Game History and the Local (Palgrave Games in Context) 303066421X, 9783030664213

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PALGRAVE GAMES IN CONTEXT

Game History and the Local Edited by Melanie Swalwell

Palgrave Games in Context Series Editors Neil Randall The Games Institute University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON, Canada Steve Wilcox Game Design and Development Wilfrid Laurier University Brantford, ON, Canada

Games are pervasive in contemporary life, intersecting with leisure, work, health, culture, history, technology, politics, industry, and beyond. These contexts span topics, cross disciplines, and bridge professions. Palgrave Games in Context situates games and play within such interdisciplinary and interprofessional contexts, resulting in accessible, applicable, and practical scholarship for students, researchers, game designers, and industry professionals. What does it mean to study, critique, and create games in context? This series eschews conventional classifications—such as academic discipline or game genre—and instead looks to practical, real-world situations to shape analysis and ground discussion. A single text might bring together professionals working in the field, critics, scholars, researchers, and designers. The result is a broad range of voices from a variety of disciplinary and professional backgrounds contributing to an accessible, practical series on the various and varied roles of games and play. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16027

Melanie Swalwell Editor

Game History and the Local

Editor Melanie Swalwell Transformative Media Technologies Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Palgrave Games in Context ISBN 978-3-030-66421-3    ISBN 978-3-030-66422-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Chapters 1 and 12 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: dpa picture alliance archive / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This collection is the culmination of a project that began when I moved to New Zealand to take up my first full-time academic position at Victoria University of Wellington. Not long after I’d started, I was approached by a museum curator who knew I had done some research on games. She asked me to conduct background research for an exhibition that Te Manawa were considering mounting, on the history, art and science of digital games. The museum was particularly insistent that I investigate the local history of games in New Zealand, a task which I was initially not sure how to begin. First, as an Australian, this was not my history, and second, I reasoned, it surely could not have been very different to the rest of the world’s. Discovering a network of game collectors who were happy to assist, I began. I discovered that in the 1970s and 1980s, New Zealand— sometimes known as the “Poland of the South Pacific”—sat behind a trade barrier and that this contributed to the development of a multi-­ faceted industry producing digital games locally. This was the beginning of my research into the local contexts of game history. The museum didn’t end up pursuing the show, but I continued the research because it was just such a gift of a project. Partly, I got lucky, happening to be in the right place at the right time. And being an outsider helped, as I got to ask all the obvious questions a local might not have. But I must also credit some remarkable and generous collectors, who have shared their knowledge, networks and collections with me, particularly Michael Davidson, Aaron Wheeler and Alan Bell. And I wouldn’t have gotten very far without the initial help of Jason Wilson. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ironically, the ideas informing this book’s premise about the local, locale and locality have been developed through successive international encounters. Talking to my colleague and friend, Andreas Lange, as we drove through a snowstorm on a visit to the Berlin Computerspiele Museum store one day in 2004, I was excited to learn that the former East Germany also had a unique history of games. Andreas visited me in Wellington the following year, and we considered a book project (we presented a panel at the DiGRA conference in 2005), but there was not yet a critical mass of people interested in these questions of the local. That seemed to change around 2012 or 2013 when I met several contributors at conferences. Multiple conference panels and a listserv later, the anthology is complete. Kudos to all the contributors for a sterling effort. I was fortunate to receive an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT130100391), which supported this project. I also acknowledge the support of Flinders University for co-investment, which funded visits from several international scholars including Graeme Kirkpatrick, and Helen Stuckey and Maria Garda as postdoctoral fellows. I have also had the pleasure of hosting Dongwon Jo and David Murphy as postdoctoral Endeavour Award recipients. Game History and the Local owes a lot to time spent on the road, meeting colleagues at conferences and trawling through archives. Work travel is not always easy. Dennis McDermott was the most supportive partner, always making it possible. I am grateful to all my friends and colleagues for their support. And Pearl McDermott, Sophie Self and Gonzalo Miranda are just the best. Finally, thanks to Palgrave editors Camille Davies and Liam McLean for their support of the project, and their accommodation of the tumult that 2020 served up.

Contents

1 Introduction: Game History and the Local  1 Melanie Swalwell 2 Adventures in Everyday Spaces: Hyperlocal Computer Games in 1980s–1990s Czechoslovakia 17 Jaroslav Švelch 3 “The Last Cassette” and the Local Chronology of 8-Bit Video Games in Poland 37 Maria B. Garda and Paweł Grabarczyk 4 The Swedish Game Development History: The Founders and the Social Structure 57 Ulf Sandqvist 5 A Place for a Nintendo? Discourse on Locale and Players’ Topobiographical Identity in the Late 1980s and the Early 1990s 79 Jaakko Suominen and Anna Sivula 6 On Footwork: Finding the Local in American Video Game History101 Laine Nooney

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Contents

7 Around the World with the Sorcerer of Exidy123 Michael Borthwick and Melanie Swalwell 8 Cracking Technocultural Memory: Scenes and Stories of Origin in the PlayStation Portable Forensic Imaginary141 David Murphy 9 Indie Games of No Nation: The Transnational Indie Imaginary and the Occlusion of National Markers159 John Vanderhoef 10 Video Games Have Never Been Global: Resituating Video Game Localization History177 Stephen Mandiberg 11 “Welcoming All Gods and Embracing All Places”: Computer Games As Constitutively Transcendent of the Local199 Graeme Kirkpatrick 12 Heterodoxy in Game History: Towards More ‘Connected Histories’221 Melanie Swalwell Index235

Notes on Contributors

Michael Borthwick  is a museum technology consultant. He is enrolled in an iPhD at Swinburne University of Technology, where he is researching the reception of the 1970s microcomputer the Exidy Sorcerer. Maria  B.  Garda  (PhD) has been researching video games and digital media from the perspectives of genre, nostalgia and local history. She is an expert on media history, and her current work focuses on the comparative history of digital game cultures. Her recent publications have dealt with indie games and early computer art, and she was previously involved with several research projects, including “Alternative Usage of New Media Technology during the Decline of People’s Republic of Poland” (University of Lodz, 2013–17) and “Creative Micro-­ computing in Australia, 1976–1992” (Flinders University, 2017–18). She is the vice president of the Games Research Association of Poland and co-founder of Replay: The Polish Journal of Game Studies. Paweł  Grabarczyk is an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. He is interested in game ontology, history of computing and virtual reality. He is the editor-in-chief of Replay: The Polish Journal of Game Studies and the head of Centre for Philosophical Research. Graeme  Kirkpatrick is Professor of Social and Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester. His Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game (2011) was listed by Edge magazine as one that should be in every gamer’s library, while his Computer Games and the Social Imaginary (2013) was described in New Media & Society as ‘one of the finest books to date on digital ix

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games’. His first book, Critical Technology (2004), won the 2005 Philip Abrams Memorial Prize from the British Sociological Association. Stephen Mandiberg  is a lecturer in the Department of Media Arts at the University of North Texas. His work focuses on the intersections between digital video games, global cultural flow and industry practices of translation, repetition, and adaptation. David  Murphy  uses communication and cultural studies theories and methods to study game literacy, the social life of information created by player communities, and the politics of intellectual property. His past work has appeared in anthologies and journals, including Game Studies, The Journal of Canadian Studies, Games and Culture, and Fans and Videogames. His current work consists of three research streams focusing on innovation and intellectual property, hacking histories and cultures, and media archaeology and platform studies. He was an Endeavour Fellow at Flinders University in 2018 where he began a project on the hacking of the PlayStation Portable (PSP). Laine Nooney  is Assistant Professor of Media and Information Industries in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she specializes in the history of American personal computing and computer gaming. She is completing her first book project, tentatively titled The Apple II: How the Computer Became Personal, under contract with University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2023. She is a founding editor of ROMchip, the first open access, scholarly journal of video game history, and organizes the leading annual conference for historians of computing as part of her work with the Special Interest Group in Computing, Information, and Society (SIGCIS). Ulf Sandqvist  holds a doctorate in Economic History and is the director of Humlab at Umeå University, Sweden. His main research area is the history of digital games and the industry surrounding these games. Research interests include business history, Swedish game history, labour and gender structures within the game industry. Anna  Sivula (Ph.D.) is Professor of Cultural Heritage Studies at the Degree Program of Cultural Production and Landscape Studies at University of Turku, Finland. She is a historian and a historiographer, and she has researched the historical identity work in cultural heritage com-

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munities. Her current work focuses in the local and localizing identity work of contemporary heritage communities. Her research interests are industrial heritage, urban heritage and game cultural heritagization. Jaakko Suominen  (Ph.D.) is Professor of Digital Culture and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Turku, Finland. In his studies, he has focused on the cultural history of information technology and the history of media and technology. Lately, he has studied particularly the history of social media as well as retro gaming and other forms of uses of history within game cultures. His works have appeared in journals such as Game Studies, Games & Culture, Well Played, Media History, Fibreculture, Technology and Culture, New Media and Society, Kinephanos, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. Jaroslav Švelch  is an assistant professor at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of the recent monograph Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (2018). He has published work on history and theory of computer games, on humour in games and social media, and on video game monsters. He is a co-founder of the Central and Eastern European Game Studies conference. Melanie Swalwell  is Professor of Digital Media Heritage at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. She is the author of Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality (2021), and co-­editor of Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives (2017) and The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on Cultural History, Theory and Aesthetics (2008). John Vanderhoef  is Assistant Professor of Film, Television, and Media in the Communications Department at California State University, Dominguez Hills. His research interests include indie media, digital labour and media industries. His book Passion, Pixels, and Profit explores the influence of romantic individualism and neoliberal ideology on the creative economy of indie game production. His work has appeared in journals like Television and New Media and Ada, and in edited collections like Production Studies, The Sequel. He is also an avid narrative gamemaker and has exhibited digital games at festivals like Slamdance DIG and PixelPop Festival.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

The loading and menu screens of Stodman (Lonský 1992). The loading screen (left) contains several references to the punk rock subculture and features “Respect,” the protagonist’s makeshift flail. The menu screen shows the school building where most of the game takes place 24 Fig. 3.1 The computer fair at Grzybowska Street in Warsaw (March 1993). (Source: PAP/Teodor Walczak) 42 Fig. 5.1 Father and child playing Nintendo tabletop electronic game (probably Donkey Kong JR) in Orivesi. The flowers on the table indicate that the photo was taken at Christmas time. (Courtesy of Tampere Museums/The Finnish Museum of Games. Photo Kirsti Sakko 1986) 89 Fig. 5.2 Kids with a rented Nintendo on Bulevardi Street Helsinki. (Courtesy of Tampere Museums/The Finnish Museum of Games. Photo Pekka Elomaa 1990) 90 Fig. 6.1 Oakhurst’s “Talking Bear,” installed outside Ditton Realty at the intersection of California State Route 41 and Crane Valley Road/Road 426 in Oakhurst 104 Fig. 6.2 Shelves in the basement production area of Ponderosa Printing. Sierra On-Line game boxes, dating to the early mid-1980s, are pinned to the wall 118 Fig. 7.1 A photograph of Quality Software’s trade stand at the 1980 West Coast Computer Faire. (Taken by the Australian technical writer, Jamieson Rowe. Image copyright Silicon Chip Publications)130 Fig. 8.1 Hello World 149 Fig. 10.1 The December 2012 issue of Wired sold within Japan 179 xiii

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 3.1 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 4.8

Overview of hyperlocal games that will be discussed in this chapter19 Video games published on a cassette tape (1977–1999) based on the data collected by MobyGames’ users (22 July 2016) 46 Number of individuals in the Swedish game industry (1997–2010)63 The generations employed in the Swedish game industry (1997–2010)63 Education levels in the Swedish game industry (1997–2010) 67 Profession classification in the Swedish game industry (2001–2010)68 Country of birth in the Swedish game industry (1997–2010) 69 Percentage of women in the Swedish game industry (1997–2010)70 Percentage of women and men leaving the Swedish game industry (1997–2009) 71 Profession classification in the Swedish game industry (2001–2010): men (M) and women (W) 72

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Game History and the Local Melanie Swalwell

Locality has largely been left out of game history, at least until recently. The orthodoxy that the U.S. and Japan constituted the ‘centres’ at the outset of the video game industry has enjoyed such legitimacy that many accounts do not bother to mention the where that their material or statistics pertain to. That many histories have been written by journalists, collectors, and other ‘insiders’—comprising what Erkki Huhtamo famously calls the “chronicle era” of game history (Huhtamo 2005, 4)—largely accepting the game industry’s ‘global’ rhetoric, has no doubt contributed to this situation. I largely agree with Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins who, reflecting on such chronicles, write, “This is a mode of writing history consumed with the ‘when’ and ‘what’ to the detriment of the ‘why’ and ‘how’” (Lowood and Guins 2016, xiii); however, to their formulation of what is missing, I would add consideration of the ‘where’. In general, location has been a massive blind spot in game history. At least until relatively recently, histories of digital games have been written

M. Swalwell (*) Transformative Media Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_1

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from North American, Japanese, and—to a lesser extent—U.K. perspectives. Geography has usually been ignored, with the implication being that games and their reception were the same everywhere. Two examples illustrate this tendency. Historian of computing Martin Campbell-Kelly writes in his software history From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: “Games accounted for about 60 per cent of home computer software sales” (2003, p. 276). Campbell-Kelly apparently sees no need to provide the provenance of these figures, nor mention the where that they pertain to. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s Racing the Beam similarly assumes an unproblematic evenness of distribution and penetration. They write of “The popularity of the Atari VCS – which was the dominant system for years and remained widely used for more than a decade …” (Montfort and Bogost 2009, 4). Dominant system where? Widely used by whom? They continue: “Although several companies fielded consoles, by 1981 the Atari VCS accounted for 75 percent of home videogame system sales.” Further on, they write: “Indeed, the generic term for a videogame system in the early 1980s was ‘an Atari’.” These facts and figures are taken to be so self-evident that they don’t require any qualification. Failing to locate them demonstrates just how unconscious the operative U.S.-, U.K.-, and/ or Northern hemisphere-centrism is. The assumption is that the experiences of making, selling, and playing games in this era were the same everywhere. This is not only factually wrong; it begs the question about the gaps in existing historical knowledge. A second, related problem has been the centrality popular game history has accorded the ‘great men’ of the games industry and their deeds (e.g. Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell), to the exclusion of other perspectives and approaches. Alongside this, the adoption of a range of foundational stories—the shortage of 100-yen coins following the Japanese release of ‘Space Invaders’, the dumping of ‘E.T.’ cartridges in the desert, and ‘the’ video game crash of 1983—effectively function as grand narratives, establishing major turning points in ‘the’ industry (as if this were singular). The iconic status of such stories—which always seem to centre the U.S. and Japan—implies that nothing of significance can have happened elsewhere. Some nuancing has been taking place. Tristan Donovan’s Replay: The history of video games, for instance, might be considered a title somewhere inbetween a ‘chronicle’ and more scholarly accounts, also reflecting the time of its publication (2010). Donovan aspires to tell game history as a history of software rather than hardware. Whilst still a journalistic account which tries to tell the whole history of games (as per his subtitle), Donovan

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acknowledges that the history of games is a global rather than solely a North American history (Chap. 9 covers game development for the Sinclair computers in 1980s Britain, Spain, and Australia, for instance). Acknowledging that other contexts exist—including using microcomputers to write and play games in the U.S.!—and allowing that there might be gaps in what mainstream histories have covered to date are welcome developments. Game History and the Local responds to the need to continue moving beyond game historical orthodoxies. Game history did not unfold uniformly and the particularities of space and place matter. Given the great historic diversity of games and contexts for their play, an appreciation of socio-cultural and geographic specificity is important to develop, particularly if other histories are to be told, for instance, from the ‘periphery’ rather than the ‘centre’. But as important as divergent contexts and specificity are, this book emerges from the conviction that local historical case studies are not in and of themselves adequate. As such, this volume collects essays that bring the local, locality, and locatedness into critical focus, encouraging reflection on the local rather than celebration of the local for its own sake. What is the significance of the local framework for game history? By collecting responses to this provocation, the anthology seeks to fill a gap in the history of the medium, bringing together empirically grounded and theoretically informed essays on game history and historiography. Each chapter critically considers some aspect of ‘the local’, reflecting on its significance. For if locality functions as one corrective to a crudely universalising history—as seems to be the case—then it is important to ask what comes after the very necessary attention to local specificity. Apart from critiquing game history’s silence with respect to locality, this introductory chapter covers some of the key literature, surveys developments in the game history and cognate fields, before surveying the different figures of locality that are examined in the chapters that follow. There is a burgeoning interest in discussing game history with respect to different locales, and in the next few paragraphs, I will summarise some of the recent scholarly contributions. Several authors have observed and attempted to summarise the trend; others have collected diverse histories, sometimes of a region or taking a more encyclopaedic approach to game history.1 In 2014, Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel’s anthology Hacking 1  Bjarke Liboriussen and Paul Martin also note the recent emergence of a “regional game studies” which “enriches the field with new perspectives drawn from regional cultural

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Europe: From computer cultures to demoscenes was published. Although the remit of their book extends beyond game histories per se, many of the chapters are written by European scholars invested in the field of game history. In their “Introduction”, the editors helpfully establish that “In geographical terms, the global influence of computers beyond the US borders has been wide and deep … [with] the rapid appropriation of personal computers on both sides of the Iron Curtain” (Alberts and Oldenziel 2014, 4). They argue that hacking—which they define by reference to “users’ unconventional, playful mastery and unique, outsider expertise”— suffers by claiming to be a U.S. story that claims universality. The emphasis on U.S. computing dominance, which the editors reference repeatedly, strikes me as important yet curious. The editors are clearly talking about both European Cold War contexts and hacking culture, yet the link to computing might seem tenuous to some American game history enthusiasts, given how arcade- and console-heavy mainstream game histories have been and how little scholarly work has been done on microcomputing in the U.S.2 The pressing question is clearly what other options there are for telling these alternate histories, if the inherited wisdom is so inadequate? Gathering lesser-known histories of different national and regional contexts together so they may be better known—as in the edited volume—is clearly a part answer to this question. In 2015, Mark J.P.  Wolf’s anthology Video Games Around the World (2015) explicitly addressed location and the variant game histories that a consideration of locale delivers, helpfully noting that many countries’ video game histories remain to be researched and written, or where these have been researched, are not widely known beyond their borders. Wolf mostly talks about “national video game histories” (2015, 6) and uses these as the structuring principle for the book (despite chapters on Africa, the Arab World, and Scandinavia). Whilst Wolf acknowledges that even the most thorough chapters in this title “can only touch upon all the contexts” (Liboriussen and Martin 2016). Though their essay does not engage with game historical work in any depth—the authors are mostly focused on “the challenges of globalization, internationalization, and postcolonialism” (about which more later)—and they demonstrate a lack of awareness of the work that has been undertaken in non-Western European and North American contexts for much longer than just the “last few years” (Hjorth and Chan 2009), their recognition of diverse contexts for game development and scholarship is welcome. 2   I discuss the question of why there has been so little attention to histories of microcomputing in the U.S. at some length in my book (Melanie Swalwell 2021).

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various aspects of a national history of video games and suggest an outline of their contours” (3), the anthology constituted an important marker, demonstrating an interest in the publishing market for more detailed and divergent histories of games. Scholarly literature on game histories was scant when I began researching the history of games in New Zealand in 2004, and it wasn’t until 2012 that the first Game History track was held at a games conference (Nordic DiGRA in Tampere), with the First International Games History conference held in 2013, in Montreal. But several book-length monographs on local game histories have appeared just since Video Games Around the World was published (Wade 2016; Kirkpatrick 2015; Švelch 2018; Lean 2016; Gazzard 2016; Melanie Swalwell 2021). These add to the scholarship already published in book chapter and journal article form. Happily, the literature is now sizeable enough to be divided by region (and my list is bound to be incomplete): on Europe (Kirkpatrick 2007, 2012, 2014; Gazzard 2013, 2014; Švelch 2013a, b; Wasiak 2014; Sandqvist 2012; Fassone 2017; Veraart 2011, 2014; Saarikoski and Suominen 2009; Saarikoski et  al. 2017; Garda 2021), Asia (Tinn 2011; Jo 2020) and Australasia (Stuckey 2014, 2016; Melanie Swalwell 2008, 2010, 2012, 2015; Melanie Swalwell and Davidson 2016). Alongside these sit several thematic collections (Alberts and Oldenziel 2014; Melanie Swalwell et al. 2017) and special issues of journals, edited by Alex Wade and Nick Webber (Cogent Arts & Humanities [2016]); Bennett Foddy and Clara Fernandez-­ Vara (Well Played [2017]); and Gleb Albert (WideScreen [2020]). It must be stressed that these references are only the scholarship available in English, which is a significant caveat. Clearly, game history is a very young field, with the vast majority of scholarship having been published post-2012. Moreover, amongst the numerous museums around the world now including some permanent exhibition of game histories (including the Strong Museum of Play, the Computer History Museum, Living Computers Museum, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image), there are some dedicating a sizeable focus to local game histories, including the Finnish Museum of Games, the UK’s National Videogame Arcade, and the Berlin Computerspiele Museum’s interactive featuring historical information from several nations.

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Defining Local What do we mean by the local in game history? I try to avoid using the phrase ‘local game history’ (or else write ‘local’ in scare quotes) because it connotes, of course, local history, usually understood as history “focusing on a particular town, district, or other limited area” (OED), which usually has no need to connect the local with broader contexts. That is not what is meant within game history. My position—and the rationale for the title of this book—is that local has emerged as a shorthand to reference historical work that is concerned with locality—or locale or locatedness—in some way. I am aware that some colleagues—including contributors to this book—hold the view that ‘local’ is a misnomer and that research in the area is more correctly termed ‘regional’ or ‘national’ game history; that is fine, if conveying scale is all that is intended.3 I am aiming at something more conceptual, a sort of collective term for the concern with location. Many levels of locality can be included under the umbrella of the local: hyper-local, regional, national, transnational, global, and the multior trans-local. Local might refer to place of production, reception, or distribution but is not limited to this. Locations can be multiple, which is important in allowing for the potential of comparative histories. Local has other advantages too, particularly if it refuses a ranked scale. It avoids any equation with national identity (Webber 2020; Parker and Jenson 2017) and helpfully sidesteps questions about the legacy of national cinemas discourse, which would be invoked if we were to adopt Wolf’s “national” moniker. As Nick Webber notes, the national cinemas discourse somewhat problematically “encompasses medium, venue and canon in one” (137). Local also leaves the possible relation with the other implied term in this scale, namely the ‘global’, an open question. What ‘global’ means is also a pertinent question for a game history concerned with locality. While avoiding the elision of local specificity under the sign of the global is key, tensions between the local and global are absolutely in scope. The point is not to pin down any singular significance of locality in game history, but to use the term as a provocation, attending to the questions and the contexts in which it is raised in scholarly work, and from there to raise yet more questions. Unsurprisingly for such a young field, game historians are often endebted to, and inspired by, our colleagues in cognate fields, including 3

 The reverse could be said for ‘global’, when what is meant is ‘regional’ or ‘non local’.

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geography and global media studies, who ponder some similar issues. For instance, Ben Aslinger and Nina Huntemann’s Gaming Globally: Production, play, and place aims to expand attention to globalisation in game studies, considering local, national, regional, transnational, and trans-local perspectives, and “touch[ing] upon nations not usually examined by game studies” (Huntemann and Aslinger 2013, 2). In their volume, Tan and Mitgutsch’s short essay “Heterogeneity in Game Histories” makes the valuable point that the lab in which the authors work (Singapore-­ MIT GAMBIT Game Lab) is an “assemblage of international scholars and practitioners from vastly different domains, cultures, age groups, and game experiences”. Their tracking of individuals’ personal biographies with video games (what they term “playographies”) challenges readers to think beyond any “assumed monolithic history of games, identifying richness, disconnects, and commonalities across decades, countries, and platforms” (Tan and Mitgutsch 2013, 91). Meanwhile, Germaine Halegoua and Ben Aslinger’s Locating Emerging Media takes emerging media rather than games as its focus, featuring essays that are concerned in some way to locate their very diverse digital media objects geographically, exemplifying that considering locality and locatedness in Media Studies and Game Studies more generally is a current concern (Halegoua and Aslinger 2016). Readers will detect a dialogue with Globalisation Studies in some of the chapters in this volume. As Webber sees it, “The field of local game studies seeks to unpick globalised narratives of game culture” (143). Such an “unpicking” can be productive. For instance, Aphra Kerr describes relations between game developers and publishers, just before the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) radically changed the industry: For decades now, the digital games industry has operated internationally and major companies have established subsidiaries outside their home markets. The trend was driven by Japanese companies like Sega and Nintendo who sold their products into the American market in the 1980s. However, with the entry of major global conglomerates like Sony and Microsoft into the industry in the 1990s we see increasing pressure on independent publishers to consolidate and organise their production and distribution networks on a global scale. (Kerr 2006, 76–77)

Some game historians will be aware that complex and often unlikely interactions between different locales were a feature of supply chains and distribution deals well before the 1990s, and will be in a position to historicise

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this so-called global moment. Meanwhile, Hiro Izushi and Yuko Aoyama’s classic study—though primarily concerned with industry development across different geographic territories rather than game history per se— offers an early model by which comparative analyses might be approached (Izushi and Aoyama 2006).

Figures of Locality I have requested of each author that they go beyond the charting of local case studies to critically reflect on ‘the local’, articulating the wider significance or role being accorded locale/location/locatedness. This means that we have eleven substantive contributions to a discourse on the significance of locality in game history, and the implications for game history as a field. We begin with Jaroslav Švelch’s discussion of homebrew games whose very content was intimately connected to the places where their authors lived and worked, in the Czechoslovakia of the 1980s–1990s. Švelch terms these ‘hyper-local’ games, reading them in terms of Michel de Certeau’s concept of spatial tactics and the Situationist practice of derive, drawing attention to the significance of power relations and participation of the Czechoslovak youth who created them. This chapter constitutes a companion piece to his monograph, Gaming the Iron Curtain (Švelch 2018). Local conditions can make for some extreme variations, and the point is made well in Maria B. Garda and Paweł Grabarczyk’s search for the last game published on tape cassette in Poland. Eschewing the concern with origins and firstness, they elegantly demonstrate the extent to which local structural factors make a difference in the case of Polish software published on tape. They use data scraped from Mobygames to generate a chart which shows that while cassette tape usage peaks worldwide in the 1980s, the 8-bit tape era doesn’t reach its peak in Poland until around 1993. Inspired by this data, Garda and Grabarczyk instead go in search of the ‘last’ cassette. They find that “most probably the last 8-bit game to be published on cassette was Tekblast” (Sikor Soft 1998). While their interest is in the first commercial lifecycle of tape, they observe that this overlaps with the ascent of retrogaming internationally. Ulf Sandqvist’s contribution is a twenty-year longitudinal study of the development of the Swedish game industry, between 1990 and 2010. Using the dataset collected by Statistics Sweden and supplementing these with developer interviews, he paints a picture of those working in the

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industry. The quantitative approach paints a fascinating picture of the development of the industry and its change over time, while the interviews reveal the humble beginnings of the industry in the microcomputing period and demoscene, and its increasing professionalisation. As a part of a wider Finnish gaming memories project, Jaakko Suominen and Anna Sivula provide an analysis of memories of playing Nintendo consoles, with an emphasis on place. Drawing on the idea of personal media histories or ‘technobiographies’ (Kennedy), they argue that memories are not only attached to social networks, artefacts, and time, but also attached to particular places. They take us through people’s responses to where they played and theorise the significance of these spaces, including vividly remembered spaces for play–from domestic spaces, players’ own or friends or family–to non-domestic spaces including places of purchase and public spaces, such as the play rooms on ferries between Finland and Sweden. Their chapter shows that it is possible to think of locality in game history in ways other than in reference to specific geographical regions or states. As they argue, “When we talk about ‘local game histories,’ we have to critically examine the concept of place itself as well as the meanings attached to given places”. Whilst the game history of the U.S. has often been treated as a default, many U.S. scholars have been working to complexify game history, ensuring their findings have specificity and acknowledging the situatedness of their research. Laine Nooney has been conducting very located research in Oakhurst, California, where the game development company Sierra Online set up in the 1980s. Nooney pushes back against the mainstream universalising game history, embracing the local and regional in her research and noting that all game historians benefit by awakening sensitivity to how geography and location inflect the mechanics of game history. Nooney presents a personal case study on the issue of the local in video game history, travelling to conduct interviews for the Sierra On-Line project, and offering the concept of regionalism as a tool with which to frame and think the local in U.S. game history. While the rise of a local emphasis in game history has often been marked by a focus on specific places and reception, Michael Borthwick and Melanie Swalwell’s chapter shows that the local need not be understood as sharply contrasting with the non-local. Though user groups are usually taken to be the epitome of locality, the newsletters of groups dedicated to the Exidy Sorcerer demonstrate that the footprints of some went well beyond the local. Thanks to a remarkable archive of newsletters that Borthwick has

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assembled, the chapter charts how membership lists connected local users and enabled them to reach a global audience. The chapter not only documents the many trans-local connections that existed in the early microcomputer period; the newsletter archive also supports some ‘cross-local’ observations as to the reception of this specific early microcomputer by hobbyists. The next three chapters are explicitly concerned with debates about the local and global. John Vanderhoef is not undertaking historical work per se, but his work usefully speaks to historical work, and vice versa. Though game production always happens somewhere, the game product need not reflect the culture of the location(s) in which it was developed, as Vanderhoef remind us in his study of the erasure of national markers in indie games made in Poland. Vanderhoef draws on scholarship in national cinemas as well as extending Felan Parker and Jennifer Jenson’s conception of “transnational game identities” (Parker and Jenson 2017) as identities that swivel between identification with the hyper-local and the global, through an examination of Polish indie games and their developers since the Polish industry’s formalisation in the 1990s. The Polish developers he’s interviewed position their games as global rather than local products, as “cultural[ly] placeless”. Examining the ways the Polish video game industry navigated between locally specific tastes and a transnational appeal over the course of its emergence as a formal node in the global games industry illustrates the ongoing tension between the local and the trans-local, the national and the transnational. From Vanderhoef’s argument that “The discourse on the national has always been in conversation with the discourse on the transnational”, we pivot to another chapter where local and non-local are in tension, Stephen Mandiberg’s analysis of video game localisation, provocatively titled “Video Games Have Never Been Global”. Despite industry rhetoric which sees games as global and localisation as just a minor thing that helps games along in different markets, Mandiberg argues that “localization is first and foremost about making something local into something that can be global, not the other way around”. Bringing insights from translation studies to consider the history of game localisation, Mandiberg deploys this history to present a different view on the contemporary games industry. He argues that the global video game industry of the 2010s, which sells games over borders and between languages as ‘globally’ playable products, exists through industry practices of localisation.

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From there, Graeme Kirkpatrick’s contribution continues the line of argument he’s been making about the mid-1980s constituting a watershed in game history in the U.K. (Kirkpatrick 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017). In this chapter, Kirkpatrick draws on the work of philosophers and sociologists Bruno Latour, Henri Lefebvre, and Alain Badiou, to craft an argument attending to the localness and globalness of digital games. He argues that while it was meaningful to speak of computer gaming culture as local in the early period—the localness of ads, high score claims, where players hailed from, and even themes and storylines—this changed in the mid-1980s. Kirkpatrick calls the games and gaming devices of the 1970s and early 1980s ‘proto-games’, in that they existed in a technical and entertainment milieu in which they were a local, limited, and disparate phenomena. For Kirkpatrick, it wasn’t until the mid-part of the decade that games properly came into being, doing something new. Then there was an ‘evental transformation’ and a new ‘spatialising practice’ that coincided with a new discourse around gameplay, in which—he claims—games transcended the local. Chapters up to this point have dealt with games past and the present state of the industry, assessing where a game history concerned with the local stands at the present moment. Swalwell’s chapter takes off in a different direction, reflecting both on where game history has come from and eyeing the future. Functioning as a coda of sorts and arguing that the local needs to be critically situated, Swalwell poses several questions key for ‘local’ game history: how should the localness of game history be conceived? What might the critical potential of locality be for computer and game histories? And what comes after the very necessary attention to local specificity? She draws on debates about microhistory to suggest joining micro and macro perspectives into more connected histories, and points to specific studies where game historians are beginning to do just this, creating more connected histories. Swalwell argues that such game histories are heterodox, in that they not only counter orthodox game history but also disturb what we thought we knew about the ‘centre’. Game history is one of the most vital and exciting fields in Game Studies at present. It is time to develop a rigorous and critical discussion about what the significance of a local framework is for game history and to map out future directions. This anthology is intended to open such a dialogue and to contribute to the further maturation of the field.

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References Alberts, Gerard, and Ruth Oldenziel, eds. 2014. Hacking Europe: From Computer Cultures to Demoscenes. London: Springer Verlag. Campbell-Kelly, Martin. 2003. From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Donovan, Tristan. 2010. Replay: The History of Video Games. Lewes, UK: Yellow Ant. Fassone, Riccardo. 2017. “Cammelli and Attack of the Mutant Camels: A Variantology of Italian Video Games of the 1980s.” Well Played Journal 6 (2): 55–71. Garda, Maria B. 2021. “Microcomputing Revolution in the Polish People’s Republic in the 1980s.” In New Media Behind the Iron Curtain: Cultural History of Video, Microcomputers and Satellite Television in Communist Poland, 109–68. Lodz, Krakow: Lodz University Press/Jagellonian University Press. Gazzard, Alison. 2013. “The Platform and the Player: Exploring the (Hi)Stories of Elite.” Game Studies 13 (2). http://gamestudies.org/1302/articles/agazzard. ———. 2014. “The Intertextual Arcade: Tracing Histories of Arcade Clones in 1980s Britain.” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 14 (1). ———. 2016. Now the Chips Are Down: The BBC Micro. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press. Halegoua, Germaine R., and Ben Aslinger, eds. 2016. Locating Emerging Media. New York, London: Routledge. Hjorth, Larissa, and Dean Chan, eds. 2009. Gaming Cultures and Place in the Asia-Pacific Region. London, New York: Routledge. Huhtamo, Erkki. 2005. “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: An Archaeology of Arcade Gaming.” In Handbook of Computer Game Studies, edited by Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Huntemann, Nina, and Ben Aslinger, eds. 2013. Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Izushi, Hiro, and Yuko Aoyama. 2006. “Industry Evolution and Cross-Sectoral Skills Transfers: A Comparative Analysis of the Video Game Industry in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom.” Environment and Planning 38: 1843–61. Jo, Dongwon. 2020. “‘Bursting Circuit Boards’: Infrastructures and Technical Practices of Copying in Early Korean Video Game Industry.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 20 (2). http:// gamestudies.org/2002/articles/jo. Kerr, Aphra. 2006. “Global Networks and Cultures of Production.” In Gamework/ Gameplay, 75–101. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage.

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Kirkpatrick, Graeme. 2007. “Meritums, Spectrums and Narrative Memories of ‘Pre-Virtual’ Computing in Cold War Europe 1.” The Sociological Review 55 (2): 227–50. ———. 2012. “Game Studies  – Constitutive Tensions of Gaming’s Field: UK Gaming Magazines and the Formation of Gaming Culture 1981–1995.” Game Studies 12 (1). http://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/kirkpatrick. ———. 2014. “Making Games Normal: Computer Gaming Discourse in the 1980s.” New Media & Society 18 (8): 1439–54. ———. 2015. The Formation of Gaming Culture: UK Gaming Magazines, 1981–1995. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. “Early Games Production, Gamer Subjectivation and the Containment of the Ludic Imagination.” In Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives, edited by Melanie Swalwell, Helen Stuckey, and Angela Ndalianis, 19–37. New York: Routledge. Lean, Tom. 2016. Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer. London, New York: Bloomsbury. Liboriussen, Bjarke, and Paul Martin. 2016. “Regional Game Studies.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 16 (1). http:// gamestudies.org/1601/articles/liboriussen. Lowood, Henry, and Raiford Guins, eds. 2016. Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press. Marcin, Skrzypek, and Michał Lepkowski. 1998. Tekblast, Sikor Soft. Montfort, Nick, and Ian Bogost. 2009. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press. Parker, Felan, and Jennifer Jenson. 2017. “Canadian Indie Games Between the Global and the Local.” Canadian Journal of Communication 42: 867–91. Saarikoski, Petri, and Jaakko Suominen. 2009. “Computer Hobbyists and the Gaming Industry in Finland.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31 (3): 20–33. https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2009.39. Saarikoski, Petri, Jaakko Suominen, and Markku Reunanen. 2017. “Pac-Man for the Vic-20.” Well Played Journal 6 (2): 7–31. Sandqvist, Ulf. 2012. “The Development of the Swedish Game Industry: A True Success Story?” In The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future, edited by Peter Zackariasson and Timothy L.  Wilson, 134–53. New York, Oxon: Routledge. Stuckey, Helen. 2014. “Exhibiting the Hobbit: A Tale of Memories and Microcomputers.” Kinephanos. 2014. http://www.kinephanos.ca/2014/ the-­hobbit/. ———. 2016. “Run5 Magazine as Archive and Account of SSG’s Dialogue with Wargamers in the 1980s.” In Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives, edited by Melanie Swalwell, Helen Stuckey, and Angela Ndalianis, 38–56. New York, London: Routledge.

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Švelch, Jaroslav. 2013a. “Game Studies – Say It with a Computer Game: Hobby Computer Culture and the Non-Entertainment Uses of Homebrew Games in the 1980s Czechoslovakia.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 13 (2). http://gamestudies.org/1302/articles/svelch. ———. 2013b. “Indiana Jones Fights the Communist Police: Local Appropriation of the Text Adventure Genre in the 1980s Czechoslovakia.” In Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place, edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger, 163–81. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Swalwell, M. 2012. “Questions about the Usefulness of Microcomputers in 1980s Australia.” Media International Australia, no. 143. Swalwell, Melanie. 2008. “1980s Home Coding: The Art of Amateur Programming.” In Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, edited by Stella Brennan and Su Ballard, 193–201. Auckland: Clouds/ADA. ———. 2010. “Hobbyist Computing in 1980s New Zealand: Games and the Popular Reception of Microcomputers.” In Return to Tomorrow: 50 Years of Computing in New Zealand, edited by Janet Toland, 157–69. Wellington: NZ Computing Society. ———. 2015. “New Zealand.” In Video Games Around the World, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf, 377–91. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2021. Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Swalwell, Melanie, and Michael Davidson. 2016. “Game History and the Case of ‘Malzak’: Theorising the Manufacture of ‘Local Product’ in 1980s New Zealand.” In Locating Emerging Media, edited by Benjamin Aslinger and Germaine Halegoua, 85–105. Routledge. Swalwell, Melanie, Helen Stuckey, and Angela Ndalianis, eds. 2017. Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives. New York, Oxon: Routledge. Tan, Philip, and Konstantin Mitgutsch. 2013. “Heterogeneity in Game Histories.” In Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place, edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger, 91–99. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tinn, H. 2011. “From DIY Computers to Illegal Copies: The Controversy over Tinkering with Microcomputers in Taiwan, 1980–1984.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33 (2): 75–88. Veraart, F. 2011. “Losing Meanings: Computer Games in Dutch Domestic Use, 1975–2000.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33 (1): 52–65. ———. 2014. “Transnational (Dis)Connection in Localizing Personal Computing in the Netherlands, 1975–1990.” In Hacking Europe: From Computer Cultures

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to Demoscenes, edited by Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel, 25–48. London: Springer Verlag. Wade, Alex. 2016. Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames. New York, London: Bloomsbury. Wasiak, Patryk. 2014. “Playing and Copying: Social Practices of Home Computer Users in Poland during the 1980s.” In Hacking Europe: From Computer Cultures to Demoscenes, edited by Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel, 129–50. London: Springer Verlag. Webber, Nick. 2020. “The Britishness of ‘British Video Games.’” International Journal of Cultural Policy 26 (3): 135–49. Wolf, Mark J.P., ed. 2015. Video Games Around the World. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Open Access    This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

CHAPTER 2

Adventures in Everyday Spaces: Hyperlocal Computer Games in 1980s–1990s Czechoslovakia Jaroslav Švelch

There are many ways in which a computer or video game can be local. So far, much research and preservation of local game histories has focused on games that were produced or played locally (see, for example, Swalwell 2021; Saarikoski and Suominen 2009; Jørgensen et al. 2015; Wolf 2015; Meda-Calvet 2016; Fassone 2017). In this chapter, I want to go one step further and focus on games whose very content was intimately connected to the places where their authors lived and worked. In Czechoslovakia of the late 1980s and early 1990s, various homebrewers from all over the country produced games that took place in their towns, schools or computer clubs and featured casts of their friends. These games usually addressed the community in which they were made, although they often had the ambition to reach a wider audience who could also connect to the everyday life stories and settings that they contained. The games were

J. Švelch (*) Charles University, Prague, Czechia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_2

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produced and played locally, and in addition to that, they were about the local. Since the term local games may be interpreted merely in relation to the place of production and reception, I will call these games hyperlocal. Since they exhibit an extremely high degree of “localness,” hyperlocal games provide an intriguing entry point into a discussion about game histories and the local. Although they have not yet been conceptualized in game historiography, hyperlocal games feature prominently in the corpus of Czechoslovak homebrew games for 8-bit computers and were likely made in other countries, too. The term hyperlocal has been used in media studies since the 1990s, first to describe news content produced by local cable TV systems as well as talk show hosts who stressed their neighbourhood experience (Munson 1993). Following the proliferation of blogging, hyperlocal news was seen as a new potential avenue for journalism, filling “the gap by traditional news media in suburbs and small towns” (Kolodzy 2006, 293). Metzgar et al. define hyperlocal media operations as “geographically-based, community-­ oriented, original-news-reporting organizations indigenous to the web and intended to fill perceived gaps in coverage of an issue or region and to promote civic engagement” (Metzgar et al. 2011, 773). Overall, hyperlocal content has been associated with a focus on a particular place (usually a neighbourhood, small town or a village), with the participatory nature of the content’s creation, and with the explicit, or even proud, accentuation of the local. In a similar vein, we can define hyperlocal games—for the purpose of this chapter—as games created by people from a particular place about that place and about the people who inhabit it, written primarily (but not exclusively) for the local community. To understand how the local was woven into the fabric of computer games, I will analyse the production of hyperlocal games as a spatial practice, building on Michel de Certeau’s conceptualization of tactics. In his theory of everyday life, de Certeau distinguishes between strategies and tactics. While the former are centrally planned and calculated actions exerted from positions of power, the latter are practices of “the weak”— the uses of the spaces or products that adapt and possibly subvert the grand plans of those in power (Certeau 1984). In media scholarship, de Certeau’s work has been cited extensively when speaking of textual practices, especially “textual poaching” typical of fandoms (Jenkins 1992). But even more pertinent to hyperlocal games is de Certeau’s focus on the spatial nature of tactics. Using the term terrain in a rather literal sense, he posits that a tactic “must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and

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organized by the law of a foreign power” (Certeau 1984, 37). We can thus understand the creation of hyperlocal games as a tactical use of everyday spaces—a way of making them one’s own and transforming them into spaces of play and fantasy. As I will show later in the chapter, this spatial tactic bears striking similarities to the Situationist practice of dérive—a kind of subversive stroll whose goal was to rediscover and retake the urban space (McDonough 2002; Debord 2006a). Although the Situationist perspective has been previously applied to pervasive games and urban playful activities such as parkour or flash mobs (Stenros et al. 2009), it has not been connected to vernacular, homebrewed computer games. Both views stress the importance of power relations and participation in spatial practices, two themes that will guide my analysis. This chapter will focus primarily on three examples of late 1980s and early 1990s Czechoslovak hyperlocal text adventures for 8-bit computers—The Revenge of the Insane Atari User, Emgeton Story, and Stodman (see Table 2.1).1 My analysis builds on close reading of the three games, as Table 2.1  Overview of hyperlocal games that will be discussed in this chapter Full title (translated)

Author(s)

Multi Pascal 2.7 or The Revenge of the Insane Atari User

Viktor Lošťák and Zdeněk Polách

Platform

Year

Place

Plot

Region Atari 8-bit

1989 Odry (club and Atari user takes surroundings) revenge on the Odry Silesia club members who are to blame for the destruction of the protagonist’s machine Emgeton Story Dušan Atari 1991 Jirkov (whole Protagonist travels to Part One: Hokův and 8-bit town) Jirkov to acquire the Crazy Idea Petr Northern new game Crazy Idea Hossner Bohemia directly from its authors Stodman Jan Lonský ZX 1992 Stod (school Protagonist gets the Spectrum and local high school’s surroundings) counsellor fired in Western revenge against Bohemia psychological abuse

1  For the sake of readability, I have translated titles of all games into English. Czech or Slovak titles can be found in the list of references.

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well as interviews with their authors.2 I picked these titles because of the availability of their authors and the games themselves, and because they represent diverse kinds of everyday spaces located in three different regions. All games mentioned in this chapter are available from fan-curated online archives of Czechoslovak 8-bit games, namely Fly.atari.org, Textovky.cz and CS.Speccy.cz. The research for this chapter was conducted within a more extensive project dedicated to the social history of hobby computing and computer games in 1980s Czechoslovakia. It was written concurrently with my recent monograph Gaming the Iron Curtain (Jaroslav Švelch 2018) and may be read as a companion piece or a sequel to it. In the following sections, I will first lay out a historical overview situating hyperlocal games within the Czechoslovak homebrew games scene. This will be followed by an introduction to the context of contemporary youth culture and computing communities, teasing out the motivations behind the making of hyperlocal games. Finally, I will read the three selected games as examples of spatial tactics.

A Short History of Czechoslovak Hyperlocal Games The practice of creating hyperlocal games can be traced back to the homebrew origins of the Communist-era Czechoslovak hobby computing scene. Throughout the 1980s, the country was partially isolated on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. Computer hardware was almost unavailable in retail stores, and no commercial software market existed before 1989, give or take a few minor exceptions. Despite these limitations, a lively and productive—yet mostly male—hobby scene emerged, revolving around state-sponsored computer clubs and initially working on machines which had been individually imported from the West, mainly Sinclair ZX Spectrums and Atari 8-bit computers.3 As no money was to be made creating games, people—mostly high school and college students—wrote them for different purposes: to show off their technical skills, to circulate messages within the community or to express their opinions about current events (Jaroslav Švelch 2013). While many homebrewers tried to mimic 2  I interviewed all authors with the exception Petr Hossner, the co-author of Emgeton Story. Interviews were conducted in Czech and later translated into English. 3  The exclusion of women from these spaces is discussed in detail in my monograph (Jaroslav Švelch 2018).

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Western templates, local content also made its way into local production. Several titles adapted their rulesets from locally popular non-digital games, such as pexeso (the local variant of the Concentration mix and match game) or piškvorky (the local variant of tic-tac-toe), or national TV game shows, such as Six Hits into the Hat (Lášek et al. 1986). Another group of games combined imported genre conventions with locally or regionally specific thematic or narrative elements. Such was the case of Taking the Castle, a text adventure game taking place at a fictional medieval Czech castle (Brabec and Dlouhý 1986). The use of games to circulate messages is especially relevant to the concept of hyperlocal games, thanks to its emphasis on community and personal relationships. Around 1986, several Czechoslovak programmers started including their mailing addresses, as well as in-jokes and references to other members of the local community in their games’ paratextual content (see Jan Švelch 2016), such as scrolling messages on menu screens. The 1987 text adventure Fuksoft (Hrda et al. 1987) by the Sybilasoft collective was probably the first one to include autobiographical elements and fictionalized versions of members of the local community even in the game’s narrative. In this game, the player’s goal was to rescue František Fuka—one of the most prolific and influential real-life Czechoslovak game makers—from a room that had been rigged with explosives.4 The game featured the authors’ friends, as well as their high school teacher, but it took place in a fictional building. An influential title, Fuksoft inspired several other games and a fan sequel. Released a year later, the title Demon in Danger by Martin Malý (1988) took place in its creator’s apartment and can therefore be considered the earliest Czechoslovak example of a hyperlocal text adventure. Performing as one of Malý’s friends, the player’s goal was to disarm a bomb before Malý returns home from school (see Jaroslav Švelch 2018). The abovementioned games made their first appearances on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, although Fuksoft also earned a fan port to the 8-bit Atari computers. But it was on the Atari platform that hyperlocal games started to thrive in the early 1990s. This can be partly attributed to the success of the 1989 text adventure Multi Pascal 2.7 Or The Revenge of the Insane Atari User (from here on shortened to The Revenge) by Viktor Lošt ̌ák and Zdeněk Polách (1989). This game took place in the Atari club in the 4  Interestingly, Fuka himself had no hand in making the game and did not even know its authors in person.

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backwater town of Odry, in the region of Silesia, and featured caricatured versions of many of the club’s members, including the authors themselves. The game’s protagonist sets out on a revenge mission against the Odry Atari Club after his Atari machine had been destroyed by careless club members. Poking fun at computer hobbyists and amateur programmers, the game’s writing and humour resonated with the experiences of its players; Lošt ̌ák kept receiving fan mail until the late 1990s. The game’s success resulted in a sequel, as well as at least 11 clones (mostly for the Atari but also for the ZX Spectrum and IBM PC platforms), which shared the original’s parser-based interface and reflected on the experiences of other local microcomputer communities. One such “hobby group game” was Emgeton Story Part One: Crazy Idea (or Emgeton Story) (Hokův and Hossner 1991). The player character of the first Emgeton Story game is an Atari user and a fan of The Revenge, who travels to the town of Jirkov in order to get a new text adventure directly from its authors, in order to beat fellow club members by playing it before they receive it by mail. Once again, the creators of the game inserted themselves into the story, this time as authors of the coveted game (entitled Crazy Idea).5 Another significant group of hyperlocal games were set in schools. The earliest international example of a hyperlocal “school adventure” I have come across in my research is the Yugoslavian title XIV (Pandovisia Software 1984), which took place at Belgrade’s grammar school no. 14 (or XIV). At present, the earliest preserved Czechoslovak example is probably Stodman, written by Jan Lonský (1992). Its title refers to the small town of Stod in Western Bohemia, where Lonský attended secondary vocational school. Playing as the author’s alter ego Stodman, the goal of the game is to get the school’s counsellor fired. Despite its comedic nature and numerous in-jokes, the game was written in response to the psychological abuse that the author and his friend received from the counsellor and some of the teachers. At least ten more similar Czech school adventures for various platforms have been preserved from the 1990s, all of which took place in specific, explicitly named schools in different parts of the country, both in larger cities and in small towns; eight more games took place in unspecified schools. Unlike hobby group adventures, school-­ themed games do not seem to share a lineage derived from one particularly influential title. Instead, they vary wildly in terms of interface and 5  Emgeton Story takes its title from the Czechoslovak brand of audio cassettes, which were at the time the prevalent storage medium used for 8-bit computers.

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visual design. Some of them use a parser or a menu-based input system, while others contain elements of point’n’click adventures. Altogether, a total of at least 23 Czech and Slovak hyperlocal games can be found in online archives.6 That may seem like a relatively high number given that such a trend has not yet been documented in other local histories. However, the reason behind such a high number may be related to preservation rather than production. Given the relatively slow start of commercial game development in Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, few professionally produced games were published in the 1990s. In this context, homebrew games, including hyperlocal ones, were more prominent representatives of the national production and that may have made them more worthy of archiving among fan preservation enthusiasts than in other countries. Although it is difficult to estimate the size of these games’ audience at the time of their release, user comments in online archives and the existence of recent walkthroughs suggest that people continue to run them and play them, even if they do so for the sake of nostalgia.

The Terrains of Czechoslovak Youth and Homebrew Cultures In order to understand the tactics of hyperlocal games, we must first learn about the cultural and physical terrains in which their authors lived their everyday lives. Given how little historical work has been written on youth culture and everyday life in the late 1980s and early 1990s Czechoslovakia,7 I will rely mainly on what authors disclosed in interviews. At the time when they wrote their titles, all of the authors were secondary school students, surrounded by the contemporary youth culture. Despite its late- and post-Communist specifics, this culture in many ways paralleled Western ones. Young people were negotiating social norms and looking for ways to resist the pressure to conform—even though this conformity was often defined in terms of Communist ideology rather than 6  Not counting the (at least) eight games taking place in unspecified schools, which may be or may not be based on real-life ones. Besides games taking place in apartments, hobby clubs, and schools, there is, for example, one set in a gas heater factory (Misterka and Hertl 1988). 7  Most existing literature on everyday life and youth culture in Communist Czechoslovakia focuses on the 1950s and 1960s (Knapík and Franc 2011; Knapík 2014). Later decades have mostly been studied from the perspectives of the dissent and music subcultures (Vaněk 2002, 2010).

