Wired's Chris Kohler on Racing the Beam
Chris Kohler, author of Power Up and games writer at Wired penned a nice piece on Racing the Beam for Wired’s Game|Life blog. One of the ideas we discuss in the book that Kohler picks up on is the fact that the Atari was manufactured and supported until 1992, albeit in increasingly smaller numbers. Today it’s almost impossible to imagine… read more
Michael Agger has written a nice piece in Slate about the Atari and Nick and my book Racing the Beam. The article does a great job characterizing the book and what we hoped to do with it. My favorite part comes at the end when Agger wonders aloud if a similar book could be written about the Nintendo Entertainment System… read more
You'd be completely shocked at the things we can convince people do with a vacuum cleaner.
Game trade news site Gamasutra ran a contest late last month to predict the future of games. Dubbed “Games of 2020,” the contest asked entrants to “imagine what video games might be like in the year 2020.” Winners would receive an all-access pass to the forthcoming Game Developers Conference. The results are in, among them a massively multiplayer origami game and… read more
The Atari in the Boston Globe
The Boston Globe today features an interview with Nick Montfort, my Racing the Beam co-author, about the Atari VCS and our new book. My favorite part of the interview is reproduced below: IDEAS: People … are still creating 2600 cartridges? MONTFORT: At this point, it’s sort of more like zines as opposed to commercial book publishing. It’s on a different… read more
Two Digital Video Discs
Speaking of the Atari VCS, Georgia Tech colleague David Terraso pointed out to me that the cover art for the third season DVD release of The Venture Bros. is styled after an original Atari game box. (Venture Bros. is one of the animated shows in Adult Swim on Cartoon Network.) The results are impressively styled indeed: I like how the… read more
The nice folks over at Hatchet Job had me on their podcast this week. You can listen to it on their website, or subscribe via iTunes. Topics covered include the Atari, games and activism, Karl Marx, ice cream, and. It’ll be up to you to judge how my reputation emerged, but there’s no denying those cats did a hatchet job… read more
A product concept
Who wouldn’t buy one, I ask you? Just imagine how the whistle would sound.
On mass-market sentimentalism in videogames. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
Thomas Kinkade paints cottages, gardens, chapels, lighthouses, and small town street scenes. He paints such subjects by the dozens each year, but he sells thousands of them for at least a thousand dollars each. All are “originals” manufactured using a complex print process that involves both machine automation and assembly line-like human craftsmanship. The result has made Kinkade the most… read more
Two lovely menu items
From recent trips out to eat. First, new at IHOP, the “Bacon Temptation Omelette”: New! Bacon Temptation Omelette Loaded with six strips of crispy bacon, a rich cheese sauce, Jack and Cheddar cheeses and diced tomatoes $8.59 But, perhaps you need something to wash it down? No problem. Enter the “Suffering Bastard”, served at Pyng Ho Chinese Restaurant: Suffering Bastard… read more
Yin and Yang on the MIT Podcast
What does the Federal Reserve have to do with the Atari VCS? They are both the subject of this month’s MIT Press podcast. First, Stephen H. Axilrod talks about his book Inside the Fed: Monetary Policy and Its Management, Martin through Greenspan to Bernanke. Then I talk about my new book (co-authored with Nick Montfort), Racing the Beam: The Atari… read more