Minor Platforms in Videogame History 9789048540303

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Minor Platforms in Videogame History

Minor Platforms in Videogame History

Benjamin Nicoll

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Guillaume Kurkdjian Cover design: Coördesign Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 828 6 e-isbn 978 90 4854 030 3 doi 10.5117/9789462988286 nur 670 © B. Nicoll / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Tables and Figures

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Acknowledgements 9 Introduction: Failed, forgotten, or overlooked? Methods for historicizing minor platforms

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1. Ways of seeing videogame history: The Vectrex as a transitional platform 45 2. Articulations of videogame piracy: The Zemmix as a decolonial platform 73 3. Domesticating the arcade: The Neo Geo as an imaginary platform 105 4. A dialectic of obsolescence? The Sega Saturn as a residual platform 133 5. ‘How history arrives’: Twine as a minor platform

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Conclusion: ‘Something new in the old’

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Index 201

Table 1.

List of Tables and Figures Korean-developed Zemmix software registered between the application of the Computer Programs Protection Act in July 1987 and November 1989, in chronological order of copyright registration. From Meeting with MSX (November 1989: 6). Translated by Sam Derboo.

Figure 1. Athanasius Kircher’s magic lantern illustration. From Georgibus de Epibus, Romani Collegi Societatis Jesu Celeberrimum (Amsterdam 1678: 39). Retrieved from: (accessed 9 April 2018). Figure 2. Memory pattern of illuminated bit locations displayed on a Williams Tube CRT. From the National Institute of Standards and Technology Research Library (original photo taken in October 1951). Retrieved from: (accessed 20 April 2018). Figure 3. Advertisement for the Vectrex light pen. Retrieved from: (accessed 14 April 2018). By permission of Matthew Henzel (scanner). Figure 4. Advertisement for a Zemmix V console. From Computer Study (January 1988: n.p.). By permission of Sam Derboo (photographer). Figure 5. Advertisement for Computer Kindergarten—which consists of four MSX cartridges of edutainment software—being played on a Zemmix Super V. From MyCom (March, 1990: n.p.). By permission of Sam Derboo (photographer). Figure 6. Zemmix MSX ‘strategy guide’ in the form of a comic strip. From Meeting with MSX (July 1988: 25-26). By permission of Sam Derboo (photographer). Figure 7. A caricature of a Japanese samurai imposing a copyright infringement notice on a South Korean peasant. From MyCom (January 1991: 71). By permission of Sam Derboo (photographer).

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Figure 8. The Zemina team in January of 1988. From Computer Study (January 1988: n.p.). By permission of Sam Derboo (photographer). Figure 9. Flyer depicting the Neo Geo AES home console (top right) and the Neo Geo MVS arcade machine variations (bottom) along with their interchangeable cartridge boards. Retrieved from: (accessed 13 April 2018). By permission of Greg McLemore. Figure 10. ‘Video games aren’t kidstuff anymore!’. From SNK’s Bigger-Badder-Better advertisement supplement (date unknown). Retrieved from: (accessed 9 April 2018). By permission of Mike Melanson (scanner). Figure 11. ‘Vectrex—the revolution starts here’. From TV Gamer (Summer 1983: 68). Retrieved from: (accessed 9 April 2018). Figure 12. ‘The only 24-bit home arcade system’. From SNK’s Bigger-Badder-Better advertisement supplement (date unknown). Retrieved from: (accessed 9 April 2018). By permission of Matthew Henzel (scanner).

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Angela Ndalianis and Bjorn Nansen for their invaluable mentorship and rigorous insights throughout this project; Dale Leorke, for reading the full manuscript and giving me confidence in its ideas and arguments; Brendan Keogh and Tom Sutherland, who read and inspired significant improvements in earlier drafts of the book; Jussi Parikka and Graeme Kirkpatrick, who supported my decision to write the book in the f irst instance; and Thao Phan, who was generous to read, re-read, and provide detailed feedback on a particular chapter. I would also like to thank Thomas Apperley, Melanie Swalwell, Ramon Lobato, Luke Van Ryn, Crystal Abidin, Chris O’Neill, Dongwon Jo, Robbie Fordyce, and Alex Edney-Brown for their collegial advice, feedback, and conversations with regard to the book. Thanks also to Maryse Elliot and the Games and Play series editors at Amsterdam University Press for their support and guidance throughout the proposal, peer review, and publication process. In the final stages of producing this monograph, I began a new stage of my career at Queensland University of Technology. Thanks to my new colleagues in the School of Communication and the Digital Media Research Centre for making me feel at home here. I also want to acknowledge the various people who have directly assisted in the research and writing of this book. Thanks especially to Sam Derboo, whom I commissioned to source, photograph, and translate the Korean magazine and newspaper materials discussed in Chapter Three. I could not have produced this research without his generous assistance and willingness to collaborate. Thanks also to the interviewees quoted in Chapter Five—for agreeing to be interviewed, for taking time out of their days to meet with me, and for allowing me to quote them in this book. These interviews were conducted as part of a broader research project on game engines, jointly funded by the University of Melbourne’s Networked Society Institute, Intellectual Property Research Institute, and Centre for Media and Communications Law. Thanks to Megan Richardson, Bjorn Nansen, Jeannie Paterson, and Adam Lodders for helping to secure this financial support. Thanks to my family—Lydia, Robert, Patrick, and Christopher—for their unwavering support, understanding, and hospitality. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Britt, whose companionship, good humour, and way with words has strengthened and sustained this work.

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Parts of Chapter Three were published previously in ‘Bridging the Gap: The Neo Geo, the Media Imaginary, and the Domestication of Arcade Games’, in Games and Culture 12(2), 2017. Small segments of Chapters One and Five appeared in ‘Mimesis as Mediation: A Dialectical Conception of the Videogame Interface’, in Thesis Eleven 137(1), 2016. They are reproduced here by the kind permission of the journals and their publishers.



Introduction: Failed, forgotten, or overlooked? Methods for historicizing minor platforms Abstract This chapter defines key terms such as ‘minor’ and ‘platform’ and situates the book in relation to existing research on media archaeology, platform studies, and videogame history. It develops three core arguments with regard to the value of minor platforms for videogame and platform historiography: minor platforms inhabit moments of rupture, or periods of discontinuity and transitional instability in videogame history; minor platforms are useful as epistemic tools, insofar as their recalcitrance compels us to question what we think we know about videogame history and the ontological stability of our object of study; and minor platforms articulate alternative structures of feeling—that is, they can provide a window onto suppressed, unrealized, or oppositional cultural and affective patterns in videogame history. Keywords: videogame history, failure, platform studies, minor, media archaeology

Over three days in April 2014, a team of self-described ‘punk archaeologists’ (Caraher et al., 2014)—researchers, historians, and filmmakers—excavated a videogame trash dump in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The site of their dig was videogame history’s most infamous e-waste deposit: the ‘Atari landfill’. This is a site where Atari had, in the midst of its financial collapse in September of 1983, buried thousands of unsold videogame cartridges, consoles, and computers. The three-day excavation yielded 1300 of approximately 700,000 buried videogames, barely scratching the surface of the 30-foot deep landfill. Many of the unearthed videogames remained surprisingly intact, despite sustaining damage as a result of their burial and excavation. The event subsequently made waves in the videogame community and even attracted

Nicoll, B., Minor Platforms in Videogame History, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789462988286_intro

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widespread coverage in the mainstream press. A Canadian entertainment company facilitated the excavation and filmed the proceedings for a documentary.1 Alamogordo’s city council even decided to take part in the event by auctioning many of the unearthed videogames on eBay. Suffice it to say, this was not a typical archaeological dig. Perhaps the most unconventional aspect of the excavation was that it promised no surprise findings—nothing that would inspire a radical rethinking of the existing knowledge regarding the landfill and its deposits. Indeed, the excavated materials largely confirmed what was already known—that Atari, facing bankruptcy in 1983 because of internal mismanagement and a faltering North American videogame industry, buried thousands of its unsold products in a New Mexico desert. So, what did videogame historians, players, and scholars stand to gain from this excavation? In an article published in The Atlantic (Caraher et al., 2014), the punk archaeologists explain that the purpose of the dig was not to reveal what the landfill concealed, but rather to reveal something about the spectacle of the dig itself. For them, the purpose of the excavation was to show that videogames take on different cultural meanings when placed in different spatial and temporal contexts. An excavated Atari videogame is different to one sold on eBay, for example, because it carries a particular set of cultural ‘imaginaries’ and mythic connotations. In essence, the excavation was a way of doing videogame historiography before videogame history—that is, a way of thinking through various historical approaches, methods, and ideas, as opposed to a straightforward process of unearthing previously undiscovered facts or objects. The Atari excavation is certainly unconventional as far as typical archaeological digs go, but it does raise a number of pertinent (and unresolved) questions that are emblematic of the core concerns of this book. It raises questions regarding the value of treating videogame history as a form of praxis—a way of thinking and doing—rather than an excuse to simply ‘dig up’ the suppressed past. It throws into sharp relief the residual or nostalgic qualities ascribed to commercially obsolesced videogames. It points to a current fascination with—and struggle to critically grasp—aspects of videogame history that might be considered failed or suppressed. It captures a contradictory desire to simultaneously salvage and fetishize obsolesced media commodities.

1 The documentary, Atari: Game Over (Penn, 2014), uses the Atari excavation as a reference point for narrating the North American videogame industry crash of 1983.

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This book sets out to address some of these questions by looking at ‘minor’ videogame histories.2 It deploys the term minor not to imply insignificance, but rather to describe a set of objects, subjects, and spaces that are, for various reasons, ancillary to conventional narratives of videogame history. I contend that, by analysing these minor objects, subjects, and spaces, we can gain unparalleled insight into moments of difference and discontinuity in videogame history. An overarching aim is to develop critical concepts and frameworks that can give us better analytical purchase on these ostensibly minor histories. I selectively develop these objectives and arguments through five case studies: the Vectrex, the Zemmix, the Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System, the Sega Saturn, and Twine. These are all examples of what I term ‘minor platforms’. Platforms, videogame or otherwise, are the subject of much debate and discussion in current media studies scholarship, in part because they defy easy categorization. To borrow Lawrence Grossberg’s expression (1995; 2010), platforms are ‘radically contextual’ insofar as the uses to which they are put (and, by extension, the different ways we can understand them) shift fluidly across cultural, political, and economic contexts. A key argument of this book is that we need to take this radical contextuality into account when analysing platforms. It is possible, however, to start with a basic (though simplistic and apolitical)3 definition of what platforms are and what they do. First, platforms are hardware or software infrastructures that facilitate creative expression within an imposed set of constraints (such as, for example, videogame development or amateur content creation). To this extent, platforms are also intermediaries that bring together different human and non-human actors for various cultural and commercial purposes. Companies such as Google and Facebook have built extraordinarily dominant business empires out of this basic platform logic, leading to what has been variously identified as ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, 2016), ‘platform governance’ (Gillespie, 2017b), ‘the platform society’ (van Dijck, de Waal, and Poell, 2018), and ‘the platformization of cultural production’ (Nieborg and Poell, 2 I am not the first person to use the expression ‘minor history’. Branden Joseph (2008) uses the same expression to describe his critical biography of the filmmaker and composer Tony Conrad. I develop the term in a similar way to Joseph by drawing on thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari, as well as by developing the notion of the minor as ‘parasitical’. 3 Tarleton Gillespie (2017a) observes that many of the terms used to describe today’s digital platforms—terms such as infrastructures, intermediaries, openness, and, indeed, the platform metaphor itself—are decidedly value-neutral, and obscure the fact that platforms are political entities that regularly flout their ethical, social, and economic responsibilities (see also Tckaz, 2014).

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2018). But this is not a book about those sorts of platforms and platform effects, at least not directly. Rather, it is a book about platforms that exist or have existed on the margins of history. It is about platforms that utilize the ‘platform logic’ for experimental, disorienting, and deterritorializing (as opposed to monopolizing) purposes. It is about platforms that try to do things differently and, in turn, that can help us think differently about videogames and their histories—past, present, and future. It is a book, therefore, about minor platforms. Rather than treating the case studies as historical oddities or ‘lessons to be learned’ about success and failure, throughout the book I make three quite specific arguments about the value of minor platforms for videogame and platform historiography. The first key argument is that minor platforms inhabit moments of rupture, or periods of discontinuity and transitional instability in videogame history. These ruptures and transitional instabilities offer archaeological insight into the way videogames are or have been understood as a cultural form, and how this understanding has changed across time and space. The second key argument is that minor platforms are useful as epistemic4 tools, insofar as their recalcitrance compels us to question what we think we know about videogame history and the ontological stability of our object of study. Minor platforms challenge dominant conceptions of what qualifies as an object or subject of videogame history and, in doing so, they provide a means by which to theorize the medium anew. Finally, I argue that minor platforms articulate alternative structures of feeling—that is, they can provide a window onto suppressed, unrealized, or oppositional cultural and affective patterns in videogame history. In developing these arguments, it is necessary to deploy an alternative set of analytical and archival approaches, as many of the available methodologies in this area are ill-equipped to deal with the challenges involved in researching minor platforms. The case studies each offer unique insight into moments of uncertainty, contestation, and experimentation in videogame history. My first case, the Vectrex, concerns a period in the early 1980s when videogame developers were experimenting with different visual systems for constructing graphics, 4 I use the term epistemic here in connection with Michel Foucault’s use of the term episteme, which, in Timothy Laurie’s (2012: 1) words, ‘can be a powerful critical concept for historicising and politicising the institutional basis of “ways of knowing”—that is, by locating knowledgeformation within its practical milieu of actions, habits, dispositifs, and so on’. The term episteme is to be differentiated from epistemology, which, ‘in the Kantian philosophical tradition […] is understood as a method of knowing and imputes to its subject an order and consistent faculty for reason and concept-building distinct from pleasures and inclinations’ (Laurie, 2012: 1).

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particularly the use of vector and raster-based cathode ray tube (CRT) projection techniques. At the time, videogame developers and hardware manufacturers were in the process of positioning the medium between existing technical systems (such as television and the computer monitor) and long-standing histories of human perception (such as linear perspective and the grid), and the Vectrex is uniquely placed to reflect this transitional period. My second case, the Zemmix, concerns the formation of an informal economy of pirated videogames in South Korea in the 1980s, and the decolonization process involved in the country’s ‘cloning’ of Japanese and North American technologies. In the next case, I analyse the Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System’s ‘imaginary’ qualities—its way of ‘framing’ videogame culture and identifying a place within it—as a symbol of the medium’s unstable transition from the arcade to the home in the early 1990s. At stake in this transition was a discursive shift in the way people defined the contexts, identities, and values of videogame culture, particularly in relation to expectations around the ‘home console’ experience. The case of the Sega Saturn concerns the way that fans, beginning in the mid-1990s, started to negotiate the afterlives of commercially obsolesced platforms on fan-created websites. My discussion here raises questions regarding the ‘residual’ qualities of minor videogames and platforms, as well as the ‘dialectic of obsolescence’ at the heart of the media archaeological impulse to simultaneously fetishize and salvage memory and materiality. The final case is Twine, a platform that enables me to identify a period of transitional instability in the present. Twine is connected to the so-called ‘democratization’ of videogame development (which has allegedly been in effect since the early 2010s), and the related collapse of certain subject positions and social values that have come to define videogame culture over the historical periods I analyse. I have selected these cases because, to borrow Lisa Gitelman’s (2006: 12) terms, they ‘describe—even, yes, narrate—moments where the future narratability of contemporary events was called into question by widely shared apprehensions of technological and social change’. Although there are many other minor platforms that could be analysed along these lines—platforms such as, for example, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy and Sega’s Dreamcast, both of which have attracted academic curiosity for their status as historical outliers (Boyer, 2009; Montfort and Consalvo, 2012)—I have chosen to focus on the above cases because they exemplify my core arguments about transition and uncertainty in videogame history. To this extent, this book is by no means an exhaustive history of minor platforms. My aim is not to present a chronological history of minor platforms or construct an encyclopaedic

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record of ‘failed’ videogames. Unless I am problematizing them, I avoid conventional metaphors of periodization such as ‘console wars’ or ‘hardware generations’—metaphors that falsely present videogame history as a forwardmarching timeline spurred by capitalist competition and self-contained technological developments.5 Instead, I treat the cases as epistemic tools for ‘opening up’ various critical historical debates, and for highlighting points of difference and discontinuity in videogame history. Rather than bringing a totalizing methodology to bear upon the cases, my analysis is guided by the platforms themselves—their archives, their materialities, and their historical and cultural contexts.

Media archaeology and the historically minor A central theme of this book is that moments of rupture and discontinuity in videogame history are marked not only by technological change but also what Michel Foucault calls separate ‘epistemes’, or historically and culturally incompatible ways of knowing. Here, I am drawing influence from ‘media archaeology’, an ‘undisciplined discipline’ (Sobchack, 2011: 323) where Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods have been highly influential (albeit contested). Although media archaeology is far from a unified methodology—Thomas Elsaesser (2016: 354) even claims that it is better understood as a ‘symptom’ (an idea further discussed in Chapter Four)—it can be loosely defined as a Foucauldian search for epistemic ruptures, discontinuities, and gaps in media history, as opposed to linear sequences of progress. Elsaesser (2016: 32-33), for example, develops Foucault’s notion of epistemic ruptures in relation to film history. He looks at the distinct cultural logics and discursive formations that ground cinematic technologies in historically disparate ways of knowing (or ways of seeing). Similarly, Siegfried Zielinski (2006a) develops the term ‘anarchaeology’ to describe a form of historiography that abandons notions of origin, causality, and teleology in favour of a discontinuous conception of media history. Media archaeologists typically deploy a combination of discursive archives (books, letters, sketches, and other written documents of this nature) and technical archives (machines themselves) as a way of intervening in dominant conceptions of media history and temporality. Media archaeology therefore provides some useful theoretical and methodological coordinates for thinking through the 5 See Dominic Arsenault (2017: 12) and Carl Therrien and Martin Picard (2016) for relevant critiques of the metaphor of ‘hardware generations’ in videogame culture.