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religious or social conservatism. Although the “nerd” and “jock” stereotypes were not as clearly defined in Czechoslovakia as in, for example, U.S. high school cultures (see Eckert 1989), similar power dynamics were in place. Jan Lonský’s Stodman, for instance, features bullies and the bullied, as well as snitches and non-conformists. The game also contains numerous references to punk rock music and the punk subculture (see Fig. 2.1), which was undergoing a revival in the late 1980s and early 1990s Czechoslovakia after many years of semi-illegality and continuous oppression by the Communist authorities (Vaněk 2010). As Vaněk puts it in his account of 1980s youth activism, young people were carving out their “little islands of freedom” (Vaněk 2002). With this in mind, hyperlocal games need to be placed within a broader range of locally embedded vernacular communication and media practices, which questioned, subverted, or bypassed authority. Besides creating a game about his school, Lonský, a Sex Pistols fan and an aspiring punk rock musician, also made mix-tapes which juxtaposed his favourite punk rock songs with recordings of his teachers, made secretly during classes using a hidden tape recorder. The physical terrain that these young men traversed was defined by the focal points of home and school. While they spent much of their free time in front of their screens—playing games or tinkering with hardware and software—they also visited other computer fans or computer clubs. For a

Fig. 2.1  The loading and menu screens of Stodman (Lonský 1992). The loading screen (left) contains several references to the punk rock subculture and features “Respect,” the protagonist’s makeshift flail. The menu screen shows the school building where most of the game takes place

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young person in the early 1990s, the major modes of transportation would be walking, cycling or public transit. Walking was not just a pastime, but an efficient and necessary way of getting around, as the country’s dwellings were relatively dense and it was not heavily motorized (only half as many households owned one or more cars, as compared to the U.S.8). When walking was out of question, one could take trains or buses—and, in fact, the stories of both Stodman and Emgeton Story start out at train stations. Throughout the day, the youngsters navigated public places more or less subjected to the control of adult authorities. Computer clubs and hobby groups, however, provided “islands” where different social norms applied. They were places to go when in need of new software, advice or friendly competition—but they were also places of social contact, where relationships were built and personal narratives unfolded. Hyperlocal games highlight the importance of this kind of shared experience. The non-interactive introductory short story in The Revenge takes place in a club, at a moment when one of the members brings a new game called Caterpillar. A fight ensues among the members over who gets to make a copy of the game first: “I want the Caterpillar, I have to have the Caterpillar!” squawked Libor Klubal and threw himself into the brawl. “I am the group leader, therefore it’s mine,” cried the furious hardware guy Vala, while flailing about with an iron rod. “I’ll make the first copy, or else I’ll puke over all of you,” shrieked Viktor the drunk. Group leader Vala targeted him with a heavy swing of the girder, but because Martin Kubečka bit him in the forearm, he missed and hit your computer instead. It flew out of your hands right into the fiercest battle. (Lošťák and Polách 1989)

Disregarding the hyperbole that colours the game’s storytelling, we can observe many of the real-life concerns of young computer enthusiasts. They received software from efficient but irregular informal distribution networks, in which each new programme would be coveted; computers were expensive and dear to their owners, hence the fear of their destruction. And finally, the overwhelmingly male membership of the hobby community tended to engage in competitive behaviour, as owning more 8  About 44.3% Czech households owned at least one car in 1991, whereas this figure was 88.4% in the U.S. in 1990 (John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center 2003; Czech Statistical Office 2014).

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games or creating one’s own could boost one’s status within the community (Wasiak 2012; Albert 2018). The motivations to create hyperlocal titles arose from the dynamics of the communities that homebrewers participated in. One of the most important motivations was to be recognized by one’s peers, “to mean something in the community of programmers and fans” (Lonský 2016) or—as Lošt ̌ák of The Revenge fame jokingly put it—to be “applauded and worshipped” (Lošt ̌ák and Polách 2016).9 Homebrew communities therefore offered an alternative to real-life hierarchies of power but also engendered new hierarchies based on technical skill and programming accomplishments (see Dovey and Kennedy 2007). Hyperlocal games could serve as such accomplishments. The most immediate audience of these titles were friends and fellow local hobbyists, who were able to recognize not only familiar places and things but also themselves. All three games included authors or their close friends as fictional characters, often in comical situations, which made the games even more appealing to the local community. Initial copies of finished games were typically given out to friends in the area, but the titles were soon picked up by the national informal distribution networks, sometimes with the help of their authors. Stodman was offered to a “pirate” distributor who included it in his catalogue, and Emgeton Story was advertised in a classified ad. Moreover, The Revenge’s cumbersome full title was reportedly devised because of Lošt ̌ák’s assumption that the game would have a greater chance of spreading if it was disguised as a serious piece of software with a sophisticated title (such as “Multi Pascal 2.7”). Otherwise, it could be considered just a “stupid” local game (Lošt ̌ák and Polách 2016). Besides directly engaging with their audience, hyperlocal text adventures had another additional perk: they were relatively easy to produce. They could be built in a few weeks and their core components (such as the parser and an inventory system) did not require sophisticated programming tricks. Moreover, one did not have to invent an original fictional setting. When asked how he came up with the narrative of Emgeton Story, Dušan Hokův matter-of-factly pointed out that he did not have to create that much: “I just took a situation and imagined a story.” In the early 1990s, authors could already follow templates of games like The Revenge

9  Having made a game also meant having one more item in one’s software library—an item that could be given to others in exchange for pirated copies of new commercial games.

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and transfer them to their own settings. As Hokův remembers, “these text adventures were so hot that I decided to make one myself” (Hokův 2016). In this overview of Czechoslovak youth and homebrew culture, we have observed that homebrewers in Czechoslovakia were engaged in two relevant kinds of power relationships—the relationship with adult authorities in charge of public spaces and the relationship with other members of the home computing community, who they wanted to impress. In the next section, I will show how they used hyperlocal games to challenge authorities and empower themselves.

Owning Places Through Spatial Tactics All three games are set in relatively realistic recreations of real-life places. The author of Emgeton Story remembers walking around the town of Jirkov and its surroundings and copying locations onto graph paper.10 The game’s introductory text stresses that while “the story is partially a work of fantasy,” the persons and locations “are truthfully depicted.” Besides the layout of the map, this “truthfulness” is achieved through attention to minute mundane detail, especially in item descriptions. Examining a monkey wrench, we learn that it is “like new, chrome-plated, manufactured by OPP Rokycany, Č SN 23 0802.” Looking at a bottle of white wine in The Revenge, we get the description “The Ostrava Burner, 28 Czechoslovak crowns.” While reading these descriptions, we can picture the authors, holding and inspecting the objects and transcribing this information into their games. At the same time, this seemingly superfluous information instantly conjures the historical period when the OPP Rokycany metalworks factory still existed and the Ostrava Burner was an omnipresent brand of cheap wine. Despite the elements of realism, the locations, items and information within hyperlocal games are structured by the conventions of the text adventure genre, including the presence of the “examine” command, which provides written descriptions of each interactive object within the game world, or the grid structure that governs the map layouts of all three games. The rules and conventions of adventure games also required the authors to invent puzzles and solutions, therefore transforming everyday places to game spaces. As Hokův pointed out, whenever he copied a 10  Most of the script for Stodman was written during classes at the very school where the game took place.

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location into the grid, he started thinking “what kind of challenge could be placed there and how it connects to the other ones” (2016). While transforming everyday places into game spaces, creators of hyperlocal adventures engage in a spatial tactic that circumvents the preordained and disciplined strategies. Their—and the players’—wanderings are driven by puzzle-solving and exploration rather than pragmatic transportation from one point to another. The resulting practice begs comparison to the Situationist practice of dérive. Debord defined dérive as an unplanned passage or journey through a city which disregards the rules imposed by urban planning and the conventions of consumption (Debord 2006b). Indebted to Huizinga, Debord even explicitly described dérive as a “ludic-constructive behavior,” embracing the city or landscape as a fragmented space ready for re-construction (McDonough 2002; Debord 2006a). Although I do not intend to romanticize the authors of these games as disruptive revolutionaries, their approach to everyday space similarly challenged existing power relations. While Situationists used dérive to purposefully unshackle themselves from the strategies of power and therefore unmask the influence of oppressive institutions and commerce, the makers and protagonists of hyperlocal adventures were young pranksters, practicing their “tactics of the weak” in the world of adult strategies. In line with the adventurous nature of the text adventure genre, hyperlocal games do not simply make one follow the infrastructural network of roads and streets. Both Emgeton Story and Stodman start out at the train stations of their respective towns, but soon make us explore the brownfields and nameless structures around these stations—spaces otherwise ignored or avoided by railroad passengers. The train stations, abandoned yards, shacks and other marginal spaces would become places of adventure, exploration and discovery, both in real-life and in computer games. These were the places where the “weak” could go to exercise their limited powers. Here, we look for abandoned and lost objects, for puzzles and challenges. Emgeton Story, for example, charts the no man’s land between the railroad tracks and the edge of the town, bringing the player into an underground boiler room which, in 1991, served as a makeshift shelter for the town’s homeless. Today, the area has been repurposed into a shopping centre. Stodman recreates the walk from the station to the author’s school, depicted on the game’s title screen (see Fig. 2.1). However, one important detour has to be made, which has to do with one of the school’s peculiar features. Instead of central heating, the school had individual

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wood and coal burning heaters in each classroom and most offices, which was already considered old-fashioned in 1992. Throughout winters, the heaters became a frequent target of mischief and pranks. When the amount of coal assigned to a particular classroom ran out and the students started feeling cold, they burnt whatever they could find to heat the room, including food leftovers—to the dismay of the school’s janitor and teachers. In Stodman, one has to find a bag of freshly chopped railroad ties (sleepers) and bring them to school in order to burn them in a heater. This seemingly nonsensical puzzle is based on a true story of playful subversion. The author of the game and his friend—nicknamed Stodman and Respectman in the game—did steal and chop up railroad ties in order to keep themselves warm in the classroom. They even wrote a song about it. Called “Chopping Ties at the Station,” it used the melody of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” also featured on the game’s instruction screen. Here, we can see real-life and in-game play blending together. The one major difference between the real-life and in-game tie-chopping is that the latter conjures the spirit of the punk rock icon Sid Vicious. Hyperlocal games feature many such practical jokes and subversions of adult authority. In fact, all of the three titles can be read as stories of confrontation and empowerment. Elements of power fantasy have conventionally been a part of digital game narratives and mechanics, as they allow the player to experience agency over a game world (Linderoth 2013). In these hyperlocal games, the power fantasy is set in a recreation of a real-life environment, creating an alternate everyday universe in which the author, and through him the player, can take control. We can thus see hyperlocal games as instances of participatory practice, especially in the light of Carpentier’s definition of media participation, which assumes a move towards a more equal distribution of power among social actors (Carpentier 2011). Stodman was partially intended as a reaction to the prolonged bullying by the school’s counsellor and some other teachers who used their power to send Lonský and his friend to see a psychiatrist for acts of minor mischief and generally for the failure to conform. As Lonský himself put it, he seized the opportunity to “express himself in a way that cannot be intercepted by them.” The game enabled him to revisit the traumatic experience and get back at the oppressors. Upon a successful completion of the

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game, the counsellor is arrested for prior collaboration with the Communist-era secret police.11 The Revenge made fun of the local Atari club, including the club chairman and other senior members. Its authors, Lošt ̌ák and Polách, remember the complicated power relations within the club. The two were the youngest club members; they were loud, disobedient and often partied during or after club sessions. At the same time, they considered themselves the best coders out of the whole group and found their junior standing disproportionate to their skills. Although the senior members had considered expelling them, they never did, because the young duo’s programming chops were indispensable to the club. This “unresolvable dilemma” (as Polách has called it) created ongoing tensions, caricatured in the game itself. The Revenge sees the player character wreaking havoc in the club and eventually destroying all the club’s machines. The player gets to do what its authors could not: assert dominance over the whole club. Although more subdued, Emgeton Story also plays out as an empowerment story. The protagonist has to overcome a long series of obstacles in order to meet the fictionalized versions of the game’s authors—Hokův and Hossner—and obtain a game from them. This endows the authors with the status of respected programmers, whose product is worthy of all this effort. This was also a real-life objective of the authors, who hoped to receive the recognition that The Revenge team had before them. As we have seen, hyperlocal games allowed their authors to recreate their everyday life environments and make them into spaces in which they could take control, subvert existing power relations and fulfil their ambitions. In the Situationist sense, any spatial tactic—including mapping or digital representation—stealthily asserts a degree of control over that space. It is then no surprise that the narratives of the hyperlocal games we discussed overtly feature the themes of power, revenge and ambition.

Conclusion Throughout this chapter, I have used hyperlocal games as a test case for local game histories. Thanks to their innumerable overlaps with the context of their production, their analysis requires concentrated

11  This collaboration was part of the game’s fiction and not based on real-life factual information.

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interview-driven historical research. The three examples used in this chapter can teach us two lessons about local game histories. First, understanding hyperlocal games, as well as local histories, requires good knowledge of the everyday lives, as well as work and play cultures of their authors. It is not enough to chart maps of relationships within catalogues of digital games or between digital games and other texts. Hyperlocal games cannot be separated from the terrains and microhistories they are linked to. The “chopping ties at the station” puzzle seems nonsensical until we learn that it was inspired by an offline personal story that was extremely important to the title’s author. In local game histories—and local media histories in general—in-jokes, as well as Easter eggs and paratextual messages, should not be dismissed, but embraced and scrutinized (see Nooney 2014). Second, hyperlocal games have demonstrated the usefulness of analysing hobby computing and local game histories in terms of power relations. Once again, hyperlocal games can serve as extreme cases, as my examples contain both explicit and implicit confrontations with existing power structures. Their authors used their skills to produce representations of the spaces, social groups and institutions they lived within. Although the same could be said about music, writing and other means of expression available to young people, games are different for they are “spatial stories” (Jenkins 2004). Resembling Situationists going on a dérive, authors of hyperlocal games deconstructed everyday spaces and rebuilt them as virtual spaces of adventure—spaces in which they could and did set the rules. The reach and impact of what I call “hyperlocal” games is difficult to estimate. The ones discussed in this chapter were preserved by users other than their authors and therefore must have been played and distributed by strangers. The Revenge, in particular, was so successful that its sequel was published as a commercial release. But given the generally low production values and in-joke nature of hyperlocal games, we can imagine that many other such titles could be considered throwaway, ephemeral objects and have been lost to history. It is unlikely that hyperlocal games were a solely Czechoslovak or post-Soviet phenomenon. As I previously mentioned, the fact that they form a prominent group of titles in the Czechoslovak archives might be due to the predominantly homebrew character of game production in the 1980s and 1990s, which favoured hyperlocal and community-­oriented titles. Games that fit the definition of hyperlocal continue to be made in independent and educational settings. The game Psyclepath (Leitch and

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McLean 2011), for example, is based on the experience of biking in the heavy traffic of Toronto; as a product of a game jam, its initial audience were members of the local Dames Making Games collective. In the NYC Haunts project, co-founded by the Global Kids non-profit, high school students create geolocative mobile games about the history of selected sites in New York City (Global Kids 2015). We can see hyperlocal games as precursors of the personal and autobiographical tendencies in game design, echoing the claims that “indie games” are in fact a continuation of earlier homebrew and shareware scenes (Garda and Grabarczyk 2016; see Juul 2019). In her book-cum-­ manifesto Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, the experimental game designer Anna Anthropy advises future game creators to write games about personal topics such as “your dog, your cat, your child, […] your friends, your imaginary friends, your summer vacation, your winter in the mountains, your childhood home, your current home, your future home […], your hopes, your dreams, your fears, yours secrets […]” (Anthropy 2012a, 103). She follows this principle in her own work, such as the autobiographical title Dys4ia (Anthropy 2012b). A similar approach is at play in the influential indie game Gone Home (The Fullbright Company 2013), which takes place in the protagonist’s childhood home (albeit fictional) or the Czech title Someday You’ll Return (CBE Software 2020), which transforms important places from the designers’ childhood memories into gameplay spaces. The lessons from hyperlocal games can thus sensitize us to the local aspects of today’s more global, commercial titles. Even in major studio projects, game developers include personal touches like in-­ jokes, Easter eggs and references to their colleagues, friends and familiar places. After all, every game is made by people who live their everyday lives.

References Albert, Gleb J. 2018. Subkultur, Piraterie und neue Märkte: Die transnationale Zirkulation von Heimcomputersoftware, 1986–1995. In Wege in die digitale Gesellschaft: Computernutzung in der Bundesrepublik 1955–1990, ed. Frank Bösch, 49–66. Geschichte der Gegenwart 20. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Anthropy, Anna. 2012a. Rise of the videogame zinesters: how freaks, normals, amateurs, artists, dreamers, dropouts, queers, housewives, and people like you are taking back an art form. New York: Seven Stories Press. Anthropy, Anna. 2012b. Dys4ia. PC. Itch.io.

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Brabec, František, and Martin Dlouhý. 1986. Dobývání hradu. ZX Spectrum. Antic Software. Carpentier, Nico. 2011. Media and participation: a site of ideological-democratic struggle. Bristol; Chicago: Intellect. CBE Software. 2020. Someday You’ll Return. PC. Brno: CBE Software. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Czech Statistical Office. 2014. 3.1 Vývoj počtu a struktury domácností. Czech Statistical Office.  https://www.czso.cz/csu/czso/13-6228-03-2001-3__ domacnosti. Debord, Guy. 2006a. Theory of the Dérive. In Situationist International anthology, ed. Ken Knabb, 62–66. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets. Debord, Guy. 2006b. Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. In Situationist International anthology, ed. Ken Knabb, 8–12. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets. Dovey, Jonathan, and Helen Kennedy. 2007. From Margin to Center: Biographies of Technicity and the Construction of Hegemonic Games Culture. In The players’ realm: studies on the culture of video games and gaming, ed. J.  Patrick Williams and Jonas Heide Smith, 131–154. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co. Eckert, Penelope. 1989. Jocks and burnouts: social categories and identity in the high school. New York: Teachers College Press. Fassone, Riccardo. 2017. Cammelli and Attack of the Mutant Camels: A Variantology of Italian Video Games of the 1980s. Well Played Journal 6: 55–71. Garda, Maria B., and Paweł Grabarczyk. 2016. Is Every Indie Game Independent? Towards the Concept of Independent Game. Game Studies 16. Global Kids. 2015. NYC Haunts. Global Kids Online Leadership Program. https:// globalkids.org/nyc-haunts/.  Hokův, Dušan. 2016. Interview by Jaroslav Švelch, 19 January 2016. Hokův, Dušan, and Petr Hossner. 1991. Emgeton story aneb Bláznivý nápad. Atari, 8-bit. H & H Software. Hrda, Stanislav, Michal Hlaváč, and Martin Sústrik. 1987. Fuksoft. ZX Spectrum. Bratislava: Sybilasoft. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual poachers: television fans & participatory culture. Studies in Culture and Communication. New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry. 2004. Game Design as Narrative Architecture. In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center. 2003. Journey-To-Work Trends in the United States and its Major Metropolitan Areas 1960–1990. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Jørgensen, Kristine, Ulf Sandqvist, and Olli Sotamaa. 2015. From hobbyists to entrepreneurs: On the formation of the Nordic game industry. Convergence:

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The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 23: 457–476. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515617853. Juul, Jesper. 2019. Handmade pixels: independent video games and the quest for authenticity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Knapík, Jiří, ed. 2014. De ̌ti, mládež a socialismus v Č eskoslovensku v 50. a 60. letech. Opava: Slezská Univerzita. Knapík, Jir ̌í, and Martin Franc, ed. 2011. Průvodce kulturním de ̌ním a životním stylem v c ̌eských zemích 1948–1967. Praha: Academia. Kolodzy, Janet. 2006. Convergence Journalism: Writing and Reporting Across the News Media. Rowman & Littlefield. Lášek, Petr, Alexandra Štorkánová, and Christo Bjalkovski. 1986. Šest ran do klobouku. ZX Spectrum. Praha: SPL. Leitch, Alex, and Maggie McLean. 2011. Psyclepath. PC. Dames Making Games. Linderoth, Jonas. 2013. Superheroes, Greek gods and sport stars: Ecological empowerment as a ludo-narratological construct. In Context matters!: proceedings of the Vienna Games Conference 2013: exploring and reframing games and play in context, ed. Konstantin Mitgutsch, Simon Huber, Jeffrey Wimmer, Michael Wagner, and Herbert Rosenstingl, 17–30. Wien: New Academic Press. Lonský, Jan. 1992. Stodman. ZX Spectrum. Nýr ̌any: Nagasoft. Lonský, Jan. 2016. Interview by Jaroslav Švelch, 17 January 2016. Lošťák, Viktor, and Zdeněk Polách. 1989. Multi Pascal 2.7 aneb Pomsta šíleného ataristy. Atari 8-bit. Viktor Lošt ̌ák. Lošťák, Viktor, and Zdeněk Polách. 2016. Interview by Jaroslav Švelch, 26 January 2016. Malý, Martin. 1988. Demon in Danger. ZX Spectrum. Chleby: Demonsoft. McDonough, Tom. 2002. Situationist Space. In Guy Debord and the situationist international: texts and documents, ed. Tom McDonough, 241–266. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meda-Calvet, Ignasi. 2016. Bugaboo: A Spanish case of circulation and co-­ production of video games. Cogent Arts & Humanities 3: 1190440. https:// doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2016.1190440. Metzgar, Emily T., David D.  Kurpius, and Karen M.  Rowley. 2011. Defining hyperlocal media: Proposing a framework for discussion. New Media & Society 13: 772–787. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810385095. Misterka, Marek, and Pavel Hertl. 1988. Karma. Sharp MZ-800. Briard-Software. Munson, Wayne. 1993. All Talk: The Talkshow in Media Culture. Temple University Press. Nooney, Laine. 2014. Easter Eggs. In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson, 165–166. Johns Hopkins University Press. Pandovisia Software. 1984. XIV. ZX Spectrum. Beograd: Pandovisia Software.

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Saarikoski, Petri, and Jaako Suominen. 2009. Computer Hobbyists and the Gaming Industry in Finland. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31: 20–33. https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2009.39. Stenros, Jaakko, Markus Montola, and Frans Mäyrä. 2009. Pervasive Games in Media Culture. In Pervasive games: theory and design, ed. Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Wærn. Amsterdam; Boston: Elsevier/ Morgan Kaufmann. Švelch, Jan. 2016. “Footage Not Representative”: Redefining Paratextuality for the Analysis of Official Communication in the Video Game Industry. In Contemporary Research on Intertextuality in Video Games, ed. Christophe Duret and Christian-Marie Pons, 297–315. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Švelch, Jaroslav. 2013. Say it with a Computer Game: Hobby Computer Culture and the Non-entertainment Uses of Homebrew Games in the 1980s Czechoslovakia. Game Studies 13. Švelch, Jaroslav. 2018. Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. Game Histories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Swalwell, Melanie. 2021. Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality. Game Histories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The Fullbright Company. 2013. Gone Home. PC. The Fullbright Company. Vaněk, Miroslav. 2002. Ostruv̊ ky svobody: kulturní a obc ̌anské aktivity mladé generace v 80. letech v Č eskoslovensku. Praha: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV Č R/Votobia. Vaněk, Miroslav. 2010. Byl to jenom rock’n’roll?: hudební alternativa v komunistickém Č eskoslovensku 1956–1989. Praha: Academia. Wasiak, Patryk. 2012. ‘Illegal Guys’. A History of Digital Subcultures in Europe during the 1980s. Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe 9. Wolf, Mark J. P. 2015. Video games around the world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 3

“The Last Cassette” and the Local Chronology of 8-Bit Video Games in Poland Maria B. Garda and Paweł Grabarczyk

Introduction The discourse of firstness (Suominen and Sivula 2016) is omnipresent in the history of video games. Historians, both hobbyists and academics, repeatedly focus on the narratives of innovation and tend to ask questions about the first video game (e.g. published in a certain country), the first iteration of a given genre or the first game containing a certain property. Even though the dominant narratives created by this discourse are now being challenged by various scholars,1 there still seems to be far too little research into late stages of different game history phenomena.

1  For example, critical inspections of the emergence of the First Person Shooter genre (Arsenault 2009; Therrien 2015) or studies into the late use of ZX Spectrum platforms (Švelch 2017).

M. B. Garda (*) University of Turku, Turku, Finland P. Grabarczyk IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_3

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In humanities, lastness is often considered in the wider sense of lateness. As Hutchinson (2016, p. 86) points out, the latter can be understood as an “aesthetic category of late style” (see Said 2006). However, in this chapter, we are not interested in lateness as a metaphor or an aesthetic trope, because this would demand a different, more formal or textual approach to video games. Instead, the aim of this chapter is to explore local historical factors that have affected cultural appropriation (see Hård and Jamison 2005) of 8-bit video games in Poland, focusing on the last— often overlooked—stages of that process. The “Last Cassette”, mentioned in the title, refers to the last 8-bit game published on a cassette tape in Poland. From a Western and strictly sales-oriented perspective, the 8-bit era might have ended in 1992, when manufacturers, such as Atari, stopped the support for 8-bit computer lines (Loguidice and Barton 2014). The technology was already obsolete and the market was dominated by newer platforms: 16-bit consoles (e.g. Sega Mega Drive or SNES), handheld systems (e.g. Nintendo Gameboy) and, of course, Amiga, Atari ST and PCs. However, in some countries, the 8-bit microcomputer’s presence lasted longer. In the case of Poland, for various reasons we will detail below, 8-bit platforms, especially the Atari XL/XE machines, were popular until the mid-1990s. What interests us in this chapter is not only the longevity of certain platforms but also the special relationship the local 8-bit scene had with the cassette tape and the resulting longevity of that media storage within gaming communities. For the sake of the argument’s clarity, we would like to start by explaining the notion of “lastness” used in this chapter. First of all, we are interested only in the final moments of the first commercial lifecycle of platforms. We do not take into consideration phenomena such as cartridge reproductions or new games published by retrogaming companies specializing in obsolete platforms (e.g. Psytronik Software or Flashback Entertainment). Even though this niche of retrogaming very rarely uses the medium of cassette (mostly for collector’s editions),2 including this phenomenon makes the notion of a “last game published on a cassette”

2  For example, in 2012, a group of retrogamers re-released a Polish classic adventure game for ZX Spectrum—Pandora’s Box (Borkowski 1986). The limited collector’s edition of 100 copies came packaged in a hand-numbered metal box with a stylish label. But what is probably the most significant characteristic of this release, is what was inside the box: the game was published on a cassette tape, just like the original version.

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completely void, as there is nothing preventing companies from releasing new games on cassettes or re-releasing old games in this form. Second, it is crucial to mention that the notion of a first commercial lifecycle (and thus the notion of lastness) has to always be relativized to a given social, political and especially economic context. There is no single commercial lifecycle of a platform but rather a number of parallel cycles existing in different local markets which may influence each other (on local game production, see Saarikoski and Suominen 2009; Swalwell 2005; Swalwell and Davidson 2016). These cycles may start and finish at different moments in time, depending on when a given platform is introduced in a given region and when the users and companies stop supporting it. For example, in the case study which interests us—the life of Atari 8-bit computers in Poland—the beginning and the end of the first commercial cycle differs significantly from the first commercial lifecycle abroad.

The 8-Bit Era Behind the Iron Curtain Generally speaking, the chronology of the 8-bit era in Poland is similar to other countries of the Eastern bloc. Just like East Germany or former Czechoslovakia (Švelch 2018), Poland experienced a significant lag in the diffusion of computer technologies due to the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls’ embargo on sales to the countries behind the Iron Curtain (see Garda  2020). Only in 1984 did the regulations regarding 8-bit technology change and it became possible to legally import microcomputers from the West (see Mastanduno 1992, p.  269; Budziszewski 2015, pp. 400–401), though they remained hard to obtain, as they were expensive. The choice of brand varied depending on the country and particular government contract. Those decisions, often circumstantial and dependent on personal contacts, shaped the national 8-bit cultures for years to come. For example, in Poland, the introduction of the Atari 800 XL to the Pewex shops3 in 1985 was a result of efforts made by Lucjan Wencel. This young physicist and entrepreneur was a trusted envoy of Jack Tramiel (Kosman 2015, p. 15), who was the then CEO of Atari and, perhaps even most importantly, was born in Łódź, Poland. Since the Atari family was the only computer sold via legal distribution, it had a great advantage over its competition—it was sold with a warranty (Wasiak 2014, p.  135). By the end of the decade, the Atari XL/XE computer  Pewex was a hard-currency shop (see Wasiak 2014, pp. 134–135).

3

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M. B. GARDA AND P. GRABARCZYK

family4 had a dominant market share, overshadowing the previously popular Sinclair machines. The status quo continued even after the transition to a capitalist economy, when Polish gamers were flooded with old gaming machines from the West. But these statistics were not uniform across other socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Just across the Carpathian Mountains, in the former Czechoslovakia, the ZX Spectrum scene was still relevant, with the other dominant platform being the Commodore 64 (Švelch 2017). Transition from a state-controlled socialism to a capitalist market economy legally started on 1 January 1989 with the so-called Wilczek’s Act, “proposed by Mieczysław Wilczek (then the Minister of Industry) liberalised the law on private business and introduced a laissez-faire system which led to an explosion of small businesses” (Garda 2020, p. 163). The economic difficulties of the system transition (e.g. low income), the dominance of the Atari 8-bit platform and the lack of new Atari software (even though there was still a high demand for it) resulted in an economic niche which was quickly exploited by newly created software companies. As a result, Poland—as the only country of the Eastern bloc where Atari was popular—became what Kluska and Rozwadowski (2011) called the Last Stand of the Little Atari,5 because at this point Poland was Atari’s biggest market (Lendino 2017, p. 104). From a historiographical standpoint, this framing of the Polish 8-bit era may evoke well-known narratives, such as Hesiod’s so-called Golden Age (see Rosenmeyer 1957, p.  260) or Gibbon’s works on the decline of the Roman Empire (see Bowersock et al. 1977). But the actual motivation of the Polish users of the era was to close the technocultural distance between Poland and the West (Budziszewski 2015, p. 399). Budziszewski (Ibid., p. 406) states that “[t]he end of the 1980s also marks the beginnings of a renaissance for the 8-bit Atari machines [in Poland]”. However, this is not an accurate statement. It was not a renaissance as the 8-bit machines were only experiencing their first commercial lifecycle in Poland—the cycle was shifted as it started and ended much 4  The most popular models were Atari 800 XL, Atari 65 XE and (to a lesser extent) Atari 130XE. 5  “Little Atari” (pol. Małe Atari) was a popular nickname of the 8-bit series of Atari computers which differentiated it from the 16-bit ST/STE series.

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later than it did in the West. This has caused interesting overlaps in the temporality of 8-bit and 16-bit platforms. The transition was uneven as officially available 8-bit platforms co-existed with unofficially imported 16-bit computers that could be purchased by citizens who had significant purchasing power. On top of that, computer magazines started to publish materials on 16-bit computers based on Western publications. Even though such overlaps are hardly uncommon in the video game industry,6 the aforementioned shift of commercial cycles of 8-bit platforms in the West and in Poland makes it unique. If we look at hardware transitions within a single economic context, you will see that it is typically accompanied by “transition software”—games which appear on both platforms (in separate versions). Since Western companies producing software for 8-bit computers did not support these platforms anymore, they did not produce either scaled-down versions of their 16-bit games or scaled-up versions of their 8-bit games. Instead, these companies completely abandoned the 8-bit market. This resulted in interestingly disjointed libraries of overlapping hardware platforms: new games for 8-bit computers were produced almost exclusively by Polish developers and new 16-bit games were produced practically exclusively by Western developers. This pattern repeated itself in later contexts. For example, with the release of the Sony Playstation console for international markets in 1995, some proclaimed the death of the floppy disc, as the machine was using a CD-ROM. However, at the same time, games were still being published on cassette tape for 8-bit platforms. This overlap of different gaming platforms, and as a result media storage technologies, is perhaps hard to understand from the present perspective of digital distribution. However, at the computer fair7 in Poland in the mid-1990s, one could see all of the technologies in one place co-existing with each other: an 8-bit machine stand next to a PC stand (Fig. 3.1).

6  For example, think of a recent transition period between Playstation 3 and Playstation 4 as an example of this. 7  Another term used to describe this phenomenon is “computer bazaar” (Wasiak 2014). However, we have decided to use the term “computer fair”, as the notion of a bazaar, even though it might be good for the description of the biggest market of that sort (Persian Bazaar or even Grzybowska), it doesn’t work well with the smaller computer fairs (e.g. in Łódź or Wrocław).

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Fig. 3.1  The computer fair at Grzybowska Street in Warsaw (March 1993). (Source: PAP/Teodor Walczak)

The Magnetic Charm of Cassettes It can be argued that the “cassette era” was for many Polish gamers a generational experience, just as it was for listeners of popular music (Kilpiö 2016). This often-romanticized birth of the Polish gaming industry was also a time of great political, economic and social change, as the so-called post-communist transformation affected all aspects of life. What we know today as the dominant cassette tape format of the twentieth century was developed by Philips in 1962 in Belgium.8 In the following decades, it became very popular, as Andriessen (1999) reports: “between 1980 and 1990 only the Japanese consumer electronics industry produced some 160 million cassette-containing equipment per year” (p. 11). The compact cassette became a common media storage for digital games with the ascendance of microcomputers. Cassette’s peak popularity was in the mid-1980s when not only many new games were released on 8   On the format wars and the development of magnetic tape data storage, see Andriessen (1999).

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tapes, but also “classic” arcade games and console games (e.g. made for Atari 2600) were ported to microcomputers. But cassette tape had one serious problem: limited piracy protection capabilities (Aycock 2006, pp. 154–55). As Wasiak (2014) puts it, one of the main cultural scripts of gaming culture in communist Poland was the practice of “playing and copying”, as gamers “built up networks to exchange tapes and disks with software, so-called Sneakernets” (p. 141). An essential part of that script was the cassette tape. The sneakernets transitioned into computer fairs. The sellers would go on Saturday morning by train to Warsaw, to obtain new games, which they copied very quickly so they could be sold in local computer fairs on Sunday (Doros 2015). Copying times of the cassette tape were critical to the success of this software distribution system. The access time of cassettes was their main drawback even when it came to regular consumers, as loading times were often several minutes. Indeed, realtime length of the programmes stored on cassettes might have even been considered a form of copy protection in itself. Any imperfection in a copy resulted in a loading error, interrupting the whole process. Because of this, length added to the difficulty of copying a programme, as every minute added to the probability that errors would be introduced. The copying itself was conducted in two ways. Either the user facilitated the process using specialized copying software (so called copiers),9 or she tried her luck using standard hi-fi equipment and copied the cassette as if it were a regular audio recording, a technique that was prone to errors but which required practically no technical knowledge. One crucial invention which helped illegal cassette distribution in a significant way was the so-called turbo systems. Produced by different local developers, turbo systems allowed for the data to be loaded (and saved) much more quickly. The technique condensed data by using much faster alternating signals which encoded the signal on the cassette. This method was well suited to piracy because it allowed sellers to create collections of many games stored on a single tape, a packaging innovation that made much less sense from a software company’s perspective. For users, turbo systems had only two downsides. First, they demanded the tape deck be modified as the original machine was not capable of registering alternating signals at this frequency. Similar to the chips used to modify later consoles which enabled them to read pirated software, the installation of turbo chips was typically a service provided by pirate sellers 9

 For example, a German programme “CDT Copierer” was created in 1988.

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at  computer fairs. Second, due to their condensed nature, turbo programmes were more prone to having copy errors, though use of the aforementioned specified copiers mitigated this to an extent. It is worth noting that prior to 4 February 1994, copyright in Poland did not explicitly include software, so copying games was technically legal. However, some of the anti-piracy advocates of the era argue that the existing law protected games developed locally (Borkowski 2016). After 1989, some of the “computer studios” (see Wasiak unpublished), that in practice distributed pirated games, became interested in publishing games produced by local developers. The standard cultural scripts of obtaining and sharing software were only one of the factors that contributed to the romanticized image of cassettes. One especially interesting way to obtain new software was a radio show “Radiokomputer” broadcast on the Polish Radio Channel 4. Like every radio channel in the 1980s, it belonged to the state. The unique feature of this programme was that half of it was devoted to broadcasting the sound wave of games which the listeners (if we can call them that) could then record on cassette tapes and load into their computers (typically ZX Spectrum or Atari). It can be thus argued that from the functional point of view, the experience of Polish cassette users did not differ from later online piracy on PC computers, as they were able to easily share, copy and “download” new software (on similar or related technologies of early file sharing, see Skågeby 2015; Stachniak 2014). One last aspect of the operation of cassettes that is worth mentioning is that the loading process itself was often considered to be something of an art. First of all, it was common for games not to load properly because the magnetic header of the user’s tape deck was aligned differently to the magnetic header of the person who recorded the tape. Note that this could also happen to a single user if she happened to regulate the header after saving a programme to tape. And there was no way for her not to do it from time to time in order to load software coming from different sources. In order to regulate the alignment, users had to use a small screwdriver to turn the screw of the header (conveniently accessible through a special hole in the tape deck). In principle, users could regulate the header while listening to the sound, but more often than not, they used specialized programmes which helped in the process. It is also crucial to remember that some of the technical aspects of the cassette co-determined the types of games which were released on this medium. Polish programmers had to produce games only in selected

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genres. Disk drives and cartridges were not common enough, so they had to produce games for tapes. This limited their options regarding the choice of game genres. To understand this, we have to say a few words about the peculiarities of the tape medium. The best way of looking at cassette tape from this point of view is to consider it as an interesting intermediary between cartridges (both 8-bit Atari computers and C64 gave the developers the possibility of using this medium) and floppy disks (which could have been used for all popular 8-bit systems of the era). Contrary to cartridges, cassettes did not constrain games as much in terms of the size of their assets or chunks (e.g. levels). Creating complex, multipart games was possible (they would have been terribly expensive on cartridges due to storage limitations) and even game saves could be implemented.10 Still, contrary to floppy disks, creating non-linear complex games stored on cassettes was a very difficult task. The reason for it was that cassettes worked best if the string of chunks that needed to be loaded to memory was fixed. Racing games, such as Test Drive (Distinctive Software 1987)—which had a C64 tape version—is a good example of this. But if predicting the chunk that needed to be loaded was not possible, cassette became a very inconvenient medium as the player would have to fast forward and rewind the tape all the time (in order to simulate random access possible on floppy disks). This limitation of the medium restricted the number of types or genres of games released for cassettes. For example, more complex adventure games were rather rare (all of the Infocom classics from the 1980 have been released only on disks). All of these unique aspects of cassettes (socio-­cultural, economic and technical) suggest that tapes should not be treated simply as one of the possible media, but rather as a platform in its own right. It is difficult to estimate the scale of the cassette tape market in Poland in the early 1990s, especially given the reusable nature of the cassette itself. Indeed, in Poland, many distributors in the early 1990s were reusing tapes previously recorded for other purposes, such as music or language learning (see V12 2010). Waldemar Czajkowski, one of the main distributors of that era, says he circulated about one million copies of cassette tapes with various software, the majority of these being video games (Czajkowski 2016).

10  See Elite (Braben and Bell 1985) or Polish adventure game Mózgprcesor (Computer Adventure Studio 1990) as good examples of this.

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The compact cassette is recently experiencing a revival, with a 76% surge in sales (Caulfield 2017), that can be associated with the 1980s nostalgia. However, the approach to this media storage is different in the retromusic and retrogames scenes, as the classic 8-bit titles are re-released on tapes only for collecting purposes and more likely on other storage media. Contemporary retro-8-bit games (Garda 2013) are usually published online as an image file (*.tap). For this reason, cassette tape will never become to the gaming industry what vinyl is to the music industry. But back in the day, the cassette tape technology was important to the relationship gamers had with the microcomputer technology of the 8-bit era, just as it was crucial for listeners of music (Kilpiö 2016), even more so in countries like Poland where access to the latest technology was limited.

The Decline of 8-bit Video Games To define the end of an era can be just as challenging as finding its starting date. In both cases, it is important to acknowledge that there is no single date, as our extraction and analysis of games on tape from the MobyGames database illustrates.11 Table 3.1 shows a steady decline of games published

626

534

600

610

645

700

656

Table 3.1  Video games published on a cassette tape (1977–1999) based on the data collected by MobyGames’ users (22 July 2016)

1999

1997

1998

6 1 1 0 2 0 2 0 1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

3

35 29 31 30

61

173

Poland

11 1991

1990

0

5

0 1989

1988

1987

0

4 1986

1985

0

0

0 1984

1983

1982

0 1981

1980

0

60

0

35

0 1978

4 0 1977

0

1979

100

67

145

200

Worldwide

118 84

238

300

194

400

326

373

438

500

11  The data set consists of a list of games extracted from the MobyGames database on 22 July 2016. The original list was created by selecting—from the view of all games for all

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on cassettes after 1987, in light grey. This correlates with a decline in the number of games published for all 8-bit platforms, regardless of medium. The peak of cassette tape usage occurred in the mid-1980s. We can also observe a smaller peak in the Polish data set, shown in black in Table 3.1. The graph suggests that the 8-bit era reached its peak in Poland in 1993. In this year, according to the MobyGames data, a total of 84 games were published in Poland, including 71 for the 8-bit Atari, 15 for Commodore 64 and only 1 for the ZX Spectrum platform.12 But perhaps the most interesting year is 1995 when all but one of the commercial titles for 8-bit platforms were published in Poland. The only other title was Lunar Blitz (Cosine Systems 1995), which featured in an early British retrogaming13 magazine Commodore zone. What follows is the “long tail” of the Polish tape publishing. Supplementary archival evidence from the L.K. Avalon14 (n.d.) order form15 confirms the MobyGames data from Poland, revealing that until the mid-1990s, the company produced 89 games and distributed 31 third-party games for Atari XL/XE, and 142 and 31 third-party games for Commodore 64 (not including collections). However, it seems that the company’s definition of production might have been a bit different from the way we think about it today, as it most likely meant producing the platforms, catalogued at the time—only the titles marked by the attribute “Media Type: Cassette Tape”. The selection of media storage type resulted in narrowing the platform’s range to 45 models of 8-bit microcomputers, as only these catalogued platforms were using cassette tapes. The initial data set included 5360 games published worldwide on a cassette tape, for the 8-bit machines, between 1977 and 2016. In the next step, we have focused on the titles released between 1977 and 1999. Subsequently, we have separated a list of games published in Poland. For the years between 1990 and 1999, we have manually checked the country of release as it is listed in the “Release info” section of the MobyGames entries. For the period between 1977 and 1989, we have cross-checked the initial data set with the list of entries added by two most active Polish users (Karsa Orlong and JudgeDeadd) and then supplemented the list based on recurring titles and author’s own expertise. 12  Although the total number of titles in the data set is 84, some of them released on more than one platform. 13  This might be an anachronism, as the retrogaming movement was only gaining self-consciousness. 14  L.K. Avalon and, to a lesser extent, Mirage were two main publishers and distributors of video games in the early 1990s in Poland. Apart from these two key players, there were a couple of smaller publishing companies and numerous development studios. 15  Possibly from the year 1996 or early 1997.

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material copy of the game, not necessarily developing or publishing it. Even though Commodore 64 had a longer mainstream presence (until 1996), as it had a bigger game library to offer, the games published in Poland were mostly developed in the West. On the contrary, Atari ended its mainstream existence in 1993, but the number of games produced for the platform decreased much earlier—at the end of 1980s. This resulted in a niche that could be exploited by local creators. Creating games for the C64 was much more difficult as they had to compete with Western games developed at the time. According to MobyGames, the last 8-bit game to be published on cassette in the UK was Mayhem in Monsterland (Apex Computer Productions 1993). After that, the 8-bit games published in the UK were mostly collections (i.e. re-editions) and games featured in newspapers, such as Commodore Format (1990–95). The commercial death of cassette in Poland came later. Until 1995, many game designers created their projects for outdated platforms and still found their audience (e.g. Miecze Valdgira series). These so-called Polish late 8-bit games (Garda and Grabarczyk 2014) were hits on the local market up until the mid-1990s. In 1996, the new 8-bit game Knoorkie: The Pig (Ossowski and Maroński 1997) had difficulty finding a publisher (Kluska 2015). According to the L.K. Avalon records (Pazdan 2016), the last title published by L.K. Avalon for the Atari 8-bit platform was the game Włóczykij [Vagrant] (ECS 1993) and for the Commodore 64 a turn-based strategy game, Gwiezdny kupiec [Star Merchant] (Skowroński 1996). Pazdan (2016) suggests that the longer life of Commodore was related to the temporality of the company in the Polish market. It entered the market later than Atari but also stayed longer. Furthermore, as Pazdan accurately observes, even if the 8-bit micro wars in Poland were a rather even race between Atari and Commodore, the 16-bit competition was a clear win for the Commodore Amiga over the Atari ST. Pazdan recalls that in the early days of L.K. Avalon’s history as a publisher, less than one-third of the submitted games ended up in development; later, it was only one-­tenth. It suggests that even more games were written, their quality suffered as more experienced programmers moved to different platforms.

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Sikor Soft and the Last Cassette Our research suggests that the last video game published on a cassette tape in the first commercial lifecycle of the 8-bit platforms in Poland, was Tekblast (Skrzypek and Lepkowski 1998). It is a conversion or a “demake”, as we would call it today, of an installment in the Bomberman franchise, known in Europe as Dyna Blaster (Hudson Soft 1991). It does not mean that Tekblast is just a clone, a derivative work that lacks innovation. Rather, it is an effect of what Švelch (2017) calls the long platform utilization progress. As a platform grows old, the users learn more and more on how to transcend its limitations and are able to create more and more technologically advanced games. Furthermore, we would say that this process is not solely about platform users existing in a niche but also about the designers looking for inspiration in the libraries of other platforms. Thus, in the case of Tekblast, the creator’s goal was to show that what can be done on a 16-bit computer, can also be achieved on a “Little Atari”. Unofficial conversions of this type filled the void of transgenerational software which players who were not able to make the leap to 16-bit, demanded. The main designer and programmer of Tekblast was a member of a demoscene group called Excellent, and aesthetically the game resembles the group’s demos—for example, Vengeance (1997), especially in the menu section. It is a rare example of an Atari XL/XE title that allows up to three players (i.e. two are using joysticks and one is using the keyboard). The connection with demoscene developers is not coincidental. As can be seen in the records of demoscene database Pouet, creators of demos typically stayed with their chosen platform long after its commercial cycle had ended. Additionally, they are highly skilled in the technical side of development. This makes them perfect choices for developers of ports or conversions of games released for more advanced platforms as the job does not require game design skills and presents an interesting intellectual challenge. The publisher of Tekblast, Sikor Soft, was established in 1994 by Piotr “Sikor” Sikorski. Sikorski was a typical representative of what we can call the Polish 8-bit generation. He was born in the 1970s and introduced to microcomputer technology in the 1980s. Sikorski’s youth coincides with the microcomputer revolution in Poland and the rise of computer game fairs. He was first introduced to computer technology through a

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programming class (Atari Basic) at the local community centre, and in 1987, his parents bought him his first machine (Atari) at a hard-currency retail store (Pewex). As he was born and raised in Warsaw, Sikorski was exposed to the early adopter’s circles in the capital, which often had access to the new technology before other parts of the country. The main hub for that community was the Polish computer game fair, with the most famous operating during the weekends in a school building on Grzybowska Street in the Warsaw city centre. As he recalls: “At that time, [L.K.] Avalon and Mirage were already multiplatform [moving away from 8-bit – MBG&PG]. (…) You could already feel that there are less [8-bit] releases but still a lot of people willing to code” (Sikorski 2016). In the first two years (1994–95) of operation, Sikor Soft published over a dozen games, selling around 500 copies each, but later the numbers dropped to circa 250 copies per title. The games were distributed in co-­ operation with the two main players on the market: L.  K. Avalon and Mirage Software. According to Sikorski, these companies forced smaller studios to publish on cassette tape. The reason for the pressure was economic: the disk games were just too expensive for Atari 8-bit users, and if the company wanted to maintain a revenue, they would have to sell the cassette tape version. Unfortunately, many people preferred to have a pirated version than the original, as it was cheaper. The insistence on distributing via cassette tape limited programmers’ capabilities (Sikorski 2016). Disks offered more options, not only in regard to space but also in the sense of non-linear gameplay development. In the four years between 1994 and 1998, Sikor Soft published a total of 19 games,16 most of which were developed by members of the Polish demoscene. Interestingly enough, two titles were Polish editions of games developed by a Slovak demoscene group, called Satantronic. Sikor Soft was interested in all kinds of genres, from the then popular erotic puzzle games (Sexy Six, 1995)17 to football managers (e.g. Liga Polska [Polish League], 1995) and action games (e.g. Nexus, 1996). However, puzzles and strategy games—which offered rather slow gameplay—were dominant in the company’s portfolio.

 Not including game editors and data disks for already existing titles.  Sexy Six was allegedly the only 256-colour game published for the 8-bit Atari in Poland, and in addition to that, the only game to be published on no less than four disks. 16 17

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Why was Tekblast the last game? Eventually, because of shrinking revenues, Sikor Soft was unable to meet the salary expectations of developers, as they could find better jobs in the growing IT sector. Furthermore, the demoscene was experiencing an aesthetic shift towards the PC (Reunanen 2017) and the interest in the 8-bit platform faded away (with some noticeable exceptions), at least for several years until its resurgence in the service of retrogaming and nostalgia. When Tekblast came out in 1998, the mainstream death of the 8-bit platform in Poland was a fact. Game magazines were no longer reviewing 8-bit titles. The computer fairs as a hub for the 8-bit community were fading into the past. Small distributors potentially still interested in 8-bit production were losing the fight against supermarkets and big players, such as CD Projekt, the future developer of the Witcher series. The first commercial cycle of the “Little Atari” was coming to an end.

Conclusions In 1995, early retrogaming magazines such as “Commodore Zone” from the UK, a spiritual successor to “Zzzap!64” (1985–1992), were publishing new Commodore 64 games. Beginning in 1995, tapes were added as covermounts. The retrogaming community was emerging (see Suominen et al. 2015). For that reason, one could argue that the 8-bit era is not over, and as a matter of fact, it will never be, because new 8-bit video games are still being developed. For example, Psytronik Software is still publishing new productions. However, in our chapter, we wanted to take a better look at the late stages of the 8-bit scene in Poland. We are aware that at the same time in other countries, another period was already starting. When Waldemar Czajkowski’s software distribution company filed for bankruptcy in 2000, the liquidator decided to segregate remaining games into two groups, namely “8-bit” and “others”. The stock of 8-bit cassettes was to be sent to waste, as in the eyes of the liquidator it had no market value (Czajkowski 2016). Only 10 years later, this “trash” would become valuable again and started to circulate on Polish and international online auction websites. Games published by Sikor Soft might have been the swan song of the commercial era of the 8-bit generation, but they were also the dawn of a different phenomenon. The final act of the first lifecycle of the 8-bit generation in Poland overlapped with the ascent of retrogaming internationally.

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Acknowledgements  We would like to thank Melanie Swalwell, Jaakko Suominen and Anna Sivula for inspiration; Xavier Ho for technical assistance; Stanisław Krawczyk and James O’Connor for their valuable comments; and last but not least, special thanks to all of our informants that were generous enough to share their memories of the Polish 8-bit era with us. This research was supported by the Academy of Finland project Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (CoE-­ GameCult, 312396) and European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s H2020 ERC-ADG program (grant agreement No 695528).

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Garda, Maria B., and Paweł Grabarczyk. 2014. Polish late 8-bit games of the 1990s. Paper presented at the 1st Central and Eastern European Game Studies Conference, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 10–11.10.2014. Hård, Mikael, and Andrew Jamison. 2005. Hubris and hybrids: A cultural history of technology and science. New York: Routledge. Hutchinson, B. 2016. Book Review: Karen Leeder (ed): Figuring Lateness in Modern German Culture. Journal of European Studies 46: 85–87. https://doi. org/10.1177/0047244116630233o. Kilpiö, Kaarina. 2016. On the Remembered Relationship between Listeners and C-cassette Technology. In Memory, Space, Sound, ed. Johannes Brusila, Bruce Johnson, and John Richardson, 71–83. Bristol, UK/Chicago, USA: Intellect books. Kluska, Bartłomiej. 2015. Zapomniany kuzyn Dizzy’ego. Pixel, May 2015. Kluska, Bartłomiej, and Mariusz Rozwadowski. 2011. Bajty Polskie. Łódź: Orka. Kosman, Marcin. 2015. Nie tylko Wiedz ́min. Historia polskich gier komputerowych. Wydawnictwo Open Beta. Lendino, Jamie. 2017. Breakout: how Atari 8-bit computers defined a generation. Ziff Davis LLC. L.K. Avalon (n.d.). Formularz zamówienia firmy “L.K. Avalon” [Order form]. Loguidice, Bill, and Matt Barton. 2014. Vintage Game Consoles. Focal Press, Taylor & Francis Group. Mastanduno, Michael (1992). Economic containment: CoCom and the politics of East-West trade. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. MobyGames. 22 July 2016. Media Type: Cassette Tape [Database Search]. http://www.mobygames.com/attribute/sheet/attributeId,325/offset,0/ so,1d/. Accessed 22 July 2016. Pazdan, Tomasz. 2016. E-mail correspondence with Maria B. Garda. Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. 1957. Hesiod and historiography. Hermes 85: 257–285. Reunanen, Markku. 2017. Times of Change in the Demoscene: A Creative Community and Its Relationship with Technology [doctoral thesis]. University of Turku. Saarikoski, P., and Suominen, J. 2009. Computer hobbyists and the gaming industry in Finland. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31: 20–33. https:// doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2009.39. Said, Edward W. 2006. On late style: Music and literature against the grain. Pantheon. Sikorski, Paweł. 28 November 2016. Interview conducted by Maria B.  Garda. Retrieved from the New Media PRL Oral History Archive. Skågeby, J. 2015. The media archaeology of file sharing: broadcasting computer code to Swedish homes. Popular Communication 13: 62–73. https://doi. org/10.1080/15405702.2014.977999.

