I think abstraction is basically at an all-time high since the sixth console generation, but perhaps only by virtue of there being more video games developed and released now than any other time in history. There’s a remarkably solid essay/thesis published a few years ago that discusses ‘nostalgia games as playable games criticism’ which feels appropriate to this conversation: Sloan on Nostalgia Games
I empathize with the notion of self-suck-snake-style societal narcissism but I’m generally pleased to see more people making video games - and if the ease of appropriating lo-fi aesthetic cues from 32-bit consoles is helping folks achieve that end then so be it. After all, the visuals are only one piece of the artistic whole.
oh sick ill definitely read this, thanks! yh definitely do think overall it’s net positive in some respects, i think broadly i like the aesthetic that results from the method/material of work ie when a game is low poly but from need/constraints rather than a clear aesthetic desire to emulate a past state of restriction.
I know he’s done a lot of great stuff, but my first impression of Jeff Minter being when he went off on some java programming tutorials guy for having a 5 dollar tutorial course that was pretty much how to make your own tempest clone for being a rip off of his own tempest clone (though the how to make a music visuallizer that creates enemy wave patterns probably was really similar to his stuff)
When Nintendo reversed engineered subcontractor Ikegami Tsushinki Co., Ltd’s code to develop Donkey Kong Jr.–“making it the first game that Nintendo developed without outside help” says Wikipedia, apparently not counting that they stole outside help’s code for it–Ikegami sued and won.
"Ikegami’s designers traditionally left a small calling card in each game they worked on; if you inspect the tile-sets for SEGA’s Congo Bongo and Zaxxon (two other famous arcade titles the company appears to have developed) – as well as Donkey Kong – then it’s possible to spot the Ikegami logo.
Also found buried in the code for Donkey Kong is the following message:
CONGRATULATION !IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU.*****TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN 044(244)2151 EXTENTION 304 SYSTEM DESIGN IKEGAMI CO. LIM.
According to the GDRI, between 8,000 and 20,000 printed circuit boards were made by Ikegami and sold to Nintendo, but it is believed that Nintendo copied an additional 80,000 boards without permission. No formal contract appears to have existed between the two companies for this job, so Ikegami retained the source code for Donkey Kong – it was never handed over to Nintendo."
Oh man I had the C64 cartridge version of Congo Bongo as a kid and I just never understood that game. = P
Although wait pretty sure it was on floppy with some other games. How my dad got a handful of bootleg game disks with the C64 I have no idea–maybe they were just throwing them in with computer purchases at the shop? We had the unreleased C64 version of Mario Bros.! … Which was a helluva lot better’n Congo Bongo. : PP
I also played this on a C64 off a floppy disk filled with pirated games! my grandpa got a stack of them from a coworker at the factory where he programmed freezers or something. (the only game he had with proper retail packaging was bubble bobble - also a much better game than congo bongo)
it was so advanced compared to donkey kong. coherent 3d level geometry, basically a minecraft world! i thought i never made it past the second level, but per that youtube video it was just the same two levels looping endlessly, so maybe i did beat it and then immediately lose interest
i first heard the ode to joy in the context of another pirated commodore 64 game. i think the game involved being a space ship that looked like an insect going through a maze. it was a shitty game, but i would play it over and over just to hear the song, which for all i knew had been composed for it
When I got my second-hand C64 as a kid, I immediately started identifying others I knew who had one so we could swap disks. It was probably a year or two before I learned that computer games were things you could go to the store and buy.
It was exciting when a friend got GEOS, which allowed me to create my own collections of games on disks that were thematic and not just random.
Yeah, the C64 was the only time I actually got some disk-swapping-with-friends in. ^ _^ I’m pretty sure that by that time I knew what retail games were, but it seemed to me there was this whole separate category of smaller games that just came on these hand-labeled discs and I didn’t know or really think about how that whole side of things materialized. ; )
I think I HEARD about GEOS way later, but still didn’t really know what it was. Man, I love how these screenshots look.