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key questions of the book. That is, what can be gained by going against the dominant narratives of videogame history? What does a history of minor platforms reveal that standardized accounts of technological development do not? And what kinds of archives can be deployed for analysing minor media histories? I am not the first to apply media archaeological concepts to an analysis of videogame history. Videogame historians have drawn on media archaeology to raise questions regarding the medium’s ‘deep time’ lineages (see, for example, Huhtamo, 2005; Parikka and Suominen, 2006; Pias, 2011; Parisi, 2013) as well as its unruly voices and bodies (Nooney, 2013). Yet, although the media archaeological moment has led to a richer and more comprehensive engagement with videogame history, it has also contributed to a tendency to fetishize rather than critically account for failure and marginality. Media archaeologists often invoke terms such as ‘suppressed’, ‘neglected’, ‘forgotten’, ‘dead ends’, and even ‘losers’ (see Huhtamo and Parikka, 2011: 3) to describe their objects and subjects of study, but rarely do they reflect critically on why they are doing so, or whether it is even fair to characterize the historically minor in this way. Media archaeology, and videogame history more generally, lacks a coherent conceptual apparatus for explaining why ostensibly marginalized, forgotten, or overlooked objects and subjects are critical to our conception of the medium today. Laine Nooney (2013: n.p.) provides an important take on these issues by problematizing videogame history’s focus on technical objects rather than bodies, spaces, and memories. She observes that the current archaeological approaches are largely concerned with widening the historical remit such that more and more objects can be caught up in the scope of analysis. Yet, when this revisionist logic is applied to archaeologies of gender—when, for example, women are ‘added on’ to videogame history—it often amounts to a tokenistic gesture that sidesteps a genuine confrontation with the politics of marginality. As Nooney observes, given that media archaeology is purportedly interested in recuperating lost and suppressed narratives of media history, it is surprisingly ill-equipped to deal with historically marginalized identities, subject positions, and structures of feeling (cf. Anable, 2018a: 5-6). It tends to gloss over the historical and social infrastructures that ensured these subjects were written out of history in the first place. What is lacking, and what this book aims to develop, are critical frameworks for understanding the political and cultural meanings of marginality in videogame history. To this end, I develop the notion of the ‘historically minor’ as a heuristic device (rather than a stable category) to gain a more nuanced perspective on

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what normally passes as failed, forgotten, or marginal in videogame history. Most conceptions of history have major and minor moments, just as major and minor voices can be said to inhabit any cultural formation. The minor is often defined in terms of its subordination to the major, in that major voices and social structures often hold power over their minor counterparts. Yet, as Walter Benjamin notes in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, the hierarchical (and binary) distinction between major and minor can always be broken down and retroactively reconfigured. ‘A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones’, he writes, ‘acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history’ (Benjamin, 1969a [1940]: 254 [III]). Benjamin (1999: 458 [N1,6]) further develops this position in The Arcades Project when he argues that ‘there are no periods of decline’. Once recuperated in the present, minor histories may destabilize the supposed hegemony of the historically major. However, Benjamin is not saying that we should dissolve the distinction between major and minor entirely. The reason for this is that minor events may contain a disruptive potential by virtue of their marginal status. In this view, minor histories, cultures, and objects are not solely defined negatively—that is, in terms of their inability to obtain a majority status or reach a mass audience. Indeed, minor histories can deliberately resist mainstream assimilation. Minor histories can, as Branden Joseph (2008: 51) notes, ‘parasitically’6 feed off—yet not completely assimilate to—major discourses and movements. The historically minor thus contains what Benjamin (1999: 392 [K2,3]) calls an ‘explosive potential’ that, when ‘ignited’, can refresh our awareness of the present and undermine our collective sense of history. In political and popular rhetoric, the term minority is often used to refer to various subgroups living in a society. Timothy Laurie and Rimi Khan (2017: 2) identify a common strain of ‘political violence’ underlying attempts by majoritarian social forces to reduce ‘systemic structures of social oppression and exploitation’ to the empty signifier of ‘minority issues’. It is possible, however, to mobilize and theorize the concept of the minor without reinscribing the political violence underlying these ‘processes of 6 Building on Joseph, I am using the term ‘parasite’ here in connection with Michel Serres’s (1982) The Parasite. In Serres’s def inition, the parasite is a f igure (that could be human or non-human) that compromises communication between entities by creating ‘noise’ or ‘static’ in the communication channel. However, as Serres notes, noise and static are integral to a functioning communication system. Without noise, there is no communication. In this sense, minor platforms can parasitically disrupt, intervene in, or draw productive energy from major discourses and movements, without fully assimilating to said discourses and movements.

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minoritization’ (Laurie and Khan, 2017: 2, italics in original). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986) offer one such theorization in their study of Franz Kafka, where they identify three facets of what they call ‘a minor literature’. First, Deleuze and Guattari argue that Kafka’s minor literature resists the geopolitical logics of territory. Although Kafka wrote in German, his literature is, they argue, inflected with the idiosyncrasies of Prague German. Prague German is a ‘deterritorialized language’ that was spoken mainly by Czech families living in Prague at around the turn of the 20th century (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 17). According to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka deploys Prague German as a means of drawing attention to its unruliness within a clearly demarcated, major linguistic structure. Second, minor literature is political. It resists master narratives of, for example, ‘major’ literary figures that single-handedly reinvent the path of literature within any given geopolitical context. Third, by cutting across territorial borders, minor literature belongs to the multiplicity. It takes on what Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 17) call a ‘collective value’. Although my use of the term minor is not explicitly building on the definition offered by Deleuze and Guattari, there are a number of similarities. Minor platforms reveal historical ruptures that deterritorialize videogame history’s well-trodden master narratives. They articulate minor patterns of use and affect within major structures of feeling. The notion that the minor can take on a collective or even emancipatory value is especially pertinent when considered in relation to Twine, a platform examined in Chapter Five of this book. Twine is a platform that boasts no ‘genius’ figurehead or ‘master’ videogame developer, but ostensibly belongs to a multiplicity of authors and players. It uses a minor, somewhat neglected language of videogame design—the text adventure genre—to intervene in a major structure of feeling. It is therefore a minor platform that very much exists within—yet parasitically undermines—a major monoculture. This is why I opt for the term minor over the imprecise and problematic term ‘failure’. Media historians have long noted that binary narratives of success and failure are technologically deterministic (not to mention heteronormative, as will be discussed). We tend to assume that a technology’s success or failure can be objectively attributed to its underlying hardware and its capacity to meet traditional notions of consumer demand. Yet, as scholars such as Graeme Gooday (1998: 270) argue, notions of technological success and failure are better understood as social constructions. When a technology is labelled a failure, it is usually because it does not cohere with the prevailing norms, judgements, and expectations of a given social formation—or what Koen Vermeir (2006: 350) calls the agreed-upon ‘core

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functions’ of a technology—rather than because of an ineffective marketing strategy or lack of consumer demand. Moreover, the social values and expectations bestowed upon technologies are historically and culturally contingent. A technology once considered successful may be looked upon retrospectively as a failure because it does not align with current scientific schemas or belief systems. In turn, a technology once considered a failure may be deemed ‘ahead of its time’ when re-contextualized within current trajectories of progress and innovation. As Kenneth Lipartito (2003: 76) writes, ‘[a]lter any number of circumstances and failure might have been a success’. To paraphrase Dominic Arsenault (2017: 3), the question here should not be ‘what is a failed platform?’ but rather ‘for whom does the platform fail?’. In his platform study of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Arsenault begins with a seemingly untenable claim: the SNES—one of the most celebrated videogame platforms in the West, enshrined in many-agamer’s ‘best of all time’ list—was a failure. Arsenault corroborates this claim by analysing the SNES from the vantage point of Nintendo’s business history. With the SNES, Nintendo squandered an incredibly advantageous (though arguably unsustainable) market position (which it had cultivated through the Nintendo Entertainment System) and ushered in a conservative business model that contributed to the company’s economic downturn in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In his discussion, Arsenault (2017: 4) draws attention to the lack of clearly defined metrics for evaluating technological failure, especially from a business perspective: Perhaps we could count the number of games produced for a platform because, after all, gamers buy consoles to play games. Or maybe we should count the total number of software sales because games that don’t sell are only unwanted clutter and expenses for their publisher. However, platform owners may not care that third-party developers’ games do not sell if their own games are selling and the profit margins are high; maybe the only metric we should measure is the platform owner’s hardware and software revenue? […] And on and on it goes.

As Arsenault illustrates here, a scientific definition of failure will always elude us because success and failure are social categorizations—categorizations that, moreover, are informed by specific disciplinary assumptions. It is far more important, then, to ask ‘for whom do technologies fail?’—that is, how is the designation of ‘failure’ agreed upon in a social register and subsequently assigned to certain objects and subjects in media history?

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Technologies deemed to be failures are usually only valued for their capacity to teach us lessons about improvement and progress, after which they are forgotten. But failed or minor technologies can have value outside of their utility to consumerist narratives of progress. As Lipartito (2003: 53) writes, Failed technologies, far from being dead ends or even mere cautionary tales, may persist well beyond their material life. They may reinforce rather than undermine technological paths, even when those paths are questionable or undesirable. Failures […] can echo like footfalls down corridors not taken, leading us to the present.

The problem with most ‘from-to’ approaches to media history is that they tend to leverage binary notions of success and failure without adequately addressing the social values that inform these categorizations. ‘The deeper [one investigates] technologies previously consigned to the historical scrap heap’, writes Ben Marsden (1988: 411), ‘the less convincing the categorization “failure” becomes; the more skilfully the historian recovers and re-structures the social life of failed artefacts, the more vibrant they become’. An analysis of minor platforms reveals that videogame history is anything but a linear path wherein winners overcome losers in their aimless pursuit of progress. Rather, it reveals that videogame history is fraught with irreconcilable tensions, contradictions, and ruptures. As Paolo Ruffino (2018: 93) argues, the present should not be viewed as a ‘stable and safe destination point’ for these heterogeneous histories. Rather, the present is an ‘unstable position’ (Ruffino, 2018: 102) from which to view what Benjamin (1969a [1940]: 257 [IX]) calls the piled-up ‘wreckage’ of the past, which threatens to collapse onto the present at any moment. In videogame history, ruptures can be thought of as moments when taken-for-granted ways of making, playing, and defining videogames are suddenly thrown into question. Ruptures signify social transformations and disruptions to the means of production, but they are not ‘discovered’ in history like artefacts of an archaeological dig. Jonathan Crary (1992: 7) observes that ‘there are no such things as continuities and discontinuities in history, only in historical explanation […] where one locates ruptures or denies them are all political choices that determine the construction of the present’. In this sense, ruptures in videogame history are often directly linked with what Raymond Williams (1977: 163) calls ‘crises of technique’—that is, ‘a sense of crisis in the relation of art to society, or in the very purposes of art which had been previously agreed on or taken for granted’. Videogame

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scholars, critics, and players often identify ruptures in moments when videogames faced economic, social, or identity crises, perceived or actual. Even a cursory glance at the academic and popular literature on videogame history confirms Williams’s observation. Moments such as, for example, the 1983 crash in the North American videogame industry (Wolf, 2012), the emergence of kinaesthetic control schemes and ‘casual’ videogames in the 2000s (Juul, 2010), and more recently, the ‘democratization’ of videogame development tools (kopas, 2015), have each compelled scholars and critics to rethink existing conceptions of what videogames are. They are moments that prompt us to ask not only ‘what are videogames?’ but also ‘why or when are videogames?’ and ‘what can we claim to know about videogame history?’. That is, where did videogames come from, what are their ‘conditions of existence’ in a Foucauldian sense (Parikka, 2012: 6; Elsaesser, 2016: 98), and how are they reshaping culture, space, and ways of knowing along the way? Jesper Juul (2016: n.p.) gets at something similar when he argues that historical developments in videogame design force us to ‘reconsider the ontology of the object of study’. When new videogame design patterns and genres emerge, he argues, we are compelled to go back through history and search for precedents, thus expanding the medium’s historical remit. As he writes, ‘[v]ideo game history continually asks us to reconsider what it is we are studying, when we study video games’ (Juul, 2016). However, where Juul (2016) argues from the perspective of an ‘evolving ontology’ of design patterns that force us to ‘acknowledge facets of games we had previously overlooked’, this book argues something like the inverse. Although Juul’s approach is certainly valuable, it follows something of an evolutionary logic routinely problematized by media historians. Zielinski (2006a: 3), for example, characterizes the evolutionary approach to media history in the following way: ‘[e]verything has already been around, only in less elaborate form: one needs only to look’. The problem with this line of thought, as Zielinski observes, lies in its assertion that anything seemingly new or novel must possess a clear and identifiable connection with a more ‘primitive’ aspect of the past. Rather than re-examining the past through the ‘evolving ontology’ of the present, I argue that we can re-conceptualize the present—what we think we know about videogame history and theory in our current episteme—by going back to the suppressed ruptures of the past. This is the basic idea informing Zielinski’s (2006a: 3) ‘anarchaeological’ approach to historical description, which he summarizes in the following way: ‘do not seek the old in the new, but find something new in the old’. Minor platforms are useful in this regard because they enable us to better understand the discontinuities that inhabit ruptures. As Foucault

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(2002 [1969]: 9) observes in The Archaeology of Knowledge, conventional histories often treat discontinuities as historical inconsistencies that need to be smoothed over or rearranged to produce a semblance of progressive continuity. Yet Foucault argues that by intentionally honing in on these discontinuities—as well as the epistemic or discursive disjunctures they imply—we can see history for what it really is: a process defined not by linear progress but instead by contradictions and tensions. As he writes, discontinuity ‘is both an instrument and an object of research’—it is, in other words, an element of historical analysis and a quality that can be identified in historical artefacts (Foucault, 2002 [1969]: 10). Minor platforms are discontinuous in that they express the social and technological instabilities of their cultural periods. In reflecting on the discontinuous nature of minor platforms, I have been particularly influenced by Jesuit philosopher Athanasius Kircher’s oft-cited illustration of a magic lantern from the 1671 edition of his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (The Great Art of Light and Shadow) (Figure 1). Here, Kircher depicts the magic lantern as a storytelling device. A glass slide containing eight separate scenes—one of which is projected onto the wall—is depicted in front of the lens. However, as scholars have observed, Kircher’s illustration depicts the light source, lens, and slide in the wrong order (Musser, 1994: 21; Gansing, 2013: 264). For the projection to be correctly focused and oriented, the glass slide should be positioned in front of the lens rather than behind it, and the slides should be inverted rather than upright. Charles Musser (1994: 21) attributes this error to Kircher’s lack of ‘firsthand experience’ with the technology. However, I am more persuaded by Kristoffer Gansing’s (2013: 264) interpretation of this ‘mistake’ as a reflection of Kircher’s general understanding of the world as what Zielinski (2006b: 32) calls a ‘dissonant multiplicity, fraught with contradictions and tensions’. It is well documented that Kircher sought to capture the multiplicities of the artefacts and natural phenomena he studied. His view of the world was dialectical and anti-positivist, which is to say that he viewed objects and phenomena as inherently contradictory and always processual. Vermeir (2006: 341) notes that ‘Kircher’s oeuvre seems to resemble an illusionist theatre in which nothing is what it seems, and his play with illusion and reality, with secrecy and openness, confuses the modern reader’. His seemingly ‘incorrect’ illustration accurately captures the discontinuous and transitional nature of the magic lantern. It depicts a projection technology in transition from its early room-sized arrangement (as in the camera obscura) to its black-box form known as the magic lantern (see Crary, 1992: 30-31; Gansing, 2013: 264). In a similar

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Figure 1. Athanasius Kircher’s magic lantern illustration. From Georgibus de Epibus, Romani Collegi Societatis Jesu Celeberrimum (Amsterdam 1678: 39). Retrieved from: (accessed 9 April 2018).

vein to Kircher’s magic lantern illustration, this book recognizes that videogame history is not linear and predictable but rather processual and transitional. It uses minor platforms as epistemic tools for identifying difference, discontinuity, and alternative structures of feeling in videogame history.

Videogame history, the archive, and minor platforms Rather than treating videogame history as a taken-for-granted narrative or as mere background information, some scholars are beginning to call for more sustained, critical, and culturally specific historical analyses of the medium. One of the more important observations to come out of this emerging body of research is that videogames are not (and perhaps never were) a ‘new’

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medium. Their antecedents can be extended back through histories of painting and sculpture (Kirkpatrick, 2011), cinema (Manovich, 2001), early amusement devices (Huhtamo, 2005), and non-digital games and sports (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003). Videogames have existed as a recognizable technological form since at least the mid-twentieth century, when they were tied to military-academic-industrial experimentation with artificial intelligence and technologies for cybernetic control. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (2009: 10) and others (Crogan, 2011; Keogh, 2015) argue that early videogames such as Tennis for Two (Higginbotham, 1958) and Spacewar! (Russel, 1962) emerged from something of a countercultural— albeit gendered—realm of male hackers who sought to ‘deterritorialize’ videogames from the grip of military cybernetics and nuclear physics, thus ‘setting the stage for their “reterritorialization” by capital in pure commodity form’. The story tends to go that, after experimenting with videogames in university environments, student hackers then went on to form their own businesses in the 1970s, and an industry was subsequently born, crashed, and rebirthed by Japanese companies such as Nintendo and Sega in the mid to late 1980s. This timeline can, however, be criticized for being too evolutionary in nature;7 too reliant on what Gitelman (2006: 61) terms a ‘production/ consumption dichotomy’ that, as I will discuss in Chapter Five, situates social and cultural change squarely within dominant narratives of (male) inventors and entrepreneurs as opposed to more variegated patterns of use, reception, and feeling. Put simply, videogame history is not just a history of one successful technology replacing the next. It is also a history of objects, bodies, and communities that never quite made it; that struggled to make their voices heard; that aggravated against the conventions of the day; and that never enjoyed the commercial success or recognition of their major counterparts. Moreover, there are a number of oversights and inaccuracies associated with the aforementioned timeline that, until recently, have gone unquestioned. An often-recurring thread in popular narratives of videogame history is that the industry experienced a global crash in 1983. This crash was supposedly catalysed by Atari’s failure to contain the exigencies of a rapidly inflating videogame market in North America, which led to 7 The ‘evolutionary’ view of videogame history is at least partly symptomatic of the commercial imperatives of the videogame industry. Here, technological development is framed as a sequence of generational advancements in graphics and hardware, spurred by moments of ‘technological warfare’ (see Therrien and Picard, 2016).

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an over-saturation of low-quality software (see Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009: 13-14; Montfort and Bogost, 2009a: 133-134; Kirkpatrick, 2013: 57). Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins (2016: xv) write that the industry crash is often deployed as a ‘temporal marker for establishing a “pre” and “post” periodization’ of videogame history. However, researchers such as Alison Gazzard (2013) and Graeme Kirkpatrick (2015) cite the emergence of a thriving microcomputer scene in the United Kingdom at around this time as evidence that the supposed industry crash was mainly experienced in North America, and did not impact other regions as extensively as previously thought. My chapter on South Korea’s informal videogame industry offers further evidence that minor videogame cultures flourished rather than stagnated in the 1980s. Here, I tap into the largely untold history of videogame piracy in East Asia, and the informal economies of production and consumption that emerged in the shadow of the North American and Japanese videogame industries in the 1980s. Videogame history is often conceptualized in binaries such as pre-crash and post-crash, local and global, production and consumption, success and failure, and, indeed, major and minor. The binaries implied by these terms should not be imagined as fixed but instead permeable and open to reinterpretation. Like Benjamin, who advocates for a form of historiography ‘without distinguishing between major and minor’, my intention is not to render the distinctions between these terms irrelevant, but rather to explore their inherent contradictions and slippages. What are we missing when we conceive of videogame history in such binary terms? When is it productive to frame videogame platforms as minor platforms, and what can be gained by pursuing this line of inquiry? In answering these questions, I opt for a ‘constellational’ view of videogame history at the expense of prolonged geographical specificity. 8 As Zielinski (2013: 14) notes, a constellational or ‘bird’s eye view’ of media history has distinct advantages: From time to time, a deep-time view of developments suggests that one should risk a quick look from a bird’s eye view […] As an experiment, such a view can be helpful. With regard to history, it is informed by the interest in understanding the past not as a collection of retrievable facts but as a collection of possibilities. 8 While the book as a whole is not aiming to provide a geographically focused account of videogame history, certain chapters do set out to describe the regional and transnational dynamics of the case studies.

