Videogame histories in the wild: a panorama
Virtual
Thanks to fan-led initiatives, video game history is being documented beyond any other culture. How many of the 303 264 games currently listed on Mobygames are visible on our radar? Can anybody really claim to be knowledgeable of video game history, when so many traces confront us to our collective ignorance? To properly account for this legacy and have meaningful encounters with this heritage, thousands of researchers would be needed.
Video game platforms brand us, and in doing so they can limit our perspective. As we grow up with games, we might have the chance to visit a few digital parks, carefully crafted by big corporations. Successful rides are put forward and become exemplars of proper fun. The same few games you will find on miniature retro consoles twenty years later. But why would we stick to these protected enclaves? Moving away from the glowing trails is easier than ever, and going out of bounds, into the wild, has always been the best way to find real treasures.
In this presentation, we revisit NEC’s PC Engine platform and the fascinating oddities emerging thanks to – and often in spite of – technological innovation (most notably, the first CD-ROM extension in gaming history). This guided tour in the wild features lemmings, snatchers, a mouse, backseat players, rainbow CRT glitches, BDSM lolitas, pervy voyeurs, non-binary robots, Syd Mead, Japanese Haniwa figures, and real gamers shedding a tear at the beauty of unchallenging shoot ’em ups.
Carl Therrien is Associate Professor in games and film studies at the University of Montreal. His first book about an awesome old console that everyone has already forgotten (The TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine) was published in 2019 in the Platform Studies collection (MIT Press). He has also written numerous papers on immersion and on the history of popular genres (such as adventure games and first-person shooters). His current work seeks to integrate more video games into the canon studied by historians, in order to better document and tell the full story of the richness and diversity of this culture.