#game history

[video-game-trivia]

Solid Snake, in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is the first ever game character to utter the word 'bisexual'.

[arconinternet]

Poly-Play (In-browser, Arcade, VEB Polytechnik, 1985/1989)

Soviet East German arcade multi-game cabinets - each of these versions has some games the other doesn't. You can play them in your browser here.

Controls: arrows, Ctrl & 5 (1's unneeded here).

Tip: you can make the screen less wide by pressing Tab, then using arrows and Enter to select Video Options and then Screen #0, and turning Maintain Aspect Ratio on, then leaving the menu with Tab.

[hardcore-gaming-101]

The Video Game History Foundation recently put together an absolutely fascinating video on the lost stages of the Sega classic Sonic the Hedgehog 2. It includes partial recreations of some of those cut levels, which have never been seen before. Definitely worth a look!

[obscuritory]

My panel from Super MAGFest 2024 is up! Meredith Rose and I talk about VGHF's report that 87% of classic games are out of print and the legal battle we're fighting to make game preservation easier for libraries and archives.

[pureiceblue]

Queer Gaming History- Caper in the Castro

We are thankfully in an era where there are more openly LGBT characters in video games than ever before. Just looking at the list of known queer video game characters on Wikipedia shows how much progress we've made with the early days being organized by decade and recent times being organized by individual year.

Since it's Pride Month, I'd like to talk about one of the earliest pieces of LGBT representation within video games and just why it was created.

This is 1989's Caper in the Castro. You can now play it for free here.

Just as a warning, the language used within the game is very much dated to the 80s. I don't mean this with just 80s slang, I mean that you're gonna see words that are considered slurs nowadays.

Caper in the Castro was developed and released during the height of the AIDS epidemic. While it was released for free, it was considered a piece of software known as charityware. Unlike other freeware, charityware is distributed as a method of encouraging downloaders to donate money to a certain cause. In this case, Caper in the Castro was made to raise money for those suffering from the AIDS epidemic.

We'll get more into how the AIDS epidemic influences the game in a bit. I think I should also show you guys what the game's about.

The above screenshot sets the scene pretty well. It's a short point and click adventure game where you have to save your friend, Tessy, from the evil Straightman. It's about a fifteen minute playthrough with a few fun ways to get yourself killed or arrested (as is the adventure game tradition).

You're limited to the few buildings on the city streets, but you can mostly tackle them in any order you want. You don't have to pick up specific items, just notes which last even if you die. The death screen is pretty iconic by the way.

Deja Vu? Who is she? There is no Ace Harding, just Tracker McDyke.

Tracker McDyke is wonderful by the way. Yes you can pick locks, but you're gonna solve most of your lock problems by just shooting them. Gunshots are just background noise in this neighborhood, nobody gives a shit and neither should you.

You can also look at a lady showering and she'll say a happy "hey~" to you!

There's no reason for this. Sometimes it's just nice for Detective McDyke to look at a sideboob and butt.

It's not all butts and boob however. While the story is short, the surroundings tell a true reflection of what the queer community went through during that time (and sadly still does on a different scale).

We're going back to talking about the AIDS crisis now, because the very idea of the game was based on the cruel reality C.M. Ralph experienced. It was normal for many in the queer community to just have friends disappear and never be found. Many families wouldn't claim those who were found and same sex partners weren't given spousal rights.

In Caper in the Castro though, you can save your friend.

Tessy is found unharmed toward the end of the game and it's easy to free her. You get to be a badass and shoot her chains off before burning the whole place down.

As I type this, I think about what a lovely role you get to play in this game. You play as a gun toting lesbian that takes down the evil Straightman, save your missing drag queen friend, then burn down all of Straightman's supplies.

If this game came out today, people would say it's inciting violence against straight people- Wait a minute! There was a censored release!

C.M. Ralph did put out a commercial release for Caper in the Castro called Murder on Main Street! It takes out everything queer in order to appeal to a publisher. I can't be mad though because you do what you have to in order to get that bag and let's be real.

There's no way in hell a publisher would've taken this.

Caper in the Castro itself is named after San Francisco's historically gay neighborhood, the Castro. While many have found a community among their queer peers, many places within were under threats and violent acts.

The scenario presented within the game can only be solved by members of the community. The police can't help you, only a lesbian with a gun can. We as a community need to support each other, especially with how things have been going in 2023.

I wanted to talk about this game for pride month not just because it's an important part of gaming history. To me, it represents the reason we celebrate pride.

Because there's a scene in the game where you walk into a diner and see two gay couples just having a comfortable late night meal.