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For Zielinski, media history should not simply be treated as a process of ‘filling the gaps’. Filling historical gaps is an important and worthwhile endeavour, but a constellational approach can also be helpful in uncovering what Zielinski (2006a: 258) calls historical ‘poetics’ that cut across the past, present, and future of technological development. As Benjamin (1999: 462 [N2a,3]) also notes, a constellational view of history enables us to grasp the true ‘image’ or picture of the past in the present, in fragmented or ‘photomontage’ form: It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.

A constellational view also implies that the gaps between fixed points of history are just as important as the points themselves. In a constellation, it is the gaps between points where our imaginations are at work. In fact, gaps are the true structuring elements of constellations—they are the blank spaces onto which we project imagined pathways. But these blank spaces, these silences, are also where minor histories reside. By exploring them, we may uncover new pathways, or perhaps even deeper and more intriguing silences. Moreover, these silences may explicitly operate from a position of marginality, rather than from a desire to occupy a more central place in the overall constellation. The constellational approach does have its limitations, namely that it sacrifices a certain level of micro-historical analysis for the sake of more far-reaching—yet no less rigorous—insights into the nature of technological change. Given its occasional focus on analysing the past from the vantage point of the present, the constellational approach risks what Nooney (2018: 73) describes as a ‘history told front to back’. That is, a history where the novelty or influence of a particular videogame technology, company, or creator is projected anachronistically from the present onto the past. But this is also why I avoid validating the case studies purely for their weirdness, obscurity, or novelty. Although I argue that the platforms are notable for their status as different or discontinuous objects, I also want to acknowledge that they would not necessarily have seemed this way when they were first envisioned, manufactured, and marketed. My aim is not to present the platforms as obscure failures or weird novelties. Instead, it is to come up with specialized frameworks for unpacking their unique differences, which can then be used to construct a new ‘image’ of the past.

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For these purposes, I have found many of the available methodologies in media and game studies useful in some respects, but insufficient in others. One of the more influential methodologies in this area is Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s (2009a) ‘platform studies’ approach, which first appeared in the book Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, and has since spawned a whole series of books on MIT Press.9 Montfort and Bogost’s methodology is mainly focused on the underlying infrastructures of platforms and their various affordances to both enable creative expression (which, for them, is interchangeable with creative programming) and also limit, constrain, and change it. As Guins (2016a: 180) writes, the platform studies methodology offers a productive framework for treating ‘a game’s “flaws” or “failure” not as a reason to reject or ridicule the process of development or even the developer but to address these circumstances within a techno-historical context’. To this extent, the platform studies methodology is influential to a number of my chapters. In Chapter One, for example, I discuss how the affordances of a vector-based home console—the Vectrex—enabled programmers to explore alternative methods of visualization and player-machine interfacing. In other ways, however, the platform studies methodology does not stand up to scrutiny when tested on the case studies of this book.10 The platform studies approach requires an extensive software archive to assess the creative output facilitated by any given technology. For Montfort and Bogost, the cultural impact of a platform consists in its programmability—the way its material infrastructure affords the creative work of videogame developers and programmers. This programmability can, according to them, be examined through the lens of a platform’s software catalogue. Minor platforms present obvious challenges in this regard, in that they are unlikely to possess such diverse or accessible software archives. Take as an example SNK’s Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System (or ‘AES’), a platform examined in Chapter Three of this book. The Neo Geo AES is 9 It is important to acknowledge that Montfort and Bogost’s platform studies approach is not the original or only way to study media platforms. It is one among many platform studies; however, I focus on it here because of its specific influence in game studies and platform historiography. 10 It is worth noting that recent books in the platform studies series have sought to expand Montfort and Bogost’s original methodology. Gazzard’s (2016: 11) study of the BBC Micro, for example, draws on ideas from media archaeology to ‘place the BBC Micro in a larger historical context […] including what has been documented through television programs, magazines, user manuals, games, software and the progression of hardware during the lifespan of the platform’. Likewise, Arsenault’s (2017: 5) study of the SNES aims to ‘consider platforms not only as technological objects but also as the embodiments of marketing forces that shape the creative works performed on that platform’. However, even these later contributions adhere quite closely to Montfort and Bogost’s prototypical methodology.

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a domesticated version of SNK’s ‘MVS’ arcade machine hardware, and is designed to support an identical software catalogue. This makes the platform particularly difficult to analyse using Montfort and Bogost’s methodology, as its hardware is specifically designed to support the same software as its arcade machine counterpart. The Zemmix, which is discussed in Chapter Two, presents similar problems. The Zemmix is a platform whose software catalogue consists almost entirely of imported or cloned Japanese MSX computer games. In order to grasp the cultural meanings of platforms such as the Neo Geo AES and the Zemmix, it is necessary to deploy an alternative set of frameworks and archives. The archives of media history broadly fall into one of three (admittedly reductive) categories: discursive, technical, and affective.11 One could, for example, analyse the discursive archives that surround media—written documents, advertisements, blueprints, sketches, and so on—as resources for intervening in institutionalized narratives and recuperating marginalized memories and objects. In his book Illusions in Motion, for example, Erkki Huhtamo (2013) investigates the history of the moving panorama by drawing on discursive materials such as posters, letters, newspaper articles, and exhibition catalogues. Huhtamo is tacitly drawing on Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (2002 [1969]), where the archive specifically represents the body of knowledge from which discursive statements may be constructed. Alternatively, one could follow the technical approach of a media archaeologist such as Wolfgang Ernst (2013: 196), who argues that the archive of media history is more clearly articulated in the ‘ruptured’ forms of temporality registered within machines themselves. Ernst (2013: 196) argues that this approach is immanent to Foucault’s archaeological method, which stresses the importance of abandoning the search for beginnings or origins in historical research, and is more concerned with ‘discontinuities, gaps and absences, silence and ruptures’. Finally, as Anable (2018a: 105) discusses in her book Playing with Feelings, one could analyse media objects as affective archives that ‘index, collate, activate, and give shape to emerging and amorphous feelings about broader social conditions’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Anable (2018a: 134) also summons Foucault’s archaeological approach in her reflections on affective archives, which she reads as a method for identifying the practices, uses, and feelings encoded in media objects. Rather than working from a specif ic conception of the archive, this book seeks to resolve the trifurcation between the above approaches by 11 There are, of course, other ways of conceiving of the archive, some of which will be discussed and developed in later chapters.

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drawing upon and intermingling their methodological potentials, thus overcoming their respective biases. Following the platform studies method (as well as scholars such as Ernst), I am interested in what the materiality of videogame platforms reveals about their ‘media essentiality’. But I also argue that we cannot fully grasp the cultural significance of minor platforms without considering their discursive and affective contexts as well. As indicated above, one of the challenges involved in researching historically marginalized technologies is searching for archives in unorthodox locations, as traditional hardware and software archives can be less reliable as starting points. As such, discursive materials such as videogame magazines are important archival sources in this book, especially in Chapters Three and Four. Magazine articles and advertisements are useful not only for uncovering key historical details about particular videogames and platforms, but also for understanding how people perceived, used, and imagined these technologies in their historical contexts. I am also interested in the relational effects that escape the ‘authority’ of the institutionalized archive and its storage capacities, and how they can be adequately accounted for in historical research. This relates to calls made by scholars such as James Newman (2012) to address the challenge of preserving not only the hardware and software archives of videogame history, but also the ephemeral performances associated with videogame play itself. I return to these questions in Chapter Five, where I investigate the relational aesthetics involved in the documentation of an ‘unarchiveable’ videogame, Sonic X-treme. I also reject the idea—implicit in the platform studies approach—that there can be a unified methodology for studying videogame platforms and their histories. As Caetlin Benson-Allott (2016: 343) points out, although the term platform is often invoked in game studies research, its meaning ‘is neither self-evident nor easily defined; we do not know it when we see it or even when we read about it’. Platforms are not just standardized pieces of hardware that enable people to create software. Some scholars have critiqued Montfort and Bogost’s platform studies approach for adhering too closely to this generic definition, observing that it is optimized for its prototypical case study—the Atari 2600—but that it runs into several methodological and conceptual problems when applied to other, more complex case studies (McCrea, 2011: 390; Leorke, 2012: 265). In a similar vein, Anable (2018b) offers an important feminist critique of platform studies by observing that it all-too-easily dispenses with a platform’s ‘surface effects’. Platform studies, she argues, tends to brush aside questions of ‘subjectivity, agency, race, and sexuality’ in favour of a more ‘penetrating’ archaeological gaze that aims to

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expose the inner-workings of the ‘black box’ (Anable, 2018b: 137). Ironically, this masculine archaeological gaze serves to reaffirm the dominant ideology of the platform society—that is, the belief that platforms are discrete, unchangeable, and indifferent entities that structure our everyday actions and bodily capacities in politically neutral ways (Anable, 2018b: 138). A ‘feminist intervention’ in platform studies, she argues, ‘remind[s] us that platforms, like their creators, users, and critics, can also be curiously porous, queerly promiscuous, and radically leaky’ (Anable, 2018b: 139). I will return to a discussion of the ‘surface effects’ of platforms in the conclusion to this book, where I discuss alternative bodily ‘orientations’ to difference and discontinuity in videogame history. Not only do videogame platforms possess radically different ontologies—they are radically contextual—but the uses to which they are put can also differ across time and space. Programming is not the only way people exercise creative expression with and through videogame platforms (see Apperley and Parikka, 2016: 12-13). Platforms may perform various roles and facilitate various practices throughout their life stories—they have ‘biographies’ (Burgess and Baym, 2016)—and these roles and practices may exceed dichotomous categories of production and consumption. They may, for example, be used as tools for the articulation of political and social change (as in Chapter Two). In their commercial afterlives, they may become a target of ‘disinterested’ residual and aesthetic mediation (as in Chapter Four). They may also be analysed by researchers as objects that perform narrative or theoretical work in explaining gaps, tensions, and ruptures in videogame history. For this reason, in each chapter I deploy different methodologies and conceptual frameworks to best suit the platform at hand. This means that the cases are each treated differently: sometimes they are examined from empirical angles, at other times they are brought into contact with different bodies of theory. Sometimes their histories overlap, at other times they diverge in important ways. What this illustrates is that videogame platforms are fundamentally relational. Their materialities are grounded in historically specific regimes of knowledge and, to borrow Williams’s expression, ‘structures of feeling’. As stated earlier, platforms can be understood as infrastructures that intermediate between different objects, subjects, and spaces.12 Benson-Allott (2016: 12 Guins (2016b: 69, italics in original) uses the term ‘system’ to describe a similar set of relational effects generated by platforms: ‘system refers not to a discreet object but an aggregation of interdependent things: a network of intermingling social practices and technological processes as well as actors necessary for powering, running, and playing the “games console”‘.

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343) captures the multiplicities of this definition well when she argues that a videogame platform is a ‘concept, a thing, and a philosophy’. As she argues, Platforms are the material bases of games; they are the thingness of games that allows us to recognize how our thingness works with that of a console or operating system and by extension the larger material and political world of which we are all part. (Benson-Allott, 2016: 343)

Developing Benson-Allott’s notion of a platform as both a thing and a concept, I argue that minor platforms present us with ontological and epistemological questions. We must ask not only what a minor platform is or what it does, but also how it shapes ways of knowing and feeling videogame history. Videogame platforms are things that ‘think’; they are ‘cultural documents’ (Galloway, 2006: 14; cf. Williams, 1961: 48) that possess a discursive power to speak to us, to furnish us with new ways of thinking and imagining the medium’s theoretical and historical trajectories. Minor platforms are important case studies for videogame history because, to borrow Vermeir’s (2006: 358) writing on failed technologies more broadly, they can ‘subvert our categories of what we think should constitute an artefact, machine, or instrument […] they present us with a problem of interpretation, but their recalcitrance might also help us construct a new image of the past’. Minor platforms are valuable as epistemic tools because they compel us to question what we think we know about videogames and their histories. As I explore further in Chapter Two, this approach means ‘listening’ to what minor platforms and their archives are saying to us, and thinking ‘with’ them and their practitioners in order to challenge existing frameworks for studying the medium and its histories.

Minor structures of feeling Any given videogame platform implies a particular vision—or ‘structure of feeling’ in Raymond Williams’s terms—of how bodies and technologies should be disposed or oriented to each other. For Williams (1961: 47), structures of feeling are the affective patterns connected to the culture of a period—’the quality of life at a particular place or time: a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living’. Williams (1961: 48) acknowledges the apparent contradiction inherent in this notion, stating that a structure of feeling ‘is as firm and definite as “structure” suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least

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tangible parts of our activity’. That is, the term ‘feeling’ refers to something intangible and subjective, yet the idea of a ‘structure’ of feeling implies that these affective patterns are, to some degree, always shaped by more ‘fixed and explicit […] institutions, formations, [and] positions’ (Williams, 1977: 128). Structures of feeling are, in this sense, affective patterns that are in the process of being structured. They are always processual or, in Williams’s (1977: 126) words, ‘emergent’—grasping toward a future ‘not yet fully articulated’. Structures of feeling often pre-empt or even premediate ideology, representation, discourse, and recognizable emotions. They are, according to Williams, expressed in the most quotidian aspects of everyday life: in our texts, through our mediated techniques, how we dress and speak. The study of structures of feeling is especially pertinent in light of our current cultural period where, as Graeme Kirkpatrick (2011: 195) notes, ‘[v]ideo games are integral to the contemporary structure of feeling; they are an important example of how social relations are becoming increasingly […] animated by a distinctive set of rhythms’. In Aesthetic Theory and the Videogame, Kirkpatrick (2011) argues that videogame play can be considered ‘aesthetic’ because it engages our cognitive and sensory capacities in a manner similar to that which is described in classical aesthetic theory. Eyes, hands, and bodies work in unison to derive what he calls ‘aesthetic form’ from the videogame. The aesthetic form of videogame play, he argues, is inherently fragmentary—it lacks an overall visual consistency, much like a Cubist painting—but it is nevertheless pleasurable because it can be recuperated through play. Although Kirkpatrick’s account can be critiqued for upholding a somewhat human-centric and formalist approach to videogames (see Pias, 2011 and Anable, 2018a: 120-121), his insights are valuable because they insist, quite rightly, that videogames are both shaped by and give shape to the structures of feeling they inhabit. In a very material sense, different videogame technologies imply different possibilities for touching, looking, and feeling. Videogame play is characterized by a certain ‘in-between-ness’ wherein affective intensities arise at the interface of player and machine action (Galloway, 2006). For Brendan Keogh (2014: n.p.), ‘both the player and the game share an active agency in the way they each afford, translate, and mediate the actions of the other’, such that ‘the actual actor active in videogame play is in fact a hybrid of both player and game’. In Computer Games and the Social Imaginary, Kirkpatrick (2013: 177) extends the above arguments by suggesting that all videogame play is inherently political—not because of the representational content involved (though this of course may be political)—but rather (and in accordance with aesthetic experience more generally) because different videogame

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technologies imply different orientations to the world and other bodies. As Jacques Rancière (2009) suggests, politics is inseparable from aesthetics insofar as both are about the reconfiguration of what is perceptible, thinkable, and sayable. That videogames are political in this way is most clear in the notion that they are often ‘affectively designed’ (Ash, 2015) to mobilize player attention and cultivate behaviours conducive to brand loyalty and economic profit. Platforms such as Facebook and Google are similar, in that their designed affordances encourage (or impose) data-lucrative forms of affective intermediation. Minor platforms such as Twine, however, are political in a different way. Twine’s developer and player communities seek to shape the platform in ways that accord with the alternative structures of feeling they envision for the medium’s future. A minor structure of feeling thus pre-empts an alternative future not yet or never fully articulated. Here, I am influenced by the notion of ‘queer temporality’ as described by queer theorists such as Jack Halberstam (2005) and José Esteban Muñoz (2009). For Halberstam (2005: 6), queer time refers to the ‘nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity’ that undermine the linearity and heteronormativity of straight time (cf. Muñoz, 2009: 22). For my purposes, straight time refers not only to the videogame industry’s dominant historical narratives but also its imagined (white, heterosexual, cis male) subjects and, accordingly, its dominant modes of production and consumption. The notion of a queer temporality is perhaps best expressed through Twine (examined in Chapter Five), whose core community of developers and players—women, people of colour, people with disabilities, and/or LGBTQIA+ people—actively seek to destabilize the straight temporalities of mainstream videogame development and play. As Twine and its community illustrate, minor structures of feeling may deliberately seek to retain an oppositional or queer status in relation to dominant or hegemonic structures of feeling. For many Twine authors, retaining a queer status is crucial in an industry that routinely seeks to erase alternative voices or, alternatively, co-opt queerness because it means netting a wider market share of consumers. However, it is also important to note that, unlike Twine, most of the platforms examined in this book initially sought to become ‘normal’ or ‘mainstream’ in their respective historical periods, but ultimately ‘failed’ to do so. Yet, this is also what makes them useful as objects of study: they enable us to reconsider the historical and cultural contexts in which minor structures of feeling were once active but did not crystallize into structures of power, deliberately or otherwise. Moreover, as Halberstam (2011) argues, there is something queer about the very notion of failure; about its negative orientation to heteronormative logics

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of achievement, progress, and profit. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam (2011) identifies failure as a subversive storytelling technique in animated films that would not normally be considered canonically queer in the broader context of film history, such as Finding Nemo (Stanton, 2003) and Chicken Run (Lord and Park, 2000). As Halberstam observes, these films often feature storylines that subvert heteronormative logics of success and achievement, and depict characters who leverage their abnormalities and differences for transgressive and subversive purposes. To extend Halberstam’s argument to the present work, ‘queering’ videogame history means studying objects, bodies, and spaces that are oriented negatively toward heteronormative logics of progress, profit, and achievement. As Zoya Street (2017: 41) writes, Queering history does not just mean including queer experiences in accounts of gaming histories. It also means challenging the normative structures of history as practice, making it more open and flexible and less authoritarian. It means finding ways to embody the role of the historian in an authentic way, rather than posturing in a way that privileges some voices over others. It means abandoning knowledge. It means knowing nothing.