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Stachniak, Z. 2014. Early Commercial Electronic Distribution of Software. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 36: 39–51. https://doi.org/10.1109/ MAHC.2013.55. Swalwell, Melanie. 2005. Early games production in New Zealand. In Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views – Worlds in Play. Swalwell, Melanie, and Michael Davidson. 2016. Game History and the Case of ‘Malzak’: Theorizing the Manufacture of ‘Local Product’ in 1980s New Zealand. In Locating Emerging Media, ed. Germaine R.  Halegoua and Ben Aslinger. New York and London: Routledge. Suominen, Jakko, Markku Reunanen, and Sami Remes. 2015. Return in Play: The Emergence of Retrogaming in Finnish Computer Hobbyist and Game Magazines from the 1980s to the 2000s. Kinephanos. Suominen, Jaakko, and Anna Sivula. 2016. Participatory historians in digital cultural heritage process  – Monumentalization of the first Finnish commercial computer game. Refractory – Australian Journal of Entertainment Media 27. Švelch, Jaroslav. 2017. Keeping the Spectrum Alive: Platform Fandom in a Time of Transition. In Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives, ed. Melanie Swalwell, Angela Ndalianis, and Helen Stuckey, 57–74. New York and London: Routledge. Švelch, Jaroslav. 2018. Gaming the Iron Curtain. How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Therrien, Carl. 2015. Inspecting video game historiography through critical lens: Etymology of the first-person shooter genre. Game Studies 15. V12. 12 January 2010. History of Commodore 64  in Poland… Interview with Waldemar Czajkowski. http://www.riversedge.pl/history-­of-­commodore-­64-­ in-­poland-­interview-­with-­waldemar-­czajkowski. Accessed 27 August 2020. Wasiak, Patryk. 2014. Playing and copying: Social practices of home computer users in Poland during the 1980s. In Hacking Europe, ed. Gerard Alberts, and Ruth Oldenziel, 129–150. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-­1-­4471-­5493-­8_6. Wasiak, Patryk (unpublished). Strategie reklamowe polskich piratów komputerowych w okresie transformacji systemowej. https://www.academia. edu/24234108/Strategie_reklamowe_polskich_pirat%C3%B3w_ komputerowych_w_okresie_transformacji_systemowej. Accessed 27 August 2020.

Gameography Apex Computer Productions. 1993. Mayhem in Monsterland [Commodore 64]. UK: Apex Computer Productions. ASF s.c. 1991. Miecze Valdgira [Atari 8-bit]. Poland: ASF s.c.

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Borkowski, Marcin. 1986. Pandora’s Box [ZX Spectrum]. Poland: self-published. Braben, David and Ian Bell. 1985. Elite [Commodore 64]. Unitek Kingdon: Firebird Software. Computer Adventure Studio. 1989. Mózprocesor [Atari 8-bit]. Poland: Computer Adventure Studio. Cosine Systems. 1995. Lunar Blitz [Commodore 64]. UK: Commodore Zone. Distinctive Software. 1987. Test Drive [Commodore 64]. USA: Accolade, Inc. ECS. 1993. Włóczykij [Atari8-bit]. Poland: L.K. Avalon. Hudson Soft. 1991. Dyna Blaster [Amiga] United Kingdom: Ubi Soft Entertainment Software. Marchlewicz, Grzegorz, Krzysztof Bartosik and Michał Szpilowski. 1995. Liga Polska [Atari 8-bit]. Poland: Sikor Soft. Ossowski, Marcin, and Tomasz Maroński. 1997. Knoorkie: The Pig [Commodore 64]. Poland: TimSoft. Rychlewski, Remigiusz. 1995. Sexy Six [Atari 8-bit]. Poland: Sikor Soft. Skowroński, Grzegorz. 1996. Gwiezdny kupiec [Commodore 64]. Poland: L.K. Avalon. Skrzypek, Marcin and Michał Lepkowski. 1998. Tekbalst [Atari 8-bit]. Poland: Sikor Soft. Sword Soft. 1996. Nexus [Atari 8-bit]. Poland: Sikor Soft.

CHAPTER 4

The Swedish Game Development History: The Founders and the Social Structure Ulf Sandqvist

Introduction This chapter will take a new look at the formation of the Swedish game industry between 1990 and 2010. These are important years not only for the Swedish industry but also for the global dispersion of game development outside the core production centres of the USA and Japan. This chapter can therefore contribute to an understanding of the game industry on a local level, but it is also relevant to the larger picture of the emerging successful global industry surrounding games. The Swedish and Nordic games and game developers have already received international attention in the last couple of years. In particular, a number of Swedish game development companies like Mojang (Minecraft) and King (Candy Crush) have been celebrated for their innovative games and the subsequent spectacular financial success. The Swedish achievements might be extra notable because they coincided with a period of strong transformation in which

U. Sandqvist (*) Umeå universitet, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_4

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the industry was going through considerable structural changes related to new business models and technological change. However, articles and books written about the Swedish game industry are often stuck in what Huhtamo (2005) calls the “chronicle era”. Most narratives are descriptive, somewhat sensationalist, and focus mainly on a few successful individuals or companies. The game industry in Sweden is often framed as unique and “The Swedish game wonder” is an  often used  idiom, indicating that the domestic  industry  is special and something of a miracle (Sandqvist 2010). Most accounts are written by enthusiasts and journalists who lack a critical stance and fail to contextualize  the development within a broader international and  historical  frame. This is a reoccurring pattern within computer history (Guins 2014; Fogelberg 2011, 31–2). This chapter will take a more analytical approach, and the goal is to contribute to the research about development of local digital game industries especially in Europe. The histories of these industries have not been thoroughly examined (Kerr and Cawley 2012, 402; Latorre 2013, 136–7). The aim is to take a new look at the formation of the Swedish game industry in the 1990s related to the social composition and background of the individuals forming and working within the industry. This includes a closer look at the gender structure within the industry. Issues related to the social composition and gender structure have been discussed before, but with an absence of basic data and based on anecdotal evidence or a small number of cases. This chapter is a contribution to this research while presenting and advocating for a mixed methods strategy when approaching local game history. The time period and the evolution of the game industry in Sweden and the Nordic countries have to some extent been covered and discussed by Konzack (2015), Jørgensen et al. (2015) and Sandqvist (2012). However, this chapter will study the period by utilising a unique source. The mixed methodological approach will primarily rely on a longitudinal database containing individual data about all the employees in the game industry from 1997 to 2010. The database material will then be complemented by oral history interviews.

Approaching the Local The development of the Swedish game industry seems likely to be relevant in relation to many other nations, for example, the Nordic countries and large parts of Eastern Europe. However, it can most

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likely be used as an interesting example in any comparative study with smaller countries without a large domestic market, for example, Austria, the Baltic states, Belgium, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore and UAE.  A small state perspective could be a fruitful approach in studying these local cases. It would help in understanding local variations and historic trajectories. Ultimately, it could put choices made by different companies and entrepreneurs into a historical theoretical framework while helping in the understanding of the global development of game production.

Small State Theory Small state theory is the minor academic field dedicated to the study of the often unique development of small states. A definition of a small state used within the field is fewer than 10 million inhabitants (Kuznets 1960, 10). States with a small population tend to have some economic disadvantages relating to the diseconomy of scale. Small countries will give limited opportunities to businesses due to, for example, small domestic markets, restricted financial opportunities and a small labour market. This will limit the domestic industry structure due to a crowding out effect. The competition for skilled labour will hinder minor actors, and a small country cannot support a diverse industry structure. Firms originating from small countries will also be heavily dependent on the international market as an outlet for goods and services. A direct consequence is a concentrated and limited industrial structure. Small countries will in turn often endorse international cooperation, open markets and free movement (Krantz 2006, 6). Despite these disadvantages, small countries are—somewhat paradoxically—often very successful. Many of the wealthiest countries in the world have less than 10 million inhabitants. This can be linked to some political benefits relating to internal unity and adaptability. Small countries can often adapt, thanks to good and stable social structures and institutions. Sweden and the other Nordic countries have, in particular, pioneered and evolved many different institutions related to the welfare state (Krantz 2006, 8).

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Methods and the Database There are some specific problems related to studying the history of the game industry. Good and reliable data about the industry is scarce (White and Searle 3, 34). Few researchers have invested time in compiling data about the industry and profound research based on quantitative methods is almost non-existent. There is a lack of solid data, and the result is a situation where researchers are relying on material from uncertain sources that would, most likely, not be accepted within other academic disciplines. One type of questionable source often used for different quantitative measurements is different reports from industry trade organisations or consultants. The problem with this kind of material is that it is hard to establish what methods have been used and if the source might benefit from portraying the industry in a certain light. This relates to broader problems with moral hazard and reliability problems that arise when researchers rely on industry sources or industry-funded material. Another research problem relates to the excessive use of Internet sources, for example, journalist gaming pages, and a high number of dead links in game industry–related research. Consequently, the data situation is meagre, and the possibility to do comparative or quantitative analysis is limited. In other words, industry studies are, arguably, at an empirical deficit. This chapter will try to counter this situation and present an alternative approach to studying the history of local or national game industries. The study will be based on two different types of primary data, a longitudinal database and interviews with representatives of the early industry in Sweden. This will allow for a mixed methodological approach with a descriptive quantitative part complemented with qualitative depictions. The longitudinal database is the most unique aspect. This type of data is often used in geographical or historical research but is a seldom utilised approach within game research. The material needed is often not readily available, but Sweden is one of the countries where databases with individual data are accessible to researchers. The data is provided by the government agency, Statistics Sweden. Researchers are allowed to use anonymous data originally collected by a number of government agencies (SCB 2016). The longitudinal database consists of data relating to every individual that has worked at a Swedish game development company between 1997 and 2010. Variables relating to age, sex, birthplace and education will be analysed. Whether or not a variable can be used in analysis from an ethical perspective is determined by Statistics Sweden, and

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possible sensitive data like birthplace will always be aggregated so that individuals cannot be traced. The use is also restricted, and researchers are not allowed to attempt to reverse the anonymisation or analyse single individuals or companies (Sekretesspolicy 2016). The quantitative data will be supplemented with qualitative interviews with game developers. The developers were active at game companies that started at the end of the 1980s and during the 1990s. There are few methodological alternatives to interviews, since few Swedish game companies have deposited archives. The interviewees were selected to represent a wide range of companies and economic outcomes. Some are affiliated with large successful companies, while others worked for small companies and firms that folded in the 2000s. The interviews were focused on their life stories and done in an oral history tradition (Thompson 2000).

Pioneer Phase: Early Game Development in Sweden, 1940s–1980s Sweden was one of the industrialised countries that pioneered and made early investments in computer technology, and with the computers came digital games. The period from 1940s to 1970s was an invention phase for digital games (Sandqvist 2015). Games were developed all over the industrialised world, but there was no commercialisation (Saarikoski and Suominen 2009, 20–1). The first game demonstrated to the Swedish public was likely a NIM game displayed at the unveiling of the SMIL (Siffermaskinen i Lund) computer in 1956 (Hallberg 2007, 172). NIM was at the time a popular game to use when computers were displayed and similar games were available internationally for the first generation of computers, including in nearby Nordic countries (Haraldsen 1999, 74–5; Saarikoski and Suominen 2009, 21). There are similar examples of games through the 1950s and 1960s for, for example, the first domestic computer manufacturers (Sandqvist 2012; Svensson 2000, 66–7; Ernkvist 2008). The lack of consumer hardware manufacturing and development in Sweden meant there were no material conditions for commercial game development comparable to that of the USA or Japan in the 1970s. The Swedish electronic manufacturer Luxor produced Channel F in the 1970s with a licence from Fairchild, but no Swedish games saw the light of day. It was instead the introduction of microcomputers that made commercial

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game development possible. The Sinclair Spectrum was one of the first computers that attracted several Swedish developers. One of the first professional game developers was Jan Jangblad. Like a few other pioneering developers, he moved abroad to the UK to work in the 1980s (Ernkvist 2008). There were other pioneers and companies active during the 1980s, like the publisher American Action and development company Greve Graphics released several games in 1986–87. These companies were, however, fairly short-lived and did not generate a long-lasting industry, and the originators eventually left the game development environment (Sandqvist 2012). So, many of the pioneers and companies left game production, and when a Swedish game development industry evolved in the 1990s, it did not continue the work of earlier game developers or employ them to any large extent for their experience. The founders of the industry were instead, to a large extent, a new generation with completely different backgrounds.

Establishing a Swedish Game Industry, 1990–2010 There has been a permanent and growing game industry in Sweden since the middle of the 1990s, and a growing number of companies have shaped the development of a long-lasting industry. The growth in the number of employees working in the industry has not been linear, however (see Table 4.1). The evolution of the industry up until 2010 can be divided into two expansion phases and two stagnation phases. There was an initial expansion phase from the mid-1990s up until 2002 and a subsequent stagnation phase which coincided with the bursting of the so-called IT-bubble in 2002–2004. The naive expectations during the bubble years enabled the temporary rise of companies with unrealistic business plans, but when these failed, many developers stayed within the game industry and formed new companies. A second expansion phase started in 2004 and lasted until 2008. This period was followed again by a downturn, this time linked to the global financial crisis in 2008, when several large companies went through difficulties. The founders of the new wave of companies in the 1990s were very young. The average age of the employees in the database was 27 years in 1997 and had increased to around 32 years by 2010. Some of the groups starting out in the late 1980s and early 1990s had members who were still in their teens. These young people had a passion for computer games and often a deep knowledge of computers. Table  4.2 shows the special role

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Table 4.1  Number of individuals in the Swedish game industry (1997–2010) 1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Table 4.2  The generations employed in the Swedish game industry (1997–2010) 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Born after 1979

Born in the 1970s

Born before 1970

that the generation born in the 1970s played in the game industry. The new wave of game development companies starting off in the 1990s was based on this generation’s knowledge, commitment and entrepreneurship. They were also the first generation to have grown up with

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computers, yet they were old enough to learn and take part in the first wave of popular computer culture in the 1980s. The phenomenon is described by Schön (2013, 103) as a generational effect in a structural transformation. When a new transformative innovation is introduced— like the microcomputer at the end of the 1970s—there is often a knowledge deficit because the established workforce does not have the necessary knowledge. There is a mismatch in the human capital stock. However, the generation growing up with the innovation might be the one that takes full advantage and pushes the innovation further. People born in the 1970s seem to belong to such a generation related to microcomputer technology and games. Microcomputers were new and still fairly unusual in the early 1980s, and the possible benefits of computer knowledge were not always obvious, especially to parents who were naturally unaware of the future impact and importance of computers. Young computer enthusiasts could have problems negotiating the time they spent in front of the monitor. Christoffer Nilsson talks about a home assignment in computer class and the positive effect it had: My mother asked the teacher about the result of the assignment. He said, well there will be no problem for Christoffer to get a job as a programmer with all the knowledge he has. Then my parents understood that it was an occupation, even if it was not a common one. Then the mood changed. Someone with authority had said that this could actually be a job and it was not a waste of time. (Nilsson, Interview 2015)

Computer knowledge was very much a prerequisite when entering the game industry. However, the first groups forming game studios came from diverse backgrounds. The company Daydream emerged from traditional software development and digital graphic production. Paradox, on the other hand, had roots in an older Swedish role-playing company. The youth culture surrounding the demoscene had a particularly strong influence on several early Swedish game companies. Companies like ATOD, Digital Illusions, Starbreeze and UDS all had roots in the demoscene. The demoscene was a subculture devoted to producing and competing to make the most advanced digital art using computer programming. Sweden and the rest of Northern Europe had a very active demoscene in the 1980s and 1990s (Reunanen and Silvast 2007). The subculture often provided a channel for young men’s interest in computers, giving their hobby a social

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outlet by connecting them to likeminded people around Sweden as well as internationally (Tyni and Sotamaa 2014). This effect is likely similar to computer subcultures in other parts of the world (Veraart 2011; Levy 2002). Demosceners honed their computer skills in the ongoing rivalry with other participants. Oskar Burman, one of the first developers at UDS, talks about moving over to the demoscene and learning low-level programming. The quote shows that the demoscene was not a simple precursor to game development. Burman had programmed games long before engaging with the scene: I became a member of the group called TRR and started making demos with them. It was when I went over from games to demos and I also went over from STOS to Assembler. I had always thought Assembler seemed so incredibly difficult and complex, and then suddenly it just unlocked, and it was not as difficult as I thought. With a little help I got going with it. Then you could push the computers much more, so then it became very fun to make demos. You could do these graphical effects and time it with music and sound. It was a very fun and creative expression. Then we worked more together, I had always done the games myself but now we worked in these larger groups.

The knowledge transfer from the demoscene to game development was not linear. Central management skills and even programming methods were not always easily applicable to commercial programme development (Jørgensen et al. 2015, 16; Carlsson 2009, 18). However, the demoscene became a recruiting network and eventually became important for the expansion of the industry. Fredrik Liljegren, one of the founders of Digital Illusions, talks about the growth and recruitment strategy of the company in the 1990s: We would check the Swedish demoscene first for the best programmers and graphical artists and ask them if they wanted to start making games instead. It was in this way we found the first employees when we expanded from 8 to 18. Everyone was from the demoscene. (Liljegren, Interview 2013)

The young age and the background in the subculture might have influenced some of the businesses and organisations. Game creation was still not an entirely “serious” occupation in the early years in the 1990s. It was still similar to the hobby culture—a fun and exciting element of hobbyist computing that the young entrepreneurs happened to get economic

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compensation for. But if game development was still not a dead serious endeavour for the developers, they were still forced to link up to the global game market. Due to the lack of domestic actors, young Swedish game developers had to connect with international publishers. Most accessible, at the time, was the well-established UK industry. Christoffer Nilsson, one of the founders of ATOD, talks about the trouble and ambivalence he felt about the business side of game development during one of their first projects: We travelled to the ECTS [European Computer Trade Show] but for us it was still a hobby. We were inexperienced regarding the language and the business. […] It was a hassle for us when we had to send an invoice in English. It was actually so unpleasant that we only sent one out of two of the instalments. We had to send the first invoice before they could publish the game, so we did that. But for the second payment when the game was released, we simply refused to respond to their proposals to send an invoice. […] When Microprose bought [the game publisher from] British Telecom the Microprose’s auditors found this old unpaid debt to us, and again sent a reminder. “Please, can you send an invoice so that we can settle this debt we have to you?” Even then we didn’t want to do it. It was interesting times. We thought it was fun to make games. We had done it for fun, not for the money, so it almost felt wrong [getting paid]. Now many years later, it is perhaps a little strange that we did not ask for the money. We were young and not interested in the business. (Nilsson, Interview 2015)

The organisational structure was not entirely established within the firms either. The young entrepreneurs did not always run their companies as traditional businesses, and some had more unorthodox structures. Some of the companies were more like collectives that produced games (Jørgensen et al. 2015). At UDS the developers lived and worked as a collective for the first couple of years. They rented a three-room apartment, had beds in two rooms and used the living room as the workspace. Oskar Burman talks about the era and how they financed the early production: It was five people who lived in an apartment in Norrköping […] Some of us had unemployment benefits so we got a bit of money that we shared. Someone else had some money which they invested in the company. We had few means but everyone chipped in and did their part […] It was very willy-­ nilly, the unemployment benefits were nearly pulled back because we were supposed to go to a Datortek class [“Datortek” was a computer education scheme in the 1990s for unemployed with unemployment benefits]. I tried

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to explain to the employment agency that I already know computers, we are working on a computer game. […] Eventually we got a meeting with the ladies at the employment agency, they actually came by our apartment. We invited them for chocolate cake and explained what we were doing. Then I didn’t have to go, it was unbelievable. They turned a blind eye. (Burman, Interview 2015)

The developers starting out in the 1990s did not typically have strong academic backgrounds. Looking at the educational levels, we can see a general process towards formalisation and professionalisation within the game industry (see Table 4.3). The number of employees with a longer university education has risen from less than 10 per cent to over 40 per cent. Quite a few of the first game developers were autodidacts and did not hold formal academic degrees when they started game studios. There were few relevant computer-specific courses before the mid-1990s at the gymnasium (secondary school) level in Sweden. Jens Andersson, later at Starbreeze, had to move to study at the first gymnasium offering computer education in the early 1990s. Andersson talks about the education as a meeting place for future game developers, similar to the demoscene: There were only two places in the country, Uddevalla and Forsmark, that offered the specialization. I moved to Uddevalla with two of my classmates. It was two or three classes, with about sixty persons studying computer engineering. […] It was fun, and I met people that today are active in the gaming industry […] there were so few programs available, so those who Table 4.3  Education levels in the Swedish game industry (1997–2010) 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Compulsory education (9 years)

Gymnasium (12 years)

Tertiary education < 3 years

Tertiary education > 3 years

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were driven and most interested came together there just like in the demoscene. (Andersson, Interview 2015)

Over time, the education options for aspiring game developers and computer enthusiast have changed substantially. The new millennium has seen a significant increase in the number of specialised game-related programmes and courses at almost every level of the education system. A complementary data point to education level is profession classification. Companies have an obligation to report the kind of work their staff are engaged in (see Table  4.4). These statistics seem to be somewhat imprecise with a category for missing entries. Additionally, some reported job descriptions seem somewhat out of place. The interpretations of this data should therefore be used with some caution. The types of work are, for the purposes of this study, aggregated in five categories: management (CEOs and managers), business and administration (lawyers, business economist, sales and communication staff), computer specialists (technicians and engineers), artisans (artist, graphics, writers and sound technicians) and others. The largest change over time is an increase in the proportion of people working in the technical side of production. This could possibly be due to the evolution and increasing complexity of the technology. The game industry is also one of the industries that utilises and even promotes the further development of Moore’s law (Sandqvist 2015). A contradictory development, however, is the increasing Table 4.4  Profession classification in the Swedish game industry (2001–2010) 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% 2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

Management

Business and administration

Computer specialist

Artisans

Other

Missing

2009

2010

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importance of less sophisticated mobile technology and the rise of smaller indie games. Arguments have also been made that the new structure of the game industry would demand a new skill set, for example, customer relations and new monetarisation schemes (McGregor 2013, 66–73; Hotho 2013, 99). This development should possibly have increased the proportion within the “business and administration” category, but there is no evidence for this in the data. The time series ends in 2010, so one possible explanation is that this type of transformation happened later. Many new important gaming platforms were released around 2008 (Sandqvist 2015), and there might be a lag in the transformational impact. Another variable that shows the internationalisation and potentially the professionalisation of the industry is where employees were born (Table 4.5). The percentage of employees born outside Sweden has slowly been growing. The percentages are still low, but with the increasing size of the industry, the number is growing. Unsurprisingly, the largest group are Europeans, especially employees from the European Union and other Nordic countries. Sweden joined the EU in 1995, and it is likely that companies have taken advantage of the new work migration policies and recruited talent from across the union. The group coming from outside Europe is dominated by North Americans. There are no free movement agreements between Sweden and North America, and there have been no large streams of immigration that might affect the numbers. It seems safe Table 4.5  Country of birth in the Swedish game industry (1997–2010) 100% 95% 90% 85% 80% 75% 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Born in Sweden

Europe

Outside Europe

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to assume that this group has some relationship to the purchase of a number of major Swedish game developers by the international publishers, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft. These employees are, then, part of a more globalised workforce where employees are encouraged to move to locations with labour demand.

Gender and the Swedish Game Industry A closer look at the gender structure of the Swedish game industry reveals a segregated industry (Table  4.6). The proportion of women has been stable at a level slightly below 10 per cent before 2010. Similar numbers of around 10–15 per cent have been reported from the game industry in the USA and Canada (Dyer-Witheford 2004; Gourdin 2005). The influence of the demoscene on the Swedish industry most likely accounts for this structure. Recruitment patterns are known to influence an industry’s gender structure (Padavic and Reskin 2002, 46–47). The demoscene was homosocial. It therefore follows that use of demoscene networks for recruitment to the game industry has reproduced the demoscene’s gender segregation. The segregated structure is, however, not uncommon in society: the structure can be found in many occupations, and few industries have an

Table 4.6  Percentage of women in the Swedish game industry (1997–2010) 16.0% 14.0% 12.0% 10.0% 8.0% 6.0% 4.0% 2.0% 0.0%

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

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even gender distribution. The most segregated occupations in Sweden are general woodworkers, where almost 100 per cent are men and secretaries, where almost 100 per cent in the workforce are women (Statistiska centralbyrån 2012, 62–3). Gender segregation within a hi-tech industry like the game industry might not be a remarkable result by itself, but the database can generate some deeper insights. Even though the proportion of women is low, an aggregated number might hide structural dynamics. The number of workers leaving the industry every year has been high, especially from the end of the 1990s up until 2004, when over 35 per cent left the industry every year (Table 4.7). The figures suggest that game development is a volatile industry that many employees have left for other opportunities. By comparing the proportion of male and female workers who have left the industry, we see that the proportion of female workers leaving the industry is consistently higher. In the general Swedish population, about 10–15 per cent will change jobs in a year. Labour mobility, however, is also affected by gender (Andersson et al. 2014). We should expect the opposite situation in the game industry since men tend to change jobs more frequently. This indicates industry structures that make women more inclined to move on to other industries. Table 4.7  Percentage of women and men leaving the Swedish game industry (1997–2009) 70.0% 60.0% 50.0% 40.0% 30.0% 20.0% 10.0% 0.0%

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Women

Men

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Wright (1996) suggests that this phenomenon is not uncommon if there are negative structures within an industry. In relation to the game industry, there have been discussions about the workload and, particularly in prolonged “crunch” periods, long working hours (Sandqvist 2010, 147, 202–3; Vikström  2006). This is a structure that can affect the gender structure and negatively impact people who have responsibilities outside the workplace (Mellström 1996; Padavic och Reskin 2002, 29, 84–6). There can also be negative cultures within companies that deter women from staying in one job for a long time. Mellström (1996) has pointed out that being one of few women in a workplace can, by itself, be discouraging. The data also reveals horizontal segregation within the industry. Women and men are found in different occupations (Table 4.8). Women work to a higher degree with business and administration and are more often part of management. The proportion of men is notably higher among the computer specialists, while the proportion of artisans is fairly balanced. Considering enrolments in university game programmes, this is not a surprising result: few women in Sweden are enrolled in game-specific programming and engineering programmes (Sandqvist 2013). We can assume that this means that women are more often engaged in corporate supporting activities and not directly involved in the production of games. This is also a known structure common to other technology-intensive industries (Panteli et al. 1999). Table 4.8  Profession classification in the Swedish game industry (2001–2010): men (M) and women (W) 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Management Business and administration Computer specialist Artisans Other Missing

M W M W M W M W M W M W

7% 6% 10% 10% 9% 8% 7% 6% 6% 12% 11% 14% 15% 17% 17% 13% 10% 10% 3% 4% 4% 3% 5% 4% 5% 3% 4% 24% 19% 18% 21% 23% 26% 27% 24% 23% 41% 42% 42% 48% 46% 42% 41% 56% 53% 14% 25% 22% 19% 17% 14% 16% 27% 32% 34% 31% 34% 27% 23% 25% 24% 26% 31% 28% 30% 25% 19% 18% 9% 13% 19% 25% 2% 4% 2% 3% 6% 7% 7% 3% 2% 8% 9% 10% 8% 7% 12% 17% 13% 8% 13% 13% 9% 8% 11% 16% 16% 6% 5% 14% 6% 12% 19% 18% 22% 14% 7% 2%

5% 8% 4% 19% 59% 31% 26% 29% 2% 6% 4% 6%

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The women in the database have a higher level of education than the men. As seen in Table  4.3, the number of employees with a university education has increased over time, but women have studied at university level to a higher degree than men. This follows the general trend in Sweden where women have a higher education level. Women, particularly those in the age span 25–34, study longer and more than 50 per cent continue to a post-secondary education, for example, university level, compared to under 40 per cent in the general population (Statistics Sweden 2014). The median salary within the industry is, however, about 10 per cent lower for women. In other words, women in the game industry are better educated, but they receive lower wages. The wage gap is most likely related to the horizontal segregation. To be a computer specialist often pays better than working in business administration. It could also indicate a vertical segregation, namely that women in the industry tend to be in management and administrative positions, whereas men tend to have leadership and senior positions in their organisation.

Discussion The Swedish game industry in the 1990s was not primarily a business endeavour where a few established industrialists saw a profitable business opportunity and tried to exploit it. Instead, what became the game industry in Sweden was formed by young computer enthusiasts often with backgrounds in computer subcultures. Many were born in the 1970s and had started tinkering with computers in the 1980s. When they started companies in the 1990s, some were still in their teens. These were entrepreneurs with a passion for the technology but not necessarily with any formal education. The Nordic demoscene was a source of motivation and eventually became an important recruiting network. However, it was probably primary and secondary school teachers who gave these individuals the legitimacy and the confidence that helped them envision a career working with computers (see also Nissen 1993). Over time the social structure of the game industry has changed, and the industry has in a way grown into a more expected structure for a technology-driven industry. This study shows the increasing importance of an academic education. More employees have completed a longer university education before entering the industry. Swedish game developers have always needed to negotiate deals with international publishers, but the workforce has also started to become more international. In this way, the

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companies have become more diverse, and this development could be linked to several companies becoming part of larger multinational publishers. Looking at the internal structure of the companies, the data shows the increasing importance of computer specialists, which probably relates to increasing technological complexity within the industry up until 2010. This also explains the continuing gender segregation, which in turn relates to the uneven enrolments in STEM-fields at university. The data gives a unique insight into the gender structure within the game industry. The long Swedish history of comparably progressive welfare state policies related to a dual breadwinner system (see Ellingsæter 1998) has evidently not influenced the gender segregation of the workforce in the game industry. The Swedish game industry remains deeply segregated, exhibiting a structure similar to other countries. The data shows a horizontal segregation, and the percentage of women leaving the industry could generate some concern for current employers. There are reasons to review the current situation and look closely at possible explanations. Moving forward, we should not falsely expect a linear progression towards a more heterogeneous structure. There can be non-symmetrical inertia and even resistance related to structural change regarding gender diversity (Wahl 2003, 98). Looking ahead to future research, it would be beneficial if game scholars could generate more data regarding companies and individuals within the game industry. We need to move beyond a solely qualitative research paradigm. This would push the research frontier beyond single case studies and broad historical reports based on secondary sources. It would be highly valuable for future researchers to have access to longer time series, which could lead to more data options and new methods and ultimately make new forms of comparative research within the field of historical game studies possible. A great first goal would be a few comparative timelines with some basic data, like we already have for so many other industries. The Swedish case might be somewhat unusual, with the availability and accessibility of longitudinal individual data, but it is most likely not unique. The collection of big data and the construction of longitudinal databases is a growing field of study, and so access to similar data on industrialised countries should increase in the future. The mixed method approach presented in this chapter—with clear quantitative and qualitative components—could also be applied in a downscaled setting. Study of a few cases could fruitfully be combined with other types of longitudinal data like financial data or employee data. This could be one way to propel the field of local game history.

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References Andersson, Fredrik W., Jan Andersson, och Andreas Poldahl. 2014. “Sannolikheten att byta jobb  – den kommunala jobbalansens betydelse.” In Information om utbildning och arbetsmarknad, Rapport 2014:3. Carlsson, Anders. 2009. “The Forgotten Pioneers of Creative Hacking and Social Networking – Introducing the Demoscene.” In Re: Live: Media Art Histories 2009 Conference Proceedings, ed. Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, 16–20. Melbourne: University of Melbourne & Victorian College of the Arts and Music. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. 2004. Mapping the Canadian Video and Computer Game Industry. Queen’s University, Kingston. http://publish.uwo.ca/~ncdyerwi/ Mapping-­Queens.pdf. Ellingsæter, Anne Lise. 1998. “Dual Breadwinner Societies: Provider Models in the Scandinavian Welfare States.” Acta Sociologica 41 (1): 59–73. Ernkvist, Mirko, ed. 2008. Svensk Dataspelsutveckling, 1960–1995: Transkript Av Ett Vittnesseminarium Vid Tekniska Museet I Stockholm Den 12 December 2007. TRITA-HST, 1103–5277; 2008:28. Stockholm: Avdelningen för teknik- och vetenskapshistoria, KTH. Fogelberg, Hans. 2011. Research on IT Use and Users in Sweden, with Particular Focus on 1990–2010. Stockholm: Dataföreningen. Gourdin, Adam. 2005. Game Developer Demographics: An Exploration of Workforce Diversity. International Game Developers Association. Guins, Raiford. 2014. Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Hallberg T-J. 2007. IT-gryning: svensk Datahistoria Från 1840- Till 1960-Talet. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Haraldsen, Arild. 1999. Den Forunderlige Reisen Gjennom Datahistorien. Oslo: Tano Aschehoug. Hotho, Sabine. 2013. “‘Some Companies Are Fine One Day and Gone the Next’: Sustaining Business in the Digital Games Industry.” In Changing the Rules of the Game, ed. Sabine Hotho and Neil McGregor, 82–104. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Huhtamo, Erkki. 2005. “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble.” In Handbook of Computer Games Studies, ed Joost Raessens and Jeffrey H. Goldstein. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Jørgensen, Kristine, Ulf Sandqvist, and Olli Sotamaa. 2015. “From Hobbyists to Entrepreneurs on the Formation of the Nordic Game Industry.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 23 (5): 457–476. Kerr, Aphra, and Anthony Cawley. 2012. “The Spatialisation of the Digital Games Industry: Lessons from Ireland.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 18 (4): 398–418. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2011.598515.

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Konzack, Lars. 2015. “Scandinavia.” In Video Games Around the World, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf, 451–67. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Krantz, Olle. 2006. Small European Countries in Economic Internationalisation: An Economic Historical Perspective. Umeå Papers in Economic History 26. Umeå: Ekonomisk historia. Kuznets, Simon. 1960. “Economic Growth of Small Nations.” In Economic Consequences of the Size of the Nations, ed. E.A.G. Robinson, 14–32. London: Macmillan. Latorre, Óliver Pérez. 2013. “The European Videogame: An Introduction to Its History and Creative Traits.” European Journal of Communication 28 (2): 136–51. Levy, Steven. 2002. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Penguin. McGregor, Neil. 2013. “Business Growth, the Internet and Risk Management in the Computer Games Industry.” In Changing the Rules of the Game, ed. Sabine Hotho and Neil, McGregor, 65–81. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mellström, Ulf. 1996. “Teknologi Och Maskulinitet: Män Och Deras Maskiner.” In Från Symaskin till Cyborg, ed. Elisabeth Sundin and Boel Berner. Vol. S. 113–39. Stockholm: Nerenius & Santérus. Nissen, Jörgen. 1993. Pojkarna vid datorn: unga entusiaster i datateknikens värld. Stockholm: Symposion graduale. Padavic, Irene, and Barbara F. Reskin. 2002. Women and Men at Work. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press. Panteli, Androniki et al. 1999. The status of women in the UK IT industry: an empirical study. European Journal of Information Systems 8 (3): 170–182. Reunanen, Markku, and Antti Silvast. 2007. “Demoscene Platforms: A Case Study on the Adoption of Home Computers.” In History of Nordic Computing 2, ed. John Impagliazzo, Timo Järvi, and Petri Paju, 289–301. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer. Saarikoski, Petri, and Jaakko Suominen. 2009. “Computer Hobbyists and the Gaming Industry in Finland.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31 (3): 20–33. Sandqvist, Ulf. 2010. Digitala Drömmar Och Industriell Utveckling: En Studie Av Den Svenska Dator- Och Tv-Spelsindustrin 1980–2010. Umeå Studies in Economic History 42. Umeå: Institutionen för ekonomisk historia, Umeå universitet. Sandqvist, Ulf. 2012. “The Development of the Swedish Game Industry A True Success Story?” In The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future, ed. Peter Zackariasson and Timothy L. Wilson, 134–56. New York NY: Routledge. Sandqvist, Ulf. 2013. 9 av 100: om könssegregationen inom den digitala spelindustrin. Umeå Papers in Economic History 42. Umeå: Institutionen för ekonomisk historia, Umeå universitet.

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Sandqvist, Ulf. 2015. “The Games They Are a Changin’: New Business Models and Transformation within the Video Game Industry.” Humanities and Social Sciences Latvia 23 (2): 4–20. Statistics Sweden. 2014. Yearbook of Educational Statistics 2015. Statistiska Centralbyrån. http://share.scb.se/OV9997/data/UF0524_2014A01_BR_ UF01BR1401.pdf. SCB. 2016. “Beställa Mikrodata.” Statistiska Centralbyrån. https://www.scb.se/ vara-­tjanster/bestalla-­mikrodata/. Accessed 23 August 2020. Schön, Lennart. 2013. Tankar om cykler: perspektiv på ekonomin, historien och framtiden. Lund: Studentlitteratur. “Sekretesspolicy.” 2016. SCB. Accessed 29 February 2016. http://www.scb.se/ Grupp/OmSCB/Verksamhet/Regelverk/Policy/sekretesspolicy.pdf. Statistiska centralbyrån. 2012. På Tal Om Kvinnor Och Män: Lathund Om Jämställdhet. 2012. Stockholm: Statistiska centralbyrån. Svensson, Gary. 2000. Digitala Pionjärer: Datakonstens Introduktion I Sverige. Stockholm: Carlsson. Thompson, Paul. 2000. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tyni, Heikki, and Olli Sotamaa. 2014. “Assembling a Game Development Scene? Uncovering Finland’s Largest Demo Party.” G|A|M|E Games as Art, Media, Entertainment 1 (3). Veraart, Frank. 2011. “Losing Meanings: Computer Games in Dutch Domestic Use, 1975–2000.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33 (1): 52–65. Vikström, Linda. 2006. “Företaget Som Växte Upp.” Affärsvärlden, 1 March 2006, 88–89. Wahl, Anna. 2003. Könsstrukturer I Organisationer: [kvinnliga Civilekonomers Och Civilingenjörers Karriärutveckling]. Lund: Studentlitteratur. White, Gregor, and Nicola Searle. 2013. “Commercial Business Models for a Fast Changing Industry.” In Changing the Rules of the Game, ed. Sabine Hotho and Neil McGregor, 28–47. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, Rosemary. 1996. “The Occupational Masculinity of Computing.” In Masculinities in Organizations, ed. Cliff Cheng, 77–95. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE.

Interviews Fredrik Liljegren, 5 December 2013 (Telephone interview). Jens Andersson. 5 November 2015. (Skype interview). Oskar Burman. 25 May 2015. (Telephone Interview). Christoffer Nilsson, 1 October 2015. (Skype Interview).

CHAPTER 5

A Place for a Nintendo? Discourse on Locale and Players’ Topobiographical Identity in the Late 1980s and the Early 1990s Jaakko Suominen and Anna Sivula

Background: Gaming Memories as Topobiographies At first, I got to know Nintendo games before I was at school, at my relatives’ and friends’ residences, but in the early 1990s, I had my own NES [Nintendo Entertainment System console] as well. Games were played at mine or my friends’ homes where there was a gaming device available. At my friends’ homes, playing games was usually a social event in such a way that even when someone was playing a single-player game, someone was watching the game, or we took turns playing games. A unique situation, which was often repeated, was playing games on the ferry boats to Sweden (especially the Silja Symphony and Silja Serenade Ferries [between Finland and

J. Suominen (*) School of Hîstory, Culture and Art Studies, University of Turku, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] A. Sivula University of Turku, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_5

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Sweden]) in the children’s room. There I got to know many games and sometimes also played with strangers. Very often it was difficult to get me out of the gaming room, even to go to sleep. (55-M-19841)

The citation above is a single answer to an online inquiry consisting of questions about Nintendo console gaming memories in Finland in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The particular piece of text is an answer to an open question about where and with whom the play occurred. Most of the answers were very brief, consisting of laconic mentions of place of play and the possible naming of who the informant gamed with, but this specific writer has described his play in a much more comprehensive manner. Thus, the person is portraying the place of play, the situation and the social context in such a way that it sounds like an excerpt from an autobiographical presentation.2 The autobiography as a whole pictures the beginning of the play and reveals how the change took place. On the one hand, it describes the normal routines of gaming situations, and on the other hand, it brings up regular and specific exceptions to mundane gaming conditions. The exception in this case is named with precision (a particular ferry boat from Finland to Sweden) and emphasis is placed on the gaming company and the extraordinary duration of gaming. Our study methodology resembles a digital oral history. The research data have been produced in digital interaction with the players. The open-­ ended questions of our online inquiry encouraged the players to tell about their past. These life-stories, which can be referred to as personal media histories or “technobiographies” (Kennedy 2003), are important to the informants themselves as a tool in identity work (Sivula 2015, 57–58) and also provide researchers with multifaceted information on past media experiences. Media anthropologist David Morley (2007, 204) draws attention to “intimate histories of how we live with a variety of media” underlining specifically “how our personal memories – especially of childhood  – are formulated around media experiences, such as emblematic programmes and television characters” (see also Lavin 1990; Morley 2003, 444). While widening this earlier television-oriented conceptualization by Morley and other researchers, typical of late twentieth-century 1  Coding of research data: id. Number of the participant-Gender-Year of Birth (example: Participant 55, male, born 1984: 55-M-1984). The citations have been translated from Finnish to English by Jaakko Suominen. 2  On the nature of autobiographical sources, see, for example, Marwick (1970, 134–135).

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media ethnographic studies in anthropology, sociology and cultural history, we argue that emblematic gaming devices, games and game characters also create personal media memories (on the memory work of digital game players, see also, e.g. Stuckey et al. 2015). Personal media memories typically attach not only to social networks, artefacts and a specific time, but to particular places. We can think of these writings as topobiographies, a concept that connects places and memories which was introduced by cultural geographer Pauli Tapani Karjalainen (2009).3 According to Karjalainen (2009), topobiography is “an expression of the course of life as it relates to the places one has lived.” Elsewhere, he notes that biographical places “are deeply personal and uniquely memory-­laden.” The process of remembering is not only temporal but also spatial (Karjalainen 2004, 63). Our memories are born from the places we have lived, and we remember those places as images of our life (Karjalainen 2009, 91. See also Karjalainen 2006). Karjalainen states that memories of place are unique and individual. No one remembers a specific place the same as others, so all remembered places are different from each other. That makes a topobiography an interpretation of the biographical and individual experience of place (Karjalainen 2006, 83). In this study, we respect the original idea of Karjalainen, but give the concept of topobiography a less existential and less poetic meaning. We want to investigate whether it is possible to use the concept of topobiography as a methodological tool, as a way of connecting an individual’s recollection about certain places to the experiences of digital culture in specific locales. The topobiographical memories of playing games may thus be considered geobiographies or, as we understand them, autotopobiographical experiences. When these autotopobiographical experiences are separated from the context of a subject’s own identity work, we refer to them as topobiographies, to indicate that they are the construction of researchers.

3  Formerly, he primarily referred to a similar issue using the term, geobiography (Karjalainen 2004). According to Karjalainen, geobiography is a story that one tells about the places of one’s life. The idea of telling about certain places is connected to the individual process of working on the subject’s identity (Karjalainen 2004, 64–65). A geobiography seems, according to Karjalainen, always to be produced by the remembering persons themselves.

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Research Data and Methods This study focuses on players’ topobiographical identity from an oral historical point of view (Fingerroos 2010, 61 and 75; Fingerroos and Haanpää 2006, 25–29) using Nintendo-related source material. Our informants responded to the above-mentioned online inquiry about playing games with early Nintendo consoles and devices in Finland in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The inquiry was conducted in Finnish in January 2015, comprising 13 open-ended questions dealing with Nintendo games and devices and cultural practices around them in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In total, 115 players responded to the questions. Among them 42 of the participants were female and 72 male, while one respondent did not answer the gender question. The majority were born in the 1980s or earlier, with seven respondents stating that they were born in the 1990s, even though the inquiry dealt with Nintendo consoles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Most of the respondents were 6–15 years old during the appearance of Nintendo consoles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Therefore, the data shows that console gamers were, on average, younger than computer game players, a fact that has also been recognized in contemporary sources such as computer and game magazines (Suominen 2015). In this analysis, we focus on the ways in which respondents construct their topobiographical identity when they use terms such as “local” and “location” to situate their play activities in specific places. The analysis of the data is interpretive rather than statistical (see Livingstone 1992, 116), though we demonstrate how common certain articulations are. Whilst we are not able to make generalizations—for example, about how console gaming penetrated Finland and how many players there were in different regions of Finland—we are able to provide examples of various activities and social networks connected to gaming. According to the Italian oral history researcher Alessandro Portelli, oral historical sources do not expressly tell what people did but merely what they wanted to do, what they believed themselves to be doing and what they later thought that they did. Portelli also emphasizes the imaginary, both symbolic and desirable, features of people’s interpretations and descriptions (Portelli 2006, 56–58). Such aspects can be observed in our data when analysing the emotions and affects that have been catalysed by games and gaming, and recollections of these, as well as how informants make comparisons and valuations between different games, gaming devices, social relations, and how they describe situations in which they obtained game media. Further,

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when we place emphasis on the connections between these elements and the descriptions of place and space, we are able to conduct an analysis of informants’ topobiographical identity, even though the references to places and locations are, for the most part, only brief. Therefore, we operate with a rather simple concept of place. With a different kind of research data, we would have more profoundly analysed the practiced places of gaming. This chapter critically examines the concept of “the local” in the context of the cultural history of digital gaming. We analyse the significance of locale in the creation (or working, Sivula 2015) of players’ identities and their recollections of gaming. This chapter addresses two ways in which something can be considered local or in which gaming may be situated relative to specific places. The first section of this chapter focuses on gaming’s domestic context and the social relationships within it. The latter section places emphasis on the engagement of gaming in public or semi-­ public environments, and hence, pays attention not only to gameplay situations but also to the purchasing of games and gaming devices. We will analyse how and why participants refer to places as well as how and why they mention the specific and singular places where gaming activities occurred. In addition to Karjalainen’s concept of topobiography, we also utilize theories of the domestication of media technologies. Domestication theories (see e.g. Pantzar 1996; Lie and Sørensen 1996; Silverstone et  al. 1992; Lehtonen 2003; Morley 2003; Silverstone 2006; Haddon 2007), as well as Igor Kopytoff’s (1986) ideas of the cultural biography of things, are used as starting points and for heuristic inspiration when pondering questions of players’ topobiographical identity work. The aim is not to develop the domestication of technology theory itself. We share with other scholars ideas about the co-construction of technology: that users and use shape technology while technology shapes users at the same time (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003). Living within the built environment— which consists not only of digital objects but also of tangible buildings and other constructions—is a constant interaction between inhabitants and technology. According to Thomas Gieryn (2002, 72), “the play of agency and structure happens as we build: we mold buildings, they mold us, we mold them anew …” In this vein, we suggest that games and gaming devices have helped to form domestic media such as television (Silverstone 1994), even though television has been portrayed as a family media more frequently than

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gaming. Likewise, when studying the domestication of digital games, one has to notice their so-called double articulation: consoles are technological objects but at the same time, they are forms of media, for which one has to obtain various contents (games) (cf. Silverstone et al. 1992, 21). On the one hand, a user is domesticating a hardware platform, while on the other hand, the user is also domesticating game contents. When applying Mikael Hård’s and Andrew Jamison’s (2005) model of the cultural appropriation of science and technology, this chapter mostly follows the discursive and user dimensions of appropriation when studying gaming experiences and the ways in which they are recollected. The local and contingent nature of digital cultures have recently been emphasized in the literature (see e.g. Stuckey et al. 2015). There seems to be some tension between the sociological locality of digital cultures and the local or national characteristics of disembedded and deterritorialized global digital culture (e.g. Hand 2016, 4–7). Even though this chapter offers Finland as a case study, we are not particularly interested in its local or national game history. Rather, in this chapter, we are concerned with relating cultural historical and anthropological studies of media and games with the concepts of space and place (e.g. Morley and Robins 1995; Morley 2007; Hand 2016).

Early Home Video Game Console Boom in Finland Digital gaming only started to become commonplace in Finland after the period that has been called the “Golden Age” of arcade and home console gaming in the United States that ended in “the Video Game Crash” in 1983 (Kent 2001, 123–177; Payne 2008, 52; Eddy 2012; see also Wolf 2012). Even though Finns became familiar with arcade and some console games (see Saarikoski et al. 2017) in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the popularity of digital games was based more on electronic hand-held devices (such as Nintendo Game & Watch) and home computers, especially from 1983 onwards (Saarikoski and Suominen 2009). It was easier for households to obtain home computers (such as the Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64 or Sinclair Spectrum) than video game consoles, because home computers were compatible with rational consumer ethos. Machines were marketed as being usable for many purposes and advertised as essential tools for learning the skills needed in the future information society, not only as mere gaming devices. Even though in many cases they were used for playing games, computers had more potential and were

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considered serious and expensive machines meant for “correct use” as opposed to machines intended only for gaming (Suominen 2015. See also Pantzar 2000, 100–101; Saarikoski 2004). The arrival of new consoles in the late 1980s—especially the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and the Sega Master System—changed the situation. Computers and consoles were no longer viewed as alternatives to the same degree. The late 1980s and early 1990s can be referred to as the first console gaming boom in Finland, even though console gaming did not really become mainstream until the late 1990s, with the Sony PlayStation. Positive economic growth in the late 1980s was one reason why the earlier frugal consumer ethos started to fracture, and it became socially acceptable to obtain more consumer electronic appliances, for entertainment’s sake. Likewise, the playing of computer games raised the potential of a gaming-literate generation interested in trialling new products and willing to introduce these to their younger siblings or their own children (Suominen 2015). In the early 1990s, the penetration of consoles in Finland was not as high as in Japan, the United States and Sweden, but it was nonetheless substantial. In its second issue in 1992, MikroBitti, a Finnish computer hobbyist magazine, reported on the purchase of the 100,000th Nintendo NES console. The information was probably based on the statistics provided by the Nintendo distributor. According to the news piece, while over 5% of Finnish households had a Nintendo, in Sweden more than 10% had the same console, in the United States more than 30%, and in Japan more than 40% owned a Nintendo console (MB 2/1992, 8, uutiset, 100,000 x Nintendo). The first console gaming boom can be roughly divided into two imbricated phases or waves. In the first wave, 1987–1989, the new consoles were introduced to Finnish players—some of whom were so young that they didn’t have any recollection of the earlier consoles, such as the Atari 2600 or Mattel Intellivision, that were known but not that commonly used in Finland in the early 1980s. To introduce the new Nintendo and Sega consoles, Finnish computer magazines compared the Nintendo and Sega devices to the early 1980s consoles as well as to popular home computers and their games. The strategy was quite obvious but effective, because as in many other countries such as the UK, home computers in Finland had been transformed from multi-purpose machines to the primary digital gaming devices (Haddon 1992, 89). In this way, home computers domesticated digital gaming and provided the standard of gaming

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to which console gaming was compared. On the other hand, the comparison with the computer was a way to show the limitations of video gaming devices, as consoles were not yet marketed as home media centres such as, for example, the Sony PlayStation 2 was much later; at that time, consoles were still viewed as machines that were used purely for gaming. In the late 1980s, consoles become a companion of the television set. The home computer no longer competed with television viewing for the use of the household’s primary television set, due to the increasing use of secondary television sets and the dedicated computer monitor. Computer magazines created the need for console novelties and mapped potential consumer groups: consoles were able to be used by children while home computers were reserved for other use and perhaps, also for hardcore gaming. In the second wave of the first console boom in Finland, 1990–1992, consoles and their games became more popular, even though they did not gain everybody’s approval. Some extreme examples of controversies and conflicts between computer and console gamers were referred to in computer magazines as “console hatred,” and the situation resembled other “machine wars” that had been typical in computer and game hobbyist circles (Saarikoski and Reunanen 2014). However, because of the international boom of console gaming, computer magazines increased their console-­themed content, and some unique game console-related cultural practices began to emerge, for example, around console club magazines. Finland’s economic depression (1992–1993) was a major factor contributing to the end of the first console boom. The focus of digital gaming turned towards PC gaming for a few years. In addition, the technological changes in console generations and home computer generations began to shift—as well as the international discussion on video gaming.

