In late 2006, I received a large collection of vintage computer magazines from a friend. For days I sat on my office floor and thumbed through nearly every issue, finding page after page of priceless historical information. One day, while rapidly flipping through a 1983 issue of Popular Computing, I encountered a photo that stopped […]
And I mean epic. Last week, I crossed the country to attend Game Developers Conference 2008 in San Francisco, California. Below, you’ll find a detailed report on my travels, replete with in-depth photos, each accompanied by both honest and sometimes facetious commentary. But be warned: it’s going to be a long trip. If there be […]
Next week, I’ll be flying 2,000 miles across the country to scenic San Francisco, CA in order to attend Game Developers Conference 2008. What does this have to do with Vintage Computing and Gaming, you ask? And why would any man spend eight hours cramped in a tiny plane seat if they didn’t have to? […]
Earlier this year, I had the chance to interview Nolan Bushnell, career entrepreneur and nigh-but-legendary founder of Atari. For the last seven years, Bushnell has been pouring most of his energy into his latest venture, uWink — a sort of Chuck E. Cheese restaurant for adults. Of course, being the history buff I am, I […]
It’s true: in 1967, Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison created the world’s first television video game hardware. And forty years ago today (May 15th, 1967), the first television video game took place. Who won? Mosey on over to 1UP.com and check out the full feature I wrote about it. You’ll find out that answer and […]
Forty years ago today, the world’s first television video game contest took place in a small lab in Nashua, NH. The place was Sanders Associates, a large defense contractor, and the contestants were Ralph Baer and his technician, Bill Harrison. The inventions of these two men and a third, Bill Rusch, would later appear commercially […]
Back in February, I conducted a nice interview with Steve Wozniak (“Woz”), co-founder of Apple Computer, that mostly focused on video and computer games. The piece is now on Gamasutra for all to read. Woz talks about how the Apple II design was inspired by video games, his love of Tetris, Steve Jobs as a […]
For those of you who might not know, the GCE Vectrex (1983) was a unique game system that had a built in black and white vector graphics display. Vector graphics are composed of lines drawn point-to-point on a specially-driven CRT rather than through a bit-mapped pixel graphics method on a raster scan display (like an […]
So…you’d like to be a Video Games Inventor, eh? Well, sorry, but you have to look like the guy in the lower left. And to do that, you have to go back in time to 1982 and work for Magnavox. By the way, that guy is only twenty years old. (Ok…the article says 35, but […]