And I think about how we deserve this comfortable happiness for many decades to come.

...and this game also gives us the "fantasy" of burning down the establishments of those who want to kill us.

Happy pride everyone. I hope you're all safe and surrounded by people you love and also love you in return.

[myfriendpokey]

new season of Preserving Worlds is out, really cool show documenting weird old forgotten videogame and gamemaking scenes, the first episode is free and i talked to the creators about old rpg gamer games in it, check it outt

[alpaca-clouds]

Games to play in the Middle Ages

You know, I thought I could talk about another medieval topic that might come in handy for people trying to write anything from fanfic, over historical stories, to just fantasy with a medieval setting: The kind of games that people would have played in the middle ages. Something that might also be handy for certain TTRPGs and things like that.

But first some background: You do have to understand that for the most part in the middle ages a lot of people had mostly self-made game boards (when it came to board games) and dice. If you were good with woodworking, those might have been made of wood, but often enough game boards were often just made from patches of leather with the board painted onto it with ink of some sort.

A lot of people would use just stones in black, white and grey. Sometimes also just painted stones or rather pebbles.

Given this fact, game rules might at times have varied a lot locally, as your game did not come in a box with a set of rules inside of them. Or worse, from a historical point of view: Some game rules have not been written down at all, so actually we do not know how exactly they were played and most we have right now is guesswork.

That understood, let's talk...

Dice Games

Okay, six sided dice were used for playing game for literally thousands of years. We have dice surviving from the ancient world. And after all, they were rather handy, right? Given that you can play a lot of games with just a few dice in your pockets. Especially games of chance that you could use to gamble.

This is probably the moment to make on thing clear: Gambling for a lot of people did not really happen for money, but just for some tokens and the fun of it. Because the truth is, that a lot of people historically did not have any or if some not many coins. So, you just would not gamble for coins. Money, as this universal thing we have today, was not that common for the longest time.

Still, people would gamble. And usually the games played with the dice would go something like this: Roll two or three dice and then it would either be "if you beat a certain number, you get something" or "you make a bet before rolling". Like, "I bet the number will be even/uneven" or "I bet the number will be higher/lower than X". There are a plethora of games we know, but in the end they will boil down to something like that.

Card Games

Something to note: Card games, as we know them right now, got established probably in the late 13th or early 14th century, so clearly more towards the end of the middle ages. They might have been around a bit longer - but if they were, we do not have any proof of that.

The current assumption among historians is, that playing cards as an idea originated in Asia, but came to Europe either through merchants - or were brought here by the Romani people. The deck of cards we know as our typical kinds of cards, was probably first created in Italy, though this, too, is not entirely certain. All we know is, that in the middle of the 14th century we have descriptions of those cards come up in surviving manuscripts.

The kind of games played with those cards were not too different from our modern games - with local variations of course. While most of the modern game rules were first written down in the 17th century, we do have a good idea that games comparable to Poker, Junker and Karnoffel have been around for fairly long.

Of course, the games really took off just after the middle ages, when printing made it a lot easier to create more of the cards much more easily.

So, let's go to some of the games that were played with boards of sort.

The Fox and the Geese

A game that is still around today. Often played on a board that looked kinda like the one you can see above (though historically speaking it was often much more simple), but at times also on just a normal checker board, one player plays as the geese (in some version of the game also sheep) and one plays the fox (in some versions the wolf). The figures can move in all directions - including diagonally. The fox can also jump another figure, if the spot behind the figure (in a straight line) is free.

The goal of the game is for the fox to eat all the geese by jumping them. While the goal of the geese is to outmaneuvre the fox by surrounding it to all sides or push it against a wall.

Tablut

Tablut is a game that originates with the Norse and was important to the rest of Europe through the viking raids. Hence you will find a lot of games sold today with some viking-esque decor on the game board, like the one above.

Like Fox and Geese the game is one of unequal sides. The black pieces are the attackers, the white pieces the defenders. The central white piece is the king, whose capture will end the game.

Both sides beat opponents with the same way: They move in straight lines (not diagonally) like the rock in chess. To beat an opposing piece, you need to trap it between two of your pieces.

The goal for the attackers is, to capture the king. The goal for the defenders is to beat out at least half of the attackers.

Mills

This is probably one of the best known games from those I post here, given that it is often included in a lot of board game collections to this day.

This is a very symmetrical game, where both sides follow the same rules. The game board is empty at the start, then both players alternatingly put down one piece at a time. The goal is to get three pieces in a row. As soon as you have, three in a row, you can steal one of the opposing pieces.