Places for Play The oral historical material used in this chapter provides a somewhat different perspective on game history compared to contemporary sources such as computer hobbyist magazines from the 1980s and the early 1990s. People recounting their memories don’t tend to relate contradictions between different game cultures, articulate economic booms or recessions, or focus on dating turning points or shifts in attitudes. Console gaming memories are loaded with references to everyday experiences. Obtaining a game device or game is a turning point and experiences of

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social interaction in gaming. Memories of situations in which informants were winning (playing the game through, “beating” the game, etc.) are often partially nostalgized, effecting the ways in which informants perceive changes in gaming cultures. In this context, nostalgization refers to the situation where the informant emphasizes positive gaming experiences and recollects their memories as a gaming fan within a nostalgic discursive framework of remembrance (on various forms of simple, reflexive and interpretative nostalgia, see Davis 1978; Suominen et al. 2015). The places of childhood gaming were often closely attached in our research data to the family home of the lived past. The social context of the topobiographical experiences cannot be reconstructed: “We live in the places. Our memories are made by them and they are nothing but our memories; mnemonic pictures of how we lived” (Karjalainen 2006, 91). The last referent behind the memory is the irreversible pastness, “passéité,” of the past (Ricoeur 2000, 7). Place in Social Relations: Domestic Context One is able to divide places of play mentioned in the online responses, into roughly four groups. Informants variously remembered playing games at home, at friends’ residences, at relatives’ households and sometimes elsewhere. The descriptions of places that are most often reflected upon with social relations, can be referred to as the domestic context. This seems obvious, particularly when answers relate to consumer electronic user experiences, but the domestic context does not only refer to homes or households, even though it usually is related to somebody’s home or family ties. David Morley (2003, 435) writes that one must study technologies that have been domesticated, but at the same time, one must still notice how domesticity itself has been dislocated. We therefore argue that domestic context is also relevant when the playing of games has taken place outside of households, for example, during holiday trips and even in public places, which in this research context does not refer to arcade game centres, but rather to hobby clubs and the play rooms of ferries between Finland and Sweden. Such places can be seen as extensions or annexes of domesticity (cf. Silverstone 1994, 24), with domestic context recognizing the video gaming device as a form of family or family tied social media. Even though one’s home was the most commonly mentioned place for playing Nintendo games (90 mentions in the research material), in many circumstances the earliest gaming experiences took place at somebody

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else’s home, as in this example: “First [I played] with friends because I didn’t have a machine, but later [I played] at home when I got my own Nintendo” (51-M-1980). Citations like this demonstrate preferences in playing video games. Game cultural gravity is pulling towards ownership and playing at one’s own home, and this gravitational movement is a part of the video game console domestication process. We can think of domestic video gaming, on the one hand, as the “home as an arcade.” The arcadization of the home saw electronic entertainment that had been consumed outside households come to homes. Alternatively, we can refer to Raymond Williams’ (1974), Lynn Spigel’s (1992) and David Morley’s (2003, 2007, 199) concepts of mobile privatization, where media culture provides dual satisfactions: “allowing people to simultaneously ‘stay home’, safe within the realm of their familiar ontological security and travel (imaginatively or ‘virtually’) to ‘places that previous generations could never imagine visiting’”(Morley 2007, 199). The argument was used occasionally in home console advertising in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, resonating with the ways that television sets were advertised to nuclear families in the 1950s. Even though playing console games has often been advertised as social, the games were not necessary played in the company of others. Playing alone was mentioned quite often, at informants’ own homes (35 mentions). Solo play also appeared in some responses drawing comparisons between early and current gaming preferences: “[I played] Most of the time alone, I still prefer playing alone compared to online gaming” (41-­ M-­1987). Absent were any accounts of informants playing alone outside their own homes. On the contrary, they were explicit about those situations when they played alone: “Home alone, with others when visiting” (44-M-1976). Sonia Livingstone (1992, 121) has noted how domestic technologies appear to have distinct roles in social interaction. They can facilitate interaction between people or substitute contact with person-­ object interplay. Our video gaming examples show how these two categories can vary and mix in time and space. There were 55 references to playing with family members. Participants mentioned playing games with a brother (28 references), sister (14), mother (6) or father (7), as in the photograph in Fig. 5.1. Five of the participants wrote that they had played at home with their cousins. Even more often compared to playing alone, the informants brought up playing with friends (36), not only at home but in other places as well.

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Fig. 5.1  Father and child playing Nintendo tabletop electronic game (probably Donkey Kong JR) in Orivesi. The flowers on the table indicate that the photo was taken at Christmas time. (Courtesy of Tampere Museums/The Finnish Museum of Games. Photo Kirsti Sakko 1986)

Ownership of a video gaming provided an interest factor and produced techno-social capital for its owner. Informants recalled that they had visited their neighbour’s house, even though the neighbours didn’t belong to their normal circle of friends, because the neighbours owned a gaming device that they did not. In these cases, a younger child served as a gaming companion: “At home, I played with my sister. A boy next door had many more games, so I used to hang around there a lot. Especially when he also got […] a Super Nintendo!” (17-F-1981). Moreover, 76 informants mentioned that they played games at their friend’s home, sometimes referring more generally to the joy of playing video games together, as in this example: “It was just great to rent a NES console from a video rental store during a weekend and stay overnight at a friend’s place, or have friends over to our home” (33-M-1977). (On the rental situation, see Fig. 5.2.)

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Fig. 5.2  Kids with a rented Nintendo on Bulevardi Street Helsinki. (Courtesy of Tampere Museums/The Finnish Museum of Games. Photo Pekka Elomaa 1990)

Further Away from Home When analysing those answers that touched on playing games in places other than homes and their neighbourhood, we can observe the gradual mobilization of gaming related to journeys. Some informants remembered playing during vacations (six mentions). The hand-held Nintendo Gameboy device was used during car and train trips (five mentions): “[I played] Also Gameboy during journeys in trains, cars and wherever” (33-­ M-­1977). The Gameboy was further mentioned in a different context: “I

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was able to play Gameboy, using a borrowed device, with family friends during the winter holiday and later on, when I had a summer job in the strawberry fields, where I played with a device that belonged to that family’s children” (21-F-1979). Hand-held consoles were part of a more general mobilization of electronic entertainment, seen with the introduction of devices such as the Sony Walkman, and later on with mobile phones and MP3 players (Parikka and Suominen 2006). Media historian Patrice Flichy (1995, 165) calls the Walkman “a sort of prosthesis which changes people’s relationship with music.” In a similar manner, we could name hand-­ held game devices as prostheses that changed people’s relationship with (digital) gaming. Four informants stated that they had played console games in play rooms during ferry cruises between Finland and Sweden. Whilst probably specific to Finnish and Swedish players, these “Sweden boats” were very specific places for many game cultural experiences. The ferries also had slot machines, roulette tables and arcade video game cabinets that different age groups rarely had opportunities to play on-shore due to the legislative age restrictions of the casino industry as well as social norms. The variety of gaming activities was one of the main attractions of cruises, in addition to tax-free shopping and partying. Playing video games on “Sweden boats” and other equivalent places, such as amusements parks, are examples of the “ongoing transformation of the relationships between public and private spheres” (Morley 2007, 218). They can be perceived as both privatizing public space and the (re-) escaping of video gaming from homes to public places (Morley 2007, 216–218) or semi-public places that some researchers have referred to as third spaces or hybrid spaces (e.g. Souza e Silva 2009; Parikka and Suominen 2006).4 Such hybrid spaces have altered the previous topobiographical experiences for good. The contemporary digital gamer’s sense of location will be profoundly different than it was in the times of the Super Nintendo. Playing while travelling might have been an exception to everyday life, but it was still part of repetitive experience, a sort of recurring play ritual (on everyday life and its connection to media and technology, see, e.g. de Certeau 1984; Aune 1996; Silverstone 1994). On these ferries, the young informants had permission to play more, and in some play rooms, they 4  According to Souza e Silva (2009, 421.), hybrid reality games are widening the game environment, so one can see the change in the environment from the situation in the 1980s.

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were able to trial games they would not have had the opportunity to play at home. Family visits provided a very common occasion for remembering play experiences: 20 participants recollected playing games with their cousins. The slightly broader family circle—compared to nuclear families—was something we did not foresee when conducting this study. It demonstrates that social ties between relatives of a similar age provided important occasions and locations for play. Some of the participants described how they had even prepared for a specific gaming session with cousins at their grandparent’s home: More than one cousin also had a Nintendo (NES, SNES) and lots of games, so we exchanged and borrowed them many times and also brought our own gaming stuff to grandmother’s place where we were able to play days and nights round. (18-F-1981) The mobile gaming experience was not that important, because we didn’t own handheld Nintendo consoles. However, I remember how our NES was carried by car to granddad’s farm located in the district of Northern Karelia, I remember that because there we could show it to the family. (29-M-1979)

Several informants visited shops to play promotional games (three references). As one of them remembers, such playing sessions could be long and repetitive: “There was not a console at home. At stores, there were consoles ‘for trial’ and then we always ‘trialed’ them for couple of hours” (8-M-1980). Single informants mentioned various other places, such as a local sports centre, a Nintendo bus (used by the Finnish Nintendo distributor for marketing [Suominen 2015]), a game centre, video rental stores and a gas station. In one case, the gas station doubled as the rental store: “[I played] at the Kesoil gas station where there was also a rental place for VHS videos and NES games. They had a NES on a table and one was able to play it as much as one wanted. We sat there occasionally with friends and played Super Mario” (11-M-1979). Five informants mention playing at school or at a school club. In his study of UK computer gaming in the 1980s, Leslie Haddon refers to school clubs as occasional game-playing locales. He adds though that “since school on the whole provided only limited opportunities for playing games in company, meeting in the homes of friends or visiting relatives was a key way to try out the latest themes” (Haddon 1992, 88).

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A recurring theme in the answers is the urge to play freely and for a long time, which seems to have been the ideal playing situation for many, even though informants do not explicitly articulate restrictions on game contents or the amount of playing time. When browsing the data using the key word “paljon” (a lot), one finds both references to persons with many games and possibilities to spend a lot of time playing. Players seemed to gravitate to such places where they could consume content in large doses and/or for long periods of time. This is a second gravitational effect in addition to the previously mentioned tendency towards playing games at home with one’s own devices. As pointed out earlier, some kids became familiar with playing Nintendo somewhere other than at home with their own devices: “I got to know Nintendo games in the first place at my relatives’ and friends’ homes before I was seven years old” (55-M-1984). Even after a home console was purchased, play often continued elsewhere as well: “The local sport center also had a waiting room for kids, there one could find Nintendo, Super Nintendo and later, Playstation. With a few Finnish marks, one could play the game one wanted for one or a few hours” (32-M-1987). The Localization of Procurements One question in the inquiry dealt with where games and devices were purchased and by whom. In this analysis, we focus on places. While some informants did not mention places at all, most of them referred to purchasing their games from department stores, from consumer electronics stores, from home appliance stores and in certain cases, from bookshops or from game or toy stores. In Finland—like in the United States—the Nintendo console was labelled as a toy, even though Nintendo tried to market the console as a home entertainment system, as one can see from the name (Sheff 1994, 159–167). For instance, My siblings bought the SNES – they might have had some help from our parents (I don’t recall). Purchased at the Citymarket in Joensuu. (84-F-1980) The games had perhaps been obtained from department stores. In Tampere, there was also a game shop called Gamehouse, which was popular. (56-M-1986)

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Devices and games were purchased by friends’ parents, etc. I would also recall that at R-Kiosk (or from video rental store) one was able to rent a console (?) but it might have also been a SEGA. This is sort of a blurred memory. With this friend who had a Game Boy, we rented a game console together to bring to their place. (87-F-1980)

One thing we didn’t expect from the data was the detailed information on informants offered on alternatives to buying games and game devices. In some cases, this meant borrowing games and sometimes trading used games, but more often, in about 20 responses, renting games and devices was referred to. According to the informants, one could rent game products from R-Kiosks, video rental stores and even a pizzeria: “Dad bought [games]. Games were bought at game stores, which there used to be more of. One also rented games. Even pizzerias rented Nintendo games” (10-­ M-­1985). It seems that game rental was one marketing strategy that the Nintendo importing company used, and in Fig.  5.2, you can see how boldly children with rented Nintendo in a Nintendo bag could stroll in the streets. The Nintendo Club Magazine published a list of the top rented games (alongside lists of top sales) and lists of games that were only available as rentals. Game and machine rental was a method to get to know new media technology. In some ways, rental made it possible to enjoy the novelty many times over. Some of the respondents to the inquiry were able to connect purchases in an exact way to a specific place. One means for that is to use the “local” epithet (15 answers) when referring to procurement: I don’t know from where the Famicom [Japanese name for NES] clone was bought, but I was rather young then, so the devices and games were purchased by my parents. The local electronic store had some games for sale as well, but the prices were quite high. (32-M-1987) In our household, mum and dad obtained devices and games. Most likely, they were purchased via mail order (we lived in a small town), and the local Info bookstore sold new products and used items. Games were also actively rented from an R-Kiosk and borrowed from friends. (83-F-1983)

Using the term “local” like this would be partially subconscious phraseology, but it was also used when delineating the difference between current and past purchase situations. The word “local” was used when making

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comparisons between products and pointing out differences: part of the procurements took place locally, while part of them, as the previous citation shows referring to mail order, somehow differently. Some informants directly named the store or chain from which they made their procurements. Those so named—R-Kioski (kiosk), Musta Pörssi (consumer electronics), Sokos (department store), Anttila (department store), Info (book store) and Makuuni (video rental)—were chains operating all over Finland. Only a few of these corporations still exist today, and references to them are expressions of cultural memory. The period in question, the late 1980s and the early 1990s, was good for most of these corporations. They were able to expand their businesses because of new product categories and the economic upswing. But what went up eventually came down, and many of these companies’ situations later changed. Musta Pörssi, Anttila and Makuuni have decreased their retail network. Thus, mentioning the names of these corporations can imply nostalgic overtones, because when mentioning these names, the informant creates a bittersweet perception of change that has occurred in consumer culture and the consumption environment. A few informants mention a particular town or county or in two cases named a foreign country when responding to questions about where games and devices were obtained, though we did not explicitly ask informants to mention a specific place. It is difficult to give an explanation for why informants have mentioned a specific town or country. Most likely, the place has been, for some reason, unique (as in the case of a foreign country). Perhaps the informant had moved away from the place they mentioned. The informant might have thought that this particular place is worth mentioning. In any event, it is obvious that there are several individual reasons for mentioning the name of a place. In future, more research could be done on this issue.

Conclusion: Remembering Gaming as a Topobiographical Phenomenon Digital game cultures are, amongst other things, about the experience of place. The topobiographic remembering of the domestication and the later ubiquitous turn in digital game culture opens new questions for future research. The main object of this chapter has been to show that one is able to think of locality in game history in ways other than in reference

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to specific geographical regions or states. When we talk about “local game histories,” we have to critically examine the concept of place itself as well as the meanings attached to given places. In the age of mobile phones and hybrid realities, digital gamers’ topobiographical identity is obviously in transition. That’s why it is therefore important to trace the history of the cultural experience of the place of gaming, before all the oral history, traces and memories of the time of the Nintendo Entertainment System are lost. In this chapter, we have noticed modes of force that cluster around two things. On the one hand, informants have placed emphasis on the process of how gaming came to their home, even though it was combined with play in other places as well. On the other hand, many of the informants wanted to remember the kind of playing situations in which they were able to spend extra time playing many different sorts of games. These kinds of situations were not mundane and were the expected highlights of gaming, and this sort of seeking extra in many cases required them to move from one place to another for playing games. We can only speculate on what the recollection of console video gaming experiences might have meant for the participants nearly 25 years after the original playing situations. Oral history is always a project of interactive, twofold participation. The historian obtains information, and the informant works on her or his identity and strengthens a biographical consciousness of a historical self. The act of gaming is connected to the past age and past places. From the space of private memories, the informant of an oral historian enters to the documentary phase of historiographical operations.5 In the 2020s, the location of digital gaming has not entered oblivion; nor does it exist only in individual memories, but in a third, historized space. Acknowledgements  We are grateful to the Academy of Finland for funding the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (decision #312396).

5  On historiographical operations, see Ricoeur (2000). On historicizing identity work, see Sivula (2015).

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Spigel, Lynn. 1992. Make Room for TV. Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Stuckey, Helen, Melanie Swalwell, Angela Ndalianis, and Denise de Vries. 2015. Remembering & Exhibiting Games Past: The Popular Memory Archive. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (ToDiGRA), Vol 2, No 1 (2015). http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/40/79. Accessed 13 August 2020. Suominen, Jaakko. 2015. Suomen ensimmäinen konsolipelibuumi 1988–1994 tietokonelehdistön ja pelaajien muistitiedon kautta tarkasteltuna. [The first console gaming boom in Finland 1988–1994 from the perspectives of computer hobbyist press and oral history of players] In Pelitutkimuksen vuosikirja 2015 [Finnish Yearbook of Game Studies 2015], ed. Raine Koskimaa, Jaakko Suominen, Frans Mäyrä, J. Tuomas Harviainen, Usva Friman, Jonne Arjoranta. Tampere: University of Tampere, http://www.pelitutkimus.fi/vuosikirja2015/ a r t i k k e l i -­s u o m e n -­e n s i m m a i n e n -­k o n s o l i p e l i b u u m i -­1 9 8 8 -­1 9 9 4 -­ tietokonelehdiston-­ja-­pelaajien-­muistitiedon-­kautta-­tarkasteltuna. Accessed 13 August 2020. Suominen, Jaakko, Markku Reunanen, and Sami Remes. 2015. Return in Play: The Emergence of Retrogaming in Finnish Computer Hobbyist and Game Magazines from the 1980s to the 2000s. Kinephanos – Canadian Journal of Media Studies. http://www.kinephanos.ca/2015/emergence-­of-­ retrogaming/. Accessed 13 August 2020. Williams, Raymond. 1974/2003. Television. Technology and cultural form. Routledge Classics edition. London and New York: Routledge. Wolf, Mark J. P. (Ed.). 2012. Before the Crash: Early Video Game History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

CHAPTER 6

On Footwork: Finding the Local in American Video Game History Laine Nooney

In August 1982, the aspirational, barely-in-his-thirties tech journalist Steven Levy followed the curves of California State Route 41 into a sleepy mountain town called Oakhurst. There, at the town’s only real traffic intersection, Levy (1994[1984], 281) found a fibreglass talking grizzly bear that would report the price of land to you at the touch of a button: Only after beginning the descent from Deadwood [Mountain] did one see how Route 41 formed the center strip of Oakhurst. Population under six thousand. […] A few fast-food joints, several clusters of specialty stores, two motels, and a real estate office with a faded brown fiberglass status of a bear outside it. […] The bear could talk. Push a button on its base, and you got a low, growling welcome to Oakhurst, a pitch on the price of land. The bear did not mention the transformation of the town by the personal computer.

Levy’s documentation of this strange interaction would open the final third of the 1984 book that eventually made him famous: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Prior to arriving in Oakhurst, Levy had been on the beat researching America’s burgeoning Technorati, from the

L. Nooney (*) New York University, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_6

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youthful pranksters of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club to the makers of Spacewar! to Steve Wozniak’s brilliant Apple II. As a tech history, Hackers is regarded as prequel to the indulgent brotopia of today’s Silicon Valley and has been granted diluvian credit for its role in pumping the so-called Hacker Ethic into mainstream America. But in 1982, Steven Levy was there, at that damn talking bear, because his book needed an ending of equal gravity to its earlier sagas of Slug Russell, Lee Felsenstein, Capt’n Crunch and the Woz. And Levy believed he had found it in Oakhurst, in a man named Ken Williams, whom Levy (1994[1984], 282) described as “a burly big-gutted man … some post-­ counterculture King Cole.” Ken Williams was the not-at-all-likely President of Sierra On-Line, one of the largest independent home computer entertainment software companies in the world, which he had co-­ founded with his wife Roberta just two years prior in 1980 (Carlston 1985, 154–168; Nooney 2017).1 While Sierra On-Line’s history was not yet written in stone, the Williamses’ company was already notable for its technical and design leadership in the graphical adventure game genre, showcased by popular early 1980s Apple II releases like Mystery House, Wizard and the Princess and Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, as well as its work in arcade-style and educational game development and publishing. The story Levy would twine from his embedded reporting on Sierra On-Line was an impassioned clash of generations and philosophies. Hackers follows the twenty-eight-year-old Ken Williams, a rising captain of industry, as he tries to wring stability and productivity from a gaggle of volatile, teenage hacker geniuses. As Levy framed it, this was a war waged over the capitalist versus the creative virtues of programming. Williams was spun as an emissary of the “Third Generation” of hackers, for whom “awesome sales figures” became the new criteria for hacker stardom, rather than “elegance, innovation, and coding pyrotechnics” (Levy 1994[1984], 373). While the long arc of Levy’s story holds weight, his instincts with regard to Sierra On-Line proved premature: the same year Levy published Hackers, in 1984, the North American Video Game Crash broke the back of titan Atari, causing a mass exodus of venture capital from games. Sierra On-Line nearly went bankrupt; it recovered and held sway as a successful company for nearly the next fifteen years, but was 1  At the time of Levy’s arrival, Sierra On-Line was known as On-Line Systems, a name Levy (1994[1984], 299) described as a “holdover from Ken’s vision of selling the respectable kind of business software for the Apple.” The company’s name changed in the fall of 1982.

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never destined to become the next behemoth of the computer game industry (Carlston 1985, 221–245). Exactly thirty-one years later to the month, in the August of 2013, I followed in Levy’s footsteps along California State Route 41. But as a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University at the time, I was on a journey to figure out how to start a history about Sierra On-Line, not how to end one. So I drove, through the stubbed plateaus moving you out of the San Joaquin Valley, around the jackknife bends of Deadwood Mountain and down into Oakhurst. And the Bear was still there (Fig. 6.1). It was as prophetic a beginning as you could hope for from any historical exploration. So I parked my car, got out, checked in on FourSquare, took a selfie and pressed the bear’s button—and it began reciting to me the classic holiday poem, “T’was the Night Before Christmas” in a growly baritone. From Dasher and Dancer alighting the rooftop to St. Nick vanishing up the chimney with a cheery farewell, I listened to the entire thing, sitting down eventually (it’s a long poem). After the final decree—“Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!”—the bear fell silent, and I stood there, affixed in a kind of Seinfeldian awe at this oratory in animal studies I had just received. I pressed the button again, but it just took us back to the breast of the new-fallen snow. So I returned to my car and left Oakhurst’s World Famous Talking Bear to spread his unseasonal message to the dry August winds. This is the way the world works in Oakhurst: things still stand, but nothing remains the same. Long after Levy left Oakhurst and drove off into a prolific future (editorships at Wired and Medium awaited him over the next thirty years), Sierra On-Line did wind up becoming one of Oakhurst’s largest employers, alongside the regional telephone company and the county government. Up until the early 1990s, every box, every disk, every package was printed, sleeved and shrink-wrapped right in Oakhurst by the hands of self-declared “mountain folk.” There had been a soft promise some thirty-five years ago, that a company like Sierra On-Line could turn middling Madera County into a “Little Silicon Valley” (a concept so out of range the town paper spelled it “Silicone” in a front page headline in 1983). But when the Williamses determined to relocate their company’s corporate headquarters to Bellevue, Washington, in 1993, it left behind disgruntled memory and boundless rumour: Sierra had left because corporate taxes were too high, because they couldn’t get a T1 line strung into Oakhurst, because the founders were running from the law. Everyone, it seems, who knew the Williamses in their final Oakhurst days,

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Fig. 6.1  Oakhurst’s “Talking Bear,” installed outside Ditton Realty at the intersection of California State Route 41 and Crane Valley Road/Road 426 in Oakhurst

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has an opinion, a reasonable explanation and secret tip. Double damage came in the late 1990s when the company closed up its remaining Oakhurst offices. After that, Sierra On-Line was just someone’s last paycheck. I have titled this chapter “On Footwork” because I believe in showing up. In what follows, I will offer a personal case study on the issue of “the local” in video game history, focusing on my time and travels spent in Oakhurst, CA, compiling source material for my research project on Sierra On-Line, and the practical techniques I use, such as oral history and civic collaboration, to trace what remains of the company’s historical footprint. In intersecting my work with currently circulating notions of “the local,” I offer the concept of regionalism as a pliable tool for doing local work within the context of hegemonic U.S. video game history. While much U.S. video game history is often conducted at comfortable distance— from the safe haven of code dumps, hardware schematics or digital archives—my practice proposes that closeness to landscape and attentiveness to regional interests offers an opportunity to expand the audit of video game history beyond the provenance of the games themselves. If the approach among fans, journalists and academics alike has been to wring our hands and try to never forget, to collect all the stuff, to pierce technology’s veil at the level of EPROM and relay, then Oakhurst offers something beyond the obviousness of these yearnings: an impression of history in which video games are something best forgotten.

Game History, the Local and Regionalism In the domain of video game history, the question of “where” game design, manufacturing or consumption happens has long been regarded as little more than trivia. This is a tendency exacerbated by the relative youth of academic video game history and its lack of scholarly, company-specific video game histories. As such, company sagas have largely remained the domain of popular press authors and self-published enthusiasts, aiming to capitalize on fan affection for specific company brands and associated IP (Kushner 2004; Sheff 1999; Vendel and Goldberg 2012). This is especially true of American video game history, where the Sunnyvales of Atari or the Cambridges of Infocom serve as merely scenic backdrop to larger technological and interpersonal dramas. To put this in game design terms: location remains more like an asset than a core mechanic in game history, a file that can be swapped around to create environmental diversity without harming the underlying structure of player experience.

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It is hardly surprising, then, that the most strident calls for attention to location, place and geography in game history come from those working in specific national or continental contexts that exist very much outside the mainstream arcs of a place-less history of games. The early interventions of these scholars have supported and expanded the focus on game histories from Australia, the Soviet Union, Europe and Scandinavia, and South America (Fernández-Vara and Foddy 2017; Garda 2016; Gazzard 2013; Saarikoski and Suominen 2009; Švelch 2018; Swalwell 2009; Swalwell and Davidson 2016). In showcasing local cultures of hardware and software creation from game history’s “periphery”—counterposed to a “center” held by the United States and Japan—these scholars are offering correctives to a history that has long framed the rest of the world as merely the recipients of America and Japan’s supposedly superior ludic exports. As an Americanist myself, there is much to own up to in the way grand narratives about the video game industry have been cast with the United States as lead actor. Yet there seems to be something misconstrued if the tilt-shift of scholarly work maintains “the local” as solely the province of those in an imagined periphery. The turn to the local does not require that we cast U.S. video game history as a flat and self-evident centre, somehow monolithic at the level of the nation—as if for games to be designed, manufactured or consumed in any location in the United States was for them to be existent in every location in the United States. All game historians are served by awakening sensitivity to how geography and location inflect the mechanics—not just the environmental aesthetics—of game history. As my opening scene suggests, the history of digital game production in the U.S. context can prove astoundingly “local,” even for a top-five independent software publishing company, as Sierra On-Line was in 1982. Any business with physical infrastructure has local dimensions, insofar as a company both bends to and shapes the customs, qualities and social habits specific to geographic location, local and regional government, internal company operations and larger industry ties. Showing up in Oakhurst can serve as a straightforward model for how to inject a different kind of “local” thinking into U.S. game histories. Within the domains of American studies and U.S. history, there already exists a valuable frame for thinking and theorizing at a level more granular than the nation and more fluid than the state: regionalism. First emerging in studies of American art and literature, regionalism was initially identified as a genre, aesthetic and discourse focusing on the “description or

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imagining of a local community that at least appears to be distinct from external forces,” particularly the external forces of wealth and power associated with urban centres (Hsu 2009, 218). Such artworks exhibit qualities known as “local color,” sketched as an attention to landscape, dialect and custom. Regionalist identifications, however, are not merely an aesthetic terrain; they also signify specific political and cultural allegiances. However, shiftingly defined over time, regionalist identities have played a defining role in the political, environmental and economic growth of the United States, typically in the form of regional opposition to nationalist governmental authority on everything from the control of energy grids to laws governing land usage (Dorman 2012). The term is remarkably flexible at scale: regionalism cedes only to how communities discursively distinguish themselves from one another, meaning the concept of regionalism can be utilized to discuss large geographic terrain such as “the South” or “the Great Plains,” or more specific designations like Appalachia or California’s Bay Area. Within the history of technology specifically, region has already proven a handy schematic for examining seemingly “national” technological phenomena, as in Paul Ceruzzi’s (2008) Internet Alley: High Technology in Tyson’s Corner, 1945–2005 and Annalee Saxenian’s (1996) Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. For my purposes, in the U.S. context, the concept of regionalism assists us in parsing the specifics of game companies as an industry: their distribution networks, supply chains, manufacturing, warehousing, advertising, recruitment strategies and civic engagements. Contemporary practices of outsourcing and digital distribution give the impression that technology industries are somehow simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Yet this was far from true at the commercial inception of the industry, and the U.S. game industry continues to exhibit a high degree of path dependence with the U.S. computer hardware and software industry more broadly. Thus, the issue, as it stands for game historians, isn’t that U.S. game history has no sense of the local, but that we don’t know how to grasp it. To some extent, this struggle is the logical consequence of a cultural phenomenon and technological industry that has just barely made it into the archive. It is hard to obtain a local perspective when all that remains of most companies is their externally facing products, like entertainment software and hardware, which was intended for national, continental or global commercial consumption. This is a problem that may be eased over time, as both industry professionals and cultural heritage institutions

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locate increasing middle ground with regard to what kinds of materials should be archived. But it also explains why so much game historical work focuses on more discrete actors and objects—be they platforms, designers or bundles of code. Thinking about U.S. video game history from a regional perspective necessarily involves attention not just to artefacts in short or no supply—such as internal corporate documents—but also the places themselves, which are not always easily accessible, especially to young scholars in a young field. To do local work, I’ve had to get local: much of the research offered in this chapter would not have been possible without multiple visits to the remote town of Oakhurst, California, access to physical archives at the county newspaper, Sierra Star, as well as face-­ to-­face oral histories with local ex-employees. Regular visits have given me an appreciation for how landscape, geography and longstanding local politics shaped the culture and practices of Sierra On-Line.

Local Work in a Regional Context My research in Oakhurst is part of a book project documenting the social history and cultural memory of Sierra On-Line, across its many instantiations from 1980 through to the present. The Williamses first commercial Apple II products, the graphical adventure game Mystery House and two smaller arcade-style skeetshooting games, were released in May 1980 under the company name On-Line Systems.2 During this time, the couple lived in Simi Valley, California, thirty miles west-northwest of Los Angeles, and ran the business out of their home with no employees beyond themselves.3 As their small but expanding product line met with remarkable success over the summer of 1980, the Williamses elected to satisfy a marital ambition: to relocate their family, including their two young sons, to a more rural location. In the September 1980 issue of the Apple II enthusiast magazine Softalk, the editors reported that “On-Line Systems has relocated from the hectic environs of the Los Angeles suburb of Simi to the more contemplative surroundings of Coarsegold, California, just outside of Yosemite Park” (p.  5). That Coarsegold location the company  The Williamses’ first ad for their software products was published in the May 1980 issue of MICRO: The 6502 Journal on the last page of the issue before the back cover. 3  Early on, other family members were drafted into the business. Roberta’s father, John Heuer, was reported as On-Line’s northern California distributor in 1981. Ken’s brother John Williams sometimes refers to himself variously either Sierra’s first or second employee; John Williams distributed company software out of his car in 1980, and later worked in Sierra’s marketing department (Tommervik 1981, 4–5; Williams 1987, 8–9). 2

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relocated to was the Williamses’ first home in the region of Eastern Madera County, exactly equidistant from the civic centres of both Coarsegold and Oakhurst. There, at 36575 Mudge Ranch Road, the Williamses continued their “homebrewed” style of mom-and-pop commercial production, while renting out small assorted office spaces in both Coarsegold and Oakhurst.4 For many in the early microcomputer business, the Williamses’ move must have seemed counterintuitive. Like the U.S. semiconductor and microcomputer hardware industries before them, the video game and microcomputer software industries were largely coastal Californian enterprises. Of Softalk’s twenty-two September 1980 advertisers, 64% were located in coastal Californian urban centres.5 On-Line Systems’ location roughly forty-five miles north of Fresno made it remote in the extreme, even compared to companies operating from locations such as Lincoln, Nebraska or El Paso, Texas. Pressed up against the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the area is limited to only one major roadway, State Route 41, running all the way into Yosemite National Park. The mountainous geography presses commercial business in along this narrow strip of road, while residents live dispersed across the region’s shallow valleys, steep mountainsides and placid lakefronts. The clustering effect of State Route 41 was not ideal for the shipping and receiving demands of a warehouse, while Eastern Madera County’s telecommunications could sometimes collapse if Sierra On-Line received too many customer service calls (“Sierra Extends,” 1988). In essence, the area is a bottleneck and lacked all the hallmarks of what makes a viable tech centre. There were no allied technology companies hiding in the hills—just a lot of ranches, weed and a great deal of forest fires—or even any real manufacturing to speak of at all, once the local lumber mill clocked out its last employee just a few months before Sierra On-Line set up shop. And unlike Silicon Valley’s long and mutually beneficial bond with Stanford, there was no nearby flagship technology school flooding the eastern ranges with computer science grads and hardware engineers; most of the young people who would come to work at Sierra On-Line had degrees from the Cal Polys of Pomona and San Luis Obispo, or no formal education at all. 4  Like the majority of towns in Madera County, Oakhurst and Coarsegold are unincorporated, census designated locations, meaning they have no civic elected offices and run under the jurisdiction of the county. 5  Of the fourteen coastal California companies that advertised in Softalk, eight were in the Greater Los Angeles Area, three in the San Francisco–Silicon Valley region and one in San Diego.

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While Sierra had many “local” lives—as it expanded its brand name through acquisitions from Oregon to Paris in the early 1990s, relocated its international headquarters to Bellevue, Washington in 1993, and eventually, by the early 2000s, was barely more than memory and a pile of legal IP, bought and sold by the highest bidder—it is the curious case of Oakhurst that has occupied my intellectual attention, as well as the focus of this chapter. The absence of a deep tech talent pool meant Ken Williams went about staffing Sierra On-Line by hiring local community members with any kind of lateral experience—one of Sierra’s earliest head sales representatives had also been Williams’ real estate agent, while the company’s long-time general manager, Rick Cavin, had previously worked in animal husbandry. In other words, many of the company’s employees were local citizens who showed particular aptitude or struck Ken Williams as reliable or potentially talented employees. Even as the company expanded across the late 1980s and early 1990s and had to draw more external talent, it was largely only able to attract employees interested in a rural lifestyle. In the long turn of history’s screw, this condensation of regional civics and environmental conditions resulted in a phenomenon unique to the industry: that even when the company left, a sizable number of its prior employees stayed. Those sustained civic bonds among citizens of Eastern Madera County made Oakhurst an optimal location for site-specific fieldwork and oral history about this company and the early computer game industry more generally. My first trip to Oakhurst occurred late in the summer of 2013, although I did not realize before arriving what the regional and geographical conditions of Oakhurst would offer my project. I initially travelled there to experience the area and complete a few small tasks, including viewing microfilm archives of the local paper whose only physical copies existed in the Oakhurst Branch Library. What I discovered, to my delight, was how much of Sierra’s original infrastructure still stood in Oakhurst. The two major buildings it constructed, once some of the largest in town, had been repurposed by a medical facility and the telephone company, respectively. The Williamses’ first home was occupied by a kind older woman who sat with me as I told her an unbelievable story about her house (and her hot tub).6 The Broken Bit, a local restaurant referenced by Levy (1994[1984], 6  The Williamses redwood hot tub at their Mudge Ranch Road home famously made an appearance in the advertisement for On-Line System’s Softporn, the first commercially released erotic computer game.

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337) in Hackers as “about the only decent place to eat in town,” still stood, abandoned for almost a decade on the side of the road. This architectural residue forms a basis for thinking critically about the broader regional dynamics at hand in any history of industry. It was during this trip I also learned that everyone in town seemed to know someone who knew someone who had worked at Sierra or known the Williamses at some point—which would inspire my later engagement with oral history.

Oral History as Method for Video Game Historians Like many video and computer game companies of the 1980s and 1990s, internal documentation is scant. In 2011, Ken and Roberta Williams donated their own surviving materials to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. However, this collection is largely comprised of publicity and marketing items, such as press releases, annual reports and Sierra’s company magazine, as well as personal mementos like awards, framed pictures and the like. While containing many useful artefacts, the collection remains fairly silent on Sierra On-Line’s day-to-day operations and divisions of labour.7 It was the desire to understand the company’s internal organization—its departments, workflows, supply chain and labour practices—that drew me to oral history, in the absence of relevant archival material. Since graduating with my doctorate in 2014, fieldwork and oral history have become an all-encompassing part of my work. I have benefitted from a robust field of literature on the subject, in addition to well-established best practices. However, oral history still remains under-engaged as a method within video game history. When game historians, both popular and academic, turn to oral history or interviews, it is often out of a desire to “set the record straight” by documenting the “real” experiences and rationales of historical actors.8 This tendency is evident in both who tends to be selected for oral history—designers, programmers, company founders and other figures of the “innovator” or “auteur” classes—and the  For a deeper reading of the Ken and Roberta Williams Collection, see Nooney (2015).  While often used interchangeably, “oral history” has a distinct function compared to the more generic term “interview.” As Donald A.  Ritchie (2003, 24) writes, “An interview becomes an oral history only when it has been recorded, processed in some way, made available in an archive, library, or other repository, or reproduced in relatively verbatim form for publication. Availability for general research, reinterpretation, and verification defines oral history.” 7 8

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field’s general bent towards hagiography. In this regard, the tone of video game history shares much in common with histories of other contemporary digital technology, such as computing and networking. As Internet historian Andrew L. Russell (2017, 17) has noted, “historical accounts of the Internet treat their subject with deep and unquestioning reverence […] [they] are rife with an implicit sense of admiration and deference.” Similarly, video game historians rarely challenge the presumed imminence of video game history’s most famed figures. As is the case with Sierra, the company’s historical contributors have almost exclusively been its co-­ founders, Ken and Roberta Williams, and a select group of its most prolific designers, such as Al Lowe, Lori and Corey Cole, and Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe. Yet decades of scholarship on the subject of oral history is largely inconsistent with the objective posture video game historians typically bring to such material. Since the 1970s, critical works such as Ronald J. Grele and Stud Terkel’s (1985) Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History, Alessandro Portelli’s (1991) The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, and Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai’s (1991) Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History have engaged potent questions of interpretive authority, collaborative meaning-­ making, subjectivity and self-reflexivity. As Kathryn Anderson and Dana C.  Jack (2015) note in their essay “Learning to Listen,” “realizing the possibilities of the oral history interview demands a shift in methodology from information gathering, where the focus is on the right questions, to interaction, where the focus is on process, on the dynamic unfolding of the subject’s viewpoint.” Similarly, Alessandro Portelli (2016[1979], 74) originally wrote, almost forty years ago, that “The importance of oral testimony may lie not in its adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge.” Given how longstanding these discussions have been within oral history, there is no sustainable excuse for video game historians to fail to engage with a rich, accessible body of literature produced by countless historians of labour, gender and critical race scholarship. Video game historians must move beyond narrow connotations of the “factual” if they wish to truly do a service to both their subjects and historians of future generations. While oral history literature does generally value specific best practices, such as pre-interviewing and separation from distractions (especially when conducting oral histories for top-tier museums and cultural institutions), it is nonetheless understood that “the oral history interview, above all, is

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specialized, and therefore highly variable” (Gluck 1977, 7). My work in Oakhurst, and elsewhere, has often pushed me to operate under less ideal and more spontaneous conditions than are typically recommended. Traditional methods, in my experience, often become re-wired to deal with the unique logistics and constraints of the people, the place and the project. In what follows, I will offer one account of the learning and listening, as well as the occasional pushing and prodding, such memory work requires, and explain the activities I underwent to host an oral history “event” in Oakhurst during my follow-up trip in 2014.

Organizing Oral History in Oakhurst As I considered a return trip to the region to conduct a series of oral histories in 2014, I first had to assess what was personally feasible. At the time, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at New York University; residing on the other side of the country from my main research site, long-term fieldwork was not financially or logistically reasonable. To fit within my own time and funding constraints, I was aware I would need to schedule a considerable number of interviews in a short period of time.9 I was also cognizant that I needed a fairly dramatic way to get myself onto the radar of the community so that knowledge about my interest in talking to Sierra ex-employees would spread and find its way to relevant potential interviewees. To accomplish this, I coordinated my trip to run simultaneous with Oakhurst’s Heritage Days festival, which I had learned about from reading several years of the local paper, Sierra Star. Heritage Days is an annual celebration of local history dating back to the 1960s, featuring parades, local crafts, fundraising and live music. Like many of the region’s heritage events and commemorative sites, Oakhurst’s cultural memory fixates on the late nineteenth-century gold rush era and early twentieth-century lumber trade, when the region was first colonized and mapped by American settlers seeking work and fortune. My hope was to gain trickledown attention from heightened local sensitivity to the region’s industrial history. I branded it the Sierra On-Line Memories Project, set for 18–22 September 2014. To increase the visibility of my presence, I wrote a press release and 9  While I considered phone interviews and have used them when other modes of interviewing were not possible, I felt strongly about meeting in person and in the company’s historic location.

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sent it around to newspapers, radio stations and online news sources within a three county radius around Oakhurst; it was published in several prominent regional news outlets and printed in full in that week’s issue of Sierra Star (the ties I had made with the Star’s editor in 2013 proved useful in being taken seriously by the local journalists). And lastly, I cooperated, to the best of my efforts, with the Sierra Historical Sites Association, the local historical organization that plans Heritage Days, who generously offered me a tent and table for free at the festival site itself. This was a challenging experience, as my interest in the town’s late twentieth-century history diverted from the community’s own emphasis on the Gold Rush and lumber trade eras. This was most acutely felt at the festival site itself, where my “Sierra On-Line Memories” table made for an incongruous fit next to a group of women weaving baskets, across a dirt path from a third-­ generation broom maker and older men teaching children how to pan for gold, with the ting of a blacksmith’s hammer floating above it all. I received nominal foot traffic from this part of the event, but remained committed to participating as a way to meet the town on its own terms and make clear, especially to town officials and members of the historical society, my investment in the area’s broader histories. One of the most stressful aspects of this process was not knowing whether anyone would respond to my efforts. Given the compressed time frame for the event, I did not have the luxury of carefully setting up meetings and taking my time to track down potential interviewees. Instead, I hoped that getting myself into the local news and participating in community events would instigate enough curiosity that the appropriate people would come to me. To work in this way is risk versus reward; you have to set the machine far enough into motion to make your efforts believable and inspire trust. The money is spent, the tickets are booked—there was no way for me to back out. To pad my efforts and ensure I had at least some scheduled meetings before I arrived, I tapped into networks of ex-­ employees on Facebook with the help of introductions made by the Sierra On-Line fan community. I blanketed about a dozen residents with messages and friend requests, to which roughly a third eventually responded and were generous enough to welcome an interview. But even this work hit challenges—a series of dramatic forest fires in the area forced some interviewees out of the homes as I was trying to make first contact, and generally slowed down communication as the town focused its energy on supporting community members who had lost their houses and possessions (Guy and Benjamin 2014). Nonetheless, most of my interviews

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remained to be scheduled as I boarded my plane from JFK to Fresno; the publicity was timed to lift off just as I did, to create as tight a circuit as possible for someone to get engaged, to act on that emotion by getting in touch with me and to set up a time to meet. The call to action struck a nerve. I communicated with about thirty people over the span of a week, with most of the correspondence happening during the specific days of my visit. On the backend, this produced a delirious sifting process, which required making quick decisions about which leads to follow and where to offer one’s time—a process I was assisted in by my friend and fellow historian, Natalie Scheidler, who I financed to join me on the trip precisely to help me mentally and logistically manage the communication I received.10 The process revealed over all the importance of moving through social networks. Each individual I was in touch with was able to connect me to someone else and someone else, eventually enabling me to follow a chain of loose affiliations three to four people deep. To prioritize potential interviewees within the time frame available, we informally weighed people based on how long they had worked at Sierra— longer typically receiving more of our interest than shorter; when they worked there, preferring people who worked at the company in the very early years, before there were mass layoffs in the mid-1980s; and what kind of work they did, privileging individuals who held less visible roles like general management, distribution, customer service, tech support and warehousing. We also prioritized women and people of colour, part of an overall desire to increase the representation of these stories in the historical record. By taking a wider, labour-oriented view, women appear more frequently because of their employment in critical maintenance roles like customer service, public relations and sales. Race and ethnicity are more troubled categories, both regionally and occupationally in this context; there is very minimal trace of people of colour in Sierra’s history, due to the bundling of oppressions: systemic racism as it historically and contemporarily exists in both the technology industry specifically and American culture generally, as well as the Sierra Nevada region’s own tense settler 10  Natalie Scheidler, whom I had met during my Master’s work at Kansas State University, was a doctoral student at Montana State-Bozeman at the time. I arranged for her to meet me in Fresno and we drove up to Oakhurst together. Scheidler assisted me in sorting inquires over email and phone, organizing my schedule and helping with setup for the Heritage Days booth. Scheidler also conducted an oral history when I became double booked, and provided much-needed emotional support during the long days of interviews.

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colonial histories with the indigenous Miwok, Mono and Chukchansi Yokut. As with many other American and European hardware or software manufacturers, the persistent whiteness of Sierra’s workforce itself produces a politics of knowledge worthy of consideration. While I have continued to take special effort to conduct interviews with individuals whose race or gender seemingly breaks with our presumptions of who worked in the game industry, we must remain mindful that simply “diversifying” history often misses the point. As Ann Laura Stoler (2002, 90) writes in her article on the politics of colonial archives, “We look at exemplary documents rather than at the sociology of copies, or what truth claims are lodged in the rote and redundant.” Leveraging individual oral history participants as “finds” or laden with presumptive value perpetually runs the risk not only of objectifying our conversation partners but also of uncritically privileging the rare over the habitual. Prior to attempting this event, I had never conducted or received training in oral history. To prepare, I studied Donald A. Ritchie’s (2003) Doing Oral History, a traditional handbook on the subject that outlines both methodological and procedural issues. Interviews ranged from less than ninety minutes to nearly four hours; length was in some case due to my lack of experience but also to technique. I aimed to understand the events in an individual’s lives prior to and after their work in the company, and also to frame their stories, when relevant, within a larger conversation about the role of computing or gaming in their lives. In a breach of oral history best practice, I almost always took interviews at people’s homes and did not resist when couples asked to be interviewed together (oral history traditionally mandates interviews be conducted individually). I initially chose to work this way because it made the most logistical sense, but over time, and as I’ve gone on to do more oral histories, I’ve determined that I place contextual fragments and environmental details above the archival mandate of optimal recording conditions through limited interruption and neutral soundscape. By allowing my interviews to get sticky and pick up the static of “non-relevant” detail, I could grant space to other kinds of epistemological layers that surround the conversational process. One such trace which remains very emblematic for me in all the interviews conducted during the 2014 trip was that they happened in the aftermath of sweeping forest fires in the region, as mentioned earlier. California has experienced historic levels of drought in recent years, which increases the risk of fire due to the overabundance of dry grass, tinder and bark

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beetles, causing these rampant fires to become an annual occurrence. As I sat with Police Quest game designer Jim Walls on his outdoor patio— where, as if his windchimes weren’t bad enough—scanning helicopters beat overhead, forcing us to silence, and then conversation, about the paths of the fire that remained uncontained. Composer Rudy Helm took me to his back windows and showed me the wild pigs rooting and tearing up his yard, as they roamed on a hunt for water. And local photographer and ex-Sierra tech support worker Darvin Atkeson couldn’t help but discuss his newfound fame—his stunning photos of the fires had circulated in papers from San Francisco to Germany. In every case, I keep these exchanges in the transcripts. Ecological collapse forms a sedimentary layer in these conversations “simply about video games,” testimony baked in for some future historian to parse and make sense of.

Conclusion Yet some things remain shockingly untouched. Once I was in Oakhurst, a chain of interviews eventually led to me being hand-delivered an introduction to one Cleon Jones, the eighty-something-year-old proprietor of the local print shop, Ponderosa Printing. Inside his shop, every surface seemed dented with the weight of the accumulation of life’s effects. I spotted, pushpinned to a wall and sunbleached from time, slipcovers from old Sierra games. Cleon Jones had been Sierra’s printer; for almost fifteen years, this shop had printed hundreds of thousands, easily millions, of pieces of game documentation, advertising and packaging. I couldn’t have been talking to Jones for more than a few minutes before he hitched up his pants on wide suspenders and demanded I follow him into the basement of his shop—all in a thick Arkansan drawl. The sub-level space was vast, cluttered, dark and ancient. It was a mausoleum to a bygone generation’s offset printing equipment—folders and binders and staplers and trimmers, all rusting away in cobwebs. Above my head, we passed beneath a clothesline still hanging with film negatives of old Sierra business cards, easily strung there since 1992. I followed Cleon Jones deep in the back of his shop. Near the very back of the farthest work area, he pointed up at the wall, and it took me a moment to understand what I was looking at: a row of printed boxes, Sierra games, all released around 1983 or 1984, tacked on a shelf (Fig. 6.2). Cleon had saved the first run of every game box—pulled off his equipment, folded, taped, pushpinned … and hung, for thirty years.

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Fig. 6.2  Shelves in the basement production area of Ponderosa Printing. Sierra On-Line game boxes, dating to the early mid-1980s, are pinned to the wall

Sometime later, I watched Jones mount a precarious ladder and nudge the blunt edge of a butterknife under each tack, prying the boxes loose from the wall. As each one came down, I blew the dust off it and placed it in a plastic grocery bag. He had decided to give them to me, so that I could escort them to a museum in upstate New York for final internment, preservation. But I didn’t really feel comfortable about that bare patch of wall I was leaving in my wake; I like to think my role is tracing absences, not making them. So I asked him if he wanted to keep one, so he would have something to remember it all by. But he waved his hand at me and shook his head and told me that if he kept one of them, he’d worry about where all the rest were, so better I take all of them with me. What interests me about the story of Sierra On-Line has never really been about games, much to the soft confusion of universities who keep hiring me as a Game Studies scholar. Rather, I find myself compelled to hunt for forms of historical remainder that defy archival representation and analytic mastery: things like land, buildings and bears, but also moods, instincts and sensibilities. I work my method like the classic figure-ground drawing exercise, a standard practice for anyone formally learning to draw: what the artist draws is not the object itself, but the negative space around,

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treating that as the principle form worthy of attention. The exercise sensitizes the artist to counterform, to looking through and around our presumed subjects, not just at them. For a historian, this kind of thinking can produce a similar effect: you displace the object at the outset and then try to trace its absence. As a media theorist, I dwell often on the writing of Siegfried Zielinski (2008, 14), who, early in his monograph Deep Time of the Media, speaks gently of the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria, a hydromedusa with a particular quality of bioluminescence unattached to any biological imperative; its ability to emit light is merely a byproduct of its other physiological processes. Or, as Zielinski terms it, in perfect prosic pacing, “a quasi-poetic release of accumulated energy: a phenomenal economy of squanderous expenditure.” This work isn’t about the finding. It’s about the getting lost. The way I think of it, I don’t go to the town to take history back with me; I want to try and let the town show me how it remembers. In an industry without archive—as all industries, I think, are increasingly becoming—composing through absence may be the new stress test of historical method. So when I find a stash of old boxes or a memorial long forgotten on the side of the road or a museum where they keep their archival documents “preserved” inside pillowcases—or when the bear doesn’t talk anymore, like it stopped doing in 2014—this is when I trust I’m on the right path, even if it is the long one, the poetic one, the squanderous one. I prefer to feel regularly baffled and semi-eluded by the things I follow; I like to think that the past is smarter than me. In my work, I believe my experiences tracking Sierra On-Line across fields archival, literal, and local have forged an opportunity where the methodological change of tack is precisely what allows for the production of something like a critical genealogy of the game industry—work that documents not just changes in production over time but can also trace how and on what terms the inexplicable rise of the video game industry serves as a lesson on how we do history in the age of obsolescence.

References Anderson, Kathryn, and Dana C. Jack. 2015. Learning to listen: Interview techniques and analyses. The oral history reader. 3rd ed. Eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, 179–192. New York: Routledge. Carlston, Douglas G. 1985. Software people: an insider’s look at the personal computer software industry. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Ceruzzi, Paul E. 2008. Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945–2005. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dorman, Robert L. 2012. Hell of a vision: Regionalism and the modern American West. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Fernández-Vara, Clara, and Bennett Foddy. 2017. European videogames of the 1980s. Well Played 6.2: 1–6. Garda, Maria B. 2016. Who Made That Last Game? The Alternative Chronology of the 8-bit Era in Poland. DiGRA Abstract Proceedings. http://www.digra. org/wp-­content/uploads/digital-­library/paper_394.pdf. Gazzard, Allison. 2013. The platform and the player: exploring the (hi)stories of Elite. Game Studies. 13.2. http://gamestudies.org/1302/articles/agazzard. Gluck, Sherna. 1977. What’s so special about women? Women’s oral history. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 2.2: 3–17. Gluck, Sherna Berger and Daphne Patai, eds. 1991. Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. New York: Routledge. Grele, Ronald J. and Stud Terkel. 1985. Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History. Chicago: Precedent Publishing. Guy, Jim and Marc Benjamin. 2014. Junction fire destroys eight Oakhurst structures; evacuations ordered. The Fresno Bee. August 19. http://www.fresnobee. com/news/local/article19523433.html. Hsu, Hsuan L. 2009. New regionalisms: literature and uneven development. A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900–1950, ed. John T. Matthews, 218–239. West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing. Kushner, David. 2004. Masters of Doom: How two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture. New York: Random House. Levy, Steven. 1994[1984]. Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution. New York: Penguin Books. Nooney, Laine. 2015. A Tale of Two CEOs: Digging the Sierra and Broderbund Archive Collections at the Strong Museum of Play. http://www.lainenooney. com/blog/a-­tale-­of-­two-­ceos-­digging-­the-­sierra-­and-­broderbund-­archive-­ collections-­at-­the-­strong-­museum-­of-­play. Accessed 8 April 2020. Nooney, Laine. 2017. Let’s Begin Again: Sierra On-Line and the ‘Origins’ of the Graphical Adventure Game. American Journal of Play 10.1: 71–98. Portelli, Alessandro. 1991. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Portelli, Alessandro. 2016[1979]. What makes oral history different. The oral history reader. 3rd ed. Eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, 48–58. New York: Routledge. Ritchie, Donald A. 2003. Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP. Saarikoski, Petri, and Jaakko Suominen. 2009. Computer hobbyists and the gaming industry in Finland. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31.3: 20–33.

