by Cat DeSpira
On November 6, 2019 at “80s in the Sand”, a cruise-stop destination in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, podcast show hosts John and Heidi from Sunny 93.3 recorded an interview with game developer Andrew "Drew" Becker, a man who made a startling confession. He claimed that he had created the initial code for Atari’s 1980 Centipede when he was only 13-years old … Continue reading Steve Jobs and The Jersey Centipede: Former Schoolboy Claims Jobs Bought His Game Code in 1981
You can't record accurate arcade cultural history by just looking at games and quoting industry statistics. Humanity doesn't live there. It never has. The true story lies in the people who played the games and the arcades who housed them.
People can tell you how many levels, what patterns to follow to beat the levels and how to get a "perfect game". But until now, no one's ever told you how people really played the game in The 80s.
Video game haters. If you think we have them now, then you're probably not old enough to remember the gauntlet of disgust we gamers of The 80s had to navigate just to play a simple game of Pac-Man in an arcade. With video games being mainstream today, and with video gaming being everywhere and … Continue reading Mall Rats, Vidiots and Addicts: Anti Video Game Propaganda From The 80s
Buried Arcade History #1 here Once again I'm back with more "lost photos" from national newspapers that I often find while I'm conducting research. For a while there I felt that, surely, the well would run dry, but that hasn't been the case at all. With every new cache of newspaper archives I begin leafing … Continue reading Buried Arcade History: Newspaper Photos From The Video Craze That Deserve To Be Seen Again #2
Somewhere in the Midwest, down an old road that leads across a washed out and crumbling bridge, in a stand of overgrown trees and in what appears to be a field on the edge of an industrial tract of land, sits a house that's seen better days. The abandoned house, filmed in December 2016 by … Continue reading Man Discovers Arcade Games in The Basement of An Abandoned House
Corny sexual double-entendres of the variety your dirty Uncle Johnny might conjure up, one-liners about "cocks" (roosters), firearms, phallic-looking hot dogs, allusions to rape and suicide are just a few of the most common themes found on 1950s and early 1960s adult Valentine cards.
Honestly, if Atari is hiding their relation to this film, it's not because they're ashamed of having funded it. It's because it's so bad.
Sometimes I find myself studying the faces of the people in the photos next to the games or milling around the arcade. They're usually young teenagers, just as I was back then, examples of American naivete and valor rolled up in a fuse so hot that any new interest could ignite it with a single spark. The 80s was an age of unending successive fads...except one. Video games. That was no fad. Falling in electronic-love was never a passing fad as much as people today want to claim it was.
Galaga World Championship March 29-April 1, 2018 Santa Fe, New Mexico Top Prize: $10,000