When all pieces are set, you can move the pieces in a straight line and try to once again bring three of your pieces into a line and steal more pieces. The game ends, as soon as one side only has three pieces left.

Tables / Nard

Okay, let me talk about a whole genre of games. These originated probably in either old Egypt or old Mesopotamia, though we honestly do not know this exactly and frankly: I made the mistake before to ask a historian friend about it, and learned that this is a very emotional topic for a lot of historians. It is somewhere from what we today call "the middle east".

Given it is old and has travled far, there are tons of variations, but the general idea is always the same: Both players have a certain numbers of pieces, those need to be moved all around the board once. This is done by rolling either one die or two dices.

And this if the point where the common rules end. Because in the end there is a ton of local variations. The number of pieces varies. The number of dice varies. It varies whether you can beat other pieces, whether you can strategically block fields. All of that is depending on local rules.

It should be noted that there were definitely variations of this game around made for more players. Often called "Table of Seasons" (which was for four players) and "Alchemist's Tables" (which was usually for seven players).

Of course there were other games around, too. Chess was definitely around in the middle ages too, with similar but not quite the same rules we have today. And there is some evidence that Snakes and Ladders came to Europe in the 13th century.

[darren-douglas]

Looking back at my Concept Artwork for Hardware Rival (PlayStation, 2016)

‘Hardware: Rivals is an vehicular combat game developed by  ‘SCE Connected Content Group’ and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for PlayStation 4 in 2016. It is the successor to the 2002 PlayStation 2 game, Hardware: Online Arena. Hardware: Rivals is an vehicular combat game developed by  ‘SCE Connected Content Group’ and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for PlayStation 4. It is the successor to the 2002 PlayStation 2 game, Hardware: Online Arena.’

[mugenfinder]

I've always looked at Silent Hill from afar but I happen to see this on the wiki and it really hits on my views of the game industry.

They were trying to do the 5th game 18 years ago, Origins and Homecoming were 2007 and 2008. And I totally forgot that Downpour was 2012, Generation 7 really left so much in the dirt.

They were even planning on having more normal people present

[houseboywife]

The Tower of Druaga: a game you can't play properly anymore

(insert image) Some people, upon reading this title, might think I'm talking about some kind of lost media. Not at all: The Tower of Druaga has been perfectly preserved. It has been rereleased on multiple platforms, and hell, if you wanted to you could even download and play it right now. Legally, of course. Right? Right. No, what I mean is that The Tower of Druaga is a game that was made to work only in a specific cultural context, at a specific cultural time, and playing it today would be an utterly miserable experience. And yet, the game was insanely successful when it launched in 1984. So let's see what it's all about, and why it is so utterly bizarre.

The Tower of Druaga has a pretty standard premise: you're the hero Gilgamesh, with your sword, shield, useful trinkets, and the like. Your goal is to climb 60 maze-like floors of the tower, slay the eponymous demon, save the girl and get the magic thingamajig. Each floor has enemies to avoid, a treasure to collect, a key and a locked door. Easy enough, right?

Except there's a catch. A big and huge catch. You see, each treasure contains items, and to make them appear you have to solve puzzles. Except those puzzles are completely arbitrary and are not communicated to the player in any way. They range from killing enemies in a certain order, to pressing a certain button combination, to crossing two arbitrary points in the map. Again, there is no indication on how to do any of this. What about the items? Well, here's an example. The first one you can get is a copper pickaxe that can be used to break walls. Pretty neat, but not necessary. Except that, if you miss it, you don't get any of the significantly better pickaxes later. Also, you have to break walls to get some items. Also, you can only use it twice in a floor before it breaks. Forever. You're not told this.

Some items have no effect other than making items spawn in later floors. Some are useless. Some have actively negative effects. But some items, oh some items are mandatory. And they might require that you picked previous items to spawn. And they might be locked behind nonsensical puzzles. And, of course, you can make the game unwinnable without knowing about it. The game doesn't tell you, it even lets you put in another quarter if you die. But if you miss a required item, you just can't win. Oh, and also: each floor has a time limit. Once expired, wisps start chasing you, and if they catch you you get zapped back to a lower floor. Without some of your items. Even the required ones.

Here's some examples just to put things into perspective:

Floor 5, white sword. Doesn't do anything, but without it you can't collect any of the future sword upgrades. One of them is required to win the game. To get it, you must block three spells from a wizard enemy with your shield, while moving.

Floor 19, book of light. If you don't get it, the next 3 floors will be completely dark. To get it, wait 3 seconds after unlocking the door.