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Saxenian, AnnaLee. 1996. Regional advantage: culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sheff, David. 1999. Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World. Wilton, CT: CyberActive Publishing. Sierra Extends Hint Hotlines for Holiday Season. 1988. Sierra Newsletter. 1.4: 14. Russell, Andrew L. 2017 Hagiography, Revisionism & Blasphemy in Internet Histories. Internet Histories 1.1–2: 15–25. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Colonial archives and the arts of governance. Archival science 2.1–2: 87–109. Švelch, Jaroslav. 2018. Gaming the iron curtain: How teenagers and amateurs in communist Czechoslovakia claimed the medium of computer games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Swalwell, Melaine and Michael Davidson. 2016. Game History and the Case of ‘Malzak’: Theorizing the Manufacture of ‘Local Product’ in 1980s New Zealand. Locating Emerging Media. New York: Routledge. Swalwell, Melanie. 2009. Towards the Preservation of Local Computer Game Software: Challenges, Strategies, Reflections. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 15.3: 263–279. Tommervik, Allan. 1981. Exec On-Line Systems: Adventures in Programming. Softalk. February: 4–5. Vendel, Curt, and Marty Goldberg. 2012. Atari Inc.: Business is Fun. Carmel, NY: Sygyzy Company Press. Williams, John. 1987. Welcome to Coarsegold, California. Catalog 1987. Coarsegold, CA: Sierra On-Line, 8–9. http://www.sierragamers.com/ John-Williams. Zielinski, Siegfried. 2008. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an archaeology of hearing and seeing by technical means. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 7

Around the World with the Sorcerer of Exidy Michael Borthwick and Melanie Swalwell

The Exidy Sorcerer microcomputer was a product of the computer division formed by the Californian coin-operated arcade game manufacturer Exidy. The prototype was unveiled in April 1978 at the Long Beach Computer Show (Terrell 1984), then went into “full production mode” after the company received substantial orders at the National Computer Conference (NCC) in Los Angeles later that year (Terrell, personal communication). Appearing only a year after the US introduction of the Commodore PET 2001, the Tandy TRS-80 and the Apple II, the Sorcerer is amongst that first generation of pre-assembled “Home Computers That Plug in and Go” (Shapiro 1979, p.  67) in contrast to earlier machines which required enthusiasts to solder them together from individual parts. Housed in an attractive citron-coloured case, with a full-stroke keyboard, 64 characters per line, support for upper and lower case, a separate numeric keypad and high-resolution monochrome graphics, it was an

M. Borthwick (*) Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. Swalwell Transformative Media Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_7

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up-­market machine that went on sale in Australia for $1395 (Webster 1980) and that proved useful in many professional contexts. Committee members of the user groups that formed around the world included doctors, lawyers, engineers, geologists, pilots and management consultants. The founder of the TSUNAMI newsletter (The Sorcerer Users Near Michigan), engineering student Joseph Power, conducted a survey which found that his “average reader is a 33 year old male with a BS now working as a programmer or engineer” (Power 1980, n.p.). Examples of professional applications included predicting satellite orbits, controlling laboratory instruments and calculating diving tables for undersea oil exploration. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology used at least 16 Sorcerers (Smit, personal communication), and a suite of 8 were employed by the Geology Department at the University of Melbourne for “word processing … data collection and manipulation” (Duddy 1982, p.  2). One of these Sorcerers survives in the collection of Museum Victoria along with vinyl storage wallets of Stringy Floppy tape “wafers” whose labels indicate they hold volcanic data (Computer System – Exidy Sorcerer circa 1979). To assist with their integration into the workplace, Roger Hagan (1982, p. 2) contributed a column entitled “The Office Sorcerer” to US newsletter Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The Sorcerer was the first computer in the home of Google co-founder Larry Page, and there is evidence it was used by the late Stephen Atkinson and his business partner David Walsh to conduct the early mathematical research in Tasmania that would give rise to the professional gambling business that has funded cultural projects, such as Walsh’s MONA gallery in Hobart (Stephenson n.d.). Many Sorcerer owners and their families also wrote and played computer games: indeed, there were more game titles released than programming languages, utilities and productivity applications. In this chapter, we will explore gaming on the Sorcerer as well as the locative aspects of the system’s development and reception with particular attention to how the affordances of its graphics architecture supported international use. Using user group newsletters as historical sources makes it possible to observe a range of local factors—perceptions of proximity and distance, group legitimacy and regional feuds, and the many ironies and anomalies of local and international distribution. While it was easily out-sold numerically by the “big three” systems released the year before, the Sorcerer was still a successful product in a number of international markets, particularly Australia and the Netherlands, and Exidy’s export sales accounted “for about 80% of its Data Products

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Division business …” (PORT FE 1981, n.p.). In Australia, the Sorcerer’s popularity can be attributed to the ubiquitous retail distribution network of Dick Smith Electronics who were “one of Exidy’s largest customers” (Trussell 1981, p. 10) and who in 1980 had “23 stores and around 200 agencies” (Beaver 1981, p. 53). The Sorcerer was the first fully assembled computer that Dick Smith stocked (Craven, personal communication), and a past President of the Melbourne-based user group Sorcerer Computers Users Australia (SCUA) affirms that for a time “If you went into Dick Smith to buy a computer this is what you got” (Branch, personal communication). A strong retail network was also in place in the Netherlands through importer Expert Nederland B.V., but by 1980, a unique licencing arrangement (Langhurst 1981) saw manufacturing begin in that country at the Compudata B.V. plant in Den Bosch. A further local factor in the Netherlands was the incorporation of the Compudata Sorcerer into the Dutch government’s 30 part computer literacy television series Microprocessors which first aired in 1978 on the teleac (Television Academy) educational channel (Veraart 2008a, b); like the BBC’s later Computer Literacy Project (Lean 2016; Gazzard 2016), this was accompanied by courseware. By mid-1982, Exidy Systems Inc. was “out of business” (Gottwald 1982, p. 73), and by mid-1983, the machine was being deeply discounted in Australia to $499 (Your Computer 1983). A year later, “In September 1984, according to our Dutch friends, the last Sorcerer left the assembly line in Holland” (Say 1985, p. 7). This research is based on a substantial physical archive that Borthwick has compiled of international Sorcerer user group newsletters and trade literature from the long 1980s, which has navigated the “rubbish to durable transition” (Thompson in Guins 2014, p. 62). The material is drawn from three continents and five countries, offering opportunities for both multi-local and comparative readings. Sources include the Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Troy, MI), the Sorcerer Users Group South Australia (SUGSA) (Adelaide, Australia), Sorcerer Computer Users Australia (SCUA) (Melbourne, Australia), RAMIFICATIONS (Sydney, Australia), Port FE (Toronto, Canada), European Sorcerer Gebruikers Groep (ESGG) (Netherlands), European Sorcerer Club (ESCape) (Liverpool, UK), International Sorcerer Information Service (ISIS) (Ontario, Canada), SoCal Sorcerer User’s Group (SCSUG) (Long Beach, CA), Exidy Monitor (Waltham, MA), ARESCO Sorcerer’s Source (Columbia, MD), Sorcerer Users Newsletter (SUN) (Santa Clara, CA), TSUNAMI (Lansing, MI) and Z-80 Microfans (Portland, OR).

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The Sorcerer was Borthwick’s first computer—a hand-me-down from his uncle who had transitioned to the IBM PC. He used this second-hand cassette-based machine between 1982 and 1988 as a word processor in high school and through four  years of undergraduate study—and also undertook typical hobby activities of learning programming, playing games, and building and interfacing external hardware such as robots and speech synthesisers. He was a member of both SUGSA and SCUA, and through the membership list published in the latter’s newsletter, he was able to make contact with a fellow Sorcerer owner in a nearby country town and travel with him to the monthly SCUA meetings in Melbourne. This trip represented the first time that he had travelled to Victoria’s capital city and back in one day, and lead to a profound spatial recontextualisation. The newsletter archive has come to exist through Borthwick’s direct participation in SCUA, membership of the interstate SUGSA and holdings of other former members of both of these Australian groups. The bulk of the international material belongs to geophysicist Dr. Devin Trussell, a SCUA newsletter editor and one of the three founders of disk controller developer Digitrio. The archive would appear to include the bulk of written material published in newsletters by its users. Of user group newsletters, Terry Abraham (1988)—then Head of Special Collections at the University of Idaho Library (and himself the editor of a Sanyo computer newsletter)—notes that they are a new phenomenon “published by small groups for their own informational needs” and that they “tend to evade even the most diligent bibliographer” (Abraham 1988, p.  77). Unlike the Sanyo newsletters, the editors of Sorcerer user group newsletters were in general fastidious with their “volume numbering,” but some do lack “title stability” as they grew and became more organised: the first 15 issues of what became ESCape in the UK were published initially as SPEC (Sorcerer Program Exchange Club) and the Melbourne newsletter formerly known as the Sorcerer Computer User’s Australia became Sorcerer and CP/M User’s Australia (maintaining the same acronym) and ultimately MESA (Microcomputer Enthusiasts Support Association) reflecting a broadening focus which we discuss below. Through the meticulous cataloguing of the National Library of Australia, it can be seen that the South Australian user group modestly titled their earliest editions a “newsheet,” prior to changing it to the SUGSA newsletter and then ultimately to the Sorcerer Computer Group Incorporated. The Melbourne group’s first steps under the name Sorcerer User Group bought it into conflict with enthusiasts to the north in Sydney

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who felt that they had a more legitimate and trademarked claim to the name and saw those in Melbourne not as a group but “simply a loose affiliation of individuals who produce a commercial newsletter” (SUN 1980b, p.  7). Though a regional feud, it apparently played out internationally: ironically, our first exposure to the dispute came when reading scans of a US newsletter—ARESCO Sorcerer’s Source (Laudereau and Simpson 1980)—which turned up in a UK antique shop and whose proprietor was kind enough to scan them. A number of the international user groups are remarkable for their longevity: SUGSA and ESGG remained in operation into the 1990s, a decade after Exidy itself was “no longer in [the microcomputer] business” (Burnett 1982, p. 4) and up to 16 years after the machine’s 1978 debut. Throughout that time SUGSA and ESGG remained exclusively focused on the Sorcerer—while in Melbourne SCUA broadened its focus to include, at first, other machines that also ran the CP/M operating system and then ultimately any microcomputer model—so that by 1986 the Sorcerer was “now owned by fewer than half the membership” (Millicer 1986b, p. 94). Captured within these newsletters are the internal existential debates over whether to stay focused purely on the needs of the shrinking number of users of the “obsolete” Sorcerer or to widen the focus to keep the community together as users moved to new platforms. SUGSA Secretary Don Ide determined in 1988 that “the consensus […] seemed to be that this Group should continue to remain exclusively related to the Sorcerer computer in a very broad sense” (Ide 1988, p. 2). By the late 1980s, SUGSA minutes record that meetings were being attended by around a dozen members in person, but the needs of members outside this orbit remained important. Nooney et  al. (2020, p.  109) note the importance of periodicals “especially for microcomputer owners living far from user groups or retailers,” and the SUGSA President sought to ensure that the newsletter remained of “interest for our remote members” (Carragher 1991, p.  2). Furthermore, the group’s “membership rates [were] framed with due regard to value for money for ‘out of town’ members” (Carragher 1987, p.  3) who faced STD (long distance) phone charges when calling the BBS. Nooney et al. (2020, p. 115) also note the “difficulty of microcomputing in isolation,” and this is reflected in a melancholy comment in the ESGG newsletter by a user in Taiwan who felt he had no choice but to put his machine up for sale as he lived “too far away from the Sorcerer mainstream” (Jonker 1985, p. 22).

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By the early to mid-1980s, those involved with the Sorcerer acknowledged that it was an “orphan.” As Svelch has noted of another platform that survived in niches into the 1990s (the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in Czechoslovakia), active communities of users can survive in a “highly specific local context” (Svelch 2017, p. 58), even though the hardware itself might appear obsolete in the face of the “invasion of 16-bit computers.” In the mid-1980s, Sorcerer owners were in a similar position. For instance, even though the Sorcerer was no longer being manufactured in 1983, Novelist and poet William J. Margolis of Venice, California, [didn’t] want to bury his machine, a 32K Exidy Sorcerer Model I, which he called an “orphan”. To get repairs made, Margolis can still turn to his local Sorcerer users’ group or consult The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, an international users’ newsletter … (Freiberger and Dvorak 1983, p. 28)

The support provided by these regionally based user groups allowed the platform to remain viable for a core group of committed users even into the mid-1990s. And a number of suppliers, such as Sydney’s Aurora Data Service, vowed to continue to provide “games, utilities, educational and CP/M programs, memory upgrades, service and repairs for ailing Sorcerers” (Your Computer 1984, p. 13). A SCUA committee member and hardware developer noted that “Contrary to some rumours promulgated by the pseudo-16 bit brigade, 8 bit micros and CP/M are not dead; not fashionable nor trendy perhaps but still very, very useful indeed. And, from what I’ve experienced, faster” (Millicer 1986a, p. 68). More objectively and a little later, he wrote that the “Spellbinder 5.3 [word processor] loads 3 K more text into memory on a [56 K] Sorcerer than it does on [an] IBM … with its 640 K RAM. And with a RAM disk included word processing … is about twice as fast” (Millicer 1987). Svelch (2017) identifies three strategies employed by users to resist obsolescence: treasuring the history, squeezing every ounce of performance using programming tricks and extending the platform. The newsletter archive suggests that Sorcerer owners were pragmatic and exhibited little nostalgia for the Sorcerer itself, but they did make many improvements to the firmware in the Power-on-Monitor ROM to fix bugs, improve usability and support new third-party peripherals. The strategy of extending the platform is therefore the dominant one employed by Sorcerer users and vendors to resist the obsolescence that might otherwise befall a computer “orphaned” by its manufacturers. In common with the

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Spectrum, disk drive upgrades were highly valued and were developed by small firms in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands as an alternative to the official system from Exidy with further “extensions” including up to 1 MB of RAM and “an 80 column card, several stages of improved disc operating system, a graphic card, hard disc drive and even a colour monitor …” (SCG Inc. 1993, p. 1).

Gaming and Locality Frank Veraart (2011) has noted how games initially functioned in this era to bring lay users into contact with computers and also to enable programmers to develop their talents. Australian Sorcerer programmer Martin Sevior understood this at the time and introduced his 1981 game programming tutorial in the SCUA newsletter with the following observation: One of the most important differences between using a personal computer and using a large mainframe, is the former’s ability to make and play animated games. These games truly demonstrate the fact that computers are no longer the exclusive tools of the highly trained professional, but can be used and enjoyed by anyone who can overcome prejudices against computers such as their being too complicated or that games are too childish. This last point is rather interesting; it seems that many owners of Sorcerers don’t like to give the impression that they use their computer to play games. For example one software supplier told me that he receives many orders for GALAXIANS using the following phrase ‘“…oh and a copy of GALAXIANS for the kids.”!’ (Sevior 1981)

Sevior’s tutorial includes commented sections of Z80 assembly language from his clone of the Galaxians arcade game and focuses on coding techniques for achieving smooth animation via manipulation of the Sorcerer’s programmable graphics.1 Sevior not only describes the techniques for doubling the effective spatial resolution of the game but also addresses the temporal constraints on accessing the screen at the right time in order to avoid flicker—contrasting his approach with that taken in another arcade game clone, Martian Invaders, published by North American company Quality Software. A photograph of Quality Software’s trade stand at the 1980 West Coast Computer Faire—taken by the 1  For a discussion of the importance of clones in teaching programming, see Swalwell (2021).

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Australian technical writer, Jamieson Rowe—is seen in Fig. 7.1. The photos show a teenage attendee enjoying a game of Martian Invaders. Sevior’s Galaxians was released commercially by Perth-based Sorcerer software publishing house System Software and would become one of the most popular titles for the machine. System Software distributed the game internationally through “dealers in Holland, England, and West Germany” (Donaldson 1981, p. 16), and advertisements and reviews appear in user group newsletters from Canada, the US and the UK, demonstrating the way that local software could achieve global circulation in this period. Software houses also cross-sold their titles internationally. Arrington Software—located in Boise, Idaho—boasted that “We now have an arrangement whereby we can bring you SUPER ASTEROIDS from System Software at a price below what it would cost you to order it from Australia” (Arrington Software Service 1982, p. 35). Sometimes changes

Fig. 7.1  A photograph of Quality Software’s trade stand at the 1980 West Coast Computer Faire. (Taken by the Australian technical writer, Jamieson Rowe. Image copyright Silicon Chip Publications)

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were made to the software. For example, Sevior’s Space Invaders clone, originally for sale for AUD7.50 through the SCUA Tape Library (SCUA 1981), was also sold by System Software and by Arrington Software Service whose founder published a patch to add sound (Arrington 1981). This shows that authors had multiple outlets for their software and reminds those engaged in digital preservation that multiple versions of a title might exist (Jason Scott has called this “silent versioning”). A review of Sevior’s Galaxians in Sorcerer’s Apprentice is typical of the international reception of this Australian title: “If you’re an avid computer gamesperson, Galaxians is a must. […] I would rate this program very highly. It’s fast, unpredictable and quite exciting. If I were going to buy only one arcade game, this would be it!” (LaFlamme 1981b, p. 36). In the pages of microcomputing magazines, a dialogue developed between editors and users and then ultimately between users themselves (Nooney et al. 2020), and this is exemplified by a response to LaFlamme’s review quoted above. Six months after its appearance, the newsletter taunted readers to better the reviewer’s performance: “one Sorcerer, Emiliano, has obtained a score of 15,140  in his fight against the GALAXIANS.  Have other Sorcerers killed more?” (Sorcerer’s Apprentice 1981, p. 105). In a remarkable example of the international reach of user generated content, user engagement and modes of communication, the Editor published Swedish high school student Lennart Mansson’s response that reached them by letter six months later: “Lennart […] sends along the scores of some of his fellow students achieved while playing this game. Look at these!” (LaFlamme 1982, p. 74). The popularity of games on the “professional” Sorcerer shows that gaming was not confined to “low-end” micros (Swalwell 2021). While it lacked any inbuilt sound capability and no joystick interface, standards emerged for creating sound from, and connecting joysticks to, the machine’s Centronics printer port, and these de-facto standards were supported by the major software houses, indicating users played games as well as engaging in more professional tasks. As an example of this dual use, Espen Skog in Norway recalls how his father, a professor at the National Institute of Alcohol Research, would bring home a Sorcerer and they would play another Sevior title—Clown—a clone of the Exidy’s own Circus (Skog, personal communication). Editors actively sought to understand how important gaming was to their readers, and in 1980, the Sorcerer Program Exchange Club in the UK published a survey that

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included a question asking members whether their use of the machine was “entirely work, mainly work, half work, mainly games” (Morle 1980, n.p.).2

Connecting Local Users and Reaching Global Audiences Sorcerer user groups sought to facilitate direct connections between members with similar interests. As we have recounted such groups published, on an opt-in basis, membership lists that provided members’ names, addresses and phone numbers (i.e. Trussell 1979). While user groups are usually taken to be the epitome of locality, today these lists provide a useful source of data revealing that even the smaller user groups achieved a global publishing footprint, driven by a desire to share the limited information that was available to users of what remained, in overall terms, a relatively niche platform. Veraart (2008a, pp. 132–133) has noted how in the Netherlands such lists “enabled members [of the Hobby Computer Club] to find peers with the same model of computer and similar computing interests.” Users’ desperation for information could see small groups that began with a hyper-local focus grow to achieve a global audience. This is exemplified by Joseph Power’s TSUNAMI newsletter which he began so he could connect “With over twenty Exidy owners in the area” (Power 1979a, n.p.); within a year, he would be mailing his newsletter to “30 states and 7 countries” (Power 1981, n.p.). The Exidy Monitor was a newsletter from Waltham, M.A, that was sponsored by Massachusetts computer shop Computer Mart. As such, it is the only example for the Sorcerer of commercial sponsorship of a user group newsletter, that Swalwell (2015) has noted for other platforms. Analysis of its membership list published in the final April 1980 issue reveals that this mid-sized group of 230 members were drawn from 34 US states and 6 countries (Vachon 1980). Larger groups had an even greater international reach: halfway through its eventual growth to nearly one thousand members, the Secretary of SCUA reported that newsletters were being sent to “Belgium, Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Papua-New Guinea, Thailand, the U.S.A. and the U.K.” (Reynolds 1981, p.  2). By October 1981, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice was being read in 26 countries, including Nepal (LaFlamme 1981a).  Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find the results of the survey.

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Local and Global Solo editors and smaller groups struggled with their growing workload. For example, while the small group in Portland, OR, that produced Z-80 Microfans had grown to 34 by 1980, the “contributions to the Newsletter [had] been substantially made by only SIX LOCAL MEMBERS” (Auburg 1980, p. 1). To the east in Michigan, in March 1981, Power was writing that he was “running out of steam and NEED[ed] ARTICLES!” (Power 1981, n.p.). Abraham recognised the burnout that can occur “when the burden of writing, editing, publishing and mailing etc., falls on the shoulders of one individual” (Abraham 1988, p. 79). He found that user groups newsletters “like literary magazines, […] are frequently the product of one or two individuals” (Abraham 1988, p. 78). Even the largest Sorcerer user groups struggled to receive enough contributions from users and regularly appealed for more material of any sort. SCUA and the ESGG, whose memberships both peaked at around 1000 users, are at the upper end of membership numbers identified by Abraham (1988, p.  80) in his 1988 survey of US Sanyo groups that “range from about 10 to 1500.” In a nod to its significance in binary, the ESGG presented its 1024th member with a printer at the 1984 Sorcererdag (Jonker 1984).

Postal Affordances The materiality of “a paper-based infrastructure for virtual community” (Nooney et al. 2020, p. 109) inevitably requires that paper to be moved around. Sorcerer newsletter editors found themselves grappling with the affordances of their local postal services and those of their overseas readers. They dealt with lost mail, postal strikes and the fine balance between cost and speed of delivery. Those programmers who successfully submitted their creations to international publishers had to deal with a further affordance of an earlier era: cheques drawn in foreign currencies. Swiss programmer Christian Meier, the author of the as yet unpreserved game Maze Killer, published by the Global Software Network, noted to us via email that his royalties were eroded by bank fees. In the late 1970s the exchange of information electronically amongst computer enthusiasts was still some time away, although by the early 1980s some newsletters editors had begun accepting article submissions via their accounts on the commercial dialup database services, such as The SOURCE and MicroNET, that had begun to emerge. User groups were

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optimistic about the potential of local bulletin board systems to connect users and began planning to set them up. In South Australia, for example, a committee was established in 1985 to investigate setting up an RCPM (Remote CP/M System) to provide members with “an alternative method of asking questions” (Ide 1985, p. 2). In the US, the SCSUG in Silicon Valley shared similar aims but in 1987 was still working towards this goal: The BBS is especially important for you folks that do not live in Southern California. It must be frustrating not to be able to communicate with other Exidy users … The BBS would afford us the luxury of communicating with one another in a very fast manner. (Brown and Ramirez 1987, n.p.)

A final irony of the paper-based legacy saw typewriters being used to create early newsletter editions. The first nine monthly issues of the SCUA newsletter were hand typed by the founder’s wife (Trussell 1979). In the US, although Power was receiving some articles on cassette, he was thwarted by the lack of a printer. The challenges that word processing on microcomputers presented in this era are illustrated through a remark in the Santa Clara Sorcerer Users Newsletter: that even those users who were wealthy enough to own Exidy’s USD150 word processing ROMPac cartridge could either “Practice using [their] WP Pac or just scratch something on a postcard. Let us know if you’re still computing” (SUN 1980a, p. 51).

International Travellers As archival sources, the user groups newsletters show how small locally focused groups formed and often expanded to incorporate interstate and overseas members who had an appetite for Sorcerer information and sought contact with those who shared similar interests. However, the archive also reveals that some users ventured well outside their local region. Hardware vendor and newsletter editor Trussell travelled to Europe and the US, reporting back on meetings with Exidy executives in Sunnyvale, CA, at which he advocated on behalf of Australian users (Trussell 1982). Dennis Wong, living in Hong Kong at the time, shared an account with SCUA members of a trip to Japan to buy an Epson printer (Wong 1981). And Nigel Yeo, the assistant editor of ESCape in the UK, flew himself and fellow Sorcerer enthusiasts to the Netherlands in an eight-seater jet to attend the 1982 Sorcererdag (Bunford 1982). Without

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the comprehensive travelogues of Canadian Daniel Say, we would know little of European user group activity beyond the UK and the Netherlands. Through accounts that were widely reprinted, Say detailed club meetings, publishing and hardware and software development activity in Switzerland, UK, France and Norway and provided a vivid description of the ESGG’s Sorcererdagen which were held at large venues such as soccer stadiums and attracted up to 2000 enthusiasts (Say 1983b).

Unlocking the Keys/International Characters Modern computers and operating systems support the multitude of languages used around the world. This has not always been the case. Lekkas (2014), for instance, has examined the “interventions” undertaken by Greek users to adapt microcomputers to display the Greek alphabet. To support an international alphabet, a Sorcerer user could reprogram its graphic characters because the machine kept “its character set in RAM, making it changeable by the user” (Smith 1981, p.  1). By design the Sorcerer’s programmable graphics were as “easy to put on the screen as text” (Terrell 1984, p. 103). Journalist Neil Shapiro saw this distinguishing technical affordance as a hybrid of the graphics architecture of the earlier PET and TRS-80, allowing the Sorcerer user to “program either way – with graphics right off the keyboard or you may design your own” (Shapiro 1979, p. 150). This feature clearly made the Sorcerer useful to non-English language speakers, as demonstrated in the number of different countries where it was purchased. Indeed, it seems that the higher margins and payment in advance terms for export sales may have lead Exidy to privilege the international over the domestic market. There were supply shortages in the US, and trade journal InfoWorld (1981, p.  4) recounted complaints dating back to the Sorcerer’s release “that Exidy ignored the US market and at times even put foreign contracts ahead of shipments to dealers.” End users themselves also recognised that “One of the Sorcerer’s best selling points is its extensive graphics capability – including the ability to define your own unique characters” (Power 1979b, n.p.). Just how broadly this flexibility was exploited internationally to support the character sets used in non-English speaking countries is revealed in the newsletters. For example, a Hebrew teacher at an evangelical seminary in Venezuela noted that his main reason for purchasing this machine was “The capability of the Sorcerer to use foreign letters …” (Pfeil 1982,

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p. 85). Of the 256 characters that can be represented in the 8-bit ASCII code on the Sorcerer, half were stored in RAM and could be redefined by the user. And 64 of these characters were initialised by default with useful shapes not dissimilar to those of the Commodore PET, but crucially, these pre-defined characters could also be overwritten with custom versions to double the number available, and they could be accessed directly by pressing a dedicated GRAPHIC key. While this character-based approach had constraints, it worked well for some software genres including scientific and programming applications, word processing and the arcade game clones already discussed. An undated issue of British journal Sorcerer Program Exchange Club (SPEC) includes a charming hand-drawn “SPEC Sheet” showing the standard inbuilt graphics (SPEC c.a. 1979); such sheets form a part of the materiality of microcomputing at this time. Commercial software houses published a variety of utilities to assist users in designing graphic characters and animations and newsletters published gridded layout sheets that users could colour in to undertake this process manually. The newsletters reveal that users also shared their character designs. The March 1981 issue of TSUNAMI carries type in listings of hex dumps for Hebrew, Greek and Katakana character sets, and an appeal: “More character sets (Farsi, Korean, Tengwar, etc) are always welcome” (Rowe 1981, n.p.). Character set ROMs for international use were also available commercially with Irish firm Weston Microtechnology advertising a German character set, a British character set (that included the pound sign) and a French character set that included the “Franc sign, and the three French accents” (Weston Microtechnology 1982, p. 21). Daniel Say observed during his 1983 tour that the Swiss “use a modified Monitor ROM that has the German character set with umlauts … ” (Say 1983a, p. 1), and he wrote later to the South Australian newsletter that French “machines have a specific keyboard for the dead keys3 used with French accents” (Say 1985, p. 9). The user groups whose work is preserved in the archive began in domestic spaces such as lounge rooms and met in local classrooms, but some grew so large their annual meetings took place in ice rinks and sporting stadia. A perpetual shortage of information about the Sorcerer and a commitment to “reciprocal exchange” between groups resulted in even small local grassroots publications achieving a wide international 3  A key which is pressed and released without printing a character but which changes the meaning of the next key pressed.

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readership, ultimately helping this archival material to survive. All user groups sought to understand their users’ needs and capabilities and to connect them with other local users or allies further afield. International sales appeared commercially advantageous to Exidy, and the ability for users to redefine the machine’s graphic characters saw it used to support foreign languages in countries such as Germany and France which have not previously been recognised as important locations for Sorcerer use. While the Sorcerer was a professionally oriented machine that was employed in a variety of technical and business roles, games were also developed and distributed internationally for it, with some examples only surfacing recently on 40-year-old cassettes found in  locations far from where they were originally written.

References Abraham, Terry. 1988. PC Users Group Newsletters. The Serials Librarian 13 (4):77–91. https://doi.org/10.1300/J123v13n04_07. Arrington, Howard. 1981. SINGLE VOICE SOUND GENERATION. Sorcerer’s Apprentice 3 (3):50–52. Arrington Software Service. 1982. >. Sorcerer’s Apprentice 4 (2):36–37. Auburg, C Douglas. 1980. EDITOR’S REMARKS. Z-80 MICROFANS I (8):1. Beaver, Paul. 1981. Your SORCERER Computer. Your Computer. December. Brown, Richard, and Jose Ramirez. 1987. Southern California Sorcerer User Group (SCSUG) (ca. April 1987):n.p. Bunford, Ray. 1982. RANDOM BYTES. ESCape (European Sorcerer Club) (30):12. Burnett, Jonathan. 1982. DOUBLE-SIDED DRIVES. Micropolis Users Group Newsletter (25). Carragher, John. 1987. Where are we going. Sorcerer Users Group South Australia Newsletter (SUGSA) (82):2–3. Carragher, John. 1991. The Future of SUG(SA). SUG Newsletter (formerly Sorcerer Users Group South Australia Newsletter (SUGSA)) (132):2. Computer System – Exidy Sorcerer. circa 1979. Melbourne, Australia: Museums Victoria Collections. Donaldson, John. 1981. Micropolis User Group (16):16. Duddy, Ian. 1982. STRINGY FLOPPY FOR THE SORCERER. Sorcerer’s Apprentice 4 (1):2 & 23. Freiberger, Paul, and John C Dvorak. 1983. OBSOLETE COMPUTERS. Infoworld. 6 June. Gazzard, Alison. 2016. Now the chips are down: the BBC Micro. Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press.

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Gottwald, John. 1982. ESI BELLY UP! Sorcerer’s Apprentice 4 (4&5):73. Guins, Raiford. 2014. Game after : a cultural study of video game afterlife. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Hagan, Roger. 1982. THE OFFICE SORCERER. Sorcerer’s Apprentice 4 (1):2. Ide, Don. 1985. SECRETARY’S SECTION. Sorcerer Users Group South Australia Newsletter (SUGSA) (60):2. Ide, Don. 1988. SECRETARY’S SECTION. SUG Newsletter (formerly Sorcerer Users Group South Australia Newsletter (SUGSA)) (95):2. InfoWorld. 1981. Exidy Forms Subsidiary Company. InfoWorld 3 (6). Jonker, Welmoed J. 1984. INFO. Exidy Sorcerer Gebruikers Groep a translation in English of the original Dutch version 3 (14):3. Jonker, Welmoed J. 1985. MICRO’S. ESGG (Exidy Sorcerer Gebruikers Groep) 4 (23):22. LaFlamme, Ralph. 1981a. ODDS & ENDS. Sorcerer’s Apprentice 3 (7):130–131. LaFlamme, Ralph. 1981b. SOFTWARE REVIEW ** GALAXIANS ** from Arrington Software. Sorcerer’s Apprentice 3 (2):36. LaFlamme, Ralph. 1982. ODDS & ENDS. Sorcerer’s Apprentice 4 (4&5). Langhurst, Fred. 1981. News from Exidy. Sorcerer’s Apprentice 3 (1):1. Laudereau, Terry L, and Rick S Simpson. 1980. ATTENTION USER GROUPS! ARESCO Sorcerer’s Source 1 (4 & 5):38. Lean, Tom. 2016. Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer. Bloomsbury Sigma. Lekkas, Theodoros. 2014. Legal Pirates Ltd: Home Computing Cultures in Early 1980s Greece. In Hacking Europe from Computer Cultures to Demoscenes, eds. Gerard Alberts, and Ruth Oldenziel, 73–106. vol. History of Computing. London: Springer. Millicer, Rick. 1986a. THE NEW SCUAMON 80 v2.3 and SCUAMON 64 v3.4. Sorcerer Computer Users Australia Newsletter 86 (April):68. Millicer, Rick. 1986b. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO SCUA? A reflection on trends. Sorcerer and CP/M Users of Australia (86):94. Millicer, Rick. 1987. Sorcerer Users Group South Australia Newsletter. Morle, Colin. 1980. SORCERER OWNERSHIP SURVEY. Sorcerer Program Exchange Club (12):n.p. Nooney, Laine, Kevin Driscoll, and Kera Allen. 2020. From Programming to Products: Softalk Magazine and the Rise of the Personal Computer User. Information & Culture: A Journal of History 55 (2):105–129. Pfeil, Roger. 1982. Graphics with the Word Processor. Sorcerer’s Apprentice 4 (4&5):85. PORT FE. 1981. THE LATEST FROM EXIDY. Port FE Sorcerer Users’ Group Toronto (January). Power, Joseph R. 1979a. Introduction. TSAR 0.0:n.p. Power, Joseph R. 1979b. User Defined Characters in BASIC. TSAR 0.0:n.p.

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Power, Joseph R. 1980. Preliminary Survey Results. TSUNAMI (September):n.p. Power, Joseph R. 1981. Editor’s Notes. TSUNAMI (March):n.p. Reynolds, Harry. 1981. THE SECRETARY SPEAKS. Sorcerer Computer Users Australia Newsletter 25:2. Rowe, Greg. 1981. Hex Dumps of the 4 Character Sets by Greg Rowe. TSUNAMI March:n.p. Say, Daniel. 1983a. The European Sorcerer Community. ISIS (International Sorcerer Information Service) 1 (2):1–8. Say, Daniel. 1983b. What I did on my summer vacation. ESCape (European Sorcerer Club) (35):2–6. Say, Daniel. 1985. The Sorcerer Year 1984. Sorcerer Users Group South Australia Newsletter (SUGSA) (60):7–10. SCG Inc. 1993. End of an Era as John Carragher steps down as President of the Sorcerer Computer Group. Sorcerer Computer Group Incorporated (formerly SUGSA) (150):1. SCUA. 1981. S.C.U.A.  TAPE LIBRARY. Sorcerer Computer Users of Australia Newsletter (21). Sevior, Martin. 1981. ANIMATED GAMES … a tutorial by Martin Sevior. Sorcerer Computer Users Australia Newsletter 1981 (25):9–14. Shapiro, Neil. 1979. HOME COMPUTERS THAT PLUG IN AND GO. Popular Mechanics 152 (2):67–68, 150–153. Smith, Burks A. 1981. GRAPHICS PRIMER for VECTOR GRAPHIC (PART II). Micropolis Users Group Newsletter (11):1–1. Sorcerer’s Apprentice. 1981. GALAXIANS ATTACK! Sorcerer’s Apprentice 3 (6):105. SPEC. c.a. 1979. “SORCEROR” (sic) CHARACTER SET. Sorcerer Program Exchange Club (4):1. Stephenson, John. n.d. About Me. http://www.uprun.com/about-­me. Accessed 18 Feb 2020. SUN. 1980a. S.U.N IS UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. SUN (Sorcerer User’s Newsletter) 2 (5):51. SUN. 1980b. Title page missing (issue incomplete). SUN (Sorcerer User’s Newsletter) 2 (1):7. Svelch, Jaroslav. 2017. Keeping the Spectrum Alive: Platform Fandom in a Time of Transition. In Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives, eds. Melanie Swalwell, Helen Stuckey, and Angela Ndilianis, 58–74. New  York: Routledge. Swalwell, Melanie. 2015. New Zealand. In Video Games Around the World, ed. M. J. P. Wolf, 377–391. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Swalwell, Melanie. 2021. Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Terrell, Paul. 1984. A Guided Tour of Personal Computing. Creative Computing 10 (11). Trussell, Devin. 1979. Sorcerer Users Group (later renamed SCUA) 1 (2). Trussell, Devin. 1981. Visit to Exidy Systems. Sorcerer Computer Users Australia Newsletter 1981 (22):10. Trussell, Devin. 1982. Visit to Exidy Systems. Sorcerer Computer Users Australia Newsletter 1982 (32):4. Vachon, John T. 1980. The Exidy Monitor I (9). Veraart, Frank. 2008a. Basicode: Co-Producing a Microcomputer Esperanto. In History of technology. Volume 28, ed. Ian Inkster, 129–147. London. Veraart, Frank. 2008b. De domesticatie van de computer in Nederland 1975–1990. Studium (Rotterdam, Netherlands) 1 (2):145–164. Veraart, Frank. 2011. Losing Meanings: Computer Games in Dutch Domestic Use, 1975–2000. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33 (1):52–65. https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2009.66. Webster, Tony. 1980. Australian microcomputer handbook. 1st Aufl. Sydney, Australia: Computer Reference Guide. Weston Microtechnology. 1982. >. Sorcerer’s Apprentice 4 (1):21. Wong, David. 1981. SORCERER INTERFACE FOR MX-80 PRINTER. Sorcerer Computer Users Australia Newsletter (25):9. Your Computer. 1983. Dick Smith Electronics Advertisement. Your Computer. July. Your Computer. 1984. Sorcerer Not Abandoned. Your Computer. April.

CHAPTER 8

Cracking Technocultural Memory: Scenes and Stories of Origin in the PlayStation Portable Forensic Imaginary David Murphy

Hailed as one of the most powerful and affordable mobile computing platforms released at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the official discourse surrounding the PlayStation Portable (also known as the PSP) tends to highlight its three-dimensional (3D) graphical processing power. This discourse celebrates the PSP’s official history, underscoring its ability to bring a 3D home console gaming experience to a portable gaming device (Loftus 2005). What is not mentioned is the unofficial homebrew software production scene that pushed the technical capabilities of the platform. To address this gap, this chapter uses digital ethnography and media archaeology theories and methods to trace the local origins of the PSP homebrew scene, offering an empirical analysis drawing on multiple sources including interviews, archives of homebrew discussion forums, software created by users, and close readings of read me files.

D. Murphy (*) Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_8

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The history of the PSP’s cracking is at once a story of release localities and translocal cooperation. First launched in Japan in December of 2004 during the holiday shopping season, the PSP made its way to North America, Europe, Britain, South America, and Australia by October. Following a successful first week of sales (Locklear 2004), critics were impressed with the PSP’s design and the games that were available, but also disappointed by its limited storage capacity and underwhelming video file support. It would not be unreasonable to cite the lack of video file support as the potential origin point for the PlayStation Portable’s homebrew scene. But as the PSP homebrew scene developed, key members presented an alternative explanation, tracing the scene’s heritage back to peculiarities found in the first iteration of the device’s firmware. This firmware (which was only released in Japan) was protected by a security system that looked reasonably secured on paper, but which was not implemented properly (TyRaNiD 2007). Subsequent releases—in the markets of North America, Europe, and Britain—tried to improve security by shipping devices with updated firmware. However, a translocal assemblage of hackers, crackers, and makers formed an unofficial developer scene that not only reimagined the capabilities of the device, but also developed a plethora of tactics used to downgrade, circumvent, and eventually replace the firmware, enabling unofficial programs to be run. This chapter will trace the local origins of the PSP homebrew scene, beginning with an introduction to scene theory. Then, it will delve into the history of the scene itself, focusing specifically on how it constructed its own cultural memory that was geographically promiscuous but materially anchored to a forensic imaginary (Kirschenbaum 2008) rooted in an assumption that no two PSPs are alike.

Scene Theory: A Brief Introduction While scene theory (Shank 1994;  Straw 1991; Bennett and Peterson 2004; Bennett and Rogers 2016) has played an important role in the excavation and documentation of local audio cultures, a rigorously theorized and applied version of the concept is missing from the study of game history. There are many reasons for this, amongst them the tendency to distinguish ‘professional’ game production industries from ‘amateur’ modes of production; however, the persistence of this omission is not the focus of this chapter. Complicating matters further is the way in which the term ‘scene’ is often used theoretically and colloquially to tie a messy

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assemblage of musicians, audiences, studios, and venues to a specific locality. As this case demonstrates, such an anchor is not required in a digital gaming culture due to a pattern in which scene thinking coincides with shifting colloquial use. Scene thinking, according to Woo et al. (2015), involves the formation of an empirical research perspective that anchors a particular way of producing and consuming culture to a specific set of individuals, institutions, and practices. It is a flexible perspective that calls attention to the range of actors that contribute to the co-creation of a cultural space (Straw 1991), which is often, but not always, anchored to a geographic location. The term scene, according to Bennett and Peterson (2004), “was first widely used by journalists in the 1940s to characterize the marginal and bohemian ways of life of those associated with the demiworld of Jazz” (p. 2). The Oxford English Dictionary added a colloquial definition (to its theatrical definition) in 1950, defining a scene as “a social environment or milieu characterized by a particular activity”, and in 1958 it added another definition which includes bars and clubs that provide the infrastructure for gay and lesbian scenes. Academic use of the term is often attributed to Straw’s (1991) seminal paper on the concept, which this chapter will draw its inspiration from. In ‘Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music’, Straw advances a theory of scenes by distinguishing the term from more homogenized academic discourses surrounding communities and subcultures. Scenes are cultural spaces entangled in processes of internationalization, according to Straw, which produce a complex diversity, but they can also account, following Shank’s (1988) definition, for the relationship between different musical practices unfolding in specific geographical regions (pp. 372–373). In these cultural spaces, “a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization” (p. 373). Straw’s definition is rooted in an analysis of urban music, but homebrew software developers also use the term. It structures the discourse surrounding homebrew that was written for the PSP in blog posts, interviews, and forums, and it also demarcates homebrew written for other platforms. Such instances of colloquial use, for proponents of scene theory, more than justify scholarly application of the concept, following a cultural studies tradition of treating the culture being studied on its own terms (Woo et al. 2015).

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On top of accepting the culture being studied on its own terms, the application of a scene perspective to the history of homebrew software production provides several advantages. Significant to the scene discourses that surround creative homebrew software production is an attention to complex processes of differentiation that can be articulated socially, technically, and politically. The ethics and aesthetics of hacking are heterogeneous in nature, according to Coleman (2012). And hacking communities, labs, and recursive publics (Kelty 2008) have received considerable scholarly attention recently, but an under acknowledged computer underground continues to exist with scenes that develop knowledge, tactics, and cultural memory by taking legal risks. Charting these histories using a scene perspective not only provides insight into similarities and differences that overgeneralizing discussions of user-production miss, it also provides insight into trajectories of change and cross-fertilization that data-driven actor-network models fail to capture. These trajectories chart the social life of information that users create, pointing to illicit and vernacular instances of scene-driven innovation that can be falsely attributed to having occurred within industries. An analysis of the PSP scene, from this perspective, not only provides insight into cultural shifts, it also provides a means of comparing and contrasting informal modes of game production (Keogh 2019), or what Young (2017) and Vanderhoef (2016) describe as everyday game-making practices. The primary obstacle in applying scene theory to the computer underground in general and the PlayStation Portable scene in particular is the fact that a specific geographic locality cannot be used to situate messy assemblages of participants and technologies. In a discussion of user production in LittleBigPlanet (Sony 2008), for example, Grimes (2015) draws on non-place theories to conceptualize a speculative “non-scene” in which player-created levels are shaped by a platform that is owned and controlled by Sony. This argument makes sense when applied to a game designed to function like a user-production platform that remains under corporate control, but it does not apply to situations in which corporate control of a platform was subverted by users. Platforms are having a profound effect on contemporary cultural production, as well, and this effect is being noted in a wide range of literature. YouTube can also be understood as a cultural space, for example, according to Burgess and Green (2009), while recent developments in platform and infrastructure studies call attention to the ways in which platforms are increasingly behaving like infrastructures and the ways infrastructures are being built to behave like

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platforms (Plantin et  al. 2018). Just like infrastructures, hardware platforms are “abstract standardizations that exist in numerous material implementations” (Švelch 2017) which can differ slightly based on region. And this understanding, this chapter will argue, is implicitly recognized in the sense of scene that surrounds homebrew software production. While the culture implicit in the PSP homebrew scene is not demarcated by a specific location, it does not lack a material basis. It is distinguished by a forensic imaginary, instead, which is a term used to describe cultural formations rooted in material interpretations of things. In Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, Kirschenbaum defines a forensic imaginary as a culture rooted in an assumption shared by computer forensics, criminalistics, and modern forensic science which holds that “no two things in the physical world are ever exactly alike” (p. 2). Correspondingly, a similar assumption provides a logical basis for the PSP scene, which holds that no two PSPs are the same. Put another way, the sense of scene is anchored to (but not limited by) the infrastructure of the platform, resulting in a forensic imaginary that collectively negotiates different local instantiations of the device. No two things being exactly alike is an assumption implicit in any homebrew scene that explores the tensions between the prescribed activities that a platform is designed to afford and the actual activities that a specific material instantiation of a platform is capable of affording. To run homebrew on the PSP, for example, it is first necessary to determine the model of the device and the firmware version it is using: two factors contingent on where and when the device was sold. Then, a specific modification can be applied that was developed and tested by users. Computer forensics is also supported by testing, with the primary difference being its rooting in an institutionally supported assemblage of laboratories. The PSP’s forensic imaginary is different because it is domestically supported by a translocal assemblage of unofficial developers, including developers working out of Brazil, Spain, and Mexico. Brazil, Spain, and Mexico are underrepresented in scientific narratives of modern progress, but they are not underrepresented in collective forms of cultural memory constructed by the PlayStation Portable homebrew software production scene, because scenes simultaneously demarcate specific clusters of cultural activity without specifying the nature of their boundaries (Straw 2004). Attention to PSP’s simultaneous existence, as both an abstract platform and series of material devices, provides a useful means of tracing the

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history of a homebrew software production scene that constructed a metagame (Boluk and LeMieux 2017) played with, alongside, and against Sony. And while the reconstruction and analysis of this game are part of a larger research project, the construction of the scene’s local origin story will be the topic of the following section. This story is speculative, so confirming whether it happened or not is beyond the scope of this chapter. My interest is in how and why it was constructed, and how its construction points to the existence of a forensic imaginary rooted in a translocal assemblage of users which reverse engineered Sony’s localization process and identified a potential local event from which its heritage could be traced. A key event might have occurred days before the PlayStation Portable was released, but seeds were laid six months prior, when the president and chief executive officer of Sony, Ken Kutaragi, announced a new handheld entertainment platform in a rare appearance at  the Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Electronic Entertainment Expo On May 13, 2003, Sony began its annual press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Its president and chief operating officer, Kaz Hirai, began the proceedings by declaring victory in the console wars, before announcing a slew of new, exclusive PlayStation 2 releases. Then, he explained the PlayStation platform strategy and how it would find “the right path to entertainment convergence” (Kutaragi 2003, 3:04–5:10) by integrating content, hardware, and community. Finally, after devoting equal time to software and hardware, Hirai left the stage to make way for Ken Kutaragi: the father of the PlayStation and the president and chief executive officer of Sony Computer Inc. Worldwide. Kutaragi’s background is in engineering, and while engineers are not always acknowledged in game histories, his contributions are noteworthy. Kutaragi is often cited as the engineer who ‘secretly’ designed the S-Sony SMP audio subsystem that was integrated into the Super Famicom, a system which purportedly produced superior sound when compared to the chips used by Nintendo’s competitors (Fahey 2007). Recent scholarship has questioned whether this sound system was an advancement, however, with Arsenault (2017) insisting that it was merely ‘unusual’ and Grabarczyk (2018) claiming that the Amiga 500, which was released prior to the Super Famicom, had already implemented similar technology.

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In addition, Kutaragi’s role in the development of the PlayStation is also linked to a failed Sony/Nintendo collaboration that was not only supposed to produce a Super Nintendo CD add-on drive, but also supposed to produce a new hybrid system that would support cartridges (made by Nintendo) and compact discs (made by Sony). According to news reports, Nintendo backed out of the deal at the last minute (and formed a new partnership with Phillips) when Sony demanded full ownership and control of the rights for games released on CD (Shapiro 1991). Kutaragi’s work at Sony will undoubtedly be an area of future interest and debate amongst game scholars, but too much attention to his role risks overshadowing Sony’s shifting relationship with copyright and intellectual property. Sony has a long history of developing audio-visual technologies and formats, and in 1976 they became involved in a lengthy (and expensive) precedent setting copyright infringement case, when Universal Studios and Walt Disney insisted that they should be liable for infringements committed by purchasers of their Betamax video cassette recorders.1 The case had reached the United States Supreme Court by 1984, and in a narrow decision the court ruled 5-4 in favour of Sony, as the use of video cassette recording technology to copy television broadcasts for the purposes of later viewing was ruled as an exception which fell within the court’s interpretation of fair use.2 According to Johns (2010), the 1984 ruling had an impact on Sony’s corporate strategy, as it demonstrated the rift “between technology and content in the electronics and culture industries”. Shortly after, the company began to vertically integrate itself by purchasing struggling American media companies, beginning with the purchase of CBS records in 1988 and Columbia Pictures in 1989 (p. 458). The establishment of the Sony Computer Entertainment Division (and the failed partnership with Nintendo) followed soon after in 1991, as part of a larger convergence strategy (Jenkins 2006), marked by the marrying of consumer electronics and digital technologies with the production and distribution of games, movies, and music. Sony had integrated music (PlayStation 1) and movie playback (PlayStation 2) into the PlayStation brand by 2003 already, and when Kutaragi took the stage, his theme was the next phase of this strategy, as he introduced a new ‘handheld entertainment platform’ without showing a working prototype of the machine. Instead, he unveiled the 1 2

 See Samuelson (2005).  See Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 US 417 (1984).

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Universal Media Disc format, which looked like a miniature DVD, and coupled cutting edge optical ROM technology with the latest digital rights management techniques (2:19–3:36).

Japanese Release On December 12, 2004, roughly six months after Kutaragi’s announcement, the PlayStation Portable was launched in Japan. Reports indicate that the launch was successful, with over 200,000  units being sold (Locklear 2004). Eleven games were available by the end of the week,3 and the majority of the launch titles belonged to franchises that were already successful in Japan,4 as Sony was leveraging established intellectual property. Lumines (Bandai 2004) was the only new title that had yet to appear locally, a title that would eventually play a role in the homebrew scene when an exploit in its code was found three years later.

Hello World, PSP! On May 5th, 2005, an image began circulating on the internet. Posted to homebrew blogs and forums, this image was evidence of a program running on a PSP that was procedurally and graphically simple. It used purple text over a black background to display the words ‘Hello World, PSP’ and it was accompanied by a link to a post made by the user nem on the PS2 DEV forum (Fig. 8.1).5 Nem—a member of the Saturn Expedition Committee, a group involved in a variety of Sony and Sega-related homebrew projects—had made a breakthrough. A homebrew program, written by Nem, could run 3  Armored Core: Formula Front (From Software), Darstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower (Capcom), Doko Demo Issho (Sony Computer Entertainment), Everybody’s Golf (Clap Hanz), Lumines (Q Entertainment), Mahjong Fight Club (Konami), Dynasty Warriors (Omega Force), Kotoba no Puzzle: Mojipittan (Namco), The Legend of Heroes II: Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch (Nihon Falclom), Metal Gear Acid (Konami), Ridge Racer (Namco), and Ultimate Block Party (Magic Pot). 4  Every game was produced by a Japanese studio, but two never officially left Japan (Doko Demo Issho, and Kotoba no Puzzle: Mojipittan), and out of the remaining nine that eventually appeared in North America, seven were released in Europe, and only one made its way to Australia (Dynasty Warriors). 5  See https://web.archive.org/web/20050518050728/http://forums.ps2dev.org:80/ viewtopic.php?t=1570

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Fig. 8.1  Hello World

on the PSP, and no hardware modifications were needed, provided that the program was running on a PSP sold in Japan during the local launch. Nem did not post an image of the program. An image (which verified that the hack worked) was posted by ooPo, a forum administrator from Canada. This verification was indicative of the fact that PSPs sold in Japan crossed oceans, after being  ordered by early adopters, some who paid above the retail asking price after the initial shipments of Japanese units sold out (Martinez 2004). For this reason, the PSP hacking scene cannot be demarcated by positing Japan as a border. Fortunately, scene theory is not blind to the above interactions because a scene, whether it is geographically bound or not, is also a cultural space where a range of practices coexist, “interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization” (Straw 1991, p. 373). These trajectories, in the case of homebrew, unfold on sociotechnical levels that intersect with other informal production scenes. According to nem’s

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readme file, for example, Hello World, PSP! was compiled using the ps2dev toolchain, a suite of applications used to create homebrew for the PlayStation 2. In comparison, urban music scenes are characterized by similar dynamics, which Straw (1991) points out, as musicians move through different scenes bringing different influences with them. One of the strengths of scene theory is its ability to account for these migrations, and the role that they play in the formation of cultural memory. When a messy assemblage becomes a scene, it is historicized immediately, as the term scene is articulated in the past tense (Bennett and Rogers 2016), rooting new scenes in previous histories, ideas, and events. Hello World, PSP! kickstarted this process of cultural memory, in the case of the PSP scene, as the choice to release that particular program was not only a gesture to the future, but also a simultaneous acknowledgement of the past. Hello World is a simple program, but it is not just any simple program; it is part of a longstanding programming tradition. There are accounts of Hello World programs being written for mainframe computers (Press 1993), and it is the first example exercise published in The C Programming Language (1978), a seminal programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. The first edition of the book, which was a major touchstone in the development of C, is known for its simplicity, clarity, and brevity, which inspired subsequent programmers to use Hello World programs to test new systems. By announcing the hacking of the PlayStation Portable with the release of a Hello World program, nem was sending a signal through the noise and articulating new possibilities by invoking a past. It is this gesture which points to the trajectories of change and cross-fertilization that scene theory neatly conceptualizes for homebrew software production. Hello World, PSP! was a simple program, but its simplicity played an important sociotechnical role in sparking a forensic imagination that demarcated a sense of scene. Nem’s story does not end here: the Saturn Expedition Committee would not be heard from again, but nem joined Team C & D: a hacking super group responsible for the Prometheus project. This project created pandora’s battery and the magic memory stick: an ambitious hack that traced the scene’s heritage to peculiarities found in the firmware of the first batch of PSPs released in Japan. These particularities would be used to speculate about the nature of a mistake made by Sony, before the PSP was released in Japan, but before describing them, it is necessary to provide a brief introduction to the topic of firmware.

