Preserving Games

Archiving the Creation Processes of the Video Game Industry

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Month: January, 2009

Spacewar!

26 January, 2009 (13:57) | Emulation and Vintage Gameplay | By: TimA

Spacewar! is arguably the first videogame ever created. It was released in 1962 on the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processing) computer which had marked a massive shift in the philosophy of computer design when it was released just three years earlier in 1959. For today’s gamer, Spacewar! seems rather simple. There are two spaceships. [...]

What Story? Reporting a MUD-Dev Thread from April – May 2000

23 January, 2009 (14:49) | News and Commentary | By: walker

From August 22, 1996 to the early October of 2004 the MUD-Dev mailing list housed a slew of earnest and lengthy discussions — technical, philosophical, design and otherwise — concerning the development and play of multi-user dungeons (MUDs). 
MUDs were developed before graphics-capable computers, originating and remaining entirely text-based. Players type commands, role-play or just socialize [...]

Doom: 15 Years Later

13 January, 2009 (21:00) | Emulation and Vintage Gameplay | By: admin

In 2007, Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, presented a video game canon in order to encourage initial preservation efforts by the Library of Congress.  On this list of ten important video games is the 1993 DOS-based game Doom, and rightly so.  Doom is one of the earliest, [...]