Floor 25, nothing. Defeat every enemy to collect it.

Floor 28, gate detection book. If you don't collect it, the door on floor 30 doesn't spawn, softlocking you. To get it, stand on the locked door and draw your sword.

Floor 30, potion of unlock. If you don't collect it, a useful item on floor 31 doesn't spawn. To get it, walk three times over point A or B as illustrated in the following map. But also point A doesn't always work and you might need to kinda wiggle around a bit .

Floor 37, hyper helmet. Increases your health and is required to win the game. If you didn't collect the item on floor 36, turns into the evil elmet that decreases your health and makes you softlocked. To get it, defeat two druids and cross paths with a roper.

Floor 59, Druaga Fight. Just kill all the enemies, but if you accidentally absorb a spell using the hyper armor you collected previously, you get soft locked.

Floor 60: execute a specific series of actions to win, if you accidentally break a wall with a pickaxe you get softlocked.

I think this is sufficient to get that point across. And the thing is: people absolutely loved it. The Tower of Druaga attracted millions of fans, inspired a large amount of games including Zelda, had nine sequels, one manga, and even two animes. All for a game like this. Once this game got released in the future in the west, critics absolutely demolished it. And rightfully so: it really sucks to play now. Really, the only way to do it is to use a guide, because there's no way to find out realistically how to do any of that, at all.

And that's the thing, really: this game is pretty shit here and now, because it was meant to be played in a japanese arcade, in 1984. It makes little sense to review it now cause, well, an element of the game is missing. Sharing the secrets and tricks to other people can't really be done the same way anymore. Everything has been discovered, and if it released today the solution would just be posted on the internet on day 1. So every rerelease should be seen more as the preservation of a very important piece of media, a sort of time capsule to the past that can't really be replicated anymore. That's why, I think, The Tower of Druaga is really, really cool.

[video-game-trivia]

Since its release back on July 14th, 2022, Powerwash Simulator has had three crossover DLC's. The first two were Tomb Raider and Final Fantansy and also completely free. This was likely because the game was published by Square Enix.

Afterwards was the game's first paid DLC, which was a crossover with Spongebob Squarepants. And it was recently announced that the game would also be receiving a Warhammer crossover too.

[arconinternet]

Neuromancer (C64/DOS, Interplay, 1988/1989)

You can play it in your browser here. Controls for the DOS version include the mouse; keyboard controls can be found in the reviews below the game. C64 controls include numpad 84620 for joystick.

[letsplaygenderbinary]

Lvl 2: The Sims 4 & How It's Resisting Gender Binary Norms

Ready, player?

The video game industry has had an interesting history with gender, sexuality, and gender representation to say the least. But one game in recent years has had a firm footing in capturing life outside of heteronormativity.

For today I want to talk about one of my favorite games, The Sims 4.

So let's get into it :)

Since the first release of The Sims franchise in 2000, the game has been evolving its inclusivity: The Sims 1 allowed same-sex relationships, The Sims 2 allowed same-sex sims to have a “Joined Union” (marriage but not really), and The Sims 3 finally ‘legalized’ same-sex marriage.

Despite these inclusive implements, the gameplay didn’t exactly SIMulate all walks of life. Until The Sims 4.

For gender expression, The Sims 4 hadn’t really explored much beyond gender binary norms. Prior to 2016, the players were allowed to customize their sim’s walk style before their sim’s gender.

The Sims 4’s massive ‘Gender Update’ expanded the boundaries of gender expression. Customizable options (like hair, clothes, and accessories) in CAS that were previously locked behind male/female frames were now available for players to use regardless of their sim’s frame. The Sims Team even took a step further and allowed players to customize their sim’s ability to get pregnant or not as well as separate the sims frame from their gender, which was an insanely awesome feature for them to add.

In other words, they allowed for sims to be super queer and didn’t determine gender based on the sims frame or their gender expression.

And this is important: Pushing the boundaries of heteronormativity and the gender binary is ethical and inclusive, allowing for other people to be, to share their identities in games which are often exclusive in representation. If popular media, like video games, were unafraid to implement more boundary-less characters and language then I think more people would be open to learning (and accepting) queer life.

But there was still work to be done. Although players were allowed to create and represent queer sims visually in CAS and explore queer relationships in Live Mode, there still was an issue with pronouns in text-based notifications and gameplay. If the players wanted to have a gender-non-conforming sim they would still have to use he/him or she/her pronouns.

Sooo, the they/thems or neo-pronouns were practically non-existent in the Sims 4 for another 6 YEARS.