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Firmware 1.0 While platforms (Bogost and Montfort 2007), interfaces (Galloway 2012), and software are topics of scholarly discussion, firmware has received minimal attention. Complicating matters further is the fact that firmware is supposed to be firm, as the prefix indicates, with most definitions referring to it as a permanent form of software programmed into read-only memory. However, due to the development of flash memory cell storage6, firmware is no longer firm—it exists in a variety of material instantiations. In the PSP, for example, the firmware is stored in flash memory, creating a situation where it can be updated or erased, and in the case of the PSP homebrew scene it was rewritten and replaced. Sony’s firmware played an important role in the development of PSP homebrew. On a technical level, access to its kernel (TyRaNiD, 8:58–9:12) permitted entry into the computational layer where software interfaces with hardware, giving unofficial developers the ability to create new utilities and applications. And these utilities and applications pushed the technical capabilities of the device which brought the PSP scene to the attention of the media (Rubens 2007). Media coverage prompted public (Arendt 2008) and private responses from Sony, as the corporation pursued a technical as opposed to a legal solution, or the beginnings of what we now know as compulsory firmware updates. Sony could not force users to update their firmware directly, because updates had to be installed manually, so they tried an indirect approach. First, they identified and patched the bugs in the official firmware that were being used to run unsigned code. Then, they released games which required firmware updates that surreptitiously installed the patches. The initial goal was to get homebrew users to update unwittingly, but resistance in the scene was strong. Unofficial developers not only chose the running of homebrew over the playing of new games, they also started searching for new bugs, so users, stuck with updated versions of the firmware, could get unofficial programs to run. The story of this larger metagame (Boluk & LeMieux) that unofficial developers played with, alongside, and against Sony is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it drew considerable attention to Sony’s firmware. And the particularities 6  See Bez, Roberto, Camerlenghi, Emilio, Modelli, Alberto, and Visconti, Angelo. 2003. Introduction to flash memory. Proceedings of the IEEE 91,4: 489–502. doi:10.1109/ JPROC.2003.811702.

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found within this firmware provided a unique heritage for the scene, pointing to risky decisions that Sony might have made in an attempt to harm local competition. During a presentation given at the Chaos Communication Congress, members of Team Noobz provided a breakdown of the PSP’s security system which described the flaws found within it. According to TyRaNiD, the PSP implemented two distinct areas of security: boot time/hardware security and runtime security (2:20–2:51). The boot time security was governed by an engine called Kirk (named after the Captain from Star Trek) and it worked with the runtime security by following a chain of trust protocol, which gives third-party developers access to some system files while prohibiting them from accessing others7 (TyRaNiD, 2:51–3:35). This chain of trust worked with the PSP’s operating system, which was different from most standard personal computer operating systems, as it would turn on when the device was booted up and the menu was running, and turn off when a game or UMD disk was loaded (TyRaNiD, 4:25–4:57), creating a situation where bugs found in games, like Lumines, could take advantage of this discrepancy. Overall, the PSP looked reasonably secure on paper, but according to TyRaNiD Sony did not implement the security system properly (6:52–7:10). Malloc, a user on the ps2dev.org forum, provided the first hint that something might be wrong in a post made on April 27, 2005 (TyRaNiD, 8:02–8:45). According to the post,8 a program was successfully run from a folder on the memory stick intended for firmware updates, leading Malloc to wonder if a bug was present. It was not a bug, as subsequent analysis discovered a set of executable standard ELF files that did not require security protection checks to run, if they were run off a memory stick (TyRaNiD, 8:45–9:00). Using Malloc’s information, and a domain name server redirection trick, Nem was able to read and dump data from the PSP, which enabled the discovery of Sony’s executable format (EBOOT.PBP). Sony’s executable format can be thought of as the signature that the PSP looks for before loading an application. It is supposed to indicate that a file was made by an official developer, but according to Nem’s read me file it could 7  See Kagal, Lalana, Finin, Tim, and Joshi, Anupam. 2001. Trust-based security in pervasive computing environments. Computer 34, 12: 154–157. 8  The post is no longer available online, but it can be found in Tyranid’s PowerPoint presentation at 8:02.

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be compiled using the ps2dev toolchain—a suite of unofficial development programs used for creating homebrew for the PlayStation 2. At the time, creating and running homebrew on the PlayStation 2 required the use of hardware modifications, so the execution of Hello World, PSP was a rare discovery, that is, the revelation that the ps2dev tool chain could be used to create homebrew for the PSP, and that this homebrew could be run without the aid of a hardware modification. After Nem and the Saturn Expedition committee ran an unlicensed program, a buzz spread around the PSP. Sony updated the firmware, which patched the hole Malloc had found, but they could not stop hackers, crackers, and makers interested in tinkering with the device. Communication between these practitioners primarily occurred over Internet Relay Chat, an old, difficult to trace internet communication protocol that is favoured by activists and hacking groups (Maxigas 2017). Through these channels, the PSP was examined forensically by a messy assemblage of teams and individuals with a variety of political and pragmatic motivations. Amongst the many interesting bits of information that the scene uncovered, an analysis of firmware 1.0 identified code which supposedly contained the communication protocol for Sony’s debuggers (TyRaNiD, 10:39–11:06). In other words, firmware 1.0 might have been a debugging firmware, because its ability to run homebrew only makes sense if a backdoor was created for factory testing purposes which someone forgot to close (TyRaNiD, 9:51–10:35). How could this happen? Nintendo was dominating Japan’s mobile gaming market at the time, and the Nintendo DS had just been released in Japan. Given these points, Sony may have been trying to reduce Nintendo’s local market share by releasing a more powerful mobile gaming device shortly after the DS launch (TyRaNiD, 7:24–7:38).

Conclusion Did Kutaragi rush the PSP to market in an effort to hurt Nintendo?9 He would leave Sony Entertainment 3 years after the PSP was released, and reports following his departure described him as an “uncommunicative 9  In a recent keynote address given at the replaying Japan conference in 2018, Kutaragi downplayed the media hype which surrounded the console wars, but he also insisted that he wanted Sony to be more than an existing contributor to the “genre of video games” and a pioneer in a new genre of computer entertainment.

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star executive” (Kane & Dvorak, March 3, 2007, para. 10). But irrespective of the role he might have played, or the motivations he might have had, Sony’s convergence strategy did play a key role in pushing Sega out of the console business. Whether Sony had intended to or not, Dreamcast sales plummeted after the release of the PlayStation 2, due to the latter’s ability to play DVDs (Deeming and Murphy 2017). But Sony would also go on to pursue licensing deals with Sega, as popular Sega franchises, like Sonic the Hedgehog, would eventually appear on PlayStation platforms. On the whole, it is not unreasonable to assume that Sony might have been targeting Nintendo with the goal of pushing them out of hardware, so they could license or (maybe purchase) their intellectual property, and that releasing the PSP before the firmware was ready was an unintended symptom of this broader convergence strategy. Whilst suspicions stemming from the presence of debugging code in the first iteration of the PSP’s firmware have never been addressed by Sony, their validity is not important. What is significant is that a translocal scene (which was comprised of unofficial developers working in multiple hemispheres and regions that include Brazil, Spain, and Mexico) believes in the existence of a speculative event that was unmistakably local and that these speculations were produced by a forensic imaginary rooted in the assumption that no two PSPs are the same. In summary, there is an interesting friction between globalization, localization, and locality that the PSP scene’s forensic imaginary laid bare. The reverse engineering of a localization process not only propelled the growth of a homebrew software production scene; it also facilitated the construction of the scene’s history and the tracing of its heritage. In other words, a history of the PSP homebrew software production scene not only demonstrates how globally distributed game hardware can also meaningfully have local specificity; it also highlights the existence of forensic imaginaries and materially grounded forms of cultural memory that are underrepresented in modern narratives of technological progress. Given the tensions mentioned above, and the tensions inherent in this volume of essays, it is important to consider the further insight that scene theory can provide into the study of game history and culture, and the insight that game history and culture can provide to the study of scenes.

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References Arendt, Susan. 2008. Sony Investigating PSP Hackers Motivations. Wired. https:// www.wired.com/2008/04/sony-­investigat/. Accessed 20 August 2020. Arsenault, Dominic. 2017. Super power, spoony bards, and silverware: The super Nintendo entertainment system. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Bennett, Andy, and Peterson, Richard A, eds. 2004. Music scenes: Local, translocal, and virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Bennett, Andy, and Rogers, Ian. 2016. Popular music scenes and cultural memory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bez, Roberto., Camerlenghi, Emilio., Modelli, Alberto., and Visconti, Angelo. 2003. Introduction to flash memory. Proceedings of the IEEE 91,4: 489–502. https://doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.2003.811702. Bogost, Ian., and Montfort, Nick. 2007. “New media as material constraint: An introduction to platform studies.” In Electronic techtonics: Thinking at the interface. Proceedings of the first international HASTAC conference. Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, April 19–21, 176–193. Boluk, Stephanie, and LeMieux, Patrick. 2017. Metagaming: Playing, competing, spectating, cheating, trading, making, and breaking videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burgess, Jean, and Green, Joshua. 2009. YouTube: Online video and participatory culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Coleman, Gabriella E. 2012. Coding freedom: The ethics and aesthetics of hacking. Princeton: University Press. Deeming, Skot, and Murphy, David. 2017. Pirates, platforms and players: Theorising post-consumer fan histories through the Sega Dreamcast. In Fans and videogames, eds. Melanie Swalwell, Helen Stuckey, and Angela Ndalianis, 75–90. New York: Routledge. Fahey, Rob. 2007. Farewell, father: Charting the rise and fall of Ken Kutaragi. Eurogamer. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/farewell-­father-­article. Accessed 20 August 2020. Galloway, Alexander R. 2012. The interface effect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Grabarczyk, Pawel. 2018. SNES-Not so “Super,” After All. Game studies 18, 1. Grimes, Sara M. 2015. Little big scene: Making and playing culture in media molecule’s LittleBigPlanet. Cultural studies 29, 3: 379–400. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press. Johns, Adrian. 2010. Piracy: The intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kagal, Lalana, Finin, Tim, and Joshi, Anupam. 2001. Trust-based security in pervasive computing environments. Computer 34, 12: 154–157.

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Kane, Yukari Iwatani, and Dvorak, Phred. 2007. Howard Stringer, Japanese CEO. The wall street journal, March 3. Kelty, M.  Christopher. 2008. Two bits: The cultural significance of free software. Stanford: Duke University Press. Keogh, Brendan. 2019. From aggressively formalised to intensely in/formalised: Accounting for a wider range of videogame development practices. Creative industries journal 12, 1: 14–33. Kernighan, Brian, and Ritchie, Dennis. 1978. The c programming language. Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2008. Mechanisms: New media and the forensic imagination. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Kutaragi, Ken. 2003. “Sony press conference.” Electronic entertainment expo, Los Angeles convention center, May 4–16. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=elDDEqZfb94. Accessed 20 August 2020. Locklear, Fred. 2004. 200K pretty sweet purchases during Sony’s Japan PSP launch. ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2004/12/ 4458-2/. Accessed 20 August 2020. Loftus, Tom. 2005. Sony’s PSP is handheld entertainment. MSNBC.com. http:// www.nbcnews.com/id/8645863/ns/technology_and_science-­t ech_and_ gadgets/t/sonys-­psp-­handheld-­entertainment/#.XqWj8GhKg2w. Accessed 20 August 2020. Little Big Planet. 2008. Japan: Sony. Lumines. 2004. Japan: Bandai. Martinez, Hector. 2004. The top ten things you need to know about Sony’s PSP. Gearlive.com. http://www.gearlive.com/index.php/news/article/the_ top_ten_things_you_need_to_know_about_sonys_psp/. Accessed 20 August 2020. Maxigas. 2017. Hackers against technology: Critique and recuperation in technological cycles. Social studies of science 47, 6: 841–860. Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Lagoze, Carl, Edwards, Paul N., and Sandvig, Christian. 2018. Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook. New media & society 20, 1: 293–310. Press, Larry. 1993. Before the Altair: the history of personal computing. Communications of the ACM 36, 9: 27–33. Rubens, Paul. 2007. Three hacker teams unlock the PSP. BBC news, February 26. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6397797.stm. Accessed online 20 August 2020. Samuelson, Pamela. 2005. The Generativity of Sony v. Universal: The Intellectual Property Legacy of Justice Stevens. Fordham law review 74, 1831: 101–143. Shank, Barry. 1988. “Transgressing the boundaries of a rock ‘n’ roll community.” The first joint conference of IASPM Canada and IASPM USA, Yale University, October 1.

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Shank, Barry. 1994. Dissonant identities: The rock’n’roll scene in Austin, Texas. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Shapiro, Eben. 1991. Nintendo-Philips deal is a slap at Sony. The New York times. June 3. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/03/business/nintendo-­philips-­ deal-­is-­a-­slap-­at-­sony.html. Accessed online 20 August 2020. Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 US 417 (1984). Straw, Will. 1991. Systems of articulation, logics of change: Communities and scenes in popular music. Cultural studies 5, 3: 368–388. Straw, Will. 2004. Cultural scenes. Loisir et société/Society and leisure 27, 2: 411–422. Švelch, Jaroslav. 2017. Keeping the Spectrum Alive: Platform Fandom in a Time of Transition. In Fans and videogames: Histories, fandom, archives, eds. Melanie Swalwell, Helen Stuckey, and Angela Ndalianis, 57–74. New  York: Routledge. TyRaNiD. 2007. “PlayStation portable cracking: How in the end we got it all.” 24th Chaos communication congress, Berliner Congress Center, Berlin, Germany, December 27–30. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=INdUZk4NFIA. Accessed online 20 August 2020. Vanderhoef, John. 2016. An industry of indies: the new cultural economy of digital game production. Doctoral Dissertation. University of California, Santa Barbara. Woo, Benjamin, Rennie, Jamie, and Poyntz, Stuart R. 2015. Scene Thinking: Introduction. Cultural Studies 29, 3: 285–297. Young, Chris J. 2017. Game changers: Everyday gamemakers and the development of the video game industry. Doctoral dissertation. University of Toronto, Ontario.

CHAPTER 9

Indie Games of No Nation: The Transnational Indie Imaginary and the Occlusion of National Markers John Vanderhoef

Film and media scholars have long explored national cinemas in terms of cultural expression, creative policy, and the migration from local to global production and consumption contexts. Video games have received lesser critical attention in terms of defining “national games,” with scholars like Mia Consalvo (2006) discussing games in terms of “glocalization,” and hybridizing cultures during the localization process whereby a publisher takes a game produced for one territory and prepares it for release in another. Scholars like Felan Parker and Jennifer Jenson (2017), Melanie Swalwell (2009), and Jaroslav Švelch (2013), and others in this collection, address the specificities of locally produced video game content, both in contemporary and in historical contexts. In particular, this work explores the question of whether or not game designers identify with the country in which they work and the way video games may or may not bespeak the culture in which they are produced. This body of scholarship also

J. Vanderhoef (*) California State University, Dominguez Hills, Long Beach, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_9

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considers other aspects of video games, including content, production practices, and marketing and distribution, in terms of how each negotiates a position between local and transnational expressions and appeals. Typically, as small games that often reflect a more personal investment by developers, indie games might be expected to reflect their national culture of origin more profoundly than their corporate-produced brethren. This follows for the same reason national cinema is often defined by independent filmmakers supported by state-run film programs that fund local movies under the logic of protecting national cultural production against the threat of Hollywood hegemony. Parker and Jenson argue that Canadian indie game developers, some of whom take advantage of domestic creative policy funding, discursively position themselves somewhere between their local indie communities, in places like Toronto, and the larger global/transnational indie game community. What is left out, according to their research, is a sense of national identity. In dialogue with the scholarship on national markers and video games, this chapter examines the production and publishing of small indie games that often feature little or no relation to the geographic or cultural context in which they are produced. This chapter extends Parker and Jenson’s conception of “transnational game identities,” as identities that swivel between identification with the hyper-local and the global, through an examination of Polish indie games and their developers since the Polish industry’s formalization in the 1990s. Through this examination, I consider a range of aspects related to local specificity in game development, including content, production practices, marketing, and distribution, while also suggesting that these aspects change over time, fluctuating between specific expressions of localism and a larger shared transnational imaginary of indie games. As an industry that sought legitimacy starting in the 1990s after a formalized global circulation of games had already been established, Poland offers a longitudinal example of how local game industries navigate between cultural specificity and a transnational imaginary. Therefore, examining the ways the Polish video game industry navigated between locally specific tastes and a transnational appeal over the course of its emergence as a formal node in the global games industry illustrates the ongoing tension between the local and the trans-local, the national and the transnational. Key to my intervention in this chapter is a concept that I’m calling a “transnational indie imaginary.” The discourse on the national has always been in conversation with the discourse on the transnational, with the

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former concerned with politics of containment and preservation and the latter highlighting the limitations, if not the impossibility, of such a project in a globalized world. As Adrian Athique (2014) suggests, “The emerging discourse of ‘transnational’ mediation tends to emphasize the insistent cultural flows that escape and/or circumvent fixed territories and national structures” (5). These insistent cultural flows are propelled by insistent flows of capital, resources, and ideas between nations and the people who reside within them. When I use the term transnational, then, I mean precisely the inevitable and unpredictable flow of information, people, products, culture, and resources between nations in an era of globalization. When this notion is combined with the products and cultures of indie game production, I suggest a transnational indie imaginary is produced. By this I mean a shared popular conception of indie games, including mechanics, aesthetics, and iconography, between developers from all over the world, shaped and reshaped by an ongoing and unfolding discourse of indie games produced through the global video game culture and industry. The concept of a transnational indie imaginary, I argue, encapsulates portions of Parker and Jensen’s “transnational game identities,” mentioned above, but also offers a way to talk about the spectrum of indie games that include hyper-local, national, and transnational expressions, and a spectrum that ranges from esoteric to larger shared elements of iconography, mechanics, and aesthetics. The way a video game might express its cultural, geographic, and national point of origins is complex. Considerations include aesthetic, ideological, and mechanical qualities, as well as explicit or implicit cultural references. The Canadian-ness, Chinese-ness, or the Polishness of a game might be seen differently depending on what aspects of the game one considers. While grounded in the case of Polish indies, I argue that many commercial indie developers around the world omit or occlude national signifiers in their games in order to (re)produce transnational entertainment products that appeal to global markets, especially Western markets with robust digital game economies. This argument does not foreclose the possibility of indie games embracing more specific national signifiers, but instead suggests that such examples are exceptions rather than the rule in a global marketplace that privileges genre tropes and innovative mechanics over cultural narratives embedded in specific geographies and cultures.

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Discourses on (Trans)National Cinema and Video Games While the work on nationalism and transnationalism in video games is still emerging, much has been written on these subjects in relation to cinema. Stephen Crofts (1993) has argued that national cinemas take a variety of forms, which may include stylistic, aesthetic, or cultural tendencies. The identification of any one national cinema is dependent on continually shifting discourses produced by several interest groups, including “politicians, trade organizations, distributors, critics, historians, journalists and audiences” (Higson 2000, 63). Andrew Higson (2000) has called the “national cinemas” concept into question as a malleable, discursive category, arguing that while national cinema does act as an efficient taxonomic term, it often fetishizes the idea of the nation rather than describing its complexities and contradictions, prevents the potentially productive comparison of media between countries, and neglects a great deal of the “cultural diversity, exchange and interpenetration” that always already define media production locally, regionally, and transnationally (64). Higson’s articulation of the limitations of national cinemas argument has been influential on the thinking of national, transnational, and global cinema scholarship, with many scholars struggling to reconcile the need to protect local cultural expressions with the necessarily transnational nature of collaborative media labour, global distribution, and audience diasporas in an era of globalization. The blockbuster video game series Assassin’s Creed exemplifies the concept of the transnational game. Since each of its entries relies on recreating historically and geographically specific areas, from Revolutionary Boston to Turn of the Century London, it is ironic that the series is actually produced through the collaboration of ten or more game studios distributed around the world, from Canada to France to Singapore. Through its international collaborative development pipeline, the game series can both claim to be the creation of multiple nationalities and cultures working together while simultaneously becoming a game that reflects no single national influence and thus is naturalized as a transnational product for players all over the world. While the locales of Assassin’s Creed games are painstakingly specific, such as Assassin’s Creed: Origins’ recreation of late Ptolemaic-era Egypt, the development is dispersed and transnational, emblematic of contemporary triple-A game development practices.

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In line with the transnational appeal of the Assassin’s Creed series, commercial indie developers produce games intended for transnational markets, particularly markets in developed countries, and often put far more emphasis on dominant mechanics and generic themes than nationally and culturally specific scenarios. The result is a transnational video game market where it is difficult to pinpoint, without doing research on the developer, just where and within what cultural context many indie games have been created. For every Witcher from Poland, Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-­ Odan from Cameroon, and Persona from Japan, all of which bespeak aspects of their local cultures, there are games like Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games), Broforce (Free Lives), Mother Russia Bleeds (Le Cartel), and Shadow Warrior, which few players would ever guess were developed in Sweden, South Africa, France, and Poland, respectively. Although core development on indie games is only occasionally split between several nations, there is still a transnational quality to indie game development. This transnationalism is enacted virtually across online forums and Discord channels where otherwise-isolated game developers may congregate to share triumphs and struggles. It also manifests physically as indie developers travel to various game conferences, conventions, gamejams, and festivals around the world to promote their creative work. This transnational indie community, created through online and festival interactions, becomes what Pierson Browne (2015) calls the “imagined indie community,” one that eschews the barrier of nations and borders and instead embraces the shared ideals and values discursively constructed in the indie community, such as creativity, autonomy, collaboration, and a do-it-yourself ethos. Like the concept of national cinema that Croft and Higson critique, transnational games are also understood through a shifting discourse shaped by developers, publishers, game critics, and players all over the world, most of whom reinforce the quality of placelessness in these games by focusing on their unique features and mechanics rather than elements that betray a specific cultural or geographic origin. The national identity of indie developers often becomes subsumed by this imagined transnational identity. Parker and Jenson note that “national identification is conspicuously absent” as a binding agent for the formation of indie communities both online and offline. Instead of the national, then, Parker and Jenson note that it is the space between local development cultures and communities and the transnational community of indie developers, largely from the West and/or Global North, where many commercial indie game designers get their sense of identity as game

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creators. As evidenced by Parker and Jenson’s study and bolstered by my interview excerpts below of contemporary Polish indie developers, most developers do not overtly identify with their geographic and cultural context. As Parker and Jenson describe it, “Identification with local communities and the generalized, ‘global’ ideals of indie-ness trump national allegiance for most” indie developers. Additionally, as this chapter contends, most games are marketed and sold as experiences that occlude their national origins, games that are instead part of a shared transnational/ global lexicon. Few players understand themselves to be playing a United States game, a Canadian game, a Chinese game, or a Polish game. These national markers become erased through the process of migration, marketing, and reception. When thinking through the concept of nationally specific video games, then, we should recognize that all contemporary video games are produced already in conversation with the production of games and player expectations from other countries and regions. In other words, embracing the idea of the transnational rather than the national game illuminates the exchange of knowledge, labour, information, and capital that drives the dynamic global games business. The history of the Polish video game industry betrays this always already transnational component of game development. Poland transitioned from a Soviet era of pirated games on floppy discs and tapes being smuggled across borders to a post-Soviet era where these practices gradually became formalized. In this formalization period, the Polish industry shifted from an industry defined by informal piracy to one built on a foundation of legitimate contracts to localize and distribute foreign game software. Locally developed games in the early formalized Polish industry were influenced by games from the West, like Baldur’s Gate, even as early game companies began to invest more on original properties and benefit from foreign investment and partnerships with major transnational publishers.

The Formalization of the Polish Game Industry and the Rise of Transnational Polish Indie Games Starting with its liberalization in 1989, Poland transformed its Soviet, state-run economy to a free market environment, leading the way for the private media sector to take root. Without the barrier of the Iron Curtain, Polish people eagerly travelled to formerly closed-off, Western European

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countries, buying up computer software, and bringing it back to copy and sell on the streets. Like many territories without console markets, Poland’s game industry developed around the personal computer since consoles were not widely available until after liberalization. Maria B. Garda (2016) has written about how cheap PCs from the West flooded the market in the late 1980s and early 1990s, resulting in an informal market of pirated games on floppy-disks, tapes, and CDs that were piled up in baskets at makeshift street stalls. The sale of pirated software at flea markets and bazaars spearheaded the growth of the local industry, leading to the establishment of some of today’s most successful Polish game companies. As Poland’s free market economy grew and prospered, new rules and regulations, like copyright laws and trade tariffs, were put into place to foster continued economic growth and cultivate partnerships with foreign publishing partners wary of piracy. After the Polish Copyright Act of 1994, the pirated game industry in Poland collapsed. One of the early major companies to survive this collapse, Techland, diversified its operations, expanding its staff and shifting its business strategy to the development of original games. The 1994 Copyright Act also led to the formation of CD Projekt, which had previously been an illegal distribution operation. The Copyright Act marked the beginning of a period of prolific local game development in the country, as well as official game imports and exports. Distributors like Techland and CD Projekt reached out to developers in other countries, including the United States, in order to secure the Polish distribution rights to popular PC titles like Baldur’s Gate and Warcraft. Since the late 1990s, the Polish video game industry has continued to grow with major international publishers setting up shop in the country even as domestic studios have produced titles shipped around the world. For instance, one of the earliest international Polish hits was a turn-based tactics game from Metropolis called Gorky 17, distributed in the United States by Monolith Productions in 1999 under the title Odium, and eventually published in every major territory except for South America. After joining the European Union in 2004, Poland was recognized for its burgeoning economy by multinational companies whose investments helped fuel further growth. Game giants Ubisoft and Sony soon established regional headquarters in the country, with companies like Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and Nintendo following suit. Most prominently, CD Projekt formed CD Projekt Red in 2002, a subsidiary studio dedicated to game development. Combining state-of-the-art presentation, familiar tropes of Western roleplaying games, and the works of a Polish fantasy author, CD

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Projekt Red’s Witcher games are some of the few Polish-produced titles to embrace a combination of local culture and global appeal. Acting as veritable clearing houses for the Polish industry, former employees of Techland and CD Projekt have gone on to form indie studios like Flying Wild Hog, the Astronauts, 11 bit Studios, and many others. Having been formalized for almost three decades, the Polish industry has only increased its tethers to the larger transnational flows of video game culture, capital, and creative labour. Polish developers and publishers work with other publishers and developers from around the world. For instance, Techland and CD Projekt partner with publishers like Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment or Electronic Arts for distribution outside of Poland. Smaller Polish studios and indies have established relationships with boutique publishers like Devolver Digital, a small publishing and promotional team based out of Austin, Texas. Devolver Digital does not market its suite of indie games based on their country of origin. Instead, this information is omitted based on the assumption that the cultural context in which the game was produced is not relevant to the final product. If the games themselves are not invested in their national identity, Devolver has no reason to highlight it in a game’s promotion either. Meanwhile, Polish indie developer-turned-publisher, 11 bit Studios, have published games from indies in the United States, such as Children of Morta from Texas-based Dead Mage Studios. From the country’s early days of smuggling computers and pirated games across borders to its current status as a major node in the global ecosystem of video games, Poland has maintained a transnational video game imaginary, consisting of shared materials, technologies, genres, mechanics, and iconography. I suggest this reflects a larger trend in indie game development around the world. In the current era of the imagined indie community of developers and players, video games produced by indie developers are transnational by design.

The Occlusion of National Markers Formed in 2009, Flying Wild Hog is one of Poland’s premiere indie developers with offices in central Warsaw. Yet most of their games do not reference Poland’s unique culture or history directly. One of their early breakout hits, 2013’s Shadow Warrior, is a first-person shooter about a corporate shogun who must find an ancient weapon while battling gangsters and demons. As a remake of an early FPS game originally developed

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by Texas-based 3D Realms in 1997, Shadow Warrior sticks closely to the fundamentals of the genre developed in the late 1990s, such as fluid movement, the spatial logic of a first-person perspective, and gratuitous violence. Much of the game involves battling hordes of enemies, either human or demonic, in open environments using a combination of a sword and firearms. Like many Western-developed video games, historically and today, Shadow Warrior draws on an orientalist understanding of eastern cultures, conflating eastern mysticism, gangsters, and martial arts to create a pastiche of the dramatic East as seen through the Western imagination. In a particularly egregious instance of this, the white voice actor Jason Liebrecht plays the protagonist, Lo Wang, with a stereotypical, culturally insensitive Asian accent. In this regard, Shadow Warrior follows the Western tradition of Orientalist—or what Dean Chan calls “neo-orientalist”—video game design (Everett and Watkins 2008; Chan 2005). Rather than prominent markers of Polish identity, Shadow Warrior instead pays homage to a transnational indie game imaginary. This shared and intertextual imaginary includes allusions and direct references to other popular indie games at the time, such as Swedish-developed Hotline Miami, the Croatian-developed Series Sam, the original, Texas-developed Shadow Warrior, and, in a self-referential turn, even the Flying Wild Hog’s own FPS indie game Hard Reset. The impulse for commercial indie game studios around the world is not to necessarily create games that reflect their local or national cultures, but instead to create transnational games that share similar qualities, be they transnationally recognizable genres, like first-person shooters or platformers, the use of English as a game’s default language, a shared sense of gaming nostalgia and history, or allusions to other prominent indie games. The influence of the transnational indie imaginary tends to occlude the culturally specific qualities of games. The verb “occlude” here is important, because I am not suggesting that no evidence of cultural origins exists in video games, or indie games specifically, produced for global markets. Instead, I am arguing that the shared transnational imaginary of video game culture, and more specifically indie game culture, routinely takes precedence. Even Polish developers struggle to define what makes a game Polish. For example, several Polish developers I talked to had to think hard while trying to come up with an answer to this question. Konstanty Kilicki, from developer Thing Trunk, suggests that a need to

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convey a deeper meaning and what he characterizes as an over-the-top Slavic sensibility are two characteristics of Polish games that have emerged: I guess this is part of our mentality as a nation. We have this pressure to create things that convey some deeper meaning. There is a message in it. There is some substance. We don’t do stuff that’s empty or just for fun. There should be something more, some deeper meaning under the initial experience you get from the game.

In regards to cultural touchstones in games, Flying Wild Hog studio lead Klaudiusz Zych suggests: It’s very hard to get rid of it. Because you have some cultural heritage. Basically, every Polish game has an influence of Polish culture. In Hard Reset, for example, there were levels that we designed using architecture from the center of Warsaw. I think there is always a strong force. I don’t know if it’s a thought-out decision. Sometimes it just comes this way.

The influence of local cityscapes on the design of Hard Reset suggests the impossibility of ever completely obscuring a game’s cultural origins, but unless somebody has an intimate understanding of Warsaw architecture, the significance would be lost on them. Yet beyond specific reference points, some developers suggest that Poland’s history with conflict and occupation has influenced many of its games. 11 bit Studios’ Pawel Miewchowski admits that his studio’s 2014 game, This War of Mine, which he wrote and directed, does feel like a European game, if not a distinctly Polish game. He remarks: When it comes to This War of Mine, I believe it’s a game that would be more likely to be developed in Europe than America. Because Europe remembers war from the perspective of people from years ago. The last time America has been badly touched by war is the Civil War. Nobody remembers it. So being torn apart from how war really looks means this game probably couldn’t be done in America . . . My point is that even thinking about developing this project is easier for us than for Americans.

This War of Mine chronicles the story of displaced citizens trying to survive under the conditions of war. Players command a small group of survivors to scavenge for food amongst bombed-out buildings and avoid detection from occupying soldiers. It’s a dour, gloomy game steeped in

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Polish cultural memory of similar conditions under German occupation during World War II, the late-war Warsaw Uprising, and life under Soviet rule in the latter half of the twentieth century. Considering games like The Witcher and This War of Mine, Nitreal’s Sadowski explains, “Of course, there are many Polish accents [or markers]. But that is not the same as making games feel Polish. So, we have The Witcher. CI Games did Enemy Front, which had elements relating to the Warsaw Uprising. Different companies are experimenting with either Polish cultural elements a little bit or just Polish history.” Sadowski mentions a few prominent examples of games that emphasize their regional histories and influences. Yet these are only a handful of examples compared to the dozens of games produced in Poland and played all over the world. Most Polish-developed games, like Shadow Warrior or Transhuman Design’s Butcher, emphasize game mechanics and iconography that suggest influences from a shared transnational indie imaginary rather than a shared national culture. Given Poland’s lack of state support for the video game industry, perhaps it is not surprising that commercially produced indie games do not feel the need to draw more from the rich Polish tradition of political resistance, literature, art, or film. Many countries construct their cultural policies around the promotion and preservation of national culture. For instance, organizations like the Canada Council for the Arts, the Korean Ministry of Culture, or the Polish Film Institute all exist to protect the interests and expressions of local art and media production. The support of organizations like these often results in media, like films, that have distinct local characteristics. However, Flying Wild Hog is not in a position where it has to justify its games as purveyors of Polish culture. Some Polish indie studios have taken advantage of European Union funds for cultural or educational game projects, using these projects as stepping-stones to commercial game development, but most developers exist outside of government and NGO influence or support. In fact, unlike many countries such as the UK and Australia, where game developers are eager to embrace state funding, many Polish developers adopt a neoliberal stance against government involvement in the industry. This is likely because of the country’s history with the totalitarian Soviet regime, which engendered a distrust for government institutions. Unlike cinema, which is supported by the Polish Film Institute, Poland’s cultural policy seemingly does not recognize video games as distinct and influential cultural products.

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Despite the lack of state support for the video game industry, the government has used The Witcher series repeatedly on the international stage to promote Poland’s thriving digital and creative economy. This form of recognition recalls Grieg de Peuter’s (2012) conception of “talent nationalism,” whereby national pride is attached to the prestige of cultural products, whether they do or do not represent national culture. The Witcher series has become a symbol of Poland’s thriving digital and creative economy, a position supported by the fact that Polish Prime Minister Donald Trusk gifted Witcher 2 to President Obama when he visited Poland in May 2011. Outside of a shared history that stems back to hobbyist PC development and distribution in the 1980s and 1990s, little about the contemporary Polish games industry’s general output calls particular attention to its national or cultural origin. Even with the deep and troubling ethno-nationalism currently consuming Polish politics, Polish indie games largely do not express a sense of national-cultural pride. It is notable that Polish developers do not think of themselves or their games as necessarily Polish. Instead, many studios make a conscious effort not to develop what could easily be construed as a Polish game. When I talked to him in 2014, Daniel Sadowski, co-founder of Warsaw-based Nitreal Studios, explains: I don’t think that most people who are making games in Poland want these games to feel Polish. Because let’s be honest, the games are not made for the Polish market. They are made for international markets . . . It’s easy when the game is set in some [specific] country. For example, the Metro series— the same with the Witcher because of the cultural background. But in other types of games, the story is a little more generic . . . Can you tell, for example, which country made Fez, which country made The Gods Will be Watching, which country made Anomaly Defenders? These games are in English. They have English-speaking characters. There is not really anything in this game that was made in this or that country.

Sadowski emphasizes the goal of transnational circulation for most Polish indie games while also pointing to games like Fez, developed by Polytron in Canada, and The Gods Will be Watching, developed by Spain-based Deconstructeam, as examples of transnational indie games whose national and cultural origins have been obscured. Even as he recognizes the influence the region’s history of war and occupation had on him when producing This War of Mine, 11 bit studios’

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Pawel Miewchowski agrees that Polish developers aim for a transnational appeal rather than communicating a local flavour. Miewchowski suggests, “It’s completely international, because gameplay-wise, the rules are attractive for all gamers all around the world . . . I don’t think there’s anything specific about the way we’ve made our games or how they work.” Miewchowski and 11 bit developed the Anomaly Defenders series mentioned by Sadowski above as another example of a transnational indie game. Adopting the once popular tower-defence genre, Anomaly Defenders has players construct defensive bulwarks and artillery batteries along linear paths in order to fend off an alien invasion. Like most transnational indie games, Defenders leans into its generic qualities while aiming for intuitive design and pleasurable feedback, none of which necessarily embraces its status as a Polish-developed indie game. Operating within a transnational digital game marketplace that privileges design over narrative, it stands to reason that commercial Polish indie developers would position their games as global rather than local products, as culturally placeless rather than specific. For instance, in addition to being a game that lacks overt Polish markers, Shadow Warrior is also the product of a transnational development team. With a Polish development team and an American writer, the game represents the transnational flow of creative labour endemic to the video game industry as a whole. Flying Wild Hog studio lead Klaudiusz Zych explains, “For Shadow Warrior, we had one writer from New  York, an American. We needed someone from the West to tell us what western culture would like and what they wouldn’t. We had two writers and designers from here, but we needed to work with someone out there to polish our dialogue.” With the recruitment of an American writer to join two Polish writers, Shadow Warrior was built with an appeal to a Western, English-speaking audience in mind. The dialogue in the game was written primarily in English and only translated to other languages later. Rather than a game that revels in Polish cultural specificity, Shadow Warrior represents a transnational gaming imaginary, one that brings together an IP and dialogue-writer sourced from the United States with a Polish development team that grew up playing Western game imports like the original 1997 Shadow Warrior. While themes like resistance, war, and occupation pervade a subset of Polish indie titles, much of the Polish cultural residue in these games fades into the background, recognizable only to knowledgeable observers.

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Game Engines as Cultural Markers One significant factor in the emergence of a shared transnational indie imaginary has been the ubiquity of game production tools. Ubiquitous game engines like Unity and Unreal have contributed to a general shared look and feel for many indie games made today. As Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh argue in their book, The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software, the Unity engine, in particular, provides what the authors call a certain “grain” to the games produced with the software. Nicoll and Keogh (2019) remind us that game engines often dictate design principles, workflows, and a certain “look and feel” for the games made within their systems (63). Since the majority of commercial indie games produced today use either Unreal or Unity, many share an underlying design methodology and a particular visual and mechanical style, despite seeming to be singular artistic expressions at first blush. While Unreal and Unity game engines currently dominate indie game development around the world, Eastern European game developers, including those in Poland, have traditionally invested resources in writing original game engines for each project. This follows for several reasons. First, up until 2010 these countries generally lacked dedicated game development programs at universities and other higher learning institutions. As a result, many aspiring game developers enrolled in computer science departments that emphasized engineering and coding. These skills were cornerstones of a Soviet education, according to Konstanty Kilicki of Polish developer Thing Trunk during my conversation with him in 2014. The first generation of Polish game developers were highly trained engineers used to creating their own game engines. Before the hegemony of Unreal and Unity, game developers around the world often had to create their own game engines because licensing fees for established game engines were exorbitant. Flying Wild Hog’s Zych notes how it used to be normal for small Polish game companies to make their own game engines to save money on licensing fees. As Zych remarks, “Smaller companies and start-ups just couldn’t afford it. So, we decided to do our own engine, because we knew what to do and how to do it fast.” For their early games, Flying Wild Hog used their own proprietary engines on projects like Hard Reset and Shadow Warrior. It wasn’t until their 2014 platformer Juju that the developer switched to Unreal. While many dedicated game design programs have emerged in Poland over the last 15 years, early on these programs still required students to

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build their own engines. Daniel Sadowsky recalls his time at the Polish Japanese Institute for Information Technology, one of the earlier game design programs available in Poland and one indicative of the engineering emphasis of the pre-indie period. Sadowsky explains, “Back then, the guys concentrated mostly on hardcore C++ programming and Direct X programming. That was the main focus: to learn Direct X and become fluent with C++. The goal was that everyone that could finish their specialization could program their own game engine from scratch.” The idea was to produce highly competent coders who could learn game design as more of a soft skill along the way. In contrast, most game design schools today try to produce students who are skilled in a variety of game design talents, including coding, modelling, animation, and level design. Sadowsky points to the accessibility of engines like Unreal and Unity as one of the most profound impacts on the growth of indie scenes in Poland and around the world. He suggests, “There are tons and tons of smaller and bigger engines that you can use to easily make games. You don’t have to worry about technology anymore. You only have to worry about making games. And that caused this switch from Warsaw or Poland or actually the whole world having only big companies, everyone switched now to tons and tons of smaller studios because game development suddenly became easier.” What often gets ignored in the discourse of accessibility, however, is precisely what Nicoll and Keogh point out in their cultural examination of the Unity game engine. The shadow of accessibility is a shared underlying structure that produces an uncanny similarity between many of the world’s indie games. In contrast to the past concentration on hard coding skills, most Polish schools today now incorporate Unity or Unreal in the classroom experience. What is lost in this shift is the specific feels and quirks of original proprietary engines, which may be tied to specific cultural sensibilities. If original engines might betray a local specificity, the current hegemony of Unreal and Unity speaks to the shared transnational imaginary of most commercial indie games today. Some critics have expressed that the over-reliance on the Unity engine in the transnational indie development community has actually had a homogenizing effect on the output of indie games, creating a generation of games from all over the world that share similar visuals, physics, and overall feel. The contra to this critique, which laments the loss of innovation in favour of development ease, is that standardized game engines have allowed many more people to develop games who may lack the abilities to develop their own engines from scratch. The

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debate over the use of standard engines versus original, proprietary ones thus breaks down between what we might call innovation idealists and those advocating for greater access to game development. While it is not in this chapter’s purview to engage in this specific debate, it is worth noting that countries like Poland and Japan, which previously created proprietary engines for each new game project, have largely transitioned to standardized engines like Unity or Unreal in order to reduce the perpetually rising costs of game development. The result is a greater percentage of games from all over the world sharing the same backbone of code, which further supports the occlusion of national markers, not on the aesthetic or narrative levels, but instead in the shared background processes for which standardized engines are so useful.

A Shared Transnational Indie Imaginary Except for some informed players who understand The Witcher’s origins as a Polish fantasy novel series, few Western game players who encounter Polish made video games know that they are playing a Polish cultural product. Outside of countries like the United States and Japan, with series like Call of Duty and Persona, the average player, if asked, would be hard-­ pressed to identify the national origin of most video games, even smaller indie ones. Here I have argued that commercial indie developers from across many nations routinely emphasize aesthetics, narratives, systems, and game mechanics that are part of a transnational indie imaginary. Taking advantage of these shared formations, indie game creators often privilege dominant transnational genres and subject matter rather than culturally specific narratives and concerns. Although games like The Witcher and This War of Mine feel grounded in, respectively, a local fantasy narrative and specific historical experiences of military occupation, games like Shadow Warrior, Call of Juarez, or Butcher could just as easily have been produced elsewhere. The first two examples are modelled after the Western tradition of the first-person shooter while the latter follows a 2D shooter model, but all of them are built specifically to appeal to a transnational gaming audience. These games may speak to the “over-the-top Slavic sensibility,” as Kilicki puts it, but this nuance is probably lost in translation as players of these games give themselves over to the shared, transnational cultural fantasy of relentlessly blasting away at enemies.

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This argument is not about dismissing the local specificity of production, textual, and consumption practices. As much as transnational publishers and media conglomerates want us to think that talent and labour are fungible between geographies, there is value in a strong local creative force. Indeed, in recognition of local game developers as artists worth investing in, scholars have argued for increased state support of local video game industries. Brendan Keogh and John Banks (2018) have petitioned the Australian government to increase funding for Australia’s development sector, rich with indie talent, who have seen their local industry ebb and flow over the last twenty years. Likewise, in their study of Canadian indie developers, Parker and Jenson found that the only scenario in which most Canadian indie developers thought of themselves as Canadian was in their relationship to government and industry institutions, such as the Canada Media Fund. This suggests that cultural policy agencies act as focal points for a shared sense of cultural identity and perform the work of fostering locally specific artistic work. Unfortunately, in recent years the most effective arguments for state support tend to be rooted not so much in preserving cultural output as in preserving economic competitiveness and viability. This mindset, largely absent in the Polish context, sees state funding as helping to attract investment in the industry and level the global playing field, not unlike state incentives that make various global locales desirable for Hollywood production or VFX studios (Curtin and Vanderhoef 2015). Thus, we are seeing a larger global shift from cultural policies invested in preserving local culture to creative policies that are instead meant to foster local economic activity regardless of cultural stewardship. This chapter contends that rather than games that embrace local specificity or national culture, many commercial indie games are developed as culturally ambiguous, games of no nation that share a transnational indie imaginary, whether rooted in their engineering, design, aesthetics, or narratives. To argue for the transnational understanding of many commercial indie games is not to claim a homogenized creative landscape or discount the local flourishes that do exist in games, whether clear or obscured, but instead to acknowledge the transnational economic, political, and cultural forces that continue to shape and reshape the video game industry around the world, from the largest to the smallest commercial studios.

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References Athique, Adrian. 2014. Transnational Audiences: Geocultural Approaches. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 28(1): 4–17. Browne, Pierson. 2015. Jumping the Gap: Indie Labour and the Imagined Indie Community. Concordia University, 84. http://spectrum.library.concordia. ca/980737/. Chan, Dean. 2005. Playing with Race: The Ethics of Racialized Representations in E-Games. International Review of Information Ethics 4: 24–30. Consalvo, Mia. 2006. Console video games and global corporations: Creating a hybrid culture. New Media & Society 8(1): 117–137. Crofts, Stephen. 1993. Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14: 49–67. Curtin, Michael, and John Vanderhoef. 2015. A Vanishing Piece of the Pi: The Globalization of Visual Effects Labor. Television & New Media 16(3): 219–239. De Peuter, Grieg. 2012. Video Games Production: Level Up. In Cultural Industries.ca: Making Sense of Canadian Media in the Digital Age, eds. Ira Wagman and Peter Urquhart, 77–93. Toronto, ON: James Lorimer & Company. Everett, Anna, and Craig Watkins. 2008. The Power of Play: The Portrayal and Performance of Race in Video Games. In The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, eds. Katie Salen, 141–166. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Garda, Maria B. 2016. Who Made That Last Game? The Alternative Chronology of the 8-bit Era in Poland. Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG: http://www.digra.org/wp-­content/uploads/digital-­ library/paper_394.pdf. Higson, Andrew. 2000. The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema. In Cinema and Nation, eds. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 63–74. New  York: Routledge. Keogh, Brendan, and John Banks. Feb. 12, 2018. Beyond Startups: Supporting Australian Videogame Culture. Overland: https://overland.org.au/2018/02/ beyond-­startups-­supporting-­australian-­videogame-­culture/. Nicoll, Benjamin, and Brendan Keogh. 2019. The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software. Palgrave Macmillan, 63. Parker, Felan, and Jennifer Jenson. 2017. Canadian Indie Games Between the Global and the Local. Canadian Journal of Communication 4(5): 867–891. Švelch, Jaroslav. 2013. Say it with a computer game: Hobby computer culture and the non-entertainment uses of homebrew games in the 1980s Czechoslovakia. Game Studies 13(2): http://gamestudies.org/1302/articles/svelch. Swalwell, Melanie. 2009. Towards the Preservation of Local Computer Game Software Challenges, Strategies, Reflections. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 15(3): 263–279.

CHAPTER 10

Video Games Have Never Been Global: Resituating Video Game Localization History Stephen Mandiberg

Video games are often understood to be the first ‘global’ medium. Just as play is taken as a natural element within all human cultures (Huizinga 1955), video games are taken to be globally legible. This understanding is particularly supported within video game industry rhetoric. Take, for example, the Japanese cover of Wired from December 2012, which depicts the Angry Birds characters as Chewbacca, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and Darth Vader. This mash-up of the video game Angry Birds and the film Star Wars for a Japanese magazine is accompanied by the English phrase ‘Global Gaming.’ The words and image overwhelm the magazine cover’s visual space, pushing the Japanese description into much smaller text on the magazine cover’s bottom section. Within this visual rhetoric, video games are global despite the very local origins of Star Wars (United States), Angry Birds (Finland), and the English language. In contrast to this rhetoric of the global, video games are developed in national

S. Mandiberg (*) University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_10

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locales and then adapted for other national markets through processes of localization. In this case, the Finnish company Rovio Mobile created the video game Angry Birds in 2009 for the Nokia N900 and Apple iPhone and distributed the game digitally into markets around the world. Rovio then acquired the rights to use the Star Wars characters in a new version of the Angry Birds formula in 2012. The local particulars and frictional interactions between developers, publishers, creators, and players are all wiped out under the rhetoric of global legibility and flow. Video games, we are shown here, are global, and regardless of who you are and where you live you can play them (Fig. 10.1). Video games are not global in some passive, or essential sense. Rather, it is the video game industry’s localization practices that help to wipe out, or at least render invisible, the friction that occurs between the global and the local. This follows Anna Tsing’s (2005) theorization of globalization as something that comes out of frictional intersecting local conditions and actions. When publishers (with the help of developers, translators, marketers, and others) allow video games to travel, those games are marked as global; when video games (or elements within them) are prevented from moving they are marked as local. Localization, then, is a practice that constitutes and is constituted by globalization. Unfortunately, the way that localization helps create the ideas of global and local gets lost within the way that localization is understood historically as a simple means of linguistic translation that enables players in different locations around the world to play the ‘same’ game. Contemporary video game localization is a complex practice that involves the distributed cooperation of translators, testers, developers, and producers to alter a video game made in one locale for sale in another locale. In addition to linguistic alteration from one local language to another, video game localization can involve audio and graphical changes, UI manipulation, paratextual redesign, and even gameplay alterations (O’Hagan and Mangiron 2013). The origin of video game localization history is typically located in the late 1970s and early 1980s when text was first linguistically translated in order to move video games between Japan, North America, and European regions (Bernal-Merino 2011; Hasegawa 2009). Situating the origin of video game localization within the late 1970s, when linguistic text-like instructions and dialogue were first used within the game code, reinforces the general understanding of localization as a linguistic translation practice that exists to adapt an otherwise understandable game. After all, if it is the language that requires localization,

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Fig. 10.1  The December 2012 issue of Wired sold within Japan

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then there is an essential game form (the rules, mechanics, or dynamics) that can be understood as natural and therefore universal. The 1970s origin of localization renders invisible the more general practice of adapting video games so that they could travel between regions, which began two decades earlier, when Spacewar! was moved between different university supercomputers around the United States and when the physical tennis was adapted into Tennis for Two, PingPong, Pong, and all of its clones. While the earliest video games had no linguistic elements to translate, they were still altered each time they were moved, and these alterations were then critically influential on the further development (or lack thereof) of video games. In pushing video game localization history back two decades, this essay problematizes the currently subscribed rhetoric of improvement within video game localization history that focuses on the increased ability of localization industry workers to adapt an increasing number of elements within video games to facilitate an idealized, globally understandable experience. While the currently subscribed teleological history of video game localization certainly fits into the typically upgrade-focused history of video games and helps justify the relevance of localization monetarily, it does not grasp the nuances of what video game localization does as a non-­ linguistic practice. By troubling the idea of progress within video game localization history, this article is able to propose a broader understanding of what localization is and what it does. Ironically, video game localization is not, first and foremost, about making video games local, but about making them global. Through broad practices that enable games to move between markets around the world, it is localization that allows us to see video games as a global medium.

Challenging the Industry History of Localization Most popular and academic video game histories highlight technological progress.1 In these histories, the late twentieth and early twenty-first century ‘global’ video game industry is dominated by a teleological rhetoric of improvement (Friedel 2007; Kline et  al. 2003) through which 1  I draw from a number of historical accounts in this article. Popular accounts include: Burnham (2003), Donovan (2010), Harris (2014), Kent (2001), Kohler (2005). Academic accounts include: Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. (2008), Kline et al. (2003), Malliet and de Meyer (2005), Montfort and Bogost (2009).

