Two from the 'Tube

Some thoughtful friends forwarded me some links to some retro game themed videos recently. Thanks, friends!

First, apparently in March last year, Pontiac released a TV ad based on the 1983 game Spy Hunter. Like everything else, it's available on YouTube, along with the Making-Of (which to me is even more interesting.) Few, if any, of the collaborators appear to be old enough to remember the game when it came out, but there you have it.

There is also this music video by "The Go! Team," the song is "Junior Kickstart" and the star is Ms. Pac-Man running around the streets of New York - whose denizens either don't notice a real life Pac-person, or seemingly don't think anything of it. Date of the video is unknown; the album the song was released on came out in 2004, but if you look closely you'll see the World Trade Center in the video, so it must have been filmed before that.

Finally, in unrelated news, I liked the following excerpt from an article entitled Do Men Really Want to Get Married?

For me, the light bulb popped on at a penny arcade, playing classic '80s arcade games with my girlfriend. Kris destroyed asteroids and hopped barrels with impressive dexterity.

But it was the grace with which she obliterated insects that sealed the deal. Spinning that roller ball, wiping out that quickly descending centipede with master firepower -- I had to marry this girl.

Can't Stop the Blocks

Tetris, an incredibly simple and compelling game, turns 25 today. People still play it. It's one of the most widely recognized tropes in gamedom. Even Google honored it in its Google Doodle:

There is a long and fascinating history behind the game, but I won't repeat it here. I will offer this small tidbit, however - if you've ever wondered where the name Tetris comes from, it's from the Greek prefix tetra, meaning four. Each of the shapes ("tetronimoes") that drop contains four squares in various configurations. As for the "-is," apparently that's a nod to creator Alexey Pajitnov's favorite sport, Tennis.

Till next time, happy gaming.... and remember, it's hip to be square!

Tetris in the Chicago Tribune

Tetris in Wikipedia

Windows 7 (and Windows 1 through 3)

Today's slideshow shows some of the design considerations undertaken in the forthcoming Windows 7, which we're all hopeful will help us forget Vista... heh. And it includes some images from Windowses past (see slide 3, 4, etc.)

CNET news

Mean Hamster takes up Crossbow

I learned of plans for this in their press release in 2006, but I've just discovered an undocumented link on the Mean Hamster web site. As promised, they've re-done the classic 1983 Exidy shooting game Crossbow, with somewhat better graphics. And they kept it so much the same, they didn't mess it up! Go ahead and have a go at playing it with your hamster, er, I mean mouse.

Mean Hamster Crossbow

Note: no hamsters were harmed in the making of this remake.

Save the "Shell" Users

Seen on Craigslist, a decidedly different kind of personal ad. Users of the Unix operating system are kind of the Amish of the computer world. They pride themselves on using a shell (text only) interface with lots of arcane commands - the more arcane, the better. Here's a fellow who is looking to keep his species around:

There is a sad truth to the world today. I am part of a dying breed of people known as "shell users." We are an old-fashioned bunch, preferring the warm glow of a green screen full of text over the cold blockiness of a graphical interface. We use ssh, scp, and even occassionally ftp. Back in the days before high-speed connections ("broadband"), we would dial up during off-hours to avoid being slammed with huge phone bills. The whole "Microsoft Windows" fad will fade away sooner or later, but in the interim, our kind is facing extinction.

Best of Craigslist

Artwork of the Primitives

Time now for a look back at artwork analogous to cave paintings, in terms of the digital world. Of course we all see high-def graphics on our computer screens every day. But it was not always so! Used to be you only got letters and numbers, and a blocky graphic on a screen by itself IF you were lucky. People spent ungodly amounts of time collecting these - you had to dial into separate systems all over the place, select them one by one, and then wait for them to download before you could even think about looking at them. A far cry from the web, eh?

For your perusal - BBS ads!

Character based

Low-bit raster based (Warning! Contains some girlie pictures. Nothing incredibly NSFW on the first page.)

You kids get off my lawn!

Big thanks to my pal Lapsed Cannibal for this podcast discussing Atari 2600 games. I wonder if the chaps in the show are a couple years older than me... they seem to have been old enough at the time to realize Superman and Night Driver were not good games. (In fairness, the latter was a faithful console port of a mid-1970s first person racer, so what should we expect?) Certainly these worthy gents have a certain fogey-ness about them. What do you think? Were the things of your youth better than what exists today - or just more elegant in their simplicity? Vive la difference, I suppose! Now, we have both old and new - and imagine what we'd have thought of today's games if we'd been able to see a preview of them 30 years ago. It would have blown our little kid minds!