In 2022, The Sims 4 released its pronoun update that allowed players to choose their sim’s pronouns and even go as far as to write in their sim’s pronouns. This allowed players to create sims that had neo-pronouns, multiple pronouns, and they/them pronouns. Finally…

Then earlier this year on July 28th, The Sims 4 launched their sexuality update that allowed players to fully classify and customize their sim’s sexuality. So, instead of all sims being coded as pansexual and fraternizing with ANY sim regardless of gender/sex, sims were now able to be classified as strictly attracted to male, female, all sims, or even no sims at all. So, sims can now officially be asexual!

Throughout the year The Sims Team has also added customizable options for sims in CAS like binders and top surgery scars. Hopefully, they’ll start working on the makeup from masculine frame sims soon…

What do you think? Do you think The Sims has done a good job of expanding on gender expression? Are there any other games that do this? Drop a lil comment down below :)

Works Cited Image Cited: Broverman, Neal. “Sims’ Trans Characters Have Christian Zealots Seeing End of Days.” Advocate.com, 7 Feb. 2023, www.advocate.com/transgender/sims-trans-characters-have-christian-zealots-seeing-end-of-days.

[obscuritory]

VGHF Holiday Calendar Day 1: We remastered The Making of Riven

If you played Riven back in the day, you might remember the mini-doc that came with Riven. It was pretty great, but it was also compressed to hell in QuickTime.

As part of our project to digitize Cyan's archives, we went back to the original master tape for The Making of Riven and brought it back at unbelievable quality, including 4x the original framerate. Just look at this difference! Holy moly!

We're sharing this as part of our annual fundraiser! If you like what you see, please consider donating a couple bucks to the Video Game History Foundation's pledge drive to fund our next year of operations!

[caveguy22]

Japanese & Korean cover art for Ratchet and Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal

[retrogamechampion]

ROM Flashing Music (Seibu SPI System)

Arcade history time!

In the mid '90s, a company called Seibu Kaihatsu put together a special arcade machine board called the "Seibu SPI System." With it, an arcade operator could simply change out a handful of game cartridges in one machine rather than plunk down money on new boards or cabinets.

There were 7 total games made to work with this board, most famously titles in the "Raiden Fighters" SHMUP series:

When you switched out a game cartridge, the system would then need to flash the ROM of that game, loading it into the board before it was ready to play. That would take an average of about 3-10 minutes.

A cool, totally-not-needed-yet-really-sweet-bonus feature is that 6 of these 7 games played a tune while the ROM was flashing. Such an incredibly awesome, very Japanese thing to do - Give bored arcade operators something to listen to while they set up their machine.

I'd like to share the entire collection of these songs with you - While they may not be groundbreaking as a whole, a few of them are honestly really, really good retro game tracks that should not be lost to obscurity!

I'll start you off with this laid back, Jazzy song from "Raiden Fighters Jet" that sounds like what you hear when you press the "Bossa Nova" button on an old synthesizer keyboard.

This track from "Viper Phase 1" is just a delicious, somber little lullaby that could easily be playing during the sad backstory of a character from a 16 bit Squaresoft RPG.

Short and sweet, this tiny ditty plays a few times while the very short flashing for "Battle Balls" happens.

Low and rumbling with fast-paced drums and techno stingers, this "Raiden Fighters" track had to be exciting to hear while a whole new generation of promising SHMUP goodness was making its way into your arcade.

For the radically named sequel "Raiden Fighters 2: Operation Hell Dive," the previous song was just mixed a bit more full and complex, though the high-ends in the song are insufferably loud to me. This is my least favorite out of the six just because of that.

Don't worry, though, I saved the best for last to heal up your ears:

This was the first ROM flashing song I heard, when I was testing out my arcade game set a ways back. It's for the romance/sexytime mahjong game "E-Jong High School."

While I had to wait quite some time for this particular flashing, ththis track made it a serene experience. It's just so peaceful and chill... Honestly, I was kind of bummed when the timer got down to 000 and the game started. Thankfully, the music is easy to preserve! :)

Hopefully you enjoyed at least one of these to make your day a little more awesome.

Every single one of these games' soundtracks were made by Go Sato, a very busy Japanese composer (check that link for the big body of work). The exception is "Raiden Fighters Jet," which was composed by Yasuhiro Hashimoto.

However, after listening to the ROM flashing song for Jet, I have an inkling that the track was made by Go Sato as well.

More recently, Go composed the music for Cotton Rock 'n' Roll!

Here is a picture of Go with a cuddly friend (Go is the one on the left):