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additional features, faster processors, and more complex graphics help sell eight successive generations of consoles: from the first-generation Magnavox Odyssey to the eighth-generation Nintendo Wii U, Microsoft Xbox One, and Sony Playstation 4.2 By focusing on a technological progression through eight generations of consoles, this internalist history is able to highlight the current $56 billion dollar a year ‘global’ video game industry as a logical culmination of progress (Economist 2011). The idea of a global industry that results from technological progress is problematic because it presents a vision of an industry that is untroubled by borders, boundaries, cultures, and languages.3 For example, Tristan Donovan never discusses the practices of translation and localization that enable the medium to travel despite explicitly attempting to write a global history of video games that “giv[es] the US its due without neglecting the important influence of games developed [in] Japan, Europe and elsewhere” (Donovan 2010: xiii). By avoiding a US-centric history, Donovan is able to show the individual importance of England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, and Japan for the historical development of video games, but he does not once discuss how video games move between these national industries. For Donovan and the others video games are naturally global. In contrast, this article holds to the understanding that video game industry of the 2010s, which sells video games over borders and between languages as ‘globally’ playable products, exists through industry practices of localization. As game studies scholar Mia Consalvo writes, “Researchers of new media must continue to examine not only cultural products, but also the business practices that lead to the production and circulation of these products” (Consalvo 2006). To date, localization has been written out of the standard video game histories.

2  This console progression is accompanied by a similarly linear, but less easily demarcated technological progression of personal computers. 3  In addition to the essays in this volume, there have been several attempts to problematize the industry-centred, progress-oriented history described in this essay. The existence of these counter-histories, however, does not detract from the point that there is a dominant industry History. For example, the XYZ Alternative Voices in Game Design Exhibit curated by Celia Pearce and Adam Fafinski at the Museum of Design Atlanta created a non-male and nonindustry-centred history. Additionally, Flanagan (2009) details alternate histories of games that centre on domestic spaces and board games, pushing against the attention given to technological progress. Finally, the edited volume Before the Crash (Wolf 2012) includes multiple essays that problematize the progress-oriented industry history.

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Writing translation out of history is not new. One often hears that the best translation is invisible; a translator succeeds when the reader does not realize she is reading a translation, when the translation is ‘fluent’ (Venuti 2008). Such a belief is canonical in the video game industry, including the video game localization industry. As one post to the International Game Developers Association Localization Special Interest Group message board states, “As for localization effectiveness, I think it’s similar to good film soundtracks: if you don’t notice it, it’s great.”4 A second points out that “you either get no qualitative feedback when a job is done well or you get negative feedback.”5 From the experience and practice of these localization specialists, good translation is unremarked upon and invisible. Translation theorist Lawrence Venuti (1998) has decried the invisibility of translation as a ‘scandal’ because it erases the labour involved, thereby alienating translators from their labour in common discourse. While Venuti calls for rendering visible both the translator and her work, translation remains largely invisible in many publishing industries, particularly within the United States, and certainly within the video game industry. My contention here is that translation does not appear in most popular and academic histories of video games because the industry itself hides the importance of translation and its workers, and in so doing the industry is able to emphasize an inherently global nature of video games. Sometimes the translator is an unnamed freelancer who goes uncredited. As one translator notes, “I’ve translated… at least 200 games… but only a fraction of those, maybe 10 games at most, would have my name on them in the credits in one way or another. So, I have a very thin portfolio… I can say 200, but I can’t legally list 200 games.”6 At other times localization service providers work under contract with the understanding of strict confidentiality—their company cannot mention that they translated their client’s games. Often it is simply that the publisher and developer treat translation as a ‘black box’ where the text is sent out and magically transformed without real labor, so that there is no appreciable difference between a machine translator and a human, or between one linguistic version and another. As veteran translator Alexander O. Smith recounts, “historically, but still now in a lot of places… translation is considered this 4  Anonymous contributor to the International Game Developers Association Localization Special Interest Group message board, September 24, 2012. 5  ibid. 6  Interview with anonymous translator, March 6, 2012.

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black box… and the company says we need to put this Japanese text into English, [so] let’s throw it at the black box and when it comes out we’ll slap it in the game and throw it out.”7 In a black box situation, the publishers and developers seem to consider translation as a fully separate practice that does not affect the game itself. The industry considers the game to be global; the translation is a minor, local practice that does not and cannot change the essential global quality of the game. These issues of discursive and practical invisibility of translation, and the paradoxical need of translators to constantly justify their work as relevant within the business, have resulted in actions ranging from the creation of message boards such as the International Game Developers Association Localization Special Interest Group, to the publication of several histories of video game localization (Bernal-Merino 2011; Hasegawa 2009; O’Hagan and Mangiron 2013). These histories demonstrate that video game localization, as a constantly improving practice, is important to the video game industry. However, by focusing on localization as a process of improvement, these histories continue to miss the complexity of localization as a practice. Three Histories of Video Game Localization As the first published history of video game localization, Hasegawa Ryoichi’s (2009) account is particularly important because it creates a framework within which the successive histories of video game localization operate. A professional video game localizer (and producer), Hasegawa addresses the Japanese video game industry in order to encourage it to fully embrace localization as an essential part of production. In addition to explaining to his non-specialist audience the various multimodal assets that can be localized—text, voice, graphics, level design, ratings, and religious elements—Hasagawa explains how the history of localization is an expansion from partial localization of the 1980s that only focused on text to full localization of the 2000s, which can target the entirety of a video game’s multimodal assets. In the 20-year span between the 1980s and 2000s localization developed from a minor, almost inconsequential task into a practice of extensive adaptation. In the early 1980s translation was limited to the packaging and documentation, and it was often done as an afterthought by an 7

 Interview with Alexander O. Smith, November 8, 2012.

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employee with a working knowledge of the desired language. This expanded in the mid-1980s to include the translation of in-game text. By the late 1980s, Nintendo’s efforts to market its console in different markets around the world necessitated the localization of a variety of digital assets including character graphics, sounds, songs, and religious motifs. More extensive alterations in the 1980s were almost always conducted in order to adhere to console holder guidelines like Nintendo of America’s Video Game Content Guidelines and Sega’s Seal of Quality (Schwartz and Schwartz 1994: 23–5). At the same time that publishers mandated the change of non-linguistic elements, marketers began to institute targeted marketing campaigns to aim specific titles at a broader range of audiences. The development of optical storage devices in the 1990s led to enhanced content, but it also considerably impacted the scope of localization. When game developers adopted the use of CDs and DVDs in the 1990s they were able to utilize high-quality graphics, music, and most importantly, spoken dialogue. According to Hasegawa, the increased storage and enhanced sound and image quality capabilities impacted the scope of video game localization enormously, shifting the practice from the translation of printed text to audio language substitution. By the 2000s, voiced dialogue needed to be translated, re-dubbed, and finally synched properly to the high polygon count characters’ highly specific lip movements. Abstract sprites of the 1980s had no voiced dialogue, and when these characters finally spoke in the 1990s their mouths did little more than open and shut. These early characters’ visual abstraction obviated the need for translators to craft a new sound-image relationship between dialogue and image. If a segment of dialogue ran for about the same length of time as the original, then the general level of illusion of a match between sound and character image remained about the same. The introduction of characters with high polygon counts made it possible for game designers to render characters with articulated mouth movement. At this point localizers started to think about new ways to achieve translational accuracy. Localizers now had to choose between ignoring lip movement in favour of literally ‘accurate’ translations of the original words, changing dialogue to ‘accurately’ match the lip movements, or in rare (and more expensive) instances re-programming characters’ lip movements to fit with the translated dialogue. Hasegawa’s history of localization is presented as one of progress, where localization evolves at pace with the growing complexity of video games themselves, and localization improves as a practice as it becomes

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more complex. Hasegawa seems to regard the past practices of only translating text as inferior to the contemporary industry practice of ‘full localization,’ which consists of altering text, audio, video, and gameplay. His account echoes the perspective of most historians who imply that video games have ‘progressed’ from the first to the eighth console generations, and in so doing have become ‘better’ (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et  al. 2008; Malliet and de Meyer 2005; Therrien 2012). In this view, ‘better’ and ‘complicated’ are conflated: the translation process becomes ‘better’ solely because it deals with more ‘complicated,’ contemporary video games. My critique of Hasegawa’s history is that the logic of progress misses the point that the localization, in itself, has always been more complicated. It is complicated because translation is a multimodal and culturally specific process in which meanings shift and change, and in which transpositions in cultural and contextual frameworks sometimes require the translator to change meaning and sense altogether. The key point is not that video games have become more complex and that localization has been able to follow this increased complexity (even if this is true). Rather, it is that translation is both multimodal and culturally complex, ruling out the very possibility of one-for-one correspondence or mirroring between original and copy even in the most rudimentary of video games. Because of this, translation necessarily involves choosing what to present, how to present it, and what to leave out. It is in deciding which foreign elements to present, how to present them, and which to replace that localization acts not as a means of swapping one national language for another and thereby allowing an ostensibly global product to move across borders, but as a practice that creates the very possibility of understanding video games as global. The history Hasegawa presented to the video game industry has been supplemented by two academic publications that highlight the strategies and increasing success of the video game localization industry. Miguel Bernal-Merino (2011) pushes the origins of video game translation back to the 1970s, noting that arcade machines were sometimes (although not usually) exported to new locales. However, unlike console video games introduced in the 1980s, arcade games were exported with few to no changes. One early exception was Pac-Man (1979). Pronounced pakkuman in Japanese, it was originally translated as Puckman. However, “when localising the product for the US market, they decided that ‘Puck’ was far too close to the coarse four letter word ‘F***’, and decided to go for a

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similar but less troublesome spelling” (Bernal-Merino 2011: 13).8 While Pac-Man’s name was changed, terminology within the game like ‘high score’ and ‘game over’ was originally English, and it stayed in English. The development of unified terminology is important for the video game industry because it implies a globalism of video games. Like Hasegawa, Bernal-Merino reinforces the idea of a linear progression of improvement by periodizing the history into stages. His account of localization outlines, in his own words, “the different stages in this non-stop progression that has made video games into the most lucrative entertainment industry ahead of books, music and films” (Bernal-Merino 2011: 12). Minako O’Hagan and Carmen Mangiron (2013) similarly locate the beginning of video game translation in the late 1970s with strategic localizations like the alteration of Pac-Man’s title. They also fully extend Bernal-Merino’s “stages of non-stop progression” into a discrete series of evolutionary phases. O’Hagan and Mangiron call their successive periods the ‘early days,’ the ‘growth phase,’ the ‘development phase,’ the ‘maturing phase,’ and the ‘advancing phase.’ This periodization of video game culture’s ‘phases of development’ is reminiscent of modern theories of economic, political, and technological development that justify present (and dominant) practices by suggesting they are the climax of previous, lesser practices in earlier periods and in less central places (Hegel 1944). For example, O’Hagan and Mangiron’s phases are strikingly similar to W. W. Rostow’s (1960) stages of economic growth.9 As numerous postmodern and poststructural theorists of the late twentieth century have noted, such teleological accounts justify the dominance of the political power that is the subject of the history in question (Foucault 1984), but they miss much of the detail, disparity, diversity, and complexity of any given social situation. The history of video game localization recounted above celebrates the increased capabilities of localization industry workers and justifies their place within contemporary game industry practice. However, echoing game historian Carl Therrien (2012: 21), who wonders how teleological distortion has obscured how we understand video game history, I question what has been hidden by the focus on seeing video  For a more detailed account of Pac-Man’s localization, see: Kohler (2005).  Rostow’s (1960) stages for economic growth include traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, the take-off, the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass consumption. Most obviously similar are O’Hagan and Mangiron’s ‘maturing phase’ and Rostow’s ‘drive to maturity,’ but the teleological periodization is visible in both. 8 9

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game localization as the practice of accurately hitting target markets using progressively increasing ability to manipulate a video game so that it is legally acceptable for sale, and adopted by consumers in a given market. When localization is understood as a practice that matches the growing complexity of video games, video games themselves are reinforced as already global (there is something in them that localization does not touch). Simultaneously, localization is elaborated as a secondary practice that is separate from the video game’s essence (rules, mechanics, and dynamics), but helpful for increasing sales in a local market. By disrupting the typical, teleological narrative and pushing the origin of localization alongside the origin of video games themselves, I will instead be able to argue that it is localization itself that enables us to think of video games as global.

Alternate Origins of Video Game Localization The history of video games is updated with each rewriting, so that forgotten examples like Naughts and Crosses (1952) and Tennis for Two (1958) are recovered and raised in importance through media archaeology (Huhtamo 1997; Wolf 2012). Yet the underlying rhetoric of history as improvement often remains unchanged. Such a rhetoric maintains the status quo by rationalizing the industry push towards updating technology (Fron et  al. 2007; Therrien 2012). Some scholars work to trouble this hegemonic history of video games by unearthing alternate histories. Raiford Guins’ (2014) work is a particularly good example of this approach. By focusing on non-digital elements of game culture—the oscilloscope-­ based Tennis for Two, and packaging, manuals, advertisements, and other game paratexts—Guins problematizes the current ‘digital’ rhetoric. Unfortunately, no such troubling has yet occurred for the history of video game localization. A good starting point for troubling the industry history of video game localization is pointing out the discrepancy between the beginning of video game history (the late 1950s) and the beginning of video game localization history (the late 1970s). The three histories recounted above tie video game localization’s origins to linguistic alteration in the late 1970s. This is at the end of the decade after Pong ‘went global’ (Donovan 2010: 26), with national industries across the world producing clones and variations (Harris 2014: 194; Kent 2001). This essential tie of localization

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to linguistic alteration is limiting because it misses the way that video games have been translated, literally carried over, in earlier decades. The Latin roots of the word ‘translation’ point to a more general sense of the concept as transportation. According to Translation Studies scholar Antoine Berman, translation can refer to the transportation of objects or people between places, the movement of holy relics, transfer of jurisdiction, the movement of ideas, and finally linguistic alteration (Berman 1988: 9). Translation’s essence, then, implies movement from one place to another. We generally think about ‘places’ today as regions or nations, different local contexts with distinctive linguistic systems, so that the movement comes along with linguistic alternation. However, language change is not the only way to understand translation. In Berman’s pre-­ seventeenth century sense, translation implied both ‘propagation’ and ‘movement’: duplication and/or relocation across space and time through some sort of translational practice. Video game translation before the late 1970s happened in more technical ways that cannot be reduced to language, and are not incorporated into the above histories of video game localization. For example, through software migration practices, and the adaptation of physical types of play, previously coded games, and generic formulae. Both migration and adaptation are crucial elements of translation: when translation moves a text from one place to another, it necessarily alters the text in that movement. In turn, there is a balancing between translation and adaptation, which is to say, certain things are allowed to migrate with more or less adaptation. Translation, then, is a form of border negotiation: certain things are translated, other things are prevented from moving. By relocating the historical origins of video game localization to earlier instances (of migration and adaptation) we can better understand the way that video game localization is not merely an evolution of adapting more assets of a video game so that it can better target a market; rather, it is the practice that enables video games to be understood as global by separating out certain elements within video games to be understood as local. Migration The current video game origin story begins with two games: Tennis for Two (1958) and Spacewar! (1962). Tennis for Two was designed and implemented by William Higinbotham on an analogue computer, played on an oscilloscope, and deleted after its two-year run as an amusing

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demonstration for visitors at Brookhaven National Labs’ yearly open house. As a tennis simulation for two people, the game was much lighter entertainment than the laboratory’s main focus on nuclear research, and much more engaging than the non-responsive walls of mid-twentieth century mainframe computers (Yudin 2013). The second game, Spacewar!, was programmed by the Tech Model Railroad Club, a group of young scientist/hackers at MIT (Brand 1972; Graetz 1981). Programmed digitally on an early timeshare university computer called a PDP-1, the game consisted of two spaceships (a taller needle-like ship and a squatter wedge-­ like ship), each controlled by a different person with a controller, battling around a star located in the centre of the monitor. These two games are cited as the origin point of most published video game histories, but they predate Hasegawa’s, Bernal-Merino’s, and O’Hagan and Mangiron’s accounts of video game localization history by roughly two decades. Both Tennis for Two and Spacewar! are demonstrations of high technology created and played within secluded, government-funded, and academic laboratories. As re-creations of tennis and a science-fiction space battle, they were received as universally understandable play, not as culturally or linguistically based texts needing translation. However, any history that relates translation solely to the linguistic misses the broader meaning of translation as movement. Neither Tennis for Two nor Spacewar! includes ‘language’ in the sense of words on the screen. The former took the form of a line bouncing back and forth on an oscilloscope, and the latter involved two triangles shooting each other around a star field. Yet despite this absence of text, each is a particularly good example of translation: Spacewar! illustrates the migration element of translation, and Tennis for Two can help unpack the adaptation part of translation. One core of translation is movement: rendering a text mobile. Video game localization, then, must be first and foremost about making something local into something that can be mobilized and thus made global, not the other way around. While it began as a local creation of MIT students for play on their newly acquired PDP-1 computer, Spacewar! moved extensively throughout the 1960s. Like the bones of saints being translated from one European cathedral to another, Spacewar! was translated through migration between different university computers in the United States and, later, around the world (Monnens and Goldberg 2015). A group of students wrote the core program of Spacewar! on the MIT PDP-1 supercomputer over several years in the early 1960s. However, the digitally coded algorithms that made up the game were not finished,

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published, and distributed as a game would be today (even if it were later updated through patches). Instead, Spacewar! migrated to different supercomputers around the United States as students and scientists moved between labs, schools, and states (Brand 1972; Graetz 1981; Monnens and Goldberg 2015; Yasanki 1963). While digital reproducibility is an essential element of new media (Manovich 2001), copying in the 1960s was not as simple as cutting and pasting, or attaching a ROM file to an email. Reproduction accompanied human mobility. When workers moved from one department to another, or from one company or school to another, they brought a copy of the code and manually added it to the new department or company’s computer system. As people moved throughout the tech/research industry of the early 1960s, they took Spacewar! with them, translating it from one place (the PDP-1 supercomputer at MIT) to another (the PDP-6 supercomputer at Stanford University). It was these successive acts of translation as migration that led to the propagation of video games as a medium and form of culture that was literally carried, as code, and installed on the new location’s supercomputer. In the 1960s translation had to do neither with altering semiotic elements of a game nor providing a service to a paying publisher—acts that are important in localization of the 2010s. Rather, translation back then was a matter of propagation: spreading video games to new people. Adaptation The migration of Spacewar! between computers is one half of the game’s translation; the other half is the necessary adaptation that accompanied its migration. All texts change in some way or another when they are moved (language, word count, aura, context, etc.), and video games are not an exception to this rule. Video games are constantly adapted: from real-life to digital play; from version 1.0 to version 2.0; from a loose collection of features to a stable genre. Adaptation as a second mode of translation is visible with Spacewar! in several ways: the game was created based on Doc Smith’s 1950s science fiction Lensman series; continually modified as new students arrived at MIT and changed the original code; it was adapted whenever it migrated to a new university mainframe computer (Brand 1972; Graetz 1981; Monnens and Goldberg 2015); and finally it was turned into the arcade game Computer Space (1971) as the first example

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of the 2-D Shooter genre. However, this adaptation element of translation is equally explicit in the translation of the game of tennis into Tennis for Two, which then leads eventually to Pong and its clones. Because Spacewar! and Tennis for Two serve as the dual origin point of most histories of video games, they can also serve as two points of origin for a history of video game localization. William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two was dismantled after being shown at Brookhaven’s yearly open house in 1958 and 1959, thereafter existing only in human memories, photographs of the event, and incomplete instructions (Yudin 2013). It was, quite literally, not translated in the migratory sense of the word. However, as the first translation of the physical game of table tennis into a new, virtual form10 and the beginning of a series of adaptations that lead directly into the beginning of the video game industry in 1972, Tennis for Two remains an important origin point of video game localization’s history. In 1966, Ralph Baer created the ‘Brown Box’ prototype for the first home video game console, which was finally mass marketed and sold in 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey. Among the games included with the system was a simulation of table tennis. While Baer did not directly translate Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two, he did again adapt the physical game of tennis into a video game called PingPong (Baer n.d.). In 1972 Nolan Bushnell and Allan Alcorn, founders of the company Atari, created the coin-operated video game Pong.11 A simple game, Pong is a simulation of table tennis where there are two paddles and a bouncing ball. One player controls a paddle on one side of the screen, and the computer (or a second player) controls the paddle on the other side of the 10  As a minor, but historically important note, I use the term ‘virtual’ here as a means of linking an ‘analogue’ game (Tennis for Two) with a ‘digital’ game (Tennis). Because Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two was created on an analogue oscilloscope it is often separated from the history of ‘digital video games.’ While such a separation is important for media specificity, it ignores the important relationship in terms of translation and broader cultural usage of games. 11  Though a commercial failure, Bushnell released an adaptation of Spacewar! called Computer Space in 1971 through Nutting Associates. While Computer Space is interesting as both the first coin operated arcade cabinet and an example of translation as adaptation, it is overshadowed by the historical importance of Bushnell’s second game, Pong. Because of its popularity, as well as its relationship to both Tennis For Two and Baer’s table tennis game, Pong is the more important game for both the standard history of video games and the history of translation in gaming.

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screen. If the player manages to ricochet the ball behind her opponent’s paddle she scores a point, if she misses and the ball goes behind her own paddle then the opponent gets a point, and 3 points wins the match. Within a few days the arcade cabinet’s cashbox was already filled with over 1200 quarters (Burnham 2003), and its popularity only grew. Following the success of Pong, similar games began to surface around the world. In the United States, Nutting Associates made Computer Space Ball, and Allied Leisure made both Paddle Battle and Tennis Tourney (Kent 2001). In Japan, Taito created Elepon, in France René Pierre created Smatch, and in Italy, Zaccaria created TV Joker (Donovan 2010: 26). Some of these were licensed, but the majority of these games were not. Bushnell called the creators of these games ‘jackals’ descending on easy money (Kent 2001: 61), but we can much more productively think of them as translations, just as we can think of Pong as a translation of Baer’s PingPong game for the Magnavox Odyssey.12 In migrating a particular text from one place to another there is always some sort of adaptation: there is the adaptation of a physical game into a virtual game (Tennis for Two and Tennis); there is the modification of the virtual game into a slightly different game (Pong); there are the changes necessary to sell the game in new language and cultural markets (the clones); and finally there is the stabilization of adapted elements into a generic pattern of the ‘tennis game’ (all of them together). Virtual tennis moved (officially and unofficially, legally and illegally) over national lines, and between computers and consoles, where each variant is an adaptation that allows the game to sell in a distinct place. Translation as migration led to an initial boom of tech-industry games as a subculture; translation as adaptation sparked national video game industries, and then led to the creation of generic norms, which support the global legibility of ludic forms. Video games are not global. Rather, translation—in both its migratory and adaptive senses—has helped local games move around the world, enabling us to experience video games as a global medium.

12  It is unclear whether Bushnell copied Baer’s game or not—supposedly he played the Odyssey PingPong game in May of 1972. Regardless, Atari settled out of court with Magnavox on June 6, 1976, by paying a fee and agreeing to a licensing agreement (Baer n.d.; Kent 2001).

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Video Games Have Never Been Global The fledgling video game industry of the early 1970s that spread Pong around the world was not global. It was a disparate group of companies, platforms, and practices separately based in different national industries and connected through practices of translation. While there were rough multinational ties, there were no significant multinational companies until the 1980s. Publishing companies were unable to release video games in different language locales without assistance, which was sometimes prevented at the state level (Swalwell 2015), but always hindered by differences of hardware. In order to release a video game in a foreign territory, a nationally based company needed a foreign-based company to import, localize, and publish the title. However, what often kept the national video game industries apart and prevented easy localization was not language diversity, but hardware diversity. Video game localization in the 1970s was necessary not only because of the multiplicity of languages around the world, but because of the multiplicity of video game platforms around the world. In the 1970s to early 1980s there was a multiplicity of very different game platforms (hardware) that were only popular in particular regional contexts. Atari, which held a 70–80% market-share in the United States during this period (Cohen 1984; Donovan 2010), is commonly understood to have been the dominant platform of the period. But it was not the only platform, and it was more popular in the United States than elsewhere. Atari quickly failed in Japan, and it was less popular in Europe, where the Magnavox Odyssey and Odyssey2 systems dominated (Cohen 1984; Donovan 2010). Within the United States there were rival consoles including RCA’s Studio II and III, the Fairchild Channel F, Mattel’s Intellivision, and Coleco’s ColecoVision. Outside of the United States there were even more platforms, including consoles and microcomputers: Germany had the Interton VC-4000 console, England had its own rival platform, a microcomputer called the Sinclair ZX80, which was upgraded into the ZX81, and Japan had the popular MSX home computer. Other microcomputers that were popular in various regions include the Commodore 64, the Apple II, and the Sinclair family of computers.13 13  It should be noted that consoles and microcomputers are different types of game platform. While consoles could typically only run specific cartridges manufactured for that platform, microcomputers were programmable.

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Just as with Spacewar!, which required adaptation in order to migrate it from one supercomputer to the next, video games in the late 1970s to early 1980s needed to be adapted in order to move from one platform to the next, whether it be cartridge-based consoles like the Atari VCS or programmable microcomputers like the Sinclair ZX81. However, the difficulties inherent with re-writing the code so that it could work on the console of a target linguistic region tended to foreclose industry interest in the 1970s. Any attempt to move a video game from one locale/language to another would have required the reconsideration of all the particular coding techniques used to create the game on its original platform (Montfort et al. 2012; Montfort and Bogost 2009), many of which would be impossible on the new platform. Were an American Atari VCS console video game to be translated to work in Europe, it might need to be re-­ written from the ground up in a different programming language in order to operate on the Magnavox Odyssey2. The call to translate (or port, as it would have been called) a console video game was thus rare.14 Because of their rarity, and because they were not primarily linguistic alteration, these processes of porting were not referred to as ‘translation’ even if the video game happened to be moved from one regional context to another. The result is their invisibility within Hasegawa’s, Bernal-­ Merino’s, and O’Hagan and Mangiron’s three histories of localization. However, if we define video game localization as a practice that includes the adaptation of a video game in order to migrate it from one place to another, it has occurred regularly from the 1960s until the present, whether it be under the title of migrating, adapting, copying, pirating, cloning, porting, or simply translating. The problem with the current crop of game localization histories is that they begin with linguistic translation, 20 years after most video game histories begin, and in so doing they reinforce the rhetoric of video games being naturally global. According to video game localization specialists Chandler and Deming (2011), even without localization a game can be sold and played in a new market. While these un-localized video games are 14  Porting did happen, particularly in the 1980s and after. One example, The Hobbit (1983), was ported many times resulting in an instability of versions, but a sense of narrative universality (Stuckey 2014). With each port the essence of the game is assumed to be the same despite the extensive changes between versions. The story becomes global, and individual versions are pushed down as mere local variations.

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not “personalized for any international markets” (Chandler and Deming 2011: 8), the rhetoric of games as a universal form of play allows them to be understood as globally legible. Like with only translating the manual, but not the video game itself, the “experience [of playing an un-localized video game] may not be as immersive for the player” (Chandler and Deming 2011: 8) but it is still understandable. This rhetoric reinforces the idea that video games, in their essence, are global. There is some ‘global essence,’ which is surrounded by trappings that can be translated so that the video game as a product better fits into different locales around the world. Accordingly, all that localization does, within this rhetoric, is make the always-already globally legible video game a bit more immersive through tweaking certain elements. In contrast, by pushing back the history of video game localization to include broader understandings of migration and adaptation, which can include translating, porting, and even remaking, we can understand how video game localization is a practice that enables local texts, national texts, to migrate. No game is global in and of itself. Rather, it is a local thing that can be made global through practices of localization (or shown to be local by letting the text remain). That localization could be the labour of linguistically translating the text from Japanese to English and manipulating character costumes to reveal more or less skin, but it could also be the labour of porting an Atari VCS game onto the Sinclair ZX81 system by re-writing it. By carefully approaching this expanded sense of video game localization we can go back and think about how certain things have been made to flow around the world in the past 50 years while other things have been stopped. These flows and stoppages are not natural, but the result of human decisions with long-lasting outcomes that we need to look at more closely.

References Baer, Ralph. n.d. Genesis: How the Home Video Games Industry Began. RalphBaer.com. http://www.ralphbaer.com/how_video_games.htm. Accessed March 20, 2018. Berman, Antoine. 1988. From Translation to Traduction. Unpublished translation Richard Sieburth. TTR: Traduction. Terminologie, Rédaction 1 (1): 23–40. Bernal-Merino, Miguel. 2011. A Brief History of Game Localisation. Trans Dossier 15:11–17.

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Brand, Stewart. 1972. Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. Rolling Stone, 7 December. Burnham, Van. 2003. Supercade: a Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971–1984. Cambridge: MIT Press. Chandler, Heather Maxwell, and Stephanie O’Malley Deming. 2011. The Game Localization Handbook. 2nd ed. Sudbury: Jones & Bartlett Learning. Cohen, Scott. 1984. Zap!: the Rise and Fall of Atari. New York: McGraw-Hill. Consalvo, Mia. 2006. Console Video Games and Global Corporations: Creating a Hybrid Culture. New Media & Society 8 (1):117–137. https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444806059921. Donovan, Tristan. 2010. Replay: The History of Video Games. East Sussex: Yellow Ant. Economist. 2011. All the World’s a Game. Economist, December 10. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca. 2008. Understanding Video Games: the Essential Introduction. New York: Routledge. Flanagan, Mary. 2009. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge: MIT Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. What is Enlightenment? In The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. Friedel, Robert D. 2007. A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium. Cambridge: MIT Press. Fron, Janine, Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce. 2007. The Hegemony of Play. Digital Games Research Association 2007: Situated Play. Tokyo. Graetz, J.  Martin. 1981. The Origin of Spacewar. Creative Computing Magazine (August). Guins, Raiford. 2014. Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife. Cambridge: MIT Press. Harris, Blake J. 2014. Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation. HarperCollins. Hasegawa, Ryoichi. 2009. ゲームロカライズの歴史とこれから [geemu rokaraizu no rekishi to kore kara – Game Localization’s History and Future]. Paper read at デジタルコンテンツ制作の先端技術応用に関する調査研究報告書 [Study Report on Advanced Technology Applications for Developing Digital Content], at Tokyo. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1944. The Philosophy of History. Rev. ed. New York: Willey Book Co. Huhtamo, Erkki. 1997. From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: Notes Toward an Archaeology of the Media. Leonardo 30 (3):221–224. Huizinga, Johan. 1955. Homo Ludens; a Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Kent, Steve L. 2001. The Ultimate History of Video Games: from Pong to Pokémon and Beyond– The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World. Three Rivers Press. Kline, Stephen, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter. 2003. Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. Montréal; London: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Kohler, Chris. 2005. Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. Indianapolis: BradyGames. Malliet, Steven, and Gust de Meyer. 2005. The History of the Video Game. In Handbook of Computer Game Studies, ed. J.  Raessens and J.  H. Goldstein. Cambridge: MIT Press. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Monnens, Devin and Martin Goldberg. 2015. Space Odyssey: The Long Journey of Spacewar! From MIT to Computer Labs Around the World. Kinephanos, Cultural History of Video Games Special Issue (June). http://www.kinephanos.ca/2015/space-­o dyssey-­t he-­l ong-­j ourney-­o f-­s pacewar-­f rom-­m it-­t o-­ computer-­labs-­around-­the-­world/. Accessed April 1, 2020. Montfort, Nick, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C.  Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter. 2012. 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Cambridge: MIT Press. Montfort, Nick, and Ian Bogost. 2009. Racing the Beam: the Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge: MIT Press. O’Hagan, Minako, and Carmen Mangiron. 2013. Game Localization: Translating for the Global Digital Entertainment Industry. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co. Rostow, W. W. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth, a Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: University Press. Schwartz, Steven, and Janet Schwartz. 1994. Parent’s Guide to Video Games. Rocklin: Prima Lifestyles. Stuckey, Helen. 2014. Exhibiting The Hobbit: A Tale of Memories and Microcomputers. Kinephanos (Proceedings of the History of Games International Conference). http://kinephanos.ca/2014/the-­hobbit/. Accessed April 1, 2020. Swalwell, Melanie. 2015. New Zealand. In Video Games Around the World, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf. Cambridge: MIT Press. Therrien, Carl. 2012. Video Games Caught Up in History: Accessibility, Teleological Distortion, and Other Methodological Issues. In Before the Crash: Early Video Game History, ed. Mark J.  P. Wolf. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

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Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London; New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Wolf, Mark J. P., ed. 2012. Before the Crash: Early Video Game History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Yasanki, Edward K. 1963. Computing at Stanford. Datamation, 43–45. Yudin, Vlad. 2013. When Games Went Click: The Story of Tennis for Two. Short documentary film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QSHZ20MQfE. Accessed April 1, 2020.

CHAPTER 11

“Welcoming All Gods and Embracing All Places”: Computer Games As Constitutively Transcendent of the Local Graeme Kirkpatrick

Introduction How does it happen that something new comes into the world? The gyrations of the gamer’s hand, the unique calibration of the tensions in their body with on-screen imagery, the exhilarating flight of gameplay itself were all unthinkable just a few decades ago. What does this elaborate choreography (Kirkpatrick 2011), which now draws in large expanses of social coexistence, rest upon? There is no non-ontological answer to these questions. Computer hardware and programs do not constitute an infrastructure that determines practice, since it is only in the hands of the gamer that they come to life and spread from development laboratories into social space. In what follows I will suggest that the very plausibility of gameplay, in which the body of the gamer takes flight without leaving the earth, presupposes a new revealing, one that affords insights into the new itself.

G. Kirkpatrick (*) Department of Sociology, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_11

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My main argument will be that it was only in becoming an element in a new network that was more or less immediately global in scope, that computer games became computer games. Prior to this, proto-games existed in a technical and entertainment milieu that did not afford them any priority and in which setting they were local, limited and disparate phenomena—truly ‘local’. An event in the technological milieu triggers a reaction that manifests in a new discourse with new ‘collectors’ (Latour 2013). These have the force of an attraction, drawing previously disparate elements into relation, and of repulsion, as other parts of the milieu cease to be relevant and fall out of connection. In discussions of globalization informational networks are often presumed to be ‘infra-structural’, with everything else resting on them, or being pulled along behind the ‘development of the productive forces’. This way of thinking about technology, as a discrete and basic level in the social formation, assigns it a special role in the production of newness. It can be read as the result of a suture that stitches technology’s imaginary potential to a specific symbolization, forming a unity which assigns technology a role in our practices. Perhaps a characteristic feature of the digital era is that technology’s stitches tend to repeatedly come undone as hackers and others pull at them to release new dreams1 and alternative developmental trajectories. Viewed in this way, the technologies of globalization resemble a patchwork quilt that offers threads to tug on and squares to be re-folded and ‘doubled’, and not a steely surface with a pre-determined, heteronomous purpose. Outside of these metaphors, the technological real is only ever present as an absence. This chapter will identify proto-games in the technological milieu of home computing in Britain in the first half of the 1980s. Drawing on a study of UK computer magazines and an interview with a pioneering games creator, its main argument will be that computer or video games proper come into being when they separate from this local context and establish gaming as a network in Bruno Latour’s sense of a ‘double movement’ of ‘constitution and operation’. It is as an expanding network that computer gaming constitutes itself, drawing objects and subjects into relations that make them what they are. For its human participants, this reaction is not only conditioned by an ideology of determinism or resignation (a subjectification); it is the effect of a subject cleaving to a truth and its 1   Indeed, it is often no longer clear what technology is or where its limits lie (Kirkpatrick 2020).

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procedures (a subjectivation) (Badiou 2007). They are guided in their activities by a novel experience of space, which their activities also produce, and it is this that magnetizes the collectors and drives the expansion of the network. Gameplay produces and is made possible by a new ‘spatialising practice’ (Lefebvre 1991). Gamers make this space, which appears at the intersection of embodied performances and technical apparatus (screen, joystick, keyboard). Game space opens up as gaming takes flight, while the earth vanishes beneath gamers’ feet. In this process a new permutation of reality, while itself always out of reach, makes its presence felt and it is fidelity to this absent presence that informs the practices of gamers. Their activity, the production of game space, connects the network and confers a special charge of attraction/repulsion on its collectors. In so far as an innovation or design becomes identifiable as the locus of a ‘local’ event, pattern or perturbation, this is only because it has already altered the disposition of a network, giving it a new charge or twisting it into a different shape. In this sense, the local always contains the global as one of its conditions, and vice versa. What follows explores the immanence of a global network in the local eruption of video gaming in Britain in the mid-1980s and the contribution of local energies and innovations to the emergence of a global network. In this history three moments, each with implications for our thinking of the local, are highlighted: 1. The appearance of the computer game as a ‘collector’ in Latour’s sense, which draws together experiences that were previously disparate and occupied remote social, cultural and technological places and forms a network from previously unrelated items. 2. An evental disturbance, whose trace is the discourse around ‘gameplay’, implements the sorting operation implicit in 1, imposing a rarefying discourse (Foucault 1981) that excludes what no longer counts in the pre-existing technical milieu, and projects a novel experience of space. 3. A new subjectivation and intuitus that expands the network and develops its spatial potential by cleaving to the procedures specified by fidelity to 2, while conferring the charge on collectors that is integral to 1. It is only by evacuating local places and energizing a network with a new experience of space that gaming becomes gaming and computer

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games become what they are. While the process of their becoming is never completed, in order to be computer games it was necessary that the medium exceed any local manifestation. The line of flight that takes them from being proto-games in disparate milieu (computing, entertainments) to the ‘ideal commodity of informational capitalism’ (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2003) is constitutive. That the first stirrings of this can be identified in a singular national space is, therefore, neither here nor there for the purposes of my argument. Computer games have no single point of origin (Kirkpatrick 2013: 38)2; they are relationally constituted in a global flash that is also a flash of globality (a sign of the world to come). In its becoming the medium passes through a number of locales, each of them contributing in different ways to its unfolding and adding subtle and interesting modifications. This passage is what makes computer gaming; it is nothing more than this. It just so happens that computer gameness exerted its pull first somewhere in England—an event that would have been devoid of significance if it had not immediately also been global.

Proto-games At the beginning of this story, proto-games are pieces of software dispersed in various places: arcades, living rooms and offices. For many years people played around with computers and even made games but there was no such thing as a computer or video game until well into the 1980s. Before that, arcade games, TV games and game software for home computers were rarely if ever systematically identified as multiple instances of a single kind of thing. As one of the founders of modern computer science, Joseph Weizenbaum puts it, ‘the computer is a playing field on which one can play out any game one can imagine’ (in Roszack 1968: 7). Ludic forms are part of the technical flux of computation, alongside an infinity of other latent potentials. Contemporaneous documentary sources reveal that the phrase ‘computer games’ most often referred to software programs to be run on small, 2  It’s worth emphasizing this point because other have erroneously suggested that I overconcentrate on first occurrences (Wade and Webber 2016: 5). Similarly, while ‘gameplay’ becomes more frequent in the UK magazines after 1984–5, this is not when it was ‘invented’, as I’ve pointed out: ‘the term appears in early magazines, including the US magazine Electronic Games’ (Kirkpatrick 2015: 59).

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home computers that were more ‘fun’ than other such programs. There was a lack of consistency in the way the description was used and applied, so that one early game software review section includes a typing tutorial program by Severn Software, with the explanation that, ‘we’ve decided to include Typing Wizard here as somebody somewhere may conclude typing is fun’ (Commodore User 13 October 1984, p.75). In contrast, ‘TV games’ were games played by plugging a machine like the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey or Atari VCS, into a television. Initially these machines provided a single hard-wired game and then, starting with the Channel F device in 1976, they facilitated multiple games stored on cartridges. Finally, there were places called arcades where you could feed money into what were usually referred to simply as ‘arcade machines’ to play games. These disparate phenomena were not, at this time, pulled together under a dominant, singular ordering. In Latour’s (2013) terminology, there was no unifying ‘collector’ in the language that pulled them all together as instances of a single kind of phenomenon. Indeed, multiple factors counted against the occurrence of such a sort: the devices were encountered by different kinds of people in varied locations (arcades tended to be adult social spaces, often excluding children altogether; TV gaming devices were aimed at children and exclusively for the living rooms of middle-class homes; home computers were confused in terms of their purpose and function until well into the decade). They also offered very different experiences that were described and discussed using vocabularies specific to them. Moreover, the same gaming technologies were unevenly dispersed in different localities around the world. In the USA, TV gaming was the predominant available format. Several such systems were available to North American consumers in the late 1970s, until the gaming industry crash in 1982–3. Outside the USA, other formats were preferred, for a variety of reasons, some of which remain obscure. The TV gaming format popular in the USA leant itself to commercialization. Games were packaged and marketed like other entertainment commodities—physically, they resembled music tapes or cartridges—and were sold as the kind of thing parents might buy as gifts for their children. Partly in consequence of this, US games were perceived elsewhere as ‘more professional’ than locally produced software. Ironically, then, the rapid commercialization of games in the USA resulted in a crisis of quality affecting the products in Christmas 1982. The resulting loss of consumer confidence and interest in the product meant that gaming in the USA

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went into a sharp and sudden decline in 1983, from which it did not recover until the arrival of Nintendo and console gaming in 1985–6. From this vantage point, participants in the American industry cast envious glances at a UK gaming scene that continued to thrive. At the same time, the US industry continued to exert a kind of fascination for the UK—they had, after all, got there first and on some measures done it better and in 1982–3 Commodore sold more computers in the UK than in the whole of the USA (Bagnall 2010: 464). In 1985, the British hobbyist magazine Commodore User launched ‘Letter from America’, a regular column in which the two national situations were characterized in the following terms: America is confused about computers and computer games right now. Most people agree that ‘computers are the future’, but they don’t know what they would do with one if they had one. While computers have revolutionized the American office, only 13% of American households own computers today. These days, the software bestsellers are music programs, art programs, diet programs, and home finance programs. And I’m sitting here . . . waiting for the next phenomenon. …. I can see that you folks are still computer game freaks. It seems like there are hundreds of computer game companies over there, and they’re cranking out thousands of titles. It’s obviously your passion, your reason for existence. (‘Letter from America’, Commodore User 20, May 1985, p. 68)

There was no crash in the 1980s UK games industry because there had been no comparable commercialization of games production. British proto-games were embedded in a very different local environment. A key factor here was the British preference for home computers over TV gaming systems—a preference that also existed elsewhere in Europe. This preference was not necessarily lived as a choice between gaming systems. The popularity of home computers is better explained by the way they were represented in media and in popular discourse as educational devices. Technology and education policies of successive UK governments had created the image of the computer as something futuristic and spread the idea that access to computers would be beneficial for children (Selwyn 2002). Particularly important in this context was the BBC microcomputer. The BBC was part of a campaign on the part of the British

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government to get computers into schools.3 A concerted effort was made to introduce young people to computing and mastering computer skills was something parents were told would give their children an advantage. According to a 1983 review in Computer and Video Games magazine, the BBC computer had ‘graphical capabilities far superior to any machine in its price range’ (CVG 28, September 1983, p.  52). It offered eight colours and 255 pitch variations of sound4 and was suitable for running all kinds of available software, including games. However the price of the BBC made it prohibitive for many families. This created a market for cheaper home computers, so that in Britain in 1982–3 there were at least 20 kinds of home computers available, many of them priced at £200 or less. Manufacturers knew they had to undercut the BBC on price to lure parents while maintaining the functions essential to playing games, especially graphics capabilities and processing speed, to hold the interest of their children. These parameters defined the market in home computers at the time when, as Les Haddon (1988) points out, they were inherently ambiguous between their educational and entertainment functions and this ambiguity was key to their appeal. In Britain and elsewhere in the 1980s, the proto-computer game subsisted in a technical milieu with an experimental, liberal ethos, not unlike the world of hackers and hobbyists in the USA described by Steven Levy (1984) and Sherry Turkle (1995). For some, games were the interesting things and they focused on making games programs more than other kinds of software. The optic, however, that consistently distinguished computer games from other programs and pulled together what now seem to be different technical manifestations of the same singular phenomenon, did not exist. The ‘gaming culture’ that drew games together compared them with one another on terms specific to them and made them into a positive presence in discourse had yet to emerge. The British context included what has come to be known as its ‘bedroom coder’ culture.5 In the early 1980s there were countless small 3  This kind of initiative was not unique to Britain: in Poland, for example, the government also manufactured its own computer for schools, the Meritum, with similar ideological investments (Kirkpatrick 2007) and similar stories can be told from elsewhere at this time— see this volume. 4  The BBC Micro also had a relatively large 32 K of RAM and sold for between £335– £399, much more than a TV gaming system. 5  Even established game makers often worked in informal, domestic settings well into the 1980s.

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­ evelopers all over the UK producing games and other software on casd sette tape and floppy disc for the diverse range of home computers. But perhaps even more importantly it is through the medium of computing and gaming magazines published in Britain that the emergence of gaming proper can be discerned. These publications were agents in the formation of gaming culture and reflections of it.

Magazines Historical studies of different media converge in assigning a key role to printed materials6 in establishing ‘regulative concepts’ (Goehr 2007) and extending the reach of the discourse that makes sense of new media and associated cultural forms. Second-order discursive mediations are part of the becoming of a new practice, spreading and clarifying the ideas that are operative in it. They represent what is present. I have employed the term ‘proto-games’ to distinguish the items that were present in the socio-technical milieu of home computing to make it clear that while computer games were present from the 1970s, they were not represented until much later. This distinction is ontological in its implications. In Alain Badiou’s (2007) terms, representation is a ‘second count’, which produces on one side ‘the one that is not’ (a contingent cultural form), on the other a glimpse of the ‘eternal’ (or the real) as it disappears from view. At this point power intervenes to suture the imaginary and the symbolic in an historically specific cultural horizon. It is not that computer games are brought into being as a result of an ‘ontological commitment’ involved when people talk about them more. As Latour puts it, ‘what we say commits us to more than we think’ (2013: 21). The real as such cannot be made accessible; it always eludes representation. Rather, its presence is felt differently when imaginary and symbolic are stitched together according to a new pattern in the wake of a world-changing 6  A number of works in the sociology of art have done this, for example, Lydia Goehr (2007) shows that classical music was effectively invented around 1800 and this was related to changes to documentation, especially performance program notes; Nick Crossley (2014) highlights the role of fanzines in lighting up punk’s network-in-formation; Lynne Garofola (1999) shows how modern dance owes its status as an art form to Sergei Diaghilev’s activities as a promoter, who made extensive use of visual and written materials to separate it from its previous milieu and sell it to new audiences as a high art, and Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Marion (2006) highlight the role of popular publications in what they call the cultural ‘second birth’ of cinema, which occurred some years after its first, technical arrival.

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event. Such de- and re-doubling is discernible in discursive shifts manifest in the gaming magazines of the middle 1980s. The most prominent UK magazine of the 1980s was Computer and Video Games (CVG), which commenced publication in 1981 and ran continuously until 1995. Others were formally dedicated to specific machines, including the aforementioned Commodore User (CU), which ran from 1983 to 1990; Zzap!, a magazine also aimed primarily at Commodore owners that ran between 1985 and 1992, and Crash, which was aimed at Spectrum users from February 1984 until April 1992. While this focus on a specific machine confirms the thesis advanced here that the notion of computer gameness was not yet a viable collector, it must be acknowledged that in practice the magazines were rarely as tailored to specific computers as their names sometimes imply. They all contained discussions of arcade games, TV games and games for other computers but in separate columns and with different standards and criteria applied. They were also all about computing, which at that time involved articles about technical hardware issues and guidance on programming projects. On average, around 25% of magazine content in the early years of the decade was devoted to ‘game listings’, which were lines of code readers could copy into a home computer to create a program (Kirkpatrick 2015). Although the magazines were in some sense ‘British’, their circulation and readership were sometimes less national than this implies. There were a number of small-scale ‘fanzines’ whose circulations were geographically limited to regions of the UK including one called Soft-Spec in the West Midlands and Gloucestershire-based Game Over!. Production standards of these more local productions varied considerably: according to an article in Crash, pages of the ZX fanzine were individually coloured in with crayon and pencils (Crash 56, September 1988, p. 73). The larger circulation magazines tended to address readers through a national imaginary, with references to ‘le stick’ as a ‘French’ invention, for example, and attention drawn to the fact when readers’ letters came from ‘overseas’. In reality, their circulations exceeded national boundaries, with large readerships in continental Europe, Scandinavia, North Africa and Australasia. Zzap!, for instance, sold 45,000 copies a month in the UK in 1985 and mailed a further 3000 to overseas readers (Kimines n.d.). Drawing on the magazines it is possible to distinguish an early phase (1981–4) in which proto-games were mediated through multiple evaluative frameworks and presented to diverse constituencies, followed by one in which they were effectively colonized by a particular group whose tastes

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were narrower but who turned out to be more numerous, namely, teenage ‘gamers’. This shift affects the representation of games, so that what they feel like to play, the quality of their ‘gameplay’, becomes the most important thing about them, rather than how well programmed they are or how fast they load on the computer, which were standard criteria in game software reviews prior to 1985. The magazines of the early 1980s reflect and celebrate a DIY culture of technical experimentation and play while lacking a clear sense of computer gameness. What the magazines mostly esteem, though, is the ability to make software that gets home computers to do things. Their mission is the playful exploration of functionality through the application of technical ingenuity. In the early 1980s there was enthusiasm for making your own games rather than buying them ‘off the shelf’. This culture was local in a variety of ways. The pages of the early magazines have a national and local feel and this is partly because the software companies that advertised in them all included their regional or city location in the adverts, usually with a postal address. This was all necessary to commerce at this time, since much of the trade in tapes and discs would have been done by mail. It contributed to the sense of software as a national pastime—there was never any doubt that Terminal games were based in Manchester, for example, while Sulius software’s ads told readers they hailed from Chichester, West Sussex. The magazines all ran regular features about ‘high scores’ achieved by readers in their local venues, and ‘scoreboards’ based on readers’ accounts of their own performance in particular games. These would be based on trust, as there was no way to verify the reported scores, and they included information on each player’s regional location. The local nature of the technical culture had consequences for the fictional content of the games that were produced by ‘bedroom coders’ and small software firms. In 1981–5 there were probably hundreds of games written for small computers with avowedly local themes or storylines that concern national news or even features of regional and sub-regional existence. ‘Hampstead’ (1983), for example, was about the experience of being unemployed in an affluent part of North West London and it included reference to specific streets and cafes. In the North East there was at least one game in 1984 about the miner’s strike.7 There was even a 7  My evidence for this is anecdotal—more than one of my former colleagues at the University of Northumbria remembered playing such a game but I have been unable to locate it.

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game about the royal baby, which was a big news story in 1984 (‘Di’s Baby’ 1984). Others concerned national celebrities, including a quiz game featuring one of the models from a popular newspaper. These games were, perhaps, distinctively British, in the orientation of their fiction. Perhaps more surprisingly, a national imaginary even framed the early attempts at ‘on-line’ gaming. These were adventure games set in early multi-user domains and played over networks, such as ‘Micronet 800’, used by a relatively small number of computer owners. An article in CVG reports that, ‘The D&D part is quite normal. It’s the multi-user idea which makes it novel. More than one person can actually be playing the game at the same time. In fact, up to 36 people can play at one time… You are actually battling live against other players’ (CVG 33, July 1984, p.144). The article describes a ‘nocturnal’ culture around the game but mentions its internationalizing potential only in passing: ‘The nights during which I played I conversed with around a dozen people, from as far afield as Tokyo’ (p. 145). Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the discussion is concerned with the technical issues of connecting a computer to the network. In the middle of the 1980s the sense of a technical milieu that included games as relatively undefined objects disappears from these magazines. In the letters pages readers manifest a new confidence that games are the determinate vehicle for play with a computer and they argue that computer games have evaluative standards specific to them. Readers protest the emphasis on programming and coding in software reviews and call for them to address the real issue, which was ‘playability’, or ‘what the game is actually like to play’. In response, the magazines produced new criteria for game evaluation, which applied to computer games across all the disparate formats discussed above. Central to this criteriological change was a new emphasis on playability, or gameplay (Kirkpatrick 2012, 2015). After mid-1985 it is normal for the reviews to emphasize this criterion and to criticize games that fail to deliver it. Features of game programs that might have been praised previously in their own right were now set against the lack of gameplay to show that the game failed to measure up to a new standard of authenticity: ‘too much time was spent making this game “cutesy” and not enough on refining the gameplay’ (Zzap! 33 January 1988, p. 22); or ‘colourful backdrops colourless game’ (CU 70 July 1989, p. 52); or ‘should have had a bit more game and a bit less frilly edges’ (CU 73 October 1989, p. 56). Conversely, praise is heaped on game features that serve gameplay, at which point we are assured that an original feature is ‘not just a gimmick, it’s an intrinsic part of gameplay’ (CVG 126 May 1992, p. 25).

