids, in seconds with VGHF's search[1]. How would you do that on archive.org?
It's also professionally curated, which means you can trust the scans and metadata to be accurate and consistent. Aside from that, VGHF has a ton of material that archive.org doesn't (donated collections from game industry people[2], magazines that have yet to be scanned by anyone). Much of that isn't in the digital archive yet, but it's coming.
[1] https://archive.gamehistory.org/search?keyword=%22m.c.%20kid... These scans actually turned out to contain early, pre-release mockups of the game still in development, which I've now documented on TCRF. https://tcrf.net/Prerelease:M.C._Kids This whole process took me less than an hour.
superfamicoma month ago
One important item was a custom OCR for the magazine scans, particularly those with text on a crazy background. This was discussed in a Patreon call but might also be discussed in the podcast, I haven't listened through just yet. Another important distinction is it is actually being run and curated as a library (backend is preservica.com), not a grab bag like Archive.org can end up being, so the data will be more consistently correct.
Tiktaalika month ago
One of their public launch videos mentioned it.
That actually would be a topic of particular interest to this community.
Some of the layouts of these enthusiast magazines are so chaotic (looking at you Hardcore Gamefan) that the current technology for parsing text from scans wasn't good enough and they had to develop their own.
slongfielda month ago
Non-centralization is enough for me (I love archive.org, but always worry about them flying too close to the sun one day and getting shut down), but this does also have a different UX, and has a more direct focus on videogame history, which should help them surface things in more interesting ways than a general purpose archive.
samspota month ago
They have tons of physical stuff too. And if archive.org is ever destroyed we'll be glad they weren't the only ones with these records. Plus, people donate things directly to VGHF that may not be on archive.org.
risyachkaa month ago
Different UI/UX is a massive differentiator that is enough to justify it.
EncomLaba month ago
I just went to archive.org home page and typed M.C. Kids in search -
It has a timeline, magazines, videos, nes guides and a DOS box emulator that you can play the game on. All in about 10 seconds.
badlibrariana month ago
archive.org is also under the shadow of a $621 million lawsuit and run on a shoestring by activists. That amazing "play the game" feature was explicitly called out as fully illegal (even to people with disabilities) by the Librarian of Congress a few months ago.
> The librarian renewed all existing exemptions except for the exemption for accessible access to video games, for which there was no petition for renewal.
https://www.arl.org/news/librarian-of-congress-expands-dmca-...
There's enough balls being dropped here that multiple organizations with different boards, advisors, and funding models are needed. Kudos to all involved.
ranger_dangera month ago
Yes but the vast majority of software on there is 1000% pirated.
ForOldHacka month ago
Do you have any proof what so ever of this? I have a single counter example: https://archive.org/download/TheUltimateSharewareCollect
ranger_dangera month ago
The links at the top of your page take you right to it, for example https://archive.org/details/software
Just search for literally any piece of software or media you want, and you will find multiple copies of it uploaded by random people without permission. Petabytes upon petabytes of games, movies, TV shows, software, etc. constantly uploaded 24/7 for years, is all right there out in the open for anyone in the world to download. Want a zip file with every Nintendo game ever made? There's a dozen different scene groups all with their full dumps available right there. Have a favorite TV show? They have every episode of it.
Jason Scott himself has publicly advocated for people to "upload whatever you want and ask questions later" because it's "too difficult" to figure out copyright and their stance is always to just wait until a rightsholder complains before taking anything down.
badlibrariana month ago
Every single Nintendo game ROM for all systems, every arcade ROM you can imagine, acres of PlayStation games. It's a full on pirate site in there.
You can even play Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and thousands more from one click in the browser if downloading the stuff to your hard drive instead of your browser cache is too much trouble.
beretguya month ago
Will this library require online-only connection to the central servers?
(In the spirit of many games that get released these days).
autoexeca month ago
In that case they'd have to cut out parts of the images and articles and sell them as "DLC"
uwagara month ago
i tried to access say game developer but says "there was an issue loading this document. go back home" :(
dueltmp_yufsya month ago
Would love to visit this place one day.
Scudsa month ago
Digital archive means you won't have to, unless you want to see some yellowing paper.
eleverivena month ago
But it's still a good idea. A retro game museum that you can visit and play
Novosella month ago
I also go to museums and play with the exhibits.
zombota month ago
[flagged]
kernala month ago
A "History" website with no history for users to see when they visit the website.
Loudergooda month ago
I wonder what Early Access means?
kernala month ago
You mean, like going to a museum pre-opening and seeing empty exhibits?