This is precisely why I have chosen to let the platforms ‘articulate’ for themselves—a concept developed in Chapter Two—as opposed to subjecting them to a totalizing method. By allowing myself to be led by the platforms, I open myself up to alternative ways of knowing and feeling history (cf. Anable, 2018a). Studying minor structures of feeling means paying attention to what people do or have done with minor platforms, or what they say or have said about them. Therefore, the moments of epistemic rupture and transitional instability I search for in this book can be found not only in the technologies themselves. They are also found in the way people imagine, experience, and think with them. Thus, minor platforms are useful not only for challenging what we think we know about videogame history, but also for affectively orienting us toward alternative textures of experience. In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2002: 13) terms, to study or ‘perceive’ texture from a historical standpoint ‘is never only to ask or know What is it like? nor even just How does it impinge on me? Textural perception always explores two other questions as well: How did it get that way? and What could I do with it?’. To apply this thinking to the study of minor platforms, we should ask not only ‘what does the platform feel like to use?’, but also ‘why was it designed that way in the first place?’ and ‘what kinds of actions, experiences, and bodies does it support?’. In this sense, videogame history is not just a history

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of technology or labour or even culture. It is also a history of affect—of technologies giving shape to and being shaped by the affective dispositions of their users (cf. Anable, 2018a). The question, then, is how do minor platforms shape alternative or minor textures of experience? And how might these minor textures shape the very way we feel or perceive history in the present? The notion that we can perceive videogame history texturally is the subject of Chapter One, where I analyse ways of seeing videogame history through the Vectrex interface. If major videogame platforms can be said to structure the dominant feeling of specific periods of videogame history, then minor platforms threaten to break the hold of what Rancière (2009: 72) calls the ‘cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible’. Developing Williams’s notion of structures of feeling in relation to theories of affect, Anable (2018a: 40) argues that videogames not only ‘give us access to the historical grounding of our current sensorium’, but that ‘they can also give us access to the limitations of this historical grounding’ (Anable, 2018a: 25). To paraphrase Anable, minor platforms not only provide access to suppressed, unrealized, or oppositional structures of feeling in videogame history; they also reveal new possibilities for what we can know and feel about videogames in the present. Minor platforms always imply the possibility that history could be otherwise, even in questionable, undesirable, or potentially disconcerting ways. Looking at how history could be different is not only a means of countering increasing standardization in the videogame industry, or a way of correcting omissions, mistakes, or gaps in our knowledge of videogame history. As Elsaesser (2016: 99) argues, a ‘missing link’ or ‘gap’ in media history should not simply be treated as a receptacle to be filled with facts. A missing link may, as he puts it, ‘have its own meaning, but as a gap, a deliberate or accidental omission’ (Elsaesser, 2016: 99). A gap may perform transitional ‘work’ by linking one historical period to another, or it may elude notions of continuity altogether. I proceed, therefore, not with the sole purpose of filling in the gaps of videogame history, but also with the aim of intervening in the past. An intervention in the past has a reverberating effect—it can refresh our awareness of the present and help us find paths into the future that can be different.

An outline of the book The constellational approach described earlier informs my approach to the case studies and the structure of the book. That is, although there are

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interesting connections to be made between each of the case studies, these connections are not made in the service of a unified historical narrative. Instead, in each chapter I offer a different theoretical and historical ‘take’ on the platform in question. The chapters each draw on different sets of archives, methods, and frameworks. While magazines are key archival sources throughout the book, Chapter Five also draws on data collected from interviews I conducted with three Australian videogame developers in 2018. The phenomenological accounts of the platforms are largely informed by personal experience. Where I lacked first-hand experience of a specific case study (namely the Zemmix and its videogames), I gathered as much information as possible by reading or watching online fan accounts or by playing the videogames on emulators (in addition to analysing the various archival materials, of course). Tying each of the chapters together are the overarching arguments that minor platforms inhabit moments of rupture; that they are useful as epistemic tools; and that they articulate alternative structures of feeling. The notion of a rupture or alternative way of ‘seeing’ videogame history is the subject of Chapter One. This chapter analyses the Vectrex, a vector-based home videogame platform released in North America in 1982. The Vectrex utilizes an inbuilt ‘random-scan’ cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor to display images in vector graphics. Vector graphics are visualizing techniques that construct wireframe objects from point and line coordinates rather than pixels. Although several early arcade machines utilized vector graphics in their displays, the Vectrex is the only platform to have domesticated vector graphics. While it is tempting to view the Vectrex as a historical oddity or ‘dead end’ in the history of videogame interfaces, I argue that it can be more productively understood as a signifier of transition—of the convergence of various aesthetic trajectories, technical systems, and interfacing techniques during a moment of uncertainty and instability in videogame history. To make this argument, I analyse the platform’s technical construction against the backdrop of broader histories of visualization in art and computer graphics. The Vectrex is an important ‘intermezzo’ in videogame history—a brief detour or discontinuity (Elsaesser, 2016: 79-80; cf. Zielinski, 1999)—albeit one that does important narrative ‘work’ for videogame history. Chapter One therefore provides an alternative way of seeing videogame history and, in doing so, establishes the foundations of my approach to minor platforms. In Chapter Two, I analyse the Zemmix, a South Korean pirate platform released by Daewoo in 1985. In its technical construction, the Zemmix makes (unofficial) use of an international microcomputer standard known as

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‘MSX’. MSX was co-developed by Microsoft’s Japanese and North American hardware divisions in the 1980s. Its purpose was to standardize the underlying architecture of 8-bit microcomputers such that computer software could be made interoperable across platforms, regions, and cultures—especially in East Asia, where there existed a myriad of incompatible and unruly (oftentimes bricolage) microcomputers and technical standards. MSX thus carried a ‘double bind’ of neocolonial influence, in which ‘the USA and Japan functioned as a pair of colonial forces and as the objects of de-colonization’ in former Japanese colonies (Cho, 2016: 942). The Zemmix, which took advantage of MSX as an ‘open’ international standard, enabled Korean developers to import, copy, and informally distribute Japanese computer game software. The Zemmix thus helped establish a grassroots videogame industry in Korea, and enabled players and developers to begin a decolonization process in Korea’s videogame and computer industries. I argue that the Zemmix is useful as an epistemic tool or ‘theoretical object’ (Verhoeff, 2012) for reflecting on the articulation of a ‘postcolonial consciousness’ in Korea’s videogame and computer industries during this era. Chapter Three looks at the shift from public to private forms of play in videogame history through the lens of the Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System (AES). The Neo Geo AES is a ‘home arcade’ platform released by Japanese videogame company SNK in 1991. It promised to fulfil a long-term fantasy of bringing ‘arcade quality’ videogames into the home. Although the Neo Geo AES arguably succeeded in this goal—it made very few compromises in the arcade-to-home ‘porting’ process—its magazine reception was overwhelmingly negative. I argue that this was due to wider discursive, affective, and social shifts in videogame culture, as opposed to flaws in the Neo Geo AES hardware or software. The tastes, preferences, and values connected to the ‘gamer’ identity—those that had traditionally marked ‘good’ videogames from ‘bad’—were, in this period, beginning to favour play structures that offered more sedate, long-term, and narrative-oriented experiences. Ironically, the Neo Geo AES’s ‘success’ rendered a new structure of feeling—one that was incompatible with the old ideal of playing arcade videogames in the home—an imaginable reality. Chapter Four looks at how the imaginaries surrounding a commercially obsolesced ‘cult’ platform—the Sega Saturn—are reactivated and imbued with residual value in the present. This chapter differs from previous chapters in that it aims to understand the Sega Saturn’s social construction in the present. It takes as its starting point the media archaeological idea that obsolesced technologies, once liberated from their commercial contexts, are freed up for aesthetic experimentation. An obsolesced videogame technology

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may, for example, become a source of creative inspiration for an artwork or a platform for ‘homebrew’ fan development. I argue that this media archaeological impulse is often shot through with a ‘dialectic of obsolescence’ that hesitates between wanting to fetishize and salvage media history. In order to unpick this dialectic, I analyse the residual afterlife of the Sega Saturn’s cancelled ‘flagship’ title, Sonic X-treme. Sonic X-treme never came close to being completed, and today exists in multiple fragmented states. Fans have attempted to piece together these fragments in order to create playable prototypes of Sonic X-treme in the present. Sonic X-treme can never be ‘restored’ to its original state (as such a state is non-existent), and neither can it be properly ‘realized’ without significant (and contested) fan intervention. It cannot be documented through institutionalized processes of ‘archivization’ (Derrida, 1996) because it is, strictly speaking, non-existent. Instead, the ‘object’ can only be revealed momentarily in what Benjamin calls ‘photomontage’ or constellational form, thus constituting a unique intervention in the archives of videogame history. In Chapter Five, I discuss videogame history’s ‘arrival’ in the present through an analysis of the Twine platform. Twine is an HTML-based software tool for creating and playing hypertext fiction. Twine is the clearest expression among the case studies of what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘minor literature’. It belongs to a multiplicity of developers and players whose voices have, historically, been diminutized or excluded from the mainstream industry and culture of videogames. It is free to download and use, and its design interface is intuitive even for those without programming knowledge. Many of its videogames directly challenge the perceived values and expectations upheld by ‘gamers’. Its practitioners actively undermine expectations of how videogames should be played, who should make them, and what kinds of narrative themes they should explore. In this way, Twine articulates an ‘archaeology of possible futures’ for videogame history. It expresses an epistemic rupture in videogame culture—a moment of transitional instability that is currently underway—and identifies in this rupture a possibility for what Rancière (2009) calls ‘dissensus’, or a capacity to change ‘the dominant distribution of the sensible’. This chapter draws from interviews with three emerging Australian videogame developers—each of them a student or recent graduate—who are experimenting with Twine and related software tools in their videogame-making practices. In conclusion, I argue that minor platforms enable videogame scholars to re-encounter the ‘strangeness’ of their object of study. As Adrienne Shaw (2015) argues, game studies scholars often bring very normative frames of reference to bear upon their researched objects and subjects. The aim of this

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book is to reorient (or perhaps disorient) our relationship to an ostensibly ‘normal’ and everyday object in the study of videogames: the videogame platform. Minor platforms thus point not only to suppressed moments of transition and rupture in videogame history. They also disorient the present and point toward alternative possibilities for a future yet to come. The challenge of studying them is that, by virtue of their awkward and oftentimes contradictory position in videogame history, they resist many of game studies’ taken-for-granted research methods and theoretical frameworks. Minor platforms compel us to come up with a different set of critical tools and archival approaches. This invariably leads to a more anarchic and unstructured way of doing historical research. But the payoff is that minor platforms may reveal hidden paths both into and out of videogame history, thus offering new ways of critically understanding the medium in the present.

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Gameography Higginbotham W (1958) Tennis for Two. Analogue Computer. Russel S (1962) Spacewar! PDP-1.

Filmography Lord P and Park N (2000) Chicken Run. DreamWorks Pictures. Penn Z (2014) Atari: Game Over. Microsoft. Stanton A (2003) Finding Nemo. Walt Disney Pictures.

1.

Ways of seeing videogame history: The Vectrex as a transitional platform Abstract This chapter analyses the Vectrex, a vector-based home videogame platform released in North America in 1982. The Vectrex utilizes an inbuilt ‘random-scan’ cathode ray tube monitor to display images in vector graphics. While it is tempting to view the Vectrex as a historical oddity or ‘dead end’ in the history of videogames, I argue that it can more productively be understood as a signifier of transition—of the convergence of various aesthetic trajectories, technical systems, and interfacing techniques during a moment of uncertainty and instability in videogame history. To make this argument, I analyse the platform’s technical construction against the backdrop of broader histories of visualization in art and computer graphics. Keywords: Vectrex, vector graphics, interface, platform studies, visual culture, ways of seeing

Videogames inherit many of their aesthetic qualities from a deep lineage of representational media and visual techniques. Alexander Galloway (2006: 40) notes that early first-person shooter videogames, for example, built on a direct legacy of photographic and cinematic techniques for structuring embodied vision.1 In a similar vein, Angela Ndalianis (2004: 102) suggests that videogames such as Doom (id Software, 1993) possess a labyrinthine logic similar to that which proliferated in baroque art and culture in sixteenthcentury Europe. David Surman (2009: 165) argues that Pokémon’s visual style 1 As Galloway (2006: 40) points out, the first-person subjective shot is quite rare in cinema, and is usually only used to ‘effect a sense of alienation, detachment, fear, or violence’. While it could be argued that the widespread use of ‘shaky camera’ in popular films released in the past decade negates Galloway’s argument, it is important to distinguish here between the first-person subjective shot—which implies that the viewer is literally inhabiting the perspective of a character—and the shaky camera, whose effect is to remind viewers of the materiality and mediation of the film experience.

Nicoll, B., Minor Platforms in Videogame History, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789462988286_ch01

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draws influence from a long history of Japanese art and design, namely the ‘recurring form of the silhouette’. However, it is important to recognize that in the early years of videogame development, these aesthetic conventions were never inherited wholesale, as if passed down a family tree and faithfully reproduced on computer and television displays. Rather, programmers often had to shoehorn established visual techniques (such as perspectival projection) into their videogames through extensive experimentation and manipulation. For example, the developers of the arcade videogame Q*bert (Gottlieb, 1982) utilized an isometric technique that straddled multiple visual systems—both artistic and technical—in order to simulate the illusion of perspectival space on an arcade monitor with limited technical affordances (see Gaboury, 2016: 361-362).2 In the 1970s and early 1980s, the question of what a videogame display or interface should look like—how it should appear to players—was still wide open. Melanie Swalwell (2009: 275) writes that ‘[v]ariation was the norm’ during this period; there were multiple, often incompatible ways of making, feeling, and seeing videogames. This chapter reflects on this period of variability through an analysis of the Vectrex, a vector-based home videogame console released by the North American company General Consumer Electronics in 1982. The Vectrex is best known for its inbuilt ‘random-scan’ vector monitor, which features an electron gun that ‘draws’ wireframe lines and shapes onto the inside face of the platform’s screen. This distinguishes it from the more common ‘rasterscan’ cathode ray tubes (CRTs) used in most (pre-LCD) televisions, where the electron gun ‘paints’ images onto the screen row-by-row, forming a series of pixels. Because it had its own screen, the Vectrex was the first truly ‘portable’ videogame console. It was also the first to feature a rectangular controller. It experimented with a number of interfacing peripherals, including a light pen device and 3D imager headset. It attempted to straddle multiple methods of visualization during a period of rapid technological convergence in the videogame industry. The Vectrex is significant, then, not simply because it points to a ‘road not taken’ in the history of videogames and graphics, but rather because of the sheer diversity of interfacing techniques it pioneered, as well as the representational traditions it both augmented and diverged from. Considered in its immediate historical context, however, the Vectrex is radically discontinuous with the home consoles that came before and after it. No other vector-based home consoles have been created 2 Jacob Gaboury (2016: 361) writes that Q*bert’s isometric projection is a visualizing technique ‘rarely seen outside of architecture and engineering’. Unlike traditional linear perspective, isometric projection simulates 3D effects without an implied subject position or fixed vanishing point.

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since its commercial discontinuation in 1984, and most of the platform’s innovations were shelved before being ‘retrieved’ in videogame culture at a much later date. To borrow a concept that appears in the writings of both Thomas Elsaesser (2016) and Siegfried Zielinski (1999), the Vectrex can be understood as an ‘intermezzo’3 in videogame history—an ‘intermediary’ or ‘mere episode’ (Elsaesser, 2016: 236)—that, despite its minor status, offers archaeological insight into the transitional state of videogame graphics during the period in which it was developed and released. Much like Athanasius Kircher’s 1671 magic lantern illustration, which, as discussed in the introduction to this book, depicts a perspectival device in transition from old to new, the Vectrex can be viewed as a signifier of transition for videogame history. Of course, all technologies can be considered transitional insofar as technological development is never settled. However, my argument here—and across the whole book—is that minor platforms such as the Vectrex are uniquely positioned to provide insight into the transitional instabilities of their historical periods. The Vectrex articulates a clear rupture between different ways of seeing; it is (and was) useful as an epistemic tool for thinking and seeing videogame history through an alternative frame; and it proposed a minor structure of feeling that was never fully realized. This chapter begins with a close technical description of the Vectrex and its affordances, focusing particularly on its random-scan vector display. It then ‘zooms in’ on this display and the specific mode of visuality it brings to bear on videogame history. It then analyses the Vectrex’s transparent plastic overlays, which can be applied to the platform’s monitor as a way of adding depth and colour to the otherwise monochromatic wireframe images. I present these overlays as an example of the platform’s experimental blending of different visual techniques. The overlays also point to an emergent structure of feeling in the early 1980s—one that suggested more standardized techniques of player embodiment and visuality.

‘It’s not really a TV game at all’: The Vectrex’s random-scan display Jay Smith and Gerry Karr of North American companies Smith Engineering (ST) and Western Technology (WT) designed the Vectrex in 1982 and licensed 3 Zielinski (1999) prefers the term entra’acte—meaning ‘interval’ or ‘between the acts’—which he uses to describe cinema and television as historical anomalies in relation to the long history of media.

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the hardware to General Consumer Electronics (GCE). According to Smith and Karr (in Allen, 2007: 18-20), the Vectrex was originally developed to fill a market niche. There were no vector-based home consoles available at the time and, as a result, no adequate ‘ports’ of popular vector arcade videogames such as Asteroids (Atari, 1979). The term ‘port’ refers to the process of reprogramming a videogame developed for a specific platform in order to make it functional on (and meet the unique affordances of) an entirely different platform (for example, porting an arcade videogame to a home console). Smith and Karr (in Allen, 2007: 18-20) explain that their initial idea for the Vectrex was to create a vector-based handheld device that could support ports of arcade videogames. They eventually decided to design a larger home console by taking advantage of an overabundant market supply of random-scan CRT monitors. The outcome was the Vectrex—a platform that still retained its portability insofar as it housed its own vector monitor inside an arcade cabinet-like casing. The platform came pre-loaded with an Asteroids derivative known as Mine Storm (General Consumer Electronics, 1982) that would boot if the platform’s cartridge slot were empty. The Vectrex was discontinued in 1984 after being available for just over a year on the North American, European, and Japanese home console markets. The Vectrex was viewed by magazine writers as an exceedingly novel videogame platform when it was first released. Its portable screen was widely celebrated (Clark, 1982: 92; Goodman, 1983: 68), as were its ‘brilliantly luminous’ vector graphics (Davidson, 1982: 25) and ‘marvellous 3-D effects’ (Goodman, 1982: 25), the likes of which had ‘to be seen to be believed’, according to one magazine writer (Clark, 1982: 93). 4 Vector graphics were not new in the early 1980s, but the Vectrex was the first videogame platform to bring them into the home. The console’s screen was, therefore, seen as profoundly at odds with other domestic televisual displays. ‘It’s not really a TV game at all’, wrote TV Gamer magazine in 1983, ‘it doesn’t even work like any other TV game’ (‘Vectrex System Review’, 1983: 12, italics in original). With its searingly bright screen and ‘very, very fast’ refresh rate (‘Vectrex System Review’, 1983: 13), the Vectrex’s random-scan CRT differed substantially from domestic television sets, on which raster-based home consoles such as the Atari 2600 would be played. For one writer, the Vectrex’s graphics seemed to ‘pop into life’ and ‘create movement and action with a high degree of urgency’ (Worley, 1984: 84). Another journalist postulated that the platform’s 4 As Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost (2009b: 37) point out, vector graphics continue to inspire similar fascination and awe decades after their historical ‘moment’. Partly this is because vector graphics cannot be reproduced or emulated natively on contemporary LCD display technologies.

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portability would ‘liberate’ players from their ‘traditional dependence on the availability of the family television set’ (Davidson, 1982: 24), forecasting a shift wherein videogame players symbolically and physically disassociated from traditional familial spaces. Many journalists also praised the Vectrex for bringing ‘arcade-perfect’ ports of vector videogames such as Star Castle (Cinematronics, 1980) into the home (Goodman, 1982: 24; Goodman, 1983: 68; Ahl, 1983: 56). The desire to bridge the gap between the arcade and the home proved to be enduring ‘imaginary’ that outlasted the Vectrex and became fully articulated with SNK’s Neo Geo AES in 1991. I will return to an analysis of this platform in Chapter Three of the book. The Vectrex was also the first home console to use a rectangular controller that could be held between both hands, which many publications took to calling a ‘panel’ (Goodman, 1982: 24; ‘Vectrekking!’, 1982: 34). The controller is tethered to the platform and features a four-button control scheme. The notion that the player’s left thumb should control the joystick and the right thumb the buttons was, according to Smith (in Allen, 2007: 20), inspired by the placement of flight stick and throttle in fighter aircraft. Given that this was the first instance of such a control scheme in videogame hardware design, many players found the new layout somewhat jarring. One writer, who was accustomed to manoeuvring arcade-style joysticks with several fingers, complained that the Vectrex’s joystick was ‘too small and difficult to control accurately’ (Goodman, 1982: 25). Another publication claimed that the controller favoured left-handed people because of the joystick’s placement on the left-hand side of the controller (Ahl, 1983: 56). Although the Vectrex was the first videogame console to domesticate vector graphics, the basic technology underlying its display had existed for decades. The console’s display is informed by a long pre-history of vectorbased graphical user interfaces. In 1963, the American computer scientist Ivan Sutherland created ‘Sketchpad’, one of the very first graphical user interfaces, using the Lincoln TX-2’s oscilloscope vector display. Sketchpad allowed the user to draw, rotate, crop, cut, copy, paste, and manipulate line segments and circle arcs on the screen using a stylus device known as the light pen. The program simulated the act of drawing by placing a crosshair on the screen that responded to the light pen’s touch. Sutherland (1963) envisioned practical uses for Sketchpad such as engineering and ‘artistic’ drawings. In a paper delivered at a 1963 conference, he described the program as a ‘system [that] makes it possible for a man and a computer to converse rapidly through the medium of line drawings’, and claimed that it ‘opens up a new area of man-machine communication’ (Sutherland, 1963: 329). Unlike traditional raster-scan televisual displays, vector monitors do not fill

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the entire screen with pixels. Instead, they respond to commands relayed from user to computer that instruct the electron gun to light the phosphor between specific grid coordinates on the display. With Sketchpad, Sutherland had created a program that, in effect, both displayed and recorded the techniques of the human hand. It is no surprise that his graphical interface influenced the development of early videogames such as Tennis for Two (Higginbotham, 1958) and Spacewar! (Russel, 1962), which were designed for use on similar oscilloscope vector displays.5 Vector graphics arguably reached their highest expression in the arcade culture of the 1970s and 1980s, when companies such as Atari utilized vector monitors in the design of videogames such as Asteroids (Atari, 1979) and Tempest (Atari, 1981).6 Much like the oscilloscope monitors that preceded it, the Vectrex’s inbuilt CRT monitor displays random-scan rather than raster-scan images. The difference between random-scan and raster-scan relates to the movement of the electron gun as it writes images onto the screen. In raster-scan displays, which were common in domestic CRT televisions and (somewhat later) microcomputer monitors, an electron gun positioned behind the monitor fires a concentrated beam of electrons toward the inside face of the screen. On its path toward the screen, the beam is deflected by electromagnetic forces produced by coils and magnets, which are wrapped around the neck of the tube. These forces are controlled by external signals received from, for example, videogame software. The deflected beam then makes contact with the inside face of the screen, which is lined with phosphorescent molecules that cause it to glow and produce pixels. Importantly, a raster-scan electron gun is restricted to sweeping patterns. The image is therefore ‘painted’ onto the screen row-by-row in horizontal strips known as scan lines. On an ordinary television from the 1970s or 1980s, each line of the overall image is refreshed roughly fifty times a second, which produces a semblance of continuous on-screen visual movement. In order to depict an object moving from one side of the screen to another, for example, the pixels defining that object are ‘turned off’ and reanimated anew in a slightly different position. This process occurs so rapidly and in so many variations that it creates an impression of seamless visual movement. 5 Incidentally, Spacewar! influenced the design of a vector arcade videogame known as Spacewars in 1976, which was developed by Cinematronics, who later went on to port a number of vector arcade videogames to the Vectrex. 6 In addition to graphical user interfaces such as Sketchpad and videogames such as Asteroids, vector displays were also common in air traffic control systems and military heads-up displays because of their precision and brightness.

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Random-scan displays differ insofar as they allow the electron gun to be aimed at random sets of on-screen X and Y coordinates. A random-scan electron gun thus ‘draws’ points and lines of varying intensity known as vector graphics. The Vectrex is a unique random-scan device because it uses an ‘off-the-shelf’ picture tube that differs from standard raster-scan CRTs only in the monitor’s beam-deflection circuits. Inside the Vectrex, a ‘vector generator’ receives display commands from the computer—which is running the videogame’s code and reading the player’s inputs—and converts those commands into a signal that drives the deflection magnets. The deflected beam then projects vector images onto the screen by moving from the beginning to the end of a line segment and lighting the phosphor in between. Since the vector generator is command-driven, the deflected beam will only produce line segments where it has been instructed to do so, as opposed to filling the whole screen with pixels as in the aforementioned raster-scan displays. To reiterate, raster-scan CRTs follow a scanning pattern—they build images row-by-row, filling in every pixel on the screen—while the Vectrex’s random-scan vector generator commands the beam to skip points of the screen where lines are not required. If the vector generator instructs the beam to draw a square, it will simply draw a square using a pre-determined set of horizontal and vertical coordinates on the screen, rather than construct a screen-sized image from rows of pixels. Similarly, in order to enlarge said square, the Vectrex will apply varying levels of voltage to the beamdeflection magnets—which will cause the electron gun to calculate a change in the square’s location and size—as opposed to refreshing the whole screen every time the square needs to be moved or reshaped. In other words, the platform’s electron gun illuminates line segments until it is instructed to stop, rather than regenerating the picture every 1/50th of a second as in raster-scan displays. Although it is technically possible for vector-based devices to display in colour (which would require three separate electron beams for red, green, and blue), the Vectrex can only display images monochromatically, meaning that its graphics simply appear as white lines on a textureless CRT backdrop. GCE did produce a dubiously named ‘full-colour’ 3D headset peripheral for the Vectrex that enables the user to perceive colour in selected videogames. I will return to an analysis of this peripheral later in the chapter. Perhaps the main limitation of the Vectrex monitor is that it cannot feasibly depict objects with solid or shaded areas, due to the sheer complexity of the process and the platform’s lack of memory space. Several videogame magazines and trade publications identified this as a serious limitation of the

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console (Goodman, 1982: 24; Takoushi, 1983: 118; ‘Vectrekking!’, 1982: 35). My reading of the magazine discourses—both here and in other chapters—suggests that technological progress in videogame culture is often measured by advancements in graphics. The Vectrex sacrificed colour and legibility for the raw precision of vector lines, which several magazine journalists perceived as a shortcoming. To mitigate this negative reception, Vectrex videogames came bundled with translucent plastic overlays that could be applied to the screen in order to add colour and form to the display. The overlays purportedly ‘enhanced’ the play experience but, as Smith and Karr note (in Allen, 2007: 21), they were more of a marketing ploy to appease consumers who expected colourful and ‘realistic’ graphics. Despite these limitations, the Vectrex also has a number of unique affordances. For example, because the platform’s electron beam can randomly access any coordinate on the screen, it is possible for the monitor to depict multiple objects moving seamlessly and in arbitrary directions. This capacity for ‘random access’ is particularly advantageous for space shooting videogames, a genre that dominates the platform’s software catalogue. This is a genre that demands precise player movement and random on-screen access at all times. In videogames such as Mine Storm (discussed later in the chapter), players need to be able to move their spaceship avatar to any area of the display in order to avoid collision with objects drifting in random directions. This kind of random on-screen access is much more challenging to achieve on raster-based consoles such as the Atari 2600. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost (2009b) discuss some of these challenges in their comparison of the vector arcade videogame Asteroids (which Mine Storm is based on) with the Atari 2600 port of the same name. In the Atari port, the raster-scan CRT’s sweeping pattern (coupled with the platform’s lack of frame buffer and random access memory) restricts the asteroids’ on-screen movements such that they can only move up and down the screen in programmed sequences, rather than in seemingly random directions as in the original vector arcade version. It is important to note that this is a specific limitation of the Atari 2600, and is not applicable to all raster-based consoles from the era. The Atari 2600 lacked a frame buffer, meaning that programmers had to synchronize graphics information to each individual scan line, rather than construct images frame-by-frame (Montfort and Bogost, 2009a: 27-28). Most other raster-based consoles from the era possessed refresh rates fast enough to enable seamless random access interaction. The comparison here nonetheless illustrates the difficulty of porting videogames optimized for random-scan displays to raster-based home consoles during the Vectrex’s era.

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The Vectrex also excels at manipulating wireframe graphics in order to simulate three-dimensional effects. It can tilt, rotate, scale, and shear objects to make them appear as though they are moving in three-dimensional, perspectival space. Vectrex videogames such as Spike (General Consumer Electronics, 1983) and Mine Storm take advantage of this by scaling angular geometric forms such that they appear to approach and recede from the player, creating an illusion of perspectival depth. In Spike, an arcade ‘platforming’ videogame that plays similarly to Nintendo’s arcade videogame Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981), players navigate a series of conveyer belt-like platforms while avoiding enemies and collecting items. The orthogonal lines representing the platforms follow a slightly skewed axis, suggesting a fixed subject position and off-screen vanishing point. As the avatar moves along this axis, its sprite enlarges and contracts to mimic the logic of perspectival projection. As with all Vectrex videogames, Spike’s graphics are wireframe, meaning that all on-screen objects are simultaneously visible and are prone to overlapping. The reason for this is technical. As mentioned above, it is incredibly difficult for the Vectrex to make objects appear opaque in real time. It is worth noting, however, that this is a specific limitation of the Vectrex, and is not inherent to vector graphics as a general means of visualization. For example, Sketchpad, which was developed by Sutherland in 1963, had basic ‘hidden line removal’, meaning that the software could determine in advance whether objects were meant to be positioned behind or in front of each other and, accordingly, which lines should be obscured from the user’s view and which should be made visible (Sutherland, 1963; Gaboury, 2015). By bringing vector graphics into the home, the Vectrex challenged the ‘visual regime’ of raster-based home consoles and posited an alternative means of player-machine interfacing. It pioneered the rectangular controller and portable videogame screen, as well as interfacing peripherals such as the VR headset and haptic interface (discussed in the next section). The Vectrex performed important transitional work in videogame history—sealing the fate of vector graphics as a distinct mode of visualization ‘between the acts’ of arcade and home videogames. The Vectrex is, then, characterized by its negotiation of aesthetic, technological, and cultural transitions: its ‘inbetween-ness’. In the next section, I unpack this in-between-ness by honing in on the affective intensities that arise between the Vectrex and its player. In the introduction to this book, I raised the idea that minor platforms not only provide a window onto suppressed or unrealized structures of feeling in videogame history; they also enable us to perceive history texturally. By focusing on the minor structures of feeling that emerge at the interface of

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the Vectrex and its player, it is possible to gain insight into an alternative ‘image’ of videogame history.

Playing with vision, thinking through technology In Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) argue that computer graphics build on an ongoing desire for perspectival realism in Western representation. Perspective was formalized as a ‘law’ of artistic and architectural representation in the Italian Renaissance. Polymaths such as Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti claimed to have rediscovered the technique by way of classical optics. Perspective was then developed as a geometrical technique for depicting three-dimensional space on two-dimensional surfaces, through a process that involved merging orthogonal lines until they collapsed at a fixed vanishing point. Bolter and Grusin argue that the development of perspectival realism in painting and architecture belies a much more deeply ingrained—yet insatiable—desire to achieve an ‘interfaceless interface’ in mediated experience, or what they call ‘immediacy’. Immediacy refers to a desire to create a medium that so effectively displaces our present environment that we forget we are being mediated in the first place. In a bid to monopolize earlier claims to immediacy, computer interfaces incorporate or ‘remediate’ earlier visual forms into their technical construction. For example, the windowed operating system implies that perspective is funnelled through a display that ‘frames’ the user’s gaze. This genealogical logic is thought to be at work in the history of videogames as well, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. However, the extent to which computer interfaces build on older visual traditions is slightly more complex than Bolter and Grusin’s genealogical account implies. To state the obvious, computers do not visualize in the same way as films or paintings, by filtering light through an aperture or merging orthogonals on a static two-dimensional surface. Computer graphics consist instead of concealed algorithmic processes that work to simulate the supposed reality of perspectival space on monitors and LCD screens. Friedrich Kittler (2001: 35) puts this well when he writes that ‘[t]he optical laws of reflection and refraction remain in effect for output devices such as monitors or LCD screens, but the program whose data directs these devices transposes such optical laws as it obeys into algebraically pure logic’. Furthermore, as art historians have long noted, there is nothing inherently objective or truthful about enduring techniques of visuality such

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as perspective. As Jacob Gaboury (2015: 46) argues, perspective is a ‘deeply embodied cultural technique’ that emerges out of specific visual epistemologies and technological conditions. In the Italian Renaissance, perspective was naturalized as a law of vision once refracted through optical devices such as the camera obscura and the painting veil. For Jonathan Crary (1992), these devices functioned not only as artistic tools but also as philosophical metaphors that established the supposed objectivity of perspectival vision in a newly secularized, inward-looking world. However, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, perspective is not a singular and unchanging law, but rather a malleable technique that is constantly shoehorned into new technologies. As Gaboury (2016: 364) writes, videogames such as Q*bert ‘play with perspective as a convention, laying bare its function as a means of structuring relations between objects through vision’. The Vectrex exemplifies this spirit of visual experimentation in early videogame development. Its interface uniquely borrows from multiple aesthetic and technical traditions, and solicits very particular techniques of player embodiment. Before discussing these techniques, it is necessary to delve more deeply into the aesthetic and technical lineages that feed into the platform’s pre-history, beginning with the development of random access computers. The first random access storage device, the 1946 Williams tube, used a CRT to fire an electron beam onto a display surface divided into a grid of X and Y coordinates. The beam produced ‘dots’ or ‘bits’ of light on the phosphor display, creating a luminescent grid intended not for human eyes but rather for the computer’s collector plate, which would be positioned in front of the tube (Figure 2). The collector plate interpreted the illuminated bit locations as 1s and 0s. The device thus generated a continuous relay of information between display and collector plate, and would only ‘crash’ if physically interfered with. Much like the Vectrex’s vector generator, the Williams tube electron beam could access any coordinate on the display, making random access memory possible. Importantly, the light of each individual bit location took time to fade, which created ethereal traces on the phosphor display. This effect was unintentional, but could be manipulated to create images that resembled line drawings. ‘Here the image does not simply represent the processing of data; it is data in zeros and ones’, writes Gaboury (2018: 41) of the Williams tube. ‘What we see is not only an image but data itself; or rather it is image and data, indistinguishable and inseparable’ (Gaboury, 2018: 41). These ‘accidental’ image-data projections prefigured the basic visual structures of vector-based technologies such as Sketchpad and, much later, the Vectrex.

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Figure 2. Memory pattern of illuminated bit locations displayed on a Williams Tube CRT. From the National Institute of Standards and Technology Research Library (original photo taken in October 1951). Retrieved from: (accessed 20 April 2018).

The Williams tube’s graphical capacity was therefore incidental to its construction—an accident of history. Because of this, its phosphor display did not ‘naturally’ adhere to the structure and logic of human sight. The early history of graphics has been described as a dual process of concealment and visualization for this reason (Pias, 2001; Gaboury, 2015). Early computers had to be programmed such that they could determine in advance what to hide and what to reveal to users through their displays. In the mid-1960s, several computer scientists—including Sutherland, who developed Sketchpad—began addressing the problem of how to make computers graphically represent objects in three-dimensional, perspectival space. According to Gaboury (2015), the most influential research in this area took place at the University of Utah’s computer graphics research unit, whose staff developed

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many of the fundamental principles of computer graphics during the period of 1965-1979. These developments included ‘raster graphics, frame buffers, graphical databases, hidden surface removal, texture mapping, object shading, and more’ (Gaboury, 2015: 42). The most pressing issue for these researchers was not how to visualize an already-existing computational object, but rather how to make ‘visual objects legible to computation’ (Gaboury, 2015: 51). Unlike cameras, computer graphics do not share an indexical relationship with that which they represent. Instead, objects are premediated prior to their representation, and the challenge lies in programming the computer such that it can determine in advance what should and should not be visualized. As Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008: 135) writes, computers ‘present a premediated material environment built and engineered to propagate an illusion of immateriality’. Before reaching the user’s eyes, computer images undergo a series of checks and balances to ensure they are sensibly constructed. ‘In order to simulate our perception of objects as fixed in a perspective projection’, writes Gaboury (2015: 51), ‘graphics must not only calculate that which is to be seen, but also anticipate and hide that which is known but should not be seen, that which must be made hidden and invisible’. Known as the hidden line or hidden surface problem, the question of how to make ‘visual objects legible to computation’ (Gaboury, 2015: 51) was clearly at stake in the design of early vector-based videogame interfaces. Vectrex developers faced a unique challenge in this regard. As already discussed, it was borderline impossible for the platform to represent objects with rendered or shaded areas, and thus incredibly difficult for the monitor to hide lines that should not be seen. In his deliberations on vector graphics, Claus Pias (2001: 66) follows this line of reasoning to assert that ‘computers themselves do not, and cannot, contain “real” images, only artificial, algorithmic relationships between data and their visualisation’. It has been argued that vector graphics enable a distinctly tactile and performative—rather than purely optical—mode of communication between humans and computers. Pias (2001), for example, charts a genealogy of the vector line that extends back to the use of labyrinths in ancient cultures. Ancient labyrinths often took the form of continuous paths that could be used as storage devices for recording movements, like those of a dance. Labyrinths were techniques that generated instructions or commands for movement—for ‘programming eyes, bodies and drawing implements’ (Pias, 2011: 67). Laura Marks (2009) and Sean Cubitt (2014) make similar observations, arguing that vector graphics underscore the tactility of ‘the line’ in artistic representation. Riffing on Paul Klee’s idea of ‘taking a line for a walk’,

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Marks (2009: 231) argues that vector graphics provide a transparent window onto the real-time performativity of the CRT electron gun (as opposed to raster-scan displays, whose ‘connections are hidden’). Similarly, Sutherland (1963: 329) once remarked that his vector-based graphical user interface, Sketchpad, made it possible ‘for a man and a computer to converse rapidly through the medium of line drawings’. The tactility and performativity of the vector line is born out in the Vectrex interface and, as I will discuss, its interfacing peripherals. The player’s performance generates commands that instruct the electron gun to record lines between different coordinates on the platform’s display. The supposed performative disjuncture between lines and pixels has a remarkably similar precedent in the history of art. In Heinrich Wölfflin’s (1950) formalist account of classical European art, for example, the line is explicitly opposed to the painted surface in its aesthetic properties. Wölfflin conceptualizes a rupture in artistic vision that occurred between the 16th and 17th centuries, at which point the ‘linear style’, which ‘sees in lines’ (Wölfflin, 1950: 18), was displaced by ‘the painterly’, which apprehends the world as a ‘shifting semblance’ (Wölfflin, 1950: 14). Unlike the painterly, the line in Wölfflin’s (1950: 21) account is solid, tangible, and ‘plastically felt’. For Wölfflin (1950: 21), the line replicates a sense of touch through vision: The tracing out of a figure with an evenly clear line has still an element of physical grasping. The operation which the eye performs resembles the operation of the hand which feels along the body, and the modelling which repeats reality in the graduation of light also appeals to the sense of touch. A painterly representation, on the other hand, excludes this analogy.

Alois Riegl (1985: 24-26), an Austrian art historian writing at the same time as Wölfflin, also saw art history as a trajectory that began, in the ancient world, with a materialist and tactile phenomenology centred on lines and movement, and that ultimately culminated in the modern period with a purely optical regime of vision. While Riegl (1985: 74) describes this process as linear, he also argues that the line’s tactile dimension never completely disappeared from art but was rendered invisible by the painted surface. The painterly, static in its visualization, conceals and displaces the tactility of the line. Another often-unacknowledged cultural technique underlying vector graphics is the XY grid (cf. Gaboury, 2018). Bernard Siegert (2015) observes that grids are foundational to Western culture, from their use in Renaissance imaging technologies to urban planning and, of course, random-scan CRTs.

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This is why vector displays are commonly used for map-making purposes such as plotting routes in traffic control systems (Pias, 2001: 66). As will be discussed, the Vectrex’s grid-based graphical system similarly influenced the design of its videogames. Incidentally, GCE even prototyped an education videogame for the Vectrex that, according to the May 1983 edition of Arcade Express newsletter, used the light pen to ‘[cast] the arcader as the pilot of a mail plane as he learns the basics of geography’ (‘Vectrex readies light pen; plans 3-D, full color cart’, 1983: 2). Siegert identifies three characteristics of grids that are relevant in this regard. Grids ‘project a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional plain’—they are used to rationalize, configure, and colonize spaces (Siegert, 2015: 98). Grids store data that ‘can be implemented in the real as well as the symbolic’—they can turn real spaces and subjects into data that can then be manipulated in the symbolic realm (Siegert, 2015: 98). And finally, grids ‘constitute a world of objects imagined by a subject’—much like perspectival projection, grids are not an inherently natural or truthful way to organize space, but are instead a deeply embodied cultural technique. Several of the aforementioned aesthetic and technical traditions converge in the Vectrex interface. Consider Mine Storm, which is pre-loaded on every Vectrex console. Mine Storm comes accompanied with a transparent plastic overlay that superimposes a simple grid onto the screen, slicing the play area into a series of identifiable coordinates. In the opening moments of the videogame, a spaceship known as the ‘minelayer’ flies in from the foreground of the screen, seeding bits of light around the play area until it recedes into the darkness. To achieve the effect of the minelayer ‘approaching’ and ‘receding’ from the foreground of the screen (in a manner very similar to the opening scene of Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope [Lucas, 1977]), Mine Storm takes advantage of the monitor’s scaling capabilities. The lines defining the minelayer are contracted until they merge and disappear on a vanishing point. When play starts, the bits of light seeded by the minelayer hatch into star-shaped mines that drift around the screen. The player’s task is to survive by piloting their spaceship around the screen while avoiding and destroying active mines. The spaceship can be piloted to any area of the display, and seamlessly rotated 360 degrees to fire luminous shots in all directions. If one of these shots makes contact with and destroys an active mine, two more dots will hatch into mines, which then split into two smaller mines when shot. Once all the bits of light have hatched into mines, the minelayer returns to the screen and frantically seeds more unhatched mines until destroyed by the player. Once all hatched and unhatched mines are cleared, the player moves to the next round, and the process is repeated

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from the beginning. The videogame increases difficulty round-by-round by introducing mines with more challenging attack patterns. For example, rather than simply floating around the screen, in later rounds some mines will actively pursue the player. There are several key visual techniques at work in Mine Storm. Much like the Williams tube, Mine Storm instructs the vector generator to projects bits of light onto various coordinates of the platform’s display. These bits—the most basic expression of visualized data—represent unhatched mines. As the minelayer appears in each successive round of play, it writes more bits of light onto the display. The player’s role is to act as a ‘collector plate’ of sorts, interpreting the data and taking the necessary steps to ensure their flow are uninterrupted. This means avoiding collision with or destroying the mines, as any mistake will lead to a ‘crash’, a game over. The whole structure of the videogame—from the laying of mines to the free movement of the player avatar—is made possible by the platform’s capacity for seamless, random access interaction. The plastic grid overlay, meanwhile, calls to mind the painting veils used as perspective devices in Renaissance painting. It maps the space of the screen and enhances the player’s ability to make sense of and rationalize the on-screen action, which is itself structured according to the logic of an XY grid, albeit one that is visually inaccessible to the player. The resulting visual system can be thought of as a technical version of Immanuel Kant’s intuition, whereby one of the conditions of the very possibility of representation is its adherence to Cartesian grid-space. The plastic overlay is a grid that further accentuates the grid-space underlying the Vectrex monitor—to use Siegert’s (2015: 98) definition, it ‘posits an antecedent geometrical space in which objects are located and that submits the representation of objects to a theory of subjective vision’. While Mine Storm excels at depicting geometrical objects such as spaceships, it struggles with more chaotic or abstract visual effects. A ring of straight lines emanating outwards from a fixed coordinate signifies the aftermath of an exploded mine, for example. The Vectrex’s short-lived light pen and 3D imager peripherals reveal further methods of player-machine interfacing that the platform sought to accommodate.7 Much like Sutherland’s Sketchpad, the light pen gives 7 In addition to the light pen and 3D imager, various other interfacing peripherals were planned for the Vectrex but never released. The July 1983 edition of Arcade Express reported that GCE had developed a keyboard that added 16K ROM and 16K RAM to the underlying Vectrex hardware (‘Vectrex gets keyboard, 3-D Imager & Light Pen’, 1983: 2). According to the article, the keyboard supported BASIC as well as 128K wafer-tape software. It allegedly marked GCE’s ‘first

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Figure 3. Advertisement for the Vectrex light pen. Retrieved from: (accessed 14 April 2018). By permission of Matthew Henzel (scanner).

players the ability to ‘draw’ vector lines directly onto the Vectrex screen (Figure 3). Much like Sketchpad, it was created as a tool for producing ‘artistic’ drawings, underscoring the tactility and performativity of the vector line. The 3D imager, meanwhile, is a headset that allows players to experience selected videogames in stereoscopic 3D and colour. Unlike regular Vectrex videogames, imager-enabled videogames generate at least two sets of duplicate vector images in slightly different positions on the screen. At the centre of the headset itself—between the player’s eyes—is a spinning colour wheel synchronized to the on-screen image. Half the wheel is black and half is translucent and coloured. It spins so rapidly that the duplicate on-screen images appear to fuse, creating an illusion of three-dimensional depth and colour. Like the light pen, the 3D imager is not without precedent. Portable stereoscopic devices—the original ‘virtual voyaging’ media, as Erkki Huhtamo (2006: 114) puts it—have emerged in multiple guises since at least the early 19th century. The Vectrex 3D imager is an early example of a stereoscopic videogame technology—not the first, step toward a word processer that will be introduced in early 1984’; however, the peripheral never progressed beyond prototype phase (‘Vectrex gets keyboard, 3-D Imager & Light Pen’, 1983: 2).

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but the first to incorporate such technology into a headset peripheral—and perhaps the only example of a stereoscopic device that can be synchronized to a vector display. The light pen and 3D imager emphasize the need for a co-dependent relationship between the player’s body and the Vectrex technology. The light pen facilitates tactile interaction between the player and vector generator, allowing both entities to, in Sutherland’s (1963: 329) terms, ‘converse rapidly through the medium of line drawings’. The 3D imager, like all stereoscopic devices that precede it, relies on what Crary (1992: 129) calls the ‘corporeal adjacency and immobility of the observer’. That is, without an observer there ‘never really is a stereoscopic image’—the stereoscopic effect is a ‘conjuration’ forged, quite literally, at the interface of observer and apparatus (Crary, 1992: 126). This co-dependency of user and apparatus is significant because players and videogames are usually considered separate rather than integrated entities. In an essay on Pong (Atari, 1972) and player-machine interfacing, Pias (2011: 166) makes a disarmingly simple observation: most videogames can ‘manage entirely without humans’. For him, the player’s ‘role’ in videogame play is not to take control of a computer but rather to act as a third-party observer whose duty is to mediate the successful functionality of the computer’s internal communications. Pias was, at the time he wrote this essay, railing against the then-prevailing assumption that videogames were a modern-day manifestation of the playful sensibilities espoused by classical theorists of play, such as Friedrich Schiller. For Pias (2011: 166), videogames ‘modify Schiller’s paradigm, in which the “human being” stood in the center […] playing’, in that an ‘interface moves into this center and mediates the contradiction between machine and human […] thereby both creating and formatting that which the human being as user actually is’. Pias’s intervention is to decentralize the player’s privileged position in the study of videogames. Ironically, though, his account also affirms the player’s status as a free and individualized subject—free, that is, to engage with videogames from the vantage point of a detached observer. The Vectrex’s light pen, 3D imager, and performative vector monitor arguably facilitate a much higher degree of ‘corporeal adjacency’ between player and platform. They are peripherals that collapse the tactile within the optical; emphasizing that one is not possible without the other. The ‘productive confusion’ (Anable, 2018a: 68) caused by this ‘flattening’ of player and platform is more comprehensively explored through an analysis of Twine in Chapter Five. Although it made a good initial impression on magazine writers, the Vectrex’s monochromatic random-scan CRT monitor was, from the outset, decidedly outdated. But it was also inexpensive, and well understood by

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developers of vector arcade videogames. It therefore became a useful tool for ‘thinking through’ various interfacing techniques and design problems in vector-based videogames. As Montfort and Bogost (2009a) argue in their study of the Atari 2600, a platform’s limitations can inspire feats of creative programming that ultimately push the platform—and the craft of videogame development—in new directions. Similarly, in his study of the Nintendo Game Boy—a platform with ostensibly ‘withered’ or ‘seasoned’ specifications—Daniel Reynolds (2016: n.p.) argues that platforms open up spaces for ‘lateral thinking’ at the interface of content, form, and bodies:8 Technologies such as game consoles or film projectors create complex relationships between media content, media technology, and human bodies. Thinking about technology does not occur just within the human ‘thinker,’ whether an individual, a design team, or a corporation, but rather in the dynamic relationship between technologists and technologies. Likewise, videogame players think not only with their brains, but also with their eyes, ears, and hands, and with the consoles and the games themselves.

Peripherals such as the light pen and 3D imager augment eyes and hands, allowing players to ‘think with’ the Vectrex using their whole bodies. They also augment and extend the underlying platform, which allowed developers to think ‘through’ multiple interfacing techniques rather than follow the certainty of a single, obvious one. The Vectrex thus generated what Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux (2017: 84) call ‘memento mortem mortis’—that is, play experiences that ‘[perturb] assumptions about vision in order to decorrelate the body and code’; that speak to a desire to ‘play in the spaces that exceed the boundaries of perception’. This is important because the Vectrex was released at a time when standardized raster-based CRT interfaces were becoming the norm. Significant here are the plastic overlays that functioned to add colour and form to Vectrex videogames. As noted above, the Vectrex overlays were a marketing ploy to make the Vectrex’s screen more visually appealing to players—that is, to make the console’s videogames look more like those of raster-based consoles. They are thus ‘transitional objects’ that point to the abandonment of one structure of feeling—the vector interface—and the firming up of another. 8 Gunpei Yokoi, designer of the Game Boy, popularized the notion of ‘lateral thinking through withered (or seasoned) technology’. This basic philosophy remains central to the design of Nintendo hardware. See Reynolds, 2016.

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‘For improved gameplay, remove the overlays’: The standardization of the interface In the Vectrex’s era, there was a considerable dissonance between videogame artwork (displayed on packaging, manuals, and arcade machines) and the corresponding videogame graphics (displayed on monitors and television screens). This was especially the case for vector-based arcade videogames, whose developers often relied on detailed cabinet artwork to convey information to players about narrative, characters, and setting. Much like the artwork that decorated arcade cabinets such as Asteroids, the Vectrex’s plastic overlays had a dual purpose. They added visual flourishes to the platform’s screen and its videogames, and also sought to convey information to players about controls and inputs. Every Vectrex videogame came with a unique overlay. Some were quite simple—Mine Storm’s, for example, was a simple grid, rendered transparent blue and surrounded by a solid yellow border. Others, like Scramble’s (Konami, 1982; discussed below), were somewhat more varied. Much like today’s touchscreen interfaces, the Vectrex overlays drew attention to the platform’s screen as a ‘thing’ to look ‘at’ rather than ‘through’ (Verhoeff, 2012: 277-278). However, unlike touchscreen devices such as the Nintendo DS, which ‘necessitate opaqueness’ for the paradoxical purpose of ‘virtual transparency’ (Verhoeff, 2012: 288), the Vectrex’s overlays were explicitly designed to divert attention away from the platform’s monochromatic wireframe graphics (see Allen, 2007: 21). According to one source, several Vectrex programmers disagreed with the decision to encourage the use of overlays, and even joked about coding the following message into their videogames: ‘for improved gameplay, remove the overlays’ (Allen, 2007: 21). It seems that for these programmers, the overlays compromised the raw vector abstractions that made the Vectrex interface unique. The overlay for Scramble, a Vectrex port of the 1981 arcade shooting videogame of the same name, is a useful example of how overlays augment the player’s visual experience. In the videogame, players control a spaceship as it scrolls along a horizontal two-dimensional plane. A line at the base of the screen represents the terrain beneath the spaceship. At certain points, another line closes in from the top of the screen, producing narrow spaces that the player must carefully navigate. Enemy ships, which enter the screen in programmed sequences, can be destroyed using the spaceship’s laser, or avoided altogether. The spaceship’s fuel can be replenished by destroying crates scattered along the terrain. Scramble’s overlay superimposes gradient colour and perspectival projection onto the underlying vector graphics. It is divided into three sections:

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the top is red, resembling the sky at dusk; the middle yellow, resembling the setting sun; and the bottom green, resembling the planet’s terrain. The red and green sections transition to yellow by way of increasing thickness, much like the shutters of a venetian blind. The yellow space—which is usually occupied by the player—therefore appears to be foregrounded by the red and the green. There is a solid green border surrounding the whole overlay, which includes ‘player 1’ and ‘player 2’ icons, control instructions, and the Scramble logo. The overlay frames and contains the vector image, funnelling the player’s vision toward the centre of the screen, where the action takes place. In the October 1982 issue of Video magazine, Scramble’s overlay was specifically praised for its capacity to blot out the monochromatic screen: ‘when you’re really involved with a Vectrex game like “Scramble”, it’s almost possible to forget that the program is in black-and-white’ (Kunkel and Katz, 1982: 32). The Vectrex was not the first videogame device to use plastic overlays in this way. Arcade machines such as Star Castle and Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) utilized overlays to achieve similar visual effects. The first commercially available home videogame console, the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, also came packaged with translucent television overlays as well as physical peripherals such as plastic chips, cards, and play money. The Odyssey uses a standard raster-scan television CRT as its screen output. Its overlays, which come in small and large sizes to accommodate different television sets, superimpose visual effects on the display. As Jason Wilson (2007: 158) points out, these overlays were an indication of ‘the representational urge and ambition that was already present in the earliest period of game design’. Ralph Baer, the designer of the Odyssey, was primarily concerned with how the domestic television could be experimented with as a ‘representational medium’ (Wilson, 2007: 156, italics in original). As Wilson notes, Baer’s preoccupation with representation was concurrent with a broader artistic interest in the possibilities of television as a visualizing medium. Baer’s interest was in how the television screen could represent reality in different ways, and the Odyssey’s overlays were an extension of this representational experiment. The Vectrex and the Odyssey utilized overlays for similar representational purposes—to augment the televisual screen and experiment with different ways of representing reality—but the platforms’ respective affordances meant that their videogames explored vastly different realities. The difference between the Vectrex’s random-scan monitor and ordinary raster-scan monitors comes into play here yet again. For the Odyssey, Baer looked to existing non-digital games for inspiration: sports, card games, board games, and so on. Like most home consoles, the Odyssey constructed its

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graphics by following the raster-scan process of ‘painting’ images row-by-row, forming a series of pixels on the screen. Baer’s design process was literally synchronized to the sweeping pattern of the raster-scan electron gun. One of his breakthrough moments was the conceptualization of what he called a ‘third spot’ on the screen; a machine-controlled spot that could bounce back and forth between two player-controlled ‘spots’ or paddles (Wilson, 2007: 156). The resulting videogame, Table Tennis (Magnavox, 1972) would later inspire Pong and, thereafter, a lawsuit from Magnavox against Atari. The ‘third spot’ mimicked the horizontal sweeping pattern of the raster-scan electron beam by bouncing from one side of the screen to the other. The Vectrex’s random-scan CRT enabled its software developers to explore realities that were more abstract and labyrinthine in nature. As discussed above, videogames such as Spike and Mine Storm use the Vectrex’s graphical capabilities for scaling, rotating, and shearing in order to blend two-dimensional and three-dimensional viewpoints, sometimes contradictorily. Videogames such as Cosmic Chasm (Cinematronics, 1982a), Solar Quest (Cinematronics, 1982b), Space Wars (Cinematronics, 1982c), and Star Castle (Cinematronics, 1983) feature radial designs wherein play circulates around a focal point in the centre of the screen. In the Vectrex port of Star Castle, for example, the player is tasked with destroying an enemy canon positioned at the centre of the screen. This canon is surrounded by several spinning shields, and tracks the player’s avatar as it circles the screen. The overlay features a border that frames the action by appearing to slope inward toward the action. At the very centre of the overlay is a yellow and red circle representing the sun, around which the player rotates and attacks the central enemy canon. The Vectrex’s capacity for scaling and rotating objects comes into play here. Not only does the player rotate around the central canon, but the canon is also surrounded by a number of concentric rings that each rotate in different directions. The gameplay thus takes on a labyrinthine or radial character, encouraging the player to trace circular patterns on the screen with their eyes and hands. Star Castle also makes use of vector graphics in unique ways. For example, rather than exploding ‘outwards’ like the mines in Mine Storm, the central canon in Star Castle implodes upon destruction. The ring segments contract to the centre of the screen, at which point they blow into pieces in multiple directions. Visually, this effect takes advantage of—and provides a creative solution to—the limitations of the Vectrex’ random-scan monitor. An article on the arcade version of Star Castle from the March 1981 issue of Science 81 magazine claims that the videogame’s developer, Wynn Bailey, ‘wanted to create illusions […]. He was fascinated by talk of three-dimensional

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games, of machines that would give a player the sensation of being at the helm of a starship’ (Tierney, 1981: 66). Indeed, the vast majority of Vectrex videogames—many of them ports of vector-based arcade videogames—follow sci-fi conventions in their design, utilizing the ‘spectrally empty miseen-scene’ (Wilson, 2007: 322) of the Vectrex monitor as a fictional backdrop for sci-fi themed space shooting. As discussed earlier, the Vectrex’s vector generator only draws lines and points where it has been instructed to do so, and leaves the remainder of the screen blank. This gives vector graphics their luminous quality; their seeming capacity to ‘pop into life’, as one writer put it in 1984 (Worley, 1984: 84). The projection of vector objects against the textureless backdrop of the Vectrex monitor creates a sense of otherworldliness that was, at the time of the platform’s release, concurrent with techno-futurist imaginaries projected by films such as Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (Lucas, 1977) and Tron (Lisberger, 1982). Vector graphics appear in the diegetic world of Star Wars: Episode IV when, for example, Luke Skywalker plots the Death Star on his X-wing targeting computer. This scene had a clear influence on Star Hawk (Cinematronics, 1982d), a Vectrex space shooter that takes the Death Star trench run as its main inspiration. In Tron, meanwhile, a computer programmer is transported into a software world structured around a vectoral logic and aesthetic. Vector lines, and the textureless spaces in which they are drawn, were seen as windows through which we could journey into a reality divorced from our own. While the above discussion suggests that random- and raster-scan graphics afforded vastly different representational techniques, it has not been my intention to set up a binary opposition between the vector line and the pixel. Rather, my aim has been to look at how the Vectrex negotiated this representational divide. Multiple aesthetic traditions converge in the Vectrex’s overlays, much like other aspects of the platform’s interface. But the overlays also evince a common ‘representational urge’ that was present in the early stages of home console videogames, and thus an abandonment of some of the qualities that enabled vector graphics to investigate alternative ways of representing reality. Like the Vectrex itself, the overlays are transitional objects that articulate the convergence of various aesthetic traditions, interfacing techniques, and structures of feeling. Some of these traditions, techniques, and structures had a profound influence on the future development of videogames (the rectangular controller; the portable screen), some disappeared from videogame culture but then reappeared in different guises at later dates (the haptic screen; the headset peripheral), and some will likely remain tied to the Vectrex as a specific technological form (the domesticated vector monitor; the overlays).

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Conclusion Discussing the history of the camera obscura in his book Techniques of the Observer, Crary (1992: 30) writes, ‘what constitutes the camera obscura is precisely its multiple identity, its “mixed” status as an epistemological figure within a discursive order and an object within an arrangement of cultural practices’. In Crary’s account, the ontology of the camera obscura is not singular but multiple. In the European Renaissance, for example, the camera obscura coordinated a multiplicity of cultural practices and epistemologies. It was at once an artistic tool, a scientific instrument, and a philosophical metaphor that, by virtue of its capacity to reproduce a scene from the outside world inside a darkened space, ‘decorporealize[d] vision’ and transformed the observer into a ‘disembodied witness […] of the objectivity of the world’ (Crary, 1992: 39-41). The camera obscura also led a discursive life that extended beyond the Renaissance. As Huhtamo (2006: 85) writes, ‘[t]he camera obscura may have been a tool for “disinterested” perspectival imaging or astronomical observation, but it also became associated with surveillance and sexual voyeurism, developing into a hideaway for the unseen peeper’. The camera obscura, then, ‘cannot be reduced to a technological or discursive object’—it is, in Crary’s (1992: 31) terms, ‘a complex social amalgam in which its existence as a discursive object was never separable from its machinic uses’. Like the camera obscura, we can understand the Vectrex by attending to its multiplicity as an object. The Vectrex is a platform that attempted to negotiate a number of transitional moments in videogame history, such as the migration of arcade videogames into the home, the domestication of mobile screens, and the displacement of vector graphics. It is a unique interfacing device that enabled developers and players to ‘think differently’ about the interaction between opticality and tactility in videogame play. It inherits—and experiments with—multiple methods of visualization from the histories of art and computer graphics. As an intermezzo, it performed important ‘narrative work’ for videogame history. For every interfacing technique it laid the groundwork for, it sealed the fate of another. It is, therefore, a historically vital yet ultimately expendable videogame platform. Although it challenged the visual regime of raster-based home consoles, its commercial failure ultimately helped reinforce an emergent structure of feeling in videogame culture; one that would shape the look and feel of home videogames in the years to come. A number of aesthetic and technical traditions converge in the Vectrex interface, but this process of convergence is anything but harmonious.

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Indeed, a key argument of this chapter is that the pre-history of videogame graphics is, much like the pre-history of cinema in Thomas Elsaesser’s (2016: 38) account, ‘a striated and layered landscape, more like a battlefield than a natural formation, pacified by truces and compromises rather than by harmonious convergence’. When Smith and Karr created the Vectrex using an inexpensive and outdated random-scan monitor, they were attempting to facilitate the migration of arcade videogames such as Star Castle and Asteroids into the home. Vectrex videogame developers could, for this reason, build upon a number of visual techniques already established by developers of vector-based arcade videogames. However, this also led to a number of unique challenges for the Vectrex. How, for example, could the platform’s monochromatic and wireframe display be made appealing in an era dominated by raster-based home consoles? What was a randomscan CRT capable of when augmented and pushed to its capacities? The answers to these questions came in the form of videogames such as Mine Storm, which were inspired by earlier vector-based arcade videogames (in this case, Atari’s Asteroids), but which explored new vector-based imaging techniques and visual effects. In a similar vein, peripherals such as the light pen and 3D imager made use of decades-old technologies, but incorporated these technologies into a videogame interface as a means of positing new forms of optical and tactile interaction. Plastic overlays allegedly made the platform’s monochromatic monitor visually palatable for players and critics who expected colour and form from their videogames. The Vectrex is, then, simultaneously continuous and discontinuous—it is a transitional platform that expresses the technological and cultural instabilities of its era. The Vectrex can be understood as a ‘tool-for-thought’—not only for developers and players in the early 1980s—but also for historians in the present. Just as the camera obscura functions as an entry point into alternative ways of ‘seeing’ film history, the Vectrex can, to borrow Jussi Parikka’s (2012: 22) words, function ‘less [as] a technology and more like a complex dispositif and tool-for-thought’. A key argument of this book is that minor platforms are particularly useful as ‘theoretical objects’ (Verhoeff, 2012) in this regard. Not only do they enable us to construct new ‘images’ of the past; they also give us tools for theorizing the medium anew in the present. The next chapter develops this argument in more detail by looking at a South Korean pirate platform from the 1980s known as the Daewoo Zemmix. Here, I discuss the Zemmix as a theoretical object in a double sense. Not only does it allow me, as a historian, to rearticulate the dialogue between formality and informality in videogame history; it also functioned as a theoretical

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object in its immediate historical context, by enabling Korean developers to rearticulate the connections between copying, creative programming, and Korea’s postcolonial consciousness in the 1980s.

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Gameography Atari (1972) Pong. Arcade: Atari. Atari (1979) Asteroids. Arcade: Atari.

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Atari (1981) Tempest. Arcade: Atari. Cinematronics (1980) Star Castle. Arcade: Cinematronics. Cinematronics (1982a) Cosmic Chasm. Vectrex: Cinematronics. Cinematronics (1982b) Solar Quest. Vectrex: Cinematronics. Cinematronics (1982c) Space Wars. Vectrex: Cinematronics. Cinematronics (1982d) Star Hawk. Vectrex: Cinematronics. Cinematronics (1983) Star Castle. Vectrex: Cinematronics. General Consumer Electronics (1982) Mine Storm. Vectrex: General Consumer Electronics. General Consumer Electronics (1983) Spike. Vectrex: General Consumer Electronics. Gottlieb (1982) Q*bert. Arcade: Gottlieb. Higginbotham W (1958) Tennis for Two. Analogue Computer. Konami (1982) Scramble. Vectrex: General Consumer Electronics. Magnavox (1972) Table Tennis. Magnavox Odyssey: Magnavox. Nintendo (1981) Donkey Kong. Arcade: Nintendo. id Software (1993) Doom. MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows: id Software. Russel S (1962) Spacewar! PDP-1. Taito (1978) Space Invaders. Arcade: Taito.

Filmography Lisberger S (1982) Tron. Walt Disney Productions. Lucas G (1977) Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope. 20th Century Fox.

2.

Articulations of videogame piracy: The Zemmix as a decolonial platform Abstract This chapter analyses the Zemmix, a South Korean pirate platform released by Daewoo in 1985. In its technical construction, the Zemmix makes (unofficial) use of a microcomputer operating system known as ‘MSX’. MSX was co-developed by Microsoft’s Japanese and North American hardware divisions in the 1980s. It therefore carried a ‘double bind’ (Cho, 2016) of neocolonial influence in Korea. Through the Zemmix, however, MSX became an object of decolonization in Korea’s videogame and computer industries. I argue that the Zemmix is useful as an epistemic tool or ‘theoretical object’ (Verhoeff, 2012) for reflecting on the ‘postcolonial consciousness’ that became articulated in Korea’s videogame and computer industries during this era. Keywords: Zemmix, South Korean videogame history, videogame piracy, decolonial computing, MSX

It is often argued that videogames became a ‘global’ commodity in the 1980s, precipitated by the collapse of the North American videogame industry and its subsequent revival by Nintendo. This argument can, however, be critiqued for its implicit focus on the North American and Japanese home console markets and, by extension, for overlooking the many ‘microcomputer’ industries that spearheaded the emergence of videogame development scenes in Europe, South America, and Australasia during this period. Such a critique takes its cue from cultural theory, which has long recognized that narratives of neocolonialism and hegemonic expansion do not adequately account for the complex inter- and intraregional flows of globally branded technologies in non-Western contexts. Such technologies are often subject to local ‘articulations’ of use, reception, and appropriation as they circulate regional markets. Rather than adopting what Bjarke Liboriussen and Paul Martin (2016: n.p.) call a ‘centre-periphery model of power’, in which ‘a

Nicoll, B., Minor Platforms in Videogame History, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789462988286_ch02

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hegemonic centre dominates its periphery’, a regionally informed approach to videogame history is concerned with the ways in which minor narratives exist within, against, and alongside higher-order globalizing processes and discourses. In the 1980s, a number of informal videogame industries emerged in response to the global spread of North American and Japanese videogames. These informal industries were particularly concentrated in East Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, and South Korea (henceforth Korea). This chapter looks at the formation and formalization of Korea’s informal videogame industry in particular, through the lens of a ‘decolonial platform’ known as the Daewoo Zemmix. Released in 1985 by Daewoo, the Zemmix is a cartridge-based platform that shares software compatibility with Japanese and North American MSX-branded microcomputers. MSX is a microcomputer operating system co-developed by Microsoft of Japan and Microsoft of America in 1983. The ostensible aim of MSX was to standardize the architecture of 8-bit microcomputers such that software development could be streamlined across platforms and regions. To this extent, MSX was also Microsoft’s attempt to penetrate the European home computer markets where, especially in Britain, Japanese and North American microcomputers had struggled to compete with national models. The Zemmix is thus an informal hybrid of Japanese and North American technologies. In this chapter, I argue that the Zemmix is an important articulation of the ‘double bind’ of Japanese and North American neocolonialism in Korea’s videogame and computer industries in the 1980s and early 1990s—that is, ‘the condition of double colonization and the possibility of overcoming it’ (Cho, 2016: 942). The platform’s software catalogue consists almost entirely of imported and pirated Japanese MSX computer games, the distribution of which was, in part, made possible by leniencies in Korea’s copyright protection laws in the 1980s. The Zemmix facilitated the flow of pirated Japanese computer games into Korea at a time when the lingering trauma of Japanese occupation and the (related) implementation of protectionist cultural policies prohibited formal avenues of exchange between the two countries. The Zemmix therefore operated both within and against the globalizing logic of Japan’s videogame and computer industries. Once the Computer Programs Protection Act (CPPA) was introduced in Korea in 1987, Korean developers began creating hybrid videogame software for the Zemmix. In this way, the Zemmix also became a vehicle for the decolonization of Korea’s videogame and computer industries, as well as the country’s attempt to encourage creative autonomy and interregional competitiveness in its

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cultural industries. In describing the Zemmix as a decolonial platform, I aim to move beyond the dialectic of ‘imitation’ and ‘innovation’ that often frames discussions of piracy in videogame history. Existing histories of Korean videogames rarely mention the country’s informal videogame industry, but when they do, they often frame it as a necessary step in the ‘innovation process’ that spawned Korea’s now-dominant (perhaps even sub-imperial [see Jin, 2010]) online videogame industry (Chung, 2015: 496). For example, in Peichi Chung’s (2015: 496) otherwise expertly researched history of Korean videogames, the ‘imitation of game content imported from abroad’ is somewhat uncritically identified as a precursor to the ‘creative stage in the domestic market’ that began in the 1990s. My argument here is that the Zemmix and its videogames cannot adequately be described as mere ‘imitations’ of their Japanese counterparts. The platform helped foster a grassroots creative industry where amateur programmers and hackers could creatively remix Japanese computer games for a local audience, and thus contest the ‘double bind’ of Japanese and North American neocolonialism in a subterfuge way. Videogame piracy—namely the sort of counterfeiting associated with the Zemmix and its videogames—is often uncritically stigmatized as a homogenous ‘techno-Orientalist’ phenomenon. Yet videogame piracy was (and to a large extent still is) a complex and pervasive transnational phenomenon that, in the Korean context at least, occurred below the radar of global capitalism. This makes it quite difficult to research and analyse. As such, for this chapter, I collaborated with an independent Korean videogame historian, Sam Derboo, to collect and translate archival materials.1 The magazine articles, newspaper clippings, and visual resources discussed in this chapter are helpful not only for uncovering primary information about the Zemmix and related technologies, but perhaps more importantly, for gaining insight into the structures of feeling these technologies once inhabited. My aim is therefore to shift the emphasis from piracy’s effects on formal production processes to an appreciation of its affects on subjectivity, community, and creativity in peripheral media industries (cf. Hjorth and Chan, 2009).2 1 Sam’s assistance, knowledge, and insights were indispensable when researching this chapter. The translations and photographs featured in this chapter are reproduced by his permission. 2 Scholars have made similar observations regarding research on Korea’s online videogame industry, pointing out that it often overlooks the lived experiences and identities of those who play online videogames in favour of more distanced and data-based approaches (Chee, 2006; Jin and Chee, 2009).

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The Zemmix as an epistemic tool In this chapter, I treat the Zemmix as a ‘theoretical object’ (Verhoeff, 2012) that can help ‘rearticulate’ (Hall, 1986) the seemingly fixed distinction between formality and informality in videogame history, as well as an epistemic tool for decolonial critique. In her analysis of the Nintendo DS, Nanna Verhoeff (2012) argues that videogame platforms can function as ‘theoretical consoles’ for entering into various historical, phenomenological, and political debates. Her notion of theoretical consoles is similar to Thomas Elsaesser’s (2016: 37) argument that cinema is a ‘form of thought’—a medium that furnishes viewers with particular ways of knowing or seeing. Researching a videogame platform as a theoretical object means acknowledging its agency and allowing it to articulate for itself, rather than subjecting it to a particular methodology or framework. Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation is instructive in this regard. In an interview, Hall (1986: 53) notes that the term ‘articulate’ has a double meaning: it means to speak—to communicate—but also to create a ‘linkage’ or ‘unity’ between two discrete elements or parts. Hall’s concept of articulation can be productively read as an alternative to Louis Althusser’s (and others’) scientific Marxism (see Clarke, 2015: 276). For Hall, political ideologies are never intrinsically bound to individual subjects. Class-consciousness, for example, is not a mental state that exists a priori within the minds of working-class people. Rather, the connection between ideology and subject is held in place—or articulated—by a particular discourse or social formation. Hall’s interest is therefore in examining (and rearticulating) the economic, cultural, and social means by which a particular ideology becomes bound to a particular subject in the first place. In his words, ‘the theory of articulation asks how ideology discovers its subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts that belong to it’ (Hall, 1986: 53). In this sense, articulation can also be thought of as a way of historicizing and politicizing ‘epistemology’ and its link (in Enlightenment philosophy) to the colonial enterprise of imperial governance through ways of knowing. In terms of piracy, colonial epistemologies manifest themselves in Anglo-European laws and norms surrounding copyright and intellectual property, and their enforcement in nations where such laws and norms did not exist prior to colonization. Minor platforms can be leveraged as theoretical objects—either by researchers or the people who use them—for articulating political struggles and reconfiguring dominant structures of power and knowledge in a society. As I will discuss, Hall’s theory of articulation is especially pertinent in light of videogame piracy, which is often romanticized as a unified expression

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of resistance to cultural imperialism and capitalist expansion. But as the Zemmix shows, piracy can be the result of any number of articulations—the articulation of, for example, one technology to another; the articulation of cultural policy and international law to regional modes of cultural production; or the articulation of media practices, discourses, and structures of feeling to a postcolonial consciousness. Not only does the Zemmix express the theory of articulation in its material construction—it was simultaneously dependent on but also resistant to the cross-fertilization of Korean, Japanese, and North American technologies— but it is also a platform that articulates the very nature of these cultural exchanges. To return to an idea raised in the introduction to this book, the Zemmix is constituted by a kind of territorial unruliness. Like any videogame platform, it is constructed from materials sourced and manufactured from countries other than Japan and North America. But unlike most platforms, the Zemmix possesses an ‘out-of-order’ anatomy that, much like the Video Cassette Recorder in Caetlin Benson-Allott’s (2007: 180) VCR autopsy, ‘dismantles the fantasy of the autonomous, masculine apparatus’. It is almost unapologetic in its status as a bricolage object; a patchwork of components, parts, and plastics obtained informally from various East Asian manufacturers. It lays bare the fact that videogame platforms are always transnational, porous, and ‘leaky’ in their technical construction, and not at all discrete, stable, or territorially bound (Benson-Allott, 2007). It is, therefore, a theoretical console that enables me to rearticulate some of the beliefs we tend to have about videogame history, such as the idea that videogames spread outwards from North America and Japan and meet little or no resistance or modification along the way, or the idea that a platform’s success is determined by its capacity to colonize international markets. The Zemmix did not colonize, but instead cultivated informal exchanges across differentiated regional markets. By looking at these articulations, we can begin to appreciate the platform’s cultural significance.

Korea’s informal videogame industry Daewoo released the first Zemmix model, the ‘CPC-50’, in December 1985, at a time when microcomputers and videogame consoles were becoming increasingly popular around the world. Unlike videogame consoles, microcomputers were designed to perform a wide variety of computational tasks. It is well documented that videogaming was one of the earliest and most popular things to do on these computers, since other aspects of their

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interfaces were deeply unintuitive to new users (see Kirkpatrick, 2013: 74-75).3 When the Zemmix was first released, microcomputers such as the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum had already achieved widespread popularity in North America and Europe. Nintendo was also fast establishing a global presence in the home console market with its Famicom platform (or Nintendo Entertainment System as it is known in the West). In 1983, Microsoft of Japan and Microsoft of North America released their MSX standard for 8-bit microcomputers. As an international technical standard, MSX was meant to address a lack of software interoperability in what was fast becoming an overcrowded international microcomputer market. However, the underlying motive of MSX was clear: to standardize the operating systems of home computers—whether Sony, Hyundai, Toshiba, or whoever manufactured them—and, in the process, to draw previously national computer manufacturers (and the unruly, oftentimes bricolage platforms they created) into Microsoft’s increasingly transnational orbit. For this reason, the launch of the MSX generated anxiety among European and North American microcomputer manufacturers. Commodore, for instance, immediately responded with new computer standards that could better compete with MSX hardware. Yet, Microsoft’s attempt to create a global standard with the MSX was not a complete success. The European market in particular did not warm to the idea of a unified operating system. However, although the MSX failed to have its intended impact in North America and the United Kingdom, it did become the dominant standard in much of East Asia, as well as several South American and European countries, where it became popular for informal videogame distribution and development. East Asia was the ‘global centre’ of videogame piracy during this era. The Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean videogame industries started out as shadow economies that together established an intraregional network of pirated Japanese and North American hardware and software (Fung and Liao, 2015: 121-122; Liao, 2015: 5-8), preceding the ‘geo-cultural market paradigm’ they co-inhabit today (Cao and Downing, 2008: 519). In China and Korea, piracy 3 Kirkpatrick (2013) argues that before videogames secured the cultural space they now occupy, they had to contest for recognition in a media environment where little was understood about the purpose of home computers, let alone their affordances for playful interaction. Early computer games, he argues, played a significant role in naturalizing desktop interfaces and teaching people what to do with computers. As he writes, ‘[computer games] feed directly into the development of “user-friendly” and easy-to-use interfaces towards the end of the 1980s, reorganizing computing under metaphors like the “desktop” and situating human-computer interaction in line with narrative orderings familiar to users from other, “natural” contexts of action’ (Kirkpatrick, 2013: 65).

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was largely symptomatic of protectionist laws that ensured foreign media imports were either censored or banned outright. 4 In the 1980s and early 1990s, counterfeit Nintendo and Sega memory chips were manufactured in Taiwan (where Japanese videogame companies outsourced production) and then distributed to Hong Kong and Singapore, where they were assembled into cartridge clones (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter, 2003: 213). Unofficial clones of Japanese consoles such as the Famicom were then widely circulated throughout countries such as Korea (see Derboo, 2014a for a comprehensive list of ‘Famiclone’ hardware). In Taiwan, a ‘discourse of imitation’ was deployed as a semi-official strategy for bringing the country’s computing culture ‘up to speed’ with those of developed economies (Tinn, 2011: 83). In Hong Kong, Japanese videogame franchises such as Street Fighter and King of Fighters were localized ‘from below’ by comic book artists and modders, in an effort to make their fictional worlds more amenable to local tastes, experiences, and ‘jargons’ (Ng, 2009: 83). As I will later discuss, these informal practices, domestic policies, and anti-Japanese sentiments forced companies such as Nintendo to adopt ‘glocal’ marketing and distribution strategies in much of East Asia. Meanwhile, in North America, Oceania, and much of Europe, Nintendo and Sega sought to globalize their brands by, for example, subjecting all third-party software to rigorous in-house quality assurance protocols, as well as by optimizing their products for local patterns of consumption through the establishment of regionally specific ‘imagined communities’ that functioned to interpellate consumers to their brands (Kline et al., 2003). The Korean videogame industry also came into being during this era—its formation was concurrent with the Zemmix’s lifespan of 1985-1992—but it did so under unique conditions. Prior to the release of the Zemmix, videogames occupied a somewhat marginal role in Korea. Early home computers were expensive and thus not widely imported, although this changed with the introduction of microcomputer standards such as MSX and Apple II in the early 1980s. Several domestically produced clones of Japanese and North American home computers were released in 1983 (see Derboo, 2014b for a comprehensive list). Samsung’s SPC-1000 home computer, for instance, contained modified elements of Apple II and Sharp MZ hardware, according 4 Although these sorts of policies have been gradually revised in Korea, in countries such as China they continue to have an influence on the importation and distribution of Japanese and North American media content and technology (see Liboriussen, White, and Wang, 2016). These policies are arguably a result of the lingering trauma of Japanese occupation, although they are formalized under the guise of economic protectionism.

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to an article published in the Seoul-based newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun (Baek, 1983: 6). In an essay on the ‘social construction’ of imported technologies in Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, Hyungsub Choi (2017: 917) points out that the ‘localization’ of imported technologies in Korea often resembled an informal process of ‘tinkering’ in this way; imported technologies were taken apart, tweaked, and put back together in ‘novel arrangements’ (Choi, 2017: 917). Korean videogame arcades were widespread in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and were the subject of an intense moral panic and media effects debate, partly because they were conflated with gambling establishments (Yuk, 1980: 7; Huhh, 2009: 106; Chung, 2015: 497). As a result, they were made illegal unless officially authorized by Korea’s authoritarian governments of the 1970s and 1980s, who strictly regulated cultural products that were not perceived as economically beneficial in relation to the country’s policydriven focus on manufacturing and industrial development (Kwon and Kim, 2014: 425).5 On 12 February 1980, the Korean newspaper Dong-a Ilbo reported the existence of 43 government-approved arcades, in addition to an estimate of potentially hundreds of illegally operated ones (Yuk, 1980: 7). By 1983, this estimate grew to 20,000 institutions in Seoul alone (Son, 1983: 9). In September 1983, a law was passed that instituted a clear distinction between videogame arcades and gambling establishments, thereby alleviating the strict regulations (Kyunghyang Shinmun, 9 July 1983: 11). Arcade videogames were imported from Japan and often unofficially relabelled with new titles in Hangul (Korean script). The popular Japanese arcade videogame Street Fighter (Capcom, 1987), for instance, was renamed Jang Pung (Palm Wind) in reference to a special fighting technique featured in the videogame (Derboo, 2014c: n.p.). Even before the release of the Zemmix, then, informal processes of distribution and appropriation were rife in the Korean videogame industry. Electronics markets, such as Seoul’s Seun Sangga shopping area, were also important in bolstering the country’s shadow economies.6 5 State regulation and censorship of videogames has a long history in East Asia. In China, for example, the state has historically maintained tight information control over the domestic industry through the implementation of overlapping and often contradictory cultural policies (see Ernkvist and Ström, 2008; Fung and Lia, 2015). In Japan, violent videogames are heavily censored by self-regulating classification systems (Kelly, 2010). In Korea in the 1980s, the regulation of arcade videogames was fuelled by similar discourses, ideologies, and moral tensions. However, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Korean government made a concerted effort to cultivate its culture industries through various economic strategies and cultural policies, which culminated in the ‘Korean wave’ of the 2000s (Kwon and Kim, 2014). These processes helped the country’s online videogame industry achieve market dominance both domestically and intraregionally (see Chung, 2009; Jin, 2010). 6 See Jo, 2016: n.p. for an overview of Korean magazine coverage of the Cheonggycheon electronics market in the early 1980s.

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Figure 4. Advertisement for a Zemmix V console. From Computer Study (January 1988: n.p.). By permission of Sam Derboo (photographer).

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Figure 5. Advertisement for Computer Kindergarten—which consists of four MSX cartridges of edutainment software—being played on a Zemmix Super V. From MyCom (March, 1990: n.p.). By permission of Sam Derboo (photographer).

These informal circuits of consumption and production intensified with the spread of MSX-based and Apple II computers in the early 1980s. Due to the standardized nature of platforms such as MSX, videogame hardware and software became increasingly simple to import, copy, and circulate. The Zemmix played a key role here. The Zemmix was essentially an MSX computer housed in a console shell, meaning that although it contained a microcomputer operating system, it was intended for use on domestic televisions rather than computer monitors. The platform was marketed as a product for children (see Figure 4 and Figure 5) and distributed by Daewoo, who also held Zemmix videogame tournaments in their department stores (see MyCom, June, 1990: 80-81). According to an article from the September 1991 issue of the Korean videogame magazine MyCom (n.p.), a company known as Saehan Sangsa exported some Zemmix MSX software to the Netherlands in July 1990, but for the most part, it seems that the platform and its software were bound to their place of origin. Both the CPC-50 model (1985) and the widespread CPC-51 ‘Zemmix V’ redesign (1987) supported MSX1 cartridge software, while the latter and somewhat more obscure CPC-61 ‘Super V’ (1989) and CPG-120 ‘Turbo’ (1991) models were optimized for MSX2 and MSX2+ software compatibility respectively. The Super V could

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also be connected to a specialized keyboard, meaning that it could function as a basic MSX computer (Computer Study, December 1989: 99). The later Zemmix models also supported floppy disks in accordance with the MSX2 hardware upgrade—a shift from cartridge to optical as the primary means of software storage—provided an external disk drive was connected to the console. Multiple hardware peripherals were released for the platform throughout its lifespan, such as an adapter that enabled compatibility with Famicom cartridges. The Zemmix controller has two buttons and a single 8-direction ball-top stick. The Zemmix was perceived as cheaper and more convenient than a standard microcomputer, and hosted a substantial library of imported and copied MSX computer games. According to an article published in the January 1986 issue of the magazine Computer Study, the Zemmix CPC-50 retailed for KRW (South Korean won) ₩70,000 at release (approximately USD $78 in 1986), which was much cheaper than a standard MSX microcomputer (Computer Study, January 1986: 98). The platform was also able to leverage a vast catalogue of imported and pirated Japanese MSX software (approximately 200 videogames at the time of its release, according to the aforementioned article). Since the Zemmix shared software compatibility with Japanese MSX computers, many of its videogames were simply imported from Japan and informally distributed. Computer store chains such as Zemina, Prosoft, Clover, Topia, Screen Software, and Aproman would hack their own copyrights and logos into Japanese videogames in order to pass them off as Korean products (Derboo, 2014c). For example, in their copy of the Japanese MSX videogame Valis (Wolf Team, 1986), Zemina hacked their logo into the videogame’s status bar, which is where the Valis logo normally appears in the official version (Derboo, 2014c). It is crucial to note that these informal activities were permitted because the country’s copyright laws did not acknowledge foreign computer programs prior to 1987. This changed on 1 July 1987, when a Computer Programs Protection Act (CPPA) was enacted to more explicitly protect the interests of foreign copyright holders and stem the flow of grey imports into the country. Initially, this only had a minor impact on videogame piracy, as informal processes of importing, copying, and hacking were so heavily ingrained in the domestic industry. Furthermore, the CPPA only protected the code of computer programs, and not the IP. I will return to an analysis of ther CPPA and its effects later in the chapter. Another reason these videogames easily passed as local products was that the Japanese originals were ‘culturally odourless’ in Koichi Iwabuchi’s (2002) sense. Iwabuchi argues that Japanese cultural products are often deliberately

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imbued with an odourless quality that ensures their cultural ‘scent’ is nondetectable, thus making them easily digestible in any cultural context and, in turn, extending their global reach. This lack of cultural specificity, however, often exceeds the intentions of the Japanese makers, such that their products become like culturally blank slates that are susceptible to reappropriation. Iwabuchi points out that Japanese pop music (J-Pop), for example, often arrives in countries such as China by first filtering through Taiwan or Hong Kong. Chinese consumers are often not even aware they are listening to Japanese songs, since the Taiwanese and Hong Kong covers have obscured the cultural scent of the Japanese originals. Much like J-Pop, Japanese MSX videogames were subject to an ‘endless simulation’ (Iwabuchi, 2002: 98) as they spread throughout Korea and, in the process, were purged of their cultural origins. Korean videogame and computer magazines also emerged in the mid1980s. They provide an important window onto the structures of feeling that emerged around pirate platforms such as the Zemmix in the 1980s. One of the most prolific magazines was Computer Study (renamed MyCom in 1990), f irst published in 1983. It published industry news, interviews with local developers, and homebrew computer games that readers could compile on their own machines. Strategy guides were also quite common, providing readers with guidance on how to navigate pirated and untranslated Japanese software. These strategy guides also became an important site for the appropriation of Japanese videogame content. Magazines such as Meeting with MSX turned their strategy guides into comic-book style cartoons that drew inspiration from the textual content of MSX videogames (Figure 6). The magazines were also quite transparent about practices of importing and copying, partly because companies such as Nintendo and Microsoft had not yet achieved the dominant market presence in Korea that they had in other regions. As such, products such as MSX and the Famicom were seen as generic and odourless ‘common standards’ that could be refashioned to better accommodate regional needs and purposes. As an example of this, the May 1993 issue of Game World published a whole article on a Famiclone developer known as Golden Bell, whose ‘Joymax’ console utilized the Famicom’s central processing unit and graphics processing unit (Yi, 1993: 108-109). The console’s remaining parts were manufactured in-house by Golden Bell. Rather than attempting to hide its status as a bricolage platform, the magazine article revels in the Joymax’s ‘productive ambiguity’ (O’Donnell, 2014a) by including photos of Golden Bell employees assembling the counterfeit consoles. There was, clearly,

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Figure 6. Zemmix MSX ‘strategy guide’ in the form of a comic strip. From Meeting with MSX (July 1988: 25-26). By permission of Sam Derboo (photographer).

little concern about the legal ramifications that could arise as a result of publishing these materials. Discussions about intellectual property and copyright were held in magazines (some of which I will examine shortly),

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but the main reason they took place was because of international pressure from Japanese videogame companies, and the changes to domestic copyright laws that were proposed as a result. Like the Zemmix itself, the magazines were tools for negotiating the spread of Japanese technologies and videogames in Korea. Although technologies such as MSX came from Japan, they were actually products of the hybridization of North American and Japanese media industries, so they carried what Cho (2016) calls a ‘double bind’ of colonial influence. Cho (2016: 942) uses the term double bind ‘to encompass both Japanese colonialism and postcolonial consciousness in its colonies, in which the USA and Japan functioned as a pair of colonial forces and as the objects of de-colonization’. He uses baseball as an example of a hybrid colonial symbol that holds an important position in the postcolonial consciousness of former Japanese colonies, while simultaneously functioning as an object of decolonization. Japan’s occupation of Korea began in the early 20th century and off icially came to end in 1945. However, Japan retained something of a residual colonial presence in East Asia in the latter half of the 20th century through its position as something of a political and cultural ‘mediator’ between the West and its former colonies. As Iwabuchi (2002: 62) notes, Japan’s colonial legacy often manifests in a belief that the country possesses an unparalleled capacity to indigenize North American media content and f ilter said content into East Asian countries. Yet, as Cho discusses, prominent colonial symbols can and often are rearticulated as objects of decolonization in former East Asian colonies. Baseball, for example, was first introduced in Korea by North American missionaries in the early 20th century. In colonial Korea, it was utilized in Japanese-run education systems and Japanese-sponsored tournaments ‘for controlling the colonized in ways that could not be interpreted as paramilitary’ (Cho, 2016: 939). After WWII, Japan’s influence still loomed large over Korea’s now-independent baseball league—not least because former Korean-Japanese (zainichi) players and coaches returned to Korea from the Japanese leagues, bringing with them techniques and strategies associated with the ex-colonizer (Cho, 2016: 940). However, by the early 1980s, baseball had been rearticulated as a ‘national pastime’ and a vehicle for economic growth (Cho, 2016: 940). Korean baseball subsequently emerged as a highly competitive—even sub-imperial—force in the East Asian baseball scene. The idea that a nation can leverage a colonial symbol for the dual purpose of working both within and against the logic of its former colonial influence is also applicable to the spread of North American and Japanese videogame

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technologies in East Asia in the 1980s. When I use the terms ‘decolonization’ and ‘decolonial’ in these contexts—as well as ‘decolonial platform’—I am using them to refer specifically to Korea’s negotiation of the double bind of Japanese and North American neocolonialism in the latter half of the 20th century. Here, it is worth acknowledging that decolonization is not a universal process, and should not be utilized as a universal signifier in scholarly research, lest it replicate the colonial violence that it seeks to mend, challenge, or undermine. There are multiple decolonial movements, just as there are multiple ways of deploying decolonization as a political and intellectual tool, especially in the context of computing (see Chakravartty and Mills, 2018). I make the comparison between Korean baseball history and Korean videogame history because both involved the decolonization of Japanese/North American colonial objects—baseball and videogames—and their rearticulation as objects of national growth and interregional expansion in Korea. Japanese videogame companies made numerous attempts to impose copyright infringement laws on Korean developers during this period. In November 1990, Nintendo, Taito, Konami, and Capcom mounted legal action against Korean developers Haitai Electronics and Young Toys on the grounds that they had illegally copied and distributed Japanese software (Kim, 1991: 71). However, since the pirated videogames were released prior to the introduction of the 1987 Computer Programs Protection Act (which protected the code of computer programs rather than the intellectual property), Haitai and Young Toys escaped prosecution. In their write-up of the events in January 1991, MyCom published a cartoon of a Japanese Samurai imposing copyright law on a bewildered Korean peasant (Figure 7). This caricature illustrates how Japan’s colonial legacy was perceived and negotiated in Korea’s emergent videogame industry. Yet, interestingly, although the cartoon implies a critical tone, the author of the article laments the relative dearth of local software development in Korea. This is a sentiment that became increasingly common in the late 1980s and early 1990s, coinciding with the introduction of the Computer Programs Protection Act in 1987. The article captures the double bind of Korea’s videogame industry: on the one hand, a general attitude of ambivalence toward foreign copyright law; and on the other, an increasing awareness of the industry’s dependence on Japanese and North American technologies. Although it is tempting to romanticize Korea’s informal videogame industry as an articulation of mass resistance to Japanese neocolonialism, the magazine discourses paint a more complex picture of decolonization. This is at odds with how videogame piracy is usually presented in scholarly research.

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Figure 7. A caricature of a Japanese samurai imposing a copyright infringement notice on a South Korean peasant. From MyCom (January 1991: 71). By permission of Sam Derboo (photographer).

For example, in their book Digital Play, Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter (2003: 215) describe videogame piracy in its different manifestations as ‘the shadow aspect of the interactive play industry’s own labour practices’. For them, what makes the global videogame industry both insidious yet also deeply susceptible to disruption is that it takes the idea of ‘play’—an activity once prized as a tactic of resistance to institutionalized

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rationality 7—and makes it the key apparatus in a global empire intent on soliciting attention and immaterial labour from media audiences. For them, piracy is a grassroots means of converting commoditized play into countercultural forms of resistance. However, the motives of piracy are rarely as straightforward as this romanticized account implies. Moreover, as Ramon Lobato (2012: 42) argues, we need to be wary of fetishizing informal media economies in this way: While acknowledging informality’s potential, we also need to stress that informalisation is an important dynamic within the corporate sector […] One would be foolish to make any claims about the inherent worthiness of either formality or informality as ideals or empirical realities, given the diverse nature of activities occurring within—and crossing between—each realm.

We can see a similar ambivalence between formality and informality in Korea’s emergent videogame industry. As discussed, Korean videogame developers found themselves in something of a double bind of neocolonialism; operating both within and against the globalizing logic of the Japanese videogame industry. As will be discussed in the next section, some magazine writers expressed conflicted feelings about this arrangement, and advocated for a decolonization process that involved the cultivation of national creativity.

The formalization of an informal industry The enactment of the Computer Programs Protection Act (CPPA) on 1 July 1987 had a significant impact on the Korean videogame industry. It opened, for better or worse, an insular market to the workings of an increasingly transnational videogame industry, and compelled developers to adopt more subversive strategies of copying, hacking, and appropriation. As mentioned above, the CPPA meant that non-Korean computer programs were now covered under Korean copyright law, meaning that computer games could no longer be freely imported, copied, and sold as local products. An article 7 In continental thought, ‘play’ has historically been considered a radical or potentially transgressive activity. The ‘Situationist’ philosophers, for example, sought to radicalize play in order to counter the order and linearity of the ‘disciplinary society’ and envision alternative structures of work, leisure, and everyday life (see Lütticken, 2010).

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from the May 1986 issue of Computer Study articulates the conflicted feelings surrounding the CPPA by evaluating the arguments both for and against the Act: The argument against this bill generally goes as follows: […] Enacting this law in our country, where the history of the computer industry is short and the software development industry is especially weak, may have the advantage of increasing the drive for development in the long run, but ultimately it is too early for the state of our software industry, which is like a baby in a cradle. (Jeong, 1986: 36)

The main argument against the Act, in other words, was that it forced the industry to become prematurely independent. Because the CPPA prevented the wholesale copying of foreign computer programs, it ensured that Korean developers could no longer copy and distribute Japanese MSX videogames in the way that they had been doing for several years. This was problematic because programmers lacked the experience and support—both financially and professionally—to develop videogames from scratch. They also lacked the labour output, as most software companies active after July 1987 consisted