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At the same time, in longer articles, editorial comment and reviews, the magazines shed their earlier focus on technical issues and computing projects. The ‘program listings’—lines of code to be copied into home computers to create games—were gradually dropped in favour of an exclusive focus on the experience of playing a game. Older readers complained that the magazines were turning into comics and declared their intention to switch to dedicated computing magazines. The latter began to run adverts deriding CVG and others, with one citing a UK computer executive who says they are reducing computers to the cultural and educational level of ‘hula hoops’ (Kirkpatrick 2015: 81). The enigmatic concept of gameplay and the extensive way in which it is deployed after 1985 are key to the way that the new representation of the ‘computer game’ does its work as a collector. On one side, it draws instances to it, on the other it excludes and relegates those items that are unfit to be represented, or included in its count. As games are represented, so they are articulated to, and help establish, a new unfolding network; a set of relations in which their significance is entirely transformed. From elements in a sea of software and other computational flux, games are compared to other games on the basis of properties associated more or less exclusively with games. For Latour, a network is a ‘double movement’ of constitution and operation. The term ‘…“network” designates a series of associations revealed thanks to a trial—…that makes it possible to understand through what series of small discontinuities it is appropriate to pass in order to obtain a certain continuity of action’ (Latour 2013: 33). A network of relations constitutes games and gaming. As this network expands it draws in some objects (and human beings), while excluding others, with the consequence that computer games become a global phenomenon almost as soon as they leave their first ‘local’ trace in the pages of the British magazines. This process was accompanied by an at times quite vicious polemic directed at those who did not ‘get it’ about gameplay, or simply had no place in the world of gaming. The arbiters in this process were a new kind of subject, gamers. They had the right intuitus (Lefebvre 1991: 244)— they knew what made a good game—but they were themselves products or consequences of the relations established by the unfolding network. At the heart of this transition is a change to the games themselves, which start to combine elements of arcade and home computing experience in a single, emergent form and new kind of space.

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Game Space As games broke away from the rest of computing they were relocated by new collectors into an open-ended and expansive network. This was not a matter of social construction in which games were passive, any more than they were on a prior, determinate trajectory that was bound to be picked out by the culture. Several games in 1985–6 pushed in the direction of a synthesis of experiential elements from the three established platforms discussed above (TV, arcade and home computer) and the result, when folded into the activity of gamers, was a new experience of space. The discursive manifestation of this was the eruption in the reviews pages of the magazines of references to ‘deep gameplay’. It is this space that confers the new collector with its charge and gives it the power to draw together disparate instances of digital games and relocate them in a new, expanding network. Early traces of this move can be discerned in a sense of dissatisfaction with arcade and adventure games in 1984–5. An article in the Christmas 1984 issue of Crash opined that adventure games were becoming too complicated while the January 1985 issue reports there were too many overly complex adventures in the second half of that year (Crash 13 February 1985, pp.  90–1) and speculates that the move to get more graphical content into them might help overcome the problem players had remembering where they were up to in their explorations.8 Hence, adventure games started to feel more like arcade space races and ‘shoot’em ups’. But this movement was not all one way (we should recall that a considerable number of home computer games were already arcade conversions). There is evidence in the magazines of a concurrent push from arcade players for games that were about more than just shooting and chasing things. In the same Christmas 1984 issue Crash reported that ‘arcade players didn’t just want mindless zap games’ (Crash 12 Christmas 1984/5, p. 10) and a couple of months later the magazine repeats that ‘the scenario of shooting everything in sight is wearing thin’ with arcades players (Crash 14 March 1985, p.  30). A year later, another article acknowledges that arcade games have attempted to bring features of other formats into their designs, which it refers to as ‘crossover games’, while expressing 8  One consequence of the shift described here is the demise of adventure games, studied in detail by V. M. Karhulahti (2015).

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disappointment that most software houses have not realized that more than a crude mixing of genres is at issue: ‘what is required is a change in the style of play—not the detail’ (Crash 34 November 1986, p. 91). This confirms that the relevant kind of originality in game design was irreducible to technical improvements in graphics and display. Rather, games needed to measure up to a new aesthetic standard, which is implicit in these demands from players. The key was deployment of established capabilities in such a way as to affect what the games felt like to play. The space opened by the gameplay event was not the visual-virtual space gamers could see on their screens, it was the product of what Henri Lefebvre calls a ‘spatial practice’, that is, it was created by the embodied practices of gamers in conjunction with game apparatus (Kirkpatrick 2011). Initially classed as an adventure game, Shadowfire (Beyond 1985) occupies an important position here in that the review of this game in CU 19 April 1985 (p.  42) signals the start of a period in which ‘gameplay’ is applied much more frequently by reviewers. The game was promoted as ‘a text adventure without text’, which meant that instead of entering directional commands in the form of ‘east’, ‘west’ on the keyboard players used joysticks to, in the words of the reviewer, ‘move an onscreen cursor to an icon which represents the required action. Press fire and the command is implemented’. The reviewer expresses confidence that ‘we will see this technique used a lot more in the future’. The effect attributed to the new control method is that ‘Shadowfire creates a total atmosphere that gamers can lose themselves in’. Shadowfire was commended by reviews in all the magazines and they all make the same connection between the innovative control method and the feeling of atmosphere or ‘depth’ described here. A review in Zzap! illustrates how gameplay ‘deepens’ in the direction of atmosphere and a strong sense of connection to characters in the game: Yet another new approach to adventuring and an outstanding one it is too. Mastering the use of icons is easy enough, especially when armed with the superb instructions. As with all good adventures, an atmosphere is generated. Before long you feel an actual bond between yourself and the six ­characters. Recommended heartily to experienced game players who want to try something new. (Zzap! 1 May 1985, p. 66)

The review in Crash notes that Shadowfire blurs the distinction between adventure and arcade gaming by using ‘icons instead of text’ and that, in

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doing so, it ‘brings the adventure right into the arcade player’s lap’ (Crash 17, p. 16). Uridium, Hewson’s 1986 game, was lauded by Crash magazine as the best game of 1986 and subsequently referenced by all the magazines as a turning point in the development of the medium. The game was programmed on the Commodore 64 but it used a clever technique to create a ‘parallax’ effect normally only possible in arcade games. The result was not only a change in the appearance of the game but consequences for how it felt to play that seemed to demand new terminology: it had deep gameplay. The advert for the Spectrum conversion of Uridium, which came out over a year later than the Commodore version in November 1986, had the caption: ‘Turn on to Uridium: the arcade space combat game’ (advert in Crash 34 November 1986, p. 62). Uridium was never an arcade game but the advert clearly intended to convey the idea that something of the arcade experience was making its way into games played on home computers. The change here is more than the sum of improvements to graphics or responsiveness: it was more a function of the ambition to exploit elements of proto-games in a distinctive way. And this ambition was itself predicated upon a new idea, namely, that home computers could host the same experiences as other ‘computer games’. In other words, Uridium was partly powered by a burgeoning sense of the unitary and interconnected character of the computer game as combining properties from each of its, previously disparate, manifestations. Iconic control methods and parallax scrolling bring something of the visual and kinaesthetic properties of the arcade to small computers, but it is in being conjoined to the aspects of story and puzzle-solving, and probably their being relocated in the intimate domestic space of the home computer where they could be played over and over, that computer games came to be defined and discussed in terms of their feel. From mid-1985 games that possess ‘depth of gameplay’ are the only ones that count. In an interview Uridium’s creator, Andrew Braybrook, described his familiarity with arcade games and reflected that he did not draw the connection between his own activities as a programmer and the games he played in arcades: ‘Even though I was a programmer, I didn’t really connect what I was doing with batch programs in COBO with what these video games were doing. It was only when home computers came out that I realised I could get involved.’ He also recalled that, ‘when Uridium came out I knew that it was slick and smooth, but I wasn’t aware that it was causing a fuss because to me it didn’t have as many sprites or colours as the

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arcade games of the time.” This indicates that the new criteriological context was still in formation, subsisting as an intuition that was perhaps not completely clear even to the people who were driving its emergence. As the references to ‘depth’ in the reviews indicate, gameplay is rewarding in so far as it is able to give the player a sense that they are ‘in’ the game. Consequently, there are more appraisals of games in terms of the extent to which they function as compelling, immersive simulations, with comments like, ‘you do feel as if you’re playing in a world’ (Crash 22 November 1985, p.  27), or the observation that a game ‘has a really woody atmosphere’ (Crash 24 January 1986, p. 12). A superficial reading would trace this to improved graphics and superior renderings of 3D illusions on the screen, but as the example of Uridium’s parallax scrolling shows, this is only a small part of the story. What really mattered was getting the play to ‘feel’ right. This way of thinking games is radically distinct from assessing how games look, or whether they include more or less realistic graphics. A review in CU, for example, describes a game as ‘a great simulation’ but warns, ‘don’t expect mind-blowing graphics’ (CU47 August 1987, p. 67). Even as the new standards of game design were adding ‘depth’ to the gameplay experience, the thematic contents of games narrowed. Where previously the range of fictional topics covered had been both vast and idiosyncratic, now game fictions closed around a staple set of themes involving space wars and sports. Games whose premises or storylines are entirely parochial, like the ones about being unemployed in London (‘Hampstead’ 1984), or the royal family (‘Di’s baby’ 1984), largely disappear when games free themselves from the pre-existing milieu and establish a new network. Moreover, there is a strange and dramatic inversion in the character of game space, which can be discerned in the discourse of the magazines. In early adverts, for example, it is common to find the idea of an open-ended space—of imagination. Berkshire-based Audiogenic, for example, used the slogan ‘new frontiers of fun’ throughout 1982–3 (Kirkpatrick 2015: 78). Similarly, in the discussion of early online gaming cited above, there is excitement in discovering people from other countries ‘out there’. In these evocations of space the dominant metaphor is of a frontier, with the implied possibility of moving from one’s current location into territory that is as yet unknown. Many of the adverts invoke a space that is open for the imagination to run free, with captions like ‘…games that take you up to and beyond your limits’, ‘imaginations unlimited’, and ‘adventures into

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imagination’.9 Quicksilva games promised their customers a ‘free universe with every tape’ (CVG 24 October 1983, p. 2). The ‘deepening’ of gameplay coincides with a reversal of this representation of space. The reference to adventures is telling, since adventure games were a prominent casualty of the change. The contemplative, puzzling-out activity of these games, which were mostly text, contrasts with the aesthetics of gameplay. In fact, there is a doubling of space involved here. The first is that of the computer game as a new cultural presence, whose network suddenly extends, unifying and collecting experiences around the globe. This cancels the local fictions. The second is that of the gamer’s body, which now dances in pursuit of a distinctive, new kind of pleasure. According to Lefebvre (1991), spatializing practices secrete historically specific experiences of space, which are consolidated in and through determinate symbolic representations. The history of the West since the Renaissance has involved a hegemonic symbolization of objective space as geometric and conforming to the principles of linear perspective. This sense of space, so to speak, is embedded in subjective experience informing day-to-day expectations and perceptions of the world. The possibility remains, however, for other kinds of space to be produced. According to Lefebvre, modernist art was such a ‘representational space’; it offered an alternative way to perceive objects in which space was flattened and inhabited, rather than seen from outside. Such space can be produced by subjects who, in embracing it re-suture the imaginary and symbolic in new, determinate and enclosing forms for experience. The practice of daily and domestic life, including play, doubles and in a way substantiates the spatiality manifest in public infrastructures and architecture. At the same time, the interior itself acquires significance and energies from being open to and connected with the wider network. What Lefebvre writes about Roman architecture and its space applies here to gameplay: The interior reproduces the world itself as it emerges in and through the city, opening to the celestial powers, welcoming all gods and embracing all places. (Lefebvre 1991: 244)

Viewed as spatializing practice, computer games are located in this double movement of articulation to a global network, which informs their 9  Ads for Imagine software (CVG 21 July 1983, p.156); Postern software (CVG 21 July 1983, p. 59); and Richard Shepherd (CVG 23 September 1983, p. 60–61), respectively.

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imaginary, and a new embodied experience of depth into which their players are invited to fly. The double spatiality of empowerment through connection and exhilarating sensations of flight is constitutive of computer games as such. Game space is not the illusionistic, visual space on gamers’ screens; it is the intuitive condition of embodied gaming activity that was opened up by gamers cleaving to the procedures that make gaming happen and expand its network. That very process of expansion informs the procedures themselves in a feedback loop of co-constitution. In this way, gaming became a recognized and familiar practice, even though for those who embraced it first it constituted a more or less sharp break with the spatial conventions that had been with them from childhood and were inscribed in their bodily habits and dispositions (staring at a game image on the TV screen produces no game). Game space is now experienced in full flight, in separation from the local. But even as it becomes global, even universal, game space is now knitted into a kind of enclosure that contains its ‘immersed’ players. Game space is no longer open-ended, accommodating the imaginary to infinity. Instead, it presents a culturally distinctive experience of reverse perspective. Images in reverse perspective work by combining elements that create the appearance of depth, such as a series of telegraph polls getting smaller towards a vanishing point on the horizon, larger figures in the foreground smaller ones in the distance and so on, with others that subtly invert it. The classic example involves rail lines that instead of narrowing as they get further away actually widen on the horizon and narrow to a realistic depiction in the foreground. Such images undermine themselves: the self-same elements that project distance and space crash our perception of those things in an awareness that they are effects produced by design.10 Gaming is a universal practice in a global network, yet it narrows around a grammar of embodied activity that limits and constrains—hence the fictional possibilities also narrow. In this way, gameplay is a space that appears expansive and is experienced as flight, yet is always in a state of collapse. It invites, accommodates and can be filled by embodied activity, but always reduces to an implausible point in the foreground. The suture of imaginary and symbolic stitches a space that is globalized yet claustrophobic. Henceforth, game space is a sequence of places from which to escape, each as impossible as they are realistic. 10  The classic illustration can be found in Esquire magazine April 1966 and in Edgerton (1975: 13).

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The first inhabitants of this space, the ones whose activity brought it into being, identified themselves as ‘gamers’. For them the ‘gamer’ identity was not just an idea but a practical, lived reality. It was not a matter of internalizing the discourse of the magazines11 but had the character of what Lefebvre calls an intuitus: Intuitus…—as opposed to habitus—does not designate a theoretical intuition of a basically intellectual nature, but rather a practice, a spatial practice, mobilized by (equally spatial) representations. (Lefebvre 1991: 244)

This intuitus was something gamers made of themselves when they cleaved to the truth of the gameplay event. The truth, as Lacan writes, is always new (Lacan 2008: 17). What made gaming a truth that gamers could not embrace was the passing beneath them, always just out of view, of a new reality; in Badiouian terms, a permutation of the void. Cleaving to gamer identity involved the procedures of gameplay along with the attitudes and skills of one who felt this change as it brushed past. Only in the light shed by the event does their activity make sense: they are not technical dabblers and they are not children with toys, they are doing something new; something that could not have been done by anyone before, and which is nonetheless as old as playing games. Gamers’ fidelity to the name of the gaming event ties them into procedures that involve finding authentic gameplay in games on one side and working on themselves to become better players—more fitting subjects for gaming’s truth—on the other. These practices produce the new space and they sort what kinds of things are to be included in it from the ones that are not. No one knew clearly what a computer game was or what made a good one before this evental transformation. Having access to these ‘truths’ and producing this space are constitutive of a social and cultural network that simply did not exist before. This process was ambivalent because it represented a path that could be chosen only by those who found themselves ‘eligible’ and it was an identity they chose because it seemed authentic, universally true. At the same time, just as the reality of the event vanishes as soon as it appears, so too the identity of the gamer is carried away as soon as it is pinned down in language:

11  Previously, I have suggested understanding this in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1995) idea of habitus but this idea now seems a bit too passive.

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There … between an extinction that is still glowing and a birth that is retarded, ‘I’ can come into being and disappear from what I say. (Lacan 1989: 300)

The gamer subjectivation leads immediately into a normative codification of gaming; a representation that is a delimitation of its own space. What seemed like a liberation in the moment of subjectivation becomes just another way to lose oneself in a reigning procedure and production of a space that is always folding inwards, collapsing. Just as gaming space opens up only to be filled with a network of objects in closed and determinate relation with one another, so the gaming subject falls more than it flies. Nonetheless, the outcome is a new cultural field, a more or less recalcitrant formation with its own internal logic and an undeniable objective coherence.

References Bagnall, B. 2010. Commodore: company on the edge. Manitoba: Variant Books. Badiou, A. 2007. Being & Event. Trans. O. Feltham. London: Continuum. Bourdieu, P. 1995. The Field of Cultural Production. Trans. R.  Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Crossley, N. 2014. Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion. Manchester: MUP. Dyer-Witheford, N. and de Peuter, G. 2003. Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing. Ottawa: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Edgerton, S.Y. 1975. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York: Basic Books. Foucault, M. 1981. The order of discourse. In Untying the text: A post-­structuralist reader, ed. R. Young. London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul. Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. 2006. Cinéma et genealogy des medias. In MédiaMorphosis 16: 24–30. Garofola, L. 1999. Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goehr, L. 2007. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haddon, L. 1988. The home computer: the making of a consumer electronic, in Science as Culture 1: 7–51. Karhulahti, V. 2015. Adventures of Ludom: A videogame geneontology. Ph.D. thesis, University of Turku. https://www.utupub.fi/handle/10024/104333. Kimines, D. (n.d.) ‘A history of Zzap! magazine’, at www.gb64.com (accessed May 2014). Kirkpatrick, G. 2007. Meritums, spectrums and narrative memories of ‘pre-virtual’ computing in Cold War Europe’. Sociological Review 55: 227–50.

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Kirkpatrick, G. 2011. Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kirkpatrick, G. 2012. Constitutive Tensions of Gaming’s Field: UK Gaming magazines and the formation of gaming culture 1981–1995. Game Studies 12. Kirkpatrick, G. 2013. Computer Games and the Social Imaginary. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kirkpatrick, G. 2015. The Formation of Gaming Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kirkpatrick, G. 2020. Technical Politics: Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology Manchester University Press. Lacan, J. 1989. Écrits: A selection. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Routledge. Lacan, J. 2008. My Teaching. Trans. J-A. Miller. London: Verso. Latour, B. 2013. A Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Trans. C.  Porter. New York: Harvard. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Levy, S. 1984. Hackers. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Roszack, T. 1968. The Making of a Counter-Culture: Reflections on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition London: Faber & Faber. Selwyn, N. 2002. Learning to love the micro: the discursive construction of ‘educational’ computing in the UK, 1979–89, British Journal of Sociology of Education 323: 427–443. Turkle, S. 1995. Life On the Screen. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wade, A.  Webber, N. 2016. A future for game histories? Cogent Arts and Humanities 3.

CHAPTER 12

Heterodoxy in Game History: Towards More ‘Connected Histories’ Melanie Swalwell

Microhistorians have been compared to truffle hunters in contrast to those who, like parachutists, survey wide vistas. —Francesca Trivellato

I want to begin by returning to the earliest research I conducted on digital game history in 1980s New Zealand. I had learnt of a significant amount of New Zealand-made game hardware and locally written software that was little known outside the country (or inside, for that matter (Brown 2003)). Two things were immediately clear to me. First, that the history I was helping to surface contradicted the established wisdom—the then orthodoxy—of game history, that pretty much everything of note was either North American or Japanese. Second, that much of the material history of digital gaming in New Zealand was hybrid, having thoroughly mixed origins. This last fact is explained by the trade policies New Zealand

M. Swalwell (*) Transformative Media Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Swalwell (ed.), Game History and the Local, Palgrave Games in Context, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0_12

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had in place until the mid-1980s, to keep large quantities of imported goods out. Despite this, the game artefacts I was researching spoke of constant contact with the ‘outside’ world. Local content was not ‘100% pure’—as the nation’s tourist marketing slogan goes. The ‘local’ was already in the 1980s a pan- or trans-local. Imported arcade boards would be housed in locally built cabinets and the Sportronic console utilised the popular General Instruments AY-3-8500 chip. Even Kitronix’s ‘Malzak’ (1980)—a wholly New Zealand-made arcade game, with locally made cabinet, artwork, buttons, and joysticks, coded from the ground up on an Apple II—is a ‘clone’ of the international hit, ‘Scramble’ (Swalwell and Davidson 2016; Swalwell 2015). These dual realisations lead me to simultaneously focus on the specificities of the New Zealand situation—where it accorded with and where it departed from extant histories—and to problematise the ‘localness’ of the case study. I noted that while it might be tempting to treat the local New Zealand game production scene as if it grew up separately from production elsewhere in the world, such an unproblematic ‘local’ approach was unable to adequately account for the complexity of factors that contributed to the industry in the 1970s and 1980s. The New Zealand case study provides a very clear example of the interaction between local structural factors, wider non-local conditions, and imported componentry combined with local opportunism. My earliest foray into the game history subfield thus saw me asking how the localness of game history ought to be conceived (M. Swalwell 2005). It’s a good question, one that we should continue to ask. Some fifteen years later, I want to look back and ask—and try to offer an answer to the question that was often demanded of me—what is the critical potential of locality for computer and game histories? I suspect that an answer lies in another question that I desperately wanted to be able to work on, namely how the New Zealand case study compared to other nations, but this was a question that wasn’t really possible to answer in 2004. I was able to compare the New Zealand case to what I could read or glean about the USA, Japan, and occasional other elsewheres—such as in Jaro Gielens’ compendium about handhelds, Electronic Plastic (2000), and shortly thereafter Graeme Kirkpatrick’s article on Meritums in Poland (Kirkpatrick 2007)—but there wasn’t enough in-depth scholarly research to allow me to satisfactorily answer this question. Hopeful, I applied for funding for a multi-national project, but of course no one was prepared to finance such a project in the 2000s. But the landscape has changed, and so we should

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be prepared to heed this and challenge ourselves to answer these questions about game history’s critical potential, now. As I see it, the ‘local’ game history project—if we can call it that1—is an attempted corrective to some of the problems with the first draft of game history, which had many limitations and omissions. In this chapter, I conceive of the emergence of a game history concerned with the local as being in transition: from something resembling micro-histories to more ‘connected histories’. I want to use the discussion about microhistory that’s been had for some decades to challenge game historians to ask, what comes next? What comes after local case studies? Taking inspiration from Carlo Ginzburg’s classic study, I argue that ‘local’ game history is heterodox: often focusing on the outlier examples from the ‘periphery’, it undermines orthodoxies. Heterodoxy has the potential not just to throw up divergent accounts, but to also throw into question what we thought we knew about the ‘centre’. However, the two sets of concerns need to be brought together somehow. In this essay, I briefly introduce microhistory and its debates, before asking, after historians Peter Burke and Francesca Trivellato what it might mean to move towards more ‘connected histories’ (Sanjay Subrahmanyam in Trivellato 2011)? My concern is not so much with whether game histories concerned with the local are microhistories as with what can be gleaned from the debate as it has played out over the decades. Ultimately, my aim is to ask what comes after the very necessary attention to local specificity?

Debates on Microhistory The epithet above is apparently a riff on Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s characterisation of historians as either truffle hunters or parachutists: microhistorians are compared to truffle hunters, contrasted with the global historian-parachutists, surveying supposedly wider vistas (Trivellato 2011). Debates over the local in game history bear some resemblance to debates about microhistory (‘micro’ indicating the scale of analysis). ‘Local’ game history involves undertaking research that is located in a specific time and 1  We have a list of 100+ subscribers and have been hosting panels at conferences for at least 15 years, so I think it is credible to talk of this as a project, though affiliation is loose. There is no agreed set of terms, nor any unified positions. The fact that game history scholars have independently arrived at similar approaches to research objects yet not undertaken any steps to formalise association suggests that this may well be a common project.

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place, as indeed does all historical research, but perhaps defined somewhat more specifically. ‘Local’ game history might be analogous to the truffle hunter side of Le Roy Ladurie’s dyad, but it would be too simplistic to see these as mutually exclusive positions. Carlo Ginzburg’s famous microhistorical study The Cheese & the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller provides one of the best known examples of microhistory, and it is useful also for troubling the implied binary of the characterisation between truffle-hunters and parachutists. The book is written around the inquisition of a seventeenth-century Italian miller, Domenico Scandella, also called Menocchio, who is tried by the Catholic Church for heresy, tortured, and burned at the stake (Ginzburg 1992, xiii). Detailed court records exist because the Church required that a transcript be made. Menocchio—a self-taught but intellectually voracious reader—developed “his own startlingly eccentric cosmology”, at odds with Church doctrine. ‘Microhistory’ speaks to the scale of Ginzburg’s analysis, though in Menocchio’s case it also speaks to the detailed study of an individual’s life. Over the past several decades, there has been a debate over micro and macro (or global) approaches to history. Glossing this debate, Trivellato writes of microhistory: “It digs out details [usually about the lives of individuals] that are significant enough to undermine the foundations of grand narratives, but struggles to replace them with new ones” (Trivellato 2011). It is slightly confusing for a non-expert in this area that micro and macro are presented as if they are opposing sides in a battle. What is clear is that the disappointment being voiced with microhistory is separate from the admiration for scholarship such as The Cheese and the Worms; the criticisms are clearly directed at different projects, that don’t manage to pull off this blend of micro and macro. Ginzburg’s thesis is clearly substantial (Burke calls it “eye-opening” (Burke in Levi 2001, 115)). From his in-­ depth investigation centred on one man, Ginzburg goes on to develop “a general hypothesis on the popular culture ([or] more precise[ly], peasant culture) of preindustrial Europe, in the age marked by the spread of printing and the Protestant Reformation—and by the repression of the latter in Catholic countries” (Ginzburg 1992, Preface to the English edition, p. xii). Such an approach clearly marries the proverbial ‘truffle hunting’ with more panoramic insights. But for the purposes of a chapter on game history, there’s no need to get too bogged down. Thankfully, beyond the somewhat confusing characterisation of the micro as obsessed with minutiae lies some more nuanced positions.

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Historians Burke and Trivellato have separately discussed some of the criticisms and limitations of microhistory, and pondered the ways forward. Specifically they ask whether the micro and macro, the local and the global, can helpfully be connected? In 2001, Burke asked “whether the law of diminishing returns” had set in, that is, whether “more than a quarter of a century after the [microhistory] pioneers, [it might] be time to stop?” (Burke in Levi 2001, 115). He noted that the appropriate response was probably “it depends”, and went on to observe a major historical problem that is illuminated by microhistorical techniques, namely, “the possibility that events viewed under the historical microscope, rather than the naked eye, appear to take place for different reasons” (116). Burke flags the possibility that historians need to learn to live with complementary but incompatible concepts and approaches—the microhistorians coexisting with macrohistorians. Whether or not this will happen, we ought at least to be asking ourselves, as some historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have been doing, whether or not it is possible to link the microsocial with the macrosocial, experiences with structures, face-to-face relationship with the social systems or the local with the global. If this question is not taken seriously, microhistory might become a kind of escapism, an acceptance of a fragmented world rather than an attempt to make sense of it. (Burke in Levi 2001, 116–17)

Possible solutions Burke offers for “linking the local to the global might be to give more attention to the different kinds of ‘broker’ or ‘gatekeeper’ between communities and the outside world. Another might be to move backwards and forwards between the two levels…” (116–117). These solutions will sound familiar to many game historians. Francesca Trivellato, a historian of early modern Europe and the Mediterranean, has written a nice survey article on debates between micro and macro perspectives. Trivellato argues that a microhistorical approach has significant potential for global history, but that this remains underexploited. She says that whilst Italian microhistorians repeatedly grappled with the challenge of how to conceive of the relationship between microand macro-scales of analysis, they never outlined a coherent theory. Trivellato also observes that “The persistent friction between micro- and macro-analyses raises questions about the degree of generalization that can be drawn from single case-studies…” (Trivellato 2011). She sets out to review some of the ways that microhistory and global history can

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intersect, or more correctly how global history can borrow and adapt from microhistory (as she says she has done in a study of Jewish merchants in a Tuscan port city and their far reaching networks in the early eighteenth century), arguing that microhistory has considerable potential for global history. She also cites Giovanni Levi, the Italian microhistorian, who: argued that ‘historians should not generalize their answers; the real definition of history is that of a discipline that generalizes its questions, that is, a discipline that poses questions which have a general significance and yet recognizes that infinite answers are possible, depending on the local context’. (Cited in Trivellato 2011)

Provocations for Game History To bring this back to game history, several points are salient. The micro/ macro debate is not an exact fit for game history, but there are some insights we can consider as provocations. Levi’s observation about generalising questions rather than answers seems apposite. And the single case study issue is worth acknowledging as a challenge. In what remains, I want to expand the discussion a little to draw on a perspective from the cognate area of computer history, before turning to some exemplars from current work that suggest ways in which ‘local’ game history might be able to move towards more connected histories. First, the micro/macro question: in hindsight, I realise that I have— almost intuitively—been searching for larger contexts in which to situate my New Zealand research for many years. As already mentioned, I have long held that it is not particularly helpful to treat the entry of specific variant locales in game history—or digitality, more generally—as just a phenomenon of the local. But this is to state the matter negatively. We need to turn the proposition around: to state positively what divergent case studies concerned with locality make possible to think and theorise in game history, generalising our questions—after Levi. The issue of getting beyond single case studies is one on which Corinna Schlombs has previously reflected in relation to the historiography of digital computing, which faces some similar challenges to game history. In computer history, Schlombs writes, there is a default North American perspective which is perceived as the standard that all other national histories follow. In her 2006 Think Piece, ‘Toward International Computing History’, Schlombs writes that there are ‘formidable barriers’ which make

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international historical research expensive and time consuming (Schlombs 2006). For Schlombs, the main ones are “language differences, access to archival and other sources, and the demands of mastering multiple national histories” (108). She recognises that it is too hard for one scholar to be across everything, and her three suggestions for ways forward include: (1) writing local histories of computing in countries other than the USA; (2) undertaking comparative studies (helpful for “derail[ing] technological or economic determinist arguments by demonstrating how social, political, and cultural factors shape technology”); and (3) studying interactions between countries. This, she notes, has still tended to rely on the nation state as the unit of analysis, but it need not be the case. “By adjusting the scale of analysis, historians can ask new questions about the social, economic, and cultural context of computing” (Schlombs 2006, 107). Getting beyond single case studies in game history presents a similar difficulty. Yet despite the challenge, I sense that it is something that many historians concerned with locality are already doing, at least to an extent. I have been deliberating for some time as to whether doing ‘local’ game history actually means ‘comparative game history’. The answer must be a definitive ‘yes’. A game historian with a local focus is expected to articulate how their local case study compares to historical accounts from the USA, UK, or Japan to make the significance clear to non-local audiences, a burden not demanded of scholars from the ‘centre’. I have been fortunate to be able to immerse myself in two surprisingly different local game history contexts (Australia and New Zealand), placing these in international context. However, I accept that this is relatively straightforward—at least as regards the USA and UK—given no extra language skills are required. Whilst recognising that this expectation of comparative competence is not evenly shared at present, I agree with Wolf that a comparative dimension is likely to be important in the next phase of game historiography (2015, 12). One strategy that Schlombs surprisingly doesn’t mention for getting beyond the single case studies problem—and around the language challenge—is collaboration. For instance, I am engaged in a collaboration with Letícia Perani to examine the operation in New Zealand and Brazil of Taito, the company behind that most iconic ‘Japanese’ game, ‘Space Invaders’. This was prompted by an ex-Taito-tronics programmer telling me:

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Taito Brazil had a large number of “Galaxian” boards, so pretty much the next phase up from “Space Invaders”, and what we did in the R&D department in Taito New Zealand was to convert—to rewrite a couple of the classics of the time—to run on “Galaxian” hardware, because again, at the time pretty much every new game came out with a new set of PCBs.

The programmer’s recollection suggests that there are whole unexplored histories that the New Zealand material provides a way into. A 1975 advertisement Perani discovered in Cash Box indicates that Taito had offices in several locations around the world besides Tokyo (Chicago, Antwerp, Sao Paulo, Sydney), in the pre-digital era when it sold and leased a range of coin-op machines (Taito 1975). While this could be considered in terms of an early instance of a global company, at the moment we are focusing on the trans-local connections between New Zealand and Brazil. Co-authoring with Perani means that the product of our research will be shaped by our respective intimate knowledges of the local social and cultural contexts, as well as circumventing the challenges each would face undertaking research in another country (in my case, in Portuguese). Collaboration is thus another strategy for dealing with the single case study problem. To extend on this point, I am impressed by the network of European scholars who are managing to effectively pool their knowledge through engagement with each other’s research: the existence of several researchers working on Central and Eastern European game histories—helped by a conference series, the Central and Eastern European Game Studies (CEEGS) conference—is building a rich set of interrelations and knowledge that enhances everyone’s work, a sort of a collaboration by stealth. While it is hard to periodise accurately (without knowing how much research exists in languages other than English), with roughly fifteen years of critical game historical work behind us, generalisations—beyond single case studies—are starting to become possible in some regions. With a critical mass of game historians interested in the local—distributed around the globe and networked2—the barriers to developing more connected histories are lower than they ever have been. 2  I started the Localgamehist listserv with Jaroslav Svelch in 2014. With more than 100 members, the listserv is a network where one might find collaborators. The listserv is also acting as a collaborative knowledge pool and resource where new types of questions can be asked, allowing for greater contextualising of local phenomena. For instance, Jaroslav Svelch asked about ‘Hacker’ games; games with real-life contests. Maria Garda asked about the old-

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Drawing another example from computer history, Petri Paju and Thomas Haigh’s recent article on IBM in Finland (2018) further illustrates the point. “The history of IBM”—they argue—“is the sum of a set of intertwined narratives taking place on national, regional, and international levels” (5). Paju and Haigh note that while the story of a particular international subsidiary might usually be assumed to be of primarily local interest—as a footnote to the American experience—they aim to demonstrate to business historians the usefulness of approaching the stories of a large multinational corporation from its peripheries (4, 26). The Finnish account is rich with detail not only about IBM’s interrelation with Finnish national history, but also the involvement of the local office in pan-­ European activities, sales to the Soviet Union, and exchange with IBM’s ‘international’ culture of sales, management, and research. Paju and Haigh suggest their account demonstrates the value of “studying the development of intermediate levels of exchange and identity, between national subsidiary and global corporation” (27). The questions some game history scholars are asking also seem to be heading towards convergence—as Levi suggests—particularly in research related to users across multiple local sites (Borthwick and Swalwell, this volume) and tracking software distribution (Wasiak 2014; Albert 2020). Asking similar questions will make it simpler to relate the idiosyncratic histories of various elsewheres to other locales and better known histories. Some are researching multiple locations by stealth. While user group newsletters and magazines have long been recognised as rich historical sources, Borthwick’s archive of Sorcerer user group newsletters from three continents and five countries makes possible a different set of research questions than do such sources from a single place, which have more usually been studied. Gleb Albert is also conducting what is effectively multi-­ site research in relation to ‘crackers’ and informal software distribution. As he summarises, a range of developments in microcomputer reception: have been researched in case studies over the last decade. However, in order to analyse how these developments influenced each other, it might be productive to do it in a case study that takes a focus on transnational entanglements. After all, home computerisation did not take place simultaneously all est known use of the ‘indie’ term in relation to games and so on. Svelch also started to tap the combined linguistic resources of the list to ask how much literature on local game history there is in languages other than English and how much we may be missing because of the language barrier. See https://lists.flinders.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/localgamehist

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over the globe, but rather it was a process that developed (and, on a global scale, is still developing) for several decades, and its manifestations in particular countries were always bound to developments and events occurring outside the respective countries’ borders, as the triumphant march of the home computer took place against the backdrop both of a new wave of economical globalisation and massive changes in world politics. (Albert 2020)

Albert writes that the cracking scene “acted transnationally from the beginning. However, it was not ‘global’ in any meaningful sense”. He sets out to undertake an examination of the contacts between the ‘centre’— which he designates as those countries which constituted core regions in the cracking scene (USA, Canada, Scandinavia, Finland the Benelux state, Great Britain, West Germany, France, Austria, and Switzerland) —and the ‘peripheries’—defined as a range of regions which lacked either technical know how or the access to international software distribution, to get their hands on new software. ‘Transnational entanglements’ is a wonderfully rich concept, and Albert’s investigations are even more appreciated because of his “bias towards the developments in Eastern Europe due to the availability of sources and my knowledge of languages”, though he also “strives to employ sources from other parts of the world, particularly Latin America and the Middle East, insofar as they are available” (Albert 2020). On the question of sources’ availability, Albert’s initiative to gather the material traces of the demoscene in the online archive ‘Got Papers?’ is also significant here. Crowd-sourcing the remains of the culture of physically posting disks around the world and hosting this in a repository available online mean that the potential extent of the coverage is considerable, evidenced by the fact that a scholar from Switzerland (with a bias to Eastern Europe) can point to historic correspondence received from Adelaide—a city in Australia—and suggest a collaboration. The ‘Got Papers?’ archive offers a way of locating informants in a particular country who may be difficult to find (many are not open about belonging to the scene because of the questionable legal status of some of its activities). Ultimately, the archive will make it possible to get a much clearer picture of just how entangled users were, transnationally, in the point-to-point snail mail era (Albert n.d.). These are analyses on a simultaneously micro and macro scale. We have barely scratched the surface of the inter-relations between different locales, but such analyses provide encouraging evidence that game history is now moving beyond just the granular, micro scale to more connected histories.

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Heterodox Histories The ‘local’ game history project has been one corrective to an early stage history that had a number of deficiencies. Game historians have now documented many other histories away from the ‘centres’, de-centring (or otherwise complicating) the histories of those nations that were previously placed at the centre. This was a necessary first step. In this chapter, I have argued that debates in which accommodations are attempted between microhistory and global history are helpful for thinking about how ‘local’ game history scholarship might move towards more connected histories, which would be the next step in this journey. To conclude, I want to offer an answer to the question I raised about what the critical potential is of ‘local’ game history. Scholarship concerned with the local has helped the field of game history get out from under the weight of received wisdom, the orthodoxy that was inherited. I drew on Ginzburg’s microhistorical study because it brought microhistory together with heterodoxy, a concept that I find particularly resonant for game history. Ginzburg describes Menocchio’s views as ‘heterodox’ in both general and precise ways. Generally, Menocchio’s views differed from the then accepted cosmology (19), but Ginzburg’s second use is more precise: Menocchio’s ‘heterodox opinions’ go against the Church’s orthodoxy (21), and it is this which leads to his conviction as a heretic. What do we mean then, by saying that a game history concerned with the local might present knowledge that is heterodox when compared with mainstream history? What difference does an account of Taito told from the perspectives of Brazil and New Zealand make? Such histories would be heterodox in that the new perspectives they generate are not only counter to orthodox (or mainstream) game history, but because they also disturb what we thought we knew about the ‘centre’, revealing—in some cases—that histories are not quite as certain or stable as they may have been made out to be. Local histories provide alternate perspectives, but joined up, connected histories highlight absences far more effectively. For instance, Patryk Wasiak’s study of grassroots software exchange between Europe and the USA revealed some surprises for me about the culture of software in the USA (Wasiak 2014). And my study of homebrew game development in 1980s Australia and New Zealand asks where the game history research on microcomputing is in the USA (Melanie Swalwell 2021)? The point is not to replace one set of grand narratives, orthodoxies, or heroes with another. Rather, when we are attentive

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to specificity, different histories become possible, including of the ‘centres’. The move towards more connected histories is a sign, I suggest, of the maturation of game historical scholarship. It is good to be beyond the chronicle stage.

References Albert, Gleb J. n.d. “Got Papers?” Accessed June 17, 2020. https://gotpapers. scene.org. ———. 2020. “New Scenes, New Markets: The Global Expansion of the Cracking Scene, Late 1980s to Early 1990s.” WiderScreen 2. http://widerscreen.fi/ assets/Albert_2_3_2020.pdf. Brown, Russell. 2003. “‘Blast from Our Past.’” Unlimited Magazine New Zealand, 2003. http://unlimited.co.nz/unlimited.nsf/opinion/blast-­from-­our-­past. Gielens, Jaro. 2000. Electronic Plastic. Berlin: Verlag. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1992. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller. John and Anne Tedeschi, trans., New York: Penguin. Kirkpatrick, Graeme. 2007. “Meritums, Spectrums and Narrative Memories of ‘Pre-Virtual’ Computing in Cold War Europe 1.” The Sociological Review 55 (2): 227–50. Levi, Giovanni. 2001. “On Microhistory.” In New Perspectives on Historical Writing, edited by Peter Burke, 2nd edition, 97–119. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University. Paju, Petri, and Thomas Haigh. 2018. “IBM’s Tiny Peripheral: Finland and the Tensions of Transnationality.” Business History Review 92: 3–28. Schlombs, Corinna. 2006. “Toward International Computing History.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Jan-Mar: 107–8. Swalwell, M. 2005. “Early Games Production in New Zealand.” In Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views – Worlds in Play. Swalwell, Melanie. 2015. “New Zealand.” In Video Games Around the World, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf, 377–91. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2021. Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Swalwell, Melanie, and Michael Davidson. 2016. “Game History and the Case of ‘Malzak’: Theorising the Manufacture of ‘Local Product’ in 1980s New Zealand.” In Locating Emerging Media, edited by Benjamin Aslinger and Germaine Halegoua, 85–105. Routledge. Taito. 1975. “Taito, the Full Service International Leisure Company.” Cash Box, July 5, 1975.

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Trivellato, Francesca. 2011. “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” California Italian Studies 2 (1). http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq. Wasiak, Patryk. 2014. “Playing and Copying: Social Practices of Home Computer Users in Poland during the 1980s.” In Hacking Europe: From Computer Cultures to Demoscenes, edited by Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel, 129–50. London: Springer Verlag. Wolf, Mark J.P., ed. 2015. Video Games Around the World. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Index1

A Actor-network models, 144 Adaptation, 183, 188–190, 191n11, 192, 194, 195 Adventure games, 45 Aesthetics, 106, 144, 161, 174, 175 Africa, 4 American Action, 62 Amiga, 38, 48 Amiga 500, 146 Angry Birds, 177 Anthropy, Anna, 32 Apple Apple II, 102, 108 Arcade, 4, 84, 87, 88, 91, 102, 108 arcade games, 43, 185 arcade machines, 185 arcadization, 88 Arcade boards, 222 Assassin’s Creed, 162, 163 Assembler, 65

Atari, 2, 19–21, 30, 38–40, 40n4, 40n5, 43–45, 47–51, 50n17, 102, 105, 191, 192n12, 193–195 Atari ST, 38, 48 Atari VCS, 2 Atari 2600, 85 ATOD, 64, 66 Australia, 3, 106, 124–126, 129, 130, 134, 142, 148n4, 169, 175, 227, 230, 231 Melbourne, 124–127 Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 5 Austria, 59, 230 Autobiography, 21, 32, 80 B Badiou, Alain, 11 Baer, Ralph, 2, 191, 191n11, 192, 192n12

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Belgium, 42, 59, 132 Betamax, 147 Brazil, 145, 154, 227, 228, 231 Britain, 3, 142, 230 Bugs, 128, 151, 152 Bushnell, Nolan, 2, 191 C Canada, 70, 125, 130, 132, 149, 162, 169, 170, 175, 230 Candy Crush, see King Cartridges, 45, 147 Caterpillar, 25 CD Projekt, 51, 165, 166 CD-ROM, 41 Cinema, 160, 162, 163, 169 Civic collaboration, 105 Commercialisation, 61 Commodore Commodore PET, 123, 136 Commodore 64, 84 Commodore VIC-20, 84 Commodore 64, 40, 47, 48, 51 Community, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25–27, 31, 50, 51, 107, 110, 113, 114, 127, 133, 146, 160, 163, 166, 173 Compact discs, see CDs Computer clubs, 17, 20, 24 Computer fair, 41, 41n7 Computer History Museum, 5 Console clubs console club magazines, 86 Console gaming, 80, 82, 84–86, 141 Copy protection, 43 Copyright laws, 165 Czechoslovakia, 8, 17–32, 23n7, 39, 128

D Data, 8, 42n8, 43, 46, 46n11, 47, 50n16, 58, 60, 61, 68, 72, 74, 80, 80n1, 82–84, 87, 93, 94, 124, 132, 144, 152 Daydream, 64 De Certeau, Michel, 8, 18, 91 Debord, Guy, 19, 28 Debugging code, 154 Demon in Danger, 21 Demoscene, 9, 49–51, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 73, 230 Derive, 8 Devolver Digital, 166 Digital art, 64 Digital preservation, 131 Disk drives, 45 Disney, 147 Distribution, 2, 6, 7, 25, 26, 29, 39, 41, 43, 51, 107, 115, 147, 160, 162, 165, 166, 170, 229, 230 digital distribution, 107 Domestication of media technologies, 83 Domestic context, 83, 87–90 Dys4ia, see Anthropy, Anna E Easter eggs, 31, 32 Education, 60, 66–68, 73, 109 8-bit, 8, 18–21, 22n5, 37–52, 40n5, 47n11, 50n17 Electronic Arts, 165, 166 Emgeton Story, 19, 20n2, 22, 22n5, 25–28, 30 Ethics, 144 Ethnography, 141 Exidy, 123–137 Sorcerer, 9, 123–137, 229

 INDEX 

F Family, 83, 87, 88, 91, 92 Finland, 9, 79, 80, 82, 84–87, 91, 93, 95, 96, 177, 229, 230 Finnish Museum of Games, 5, 89, 90 Firmware, 128, 142, 145, 150–154 Flea markets, 165 Floppy discs, 164 Flying Wild Hog, 166–169, 171, 172 Fuksoft, 21 G Galaxians, 129–131 Game development, 3, 4n1, 9, 23, 57, 60–63, 65, 66, 71, 102, 160, 162–166, 169, 172–174, 231 Game historians, 6, 7, 9, 11, 106, 107, 111, 112, 186, 223, 225, 228 Game history, 58, 74, 105–108, 111 Gameplay, 11, 32, 50, 83, 171, 178, 185 Game production tools, 172 Gender, 58, 70, 71, 74, 82, 112, 116 gender diversity, 74 Genre, 21, 27, 28, 37, 37n1, 102, 106, 161, 167, 171, 190 Geography, 2, 7, 9, 106, 108, 109 Germany, 39, 117, 130, 137, 181, 193, 230 Global financial crisis, 62 Global game market, 66 Global industry, 57, 181 Globalisation, 230 Globalisation Studies, 7 Gone Home, 32 Greve Graphics, 62 Gwiezdny kupiec, 48

237

H Hackers, 189 Hacking, 4, 144, 149, 150, 153 Hardcore gaming., 86 Hello World, PSP!, 150 Hirai, Kaz, 146 History, 1–11, 37, 48 Hobby clubs, 23n6, 87 Hobby Computer Club, 132 Hobby computing, 20, 31 Homebrew, 8, 18, 20, 23–27, 31, 32, 141–146, 148–151, 153, 154, 231 Hyperlocal, 17–32 I Indie communities, 160, 163 Indie games, 10, 32, 69, 160, 161, 163, 166, 167, 169–173, 175 Infocom, 45, 105 International Game Developers Association Localization Special Interest Group, 182, 182n4, 183 Interview, 31 Ireland, 59 Iron Curtain, 4, 8, 20, 39–42, 164 Israel, 59 J Japan, 1, 2, 57, 61, 85, 106, 134, 142, 148–150, 148n4, 153, 153n9, 163, 174, 178, 179, 181, 192, 193, 222, 227 K King, 57 Kutaragi, Ken, 146

238 

INDEX

L Labour, 59, 70, 111, 112, 115, 162, 164, 166, 171, 175 demand, 70 mobility, 71 Lateness, 38 Latin America, 230 Latour, Bruno, 11 Lefebvre, Henri, 11 LittleBigPlanet, 144 Living Computers Museum, 5 Local history, 6 Localisation, 10 Locality, 1, 3, 6–11, 84, 95, 143, 144, 154, 222, 226, 227 Lumines, 148, 148n3, 152 Lunar Blitz, 47 M Machine wars, 86 Magazines, 41, 51, 82, 85, 86, 131, 133, 229 Magnavox Odyssey, 181, 191–193 Marketing, 92, 94, 108n3, 111, 160, 164, 184, 222 Mattel Intellivision, 85 Mayhem in Monsterland, 48 Mechanics, 106, 161, 163, 166, 169, 174, 180, 187 Media memories, 81 Mexico, 145, 154 Microcomputers, 39, 42, 47n11, 61, 193, 193n13, 194, 229 Microcomputing, 4, 4n2, 9 Microhistory, 11, 223–225, 231 Microprose, 66 Microsoft, 7, 165 Middle East, 230 Miecze Valdgira, 48 Migration, 69, 159, 164, 188–190, 192, 195 Minecraft, see Mojang

Mobile gaming, 153 Mobygames, 8, 46–48 Mojang, 57 Mystery House, 102, 108 N Narrative, 21, 26, 171, 174, 187, 194n14 Nationalism, 162, 170 Newsletters, 9, 124–127, 130, 132–136, 229 New Zealand, 5, 59, 221, 222, 226–228, 231 1980s, 2, 3, 7–9, 11, 17, 19, 20, 23, 24, 31, 40, 42, 44, 46–49, 61–62, 64, 73, 79–96, 91n4, 102, 110, 111, 115, 125, 127, 128, 133, 178, 183–185, 193, 194, 194n14, 221, 231 1990s, 7, 8, 10, 17–32, 38, 41, 45, 47, 47n14, 48, 58, 61, 62, 64–67, 71, 73, 79–96, 103, 110, 127, 128, 160, 165, 184 1970s, 11, 49, 61, 63, 73, 112, 133, 178, 180, 185–188, 193, 194, 222 Nintendo, 7, 9, 79–96, 146, 147, 153, 165, 181, 184 Game & Watch, 84 Game Boy, 38, 94 NES, 79, 85, 89, 92, 94 Nintendo Club Magazine, 94 Nintendo DS, 153 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), 79, 85, 96 SNES, 92, 93 Super Nintendo, 38, 93 Non-digital games, 21 North America, 69, 142, 148n4, 178 North American, 2 Nostalgia, 23, 46, 51, 87, 128, 167

 INDEX 

O Oakhurst, 101–103, 105, 106, 108, 109n4, 110, 113–117, 115n10 Obsolescence, see Obsolete Obsolete, 38 Open markets, 59 Oral history, 58, 61, 80, 82, 96, 105, 110–112, 111n8, 115n10, 116 P Pac-Man, 185, 186, 186n8 Paradox, 64 Participatory practice, 29 PCs, 38, 165 Philips, 42 Piracy, 43, 44, 164, 165 Platforms, 7, 22, 37n1, 38, 41, 47–49, 47n11, 69, 141, 143, 144, 151, 193 PlayStation, 141–154 PlayStation Portable (PSP), 141–154 PlayStation 2, 143, 145–148, 150, 152–154 Poland, 8, 10, 37–51, 47n11, 47n14, 50n17, 160, 163–166, 168–170, 172–174, 222 Pong, 180, 187, 191–193, 191n11 Pouet, 49 Power fantasy, 29 Programming, 26, 30, 50, 64, 65, 72, 102, 124, 126, 128, 129, 129n1, 136, 150, 173, 184, 194 Promotional games, 92 Proto-games, 11 PS2 DEV forum, 148 Psyclepath, 31 Punk, 24, 29 R Race, 112, 116 racism, 115 Radiokomputer, 44

239

Regionalism, 9, 105–107 The Revenge of the Insane Atari User, 19, 21 Reviews, 130 S Salary, 73 Saturn Expedition Committee, 148, 150 Scandinavia, 4, 106, 230 Sega, 7, 85, 148, 154, 184 Sega Master System, 85 Sega Mega Drive, 38 Shadow Warrior, 163, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 174 Shareware, 32 Sierra On-Line, 9, 102, 102n1, 103, 105, 106, 108–111, 113, 114, 118, 119 Sikor Soft, 8, 49–51 Silicon Valley, 102, 103, 107, 109, 109n5, 134 Sinclair, 3, 20, 21, 40, 193–195 ZX Spectrum, 128 Sinclair Spectrum, 62, 84 Singapore, 7, 59, 162 16-bit, 128 Small state theory, 59 Sneakernets, 43 Solo play, 88 Someday You’ll Return, 32 Sonic the Hedgehog, 154 Sony, 7, 144, 146–148, 147n2, 148n3, 150–154, 153n9, 165 PlayStation, 85, 86 PlayStation 2, 86 Sony Playstation, 41 Soviet, 20, 31, 164, 169, 172, 229 Soviet Union, 106 Space Invaders, 131 Spacewar!, 102, 180, 188–190, 191n11, 194 Spain, 3, 145, 154, 170

240 

INDEX

Spatial practices, 19 Spatial tactics, 8, 20, 27–30 Stanford University, 190 Starbreeze, 64, 67 Stodman, 19, 22, 24–26, 27n10, 28, 29 Strong Museum of Play, 5, 111 Super Asteroids, 130 Super Famicom, see Super Nintendo CD Super Mario, 92 Super Nintendo CD, 147 Sweden, 9, 58–62, 64, 67, 69, 71–73, 79, 80, 85, 87, 91, 167 The Swedish game wonder, 58 T Tactics, 18, 23, 28, 142, 144, 165 Taito, 227, 228, 231 Taiwan, 127 Tandy TRS-80, 123 Tape cassette, 8 Techland, 165, 166 Tekblast, 8, 49, 51 Television, 80, 83, 86, 88, 125, 147 Tennis for Two, 180, 187, 188, 191, 191n10, 192 Test Drive, 45 Text adventure, 21, 27, 28 Textual poaching, 18 This War of Mine, 168–170, 174 Tinkering, 24, 153 Topobiography, 81, 83 Transgenerational software, 49 Transition software, 41 Translation, 10, 178, 181–186, 188–194, 191n10, 191n11

Transnationalism, 160–164, 166, 167, 169–175 TSUNAMI newsletter, 124, 132 Turbo systems, 43 U Ubisoft, 165 UDS, 64, 66 United States, see North America Unity, 172, 173 Universal Media Disc, 148 Universal Studios, 147 Unreal, 172, 173 US, see North America V Vernacular, 19, 24, 144 Video game crash of 1983, 2 Video rental stores, 92, 94 W Word processing, 124, 128, 134, 136 X XIV, 22 Y YouTube, 144 Z ZX Spectrum, 21, 37n1, 38n2, 40, 44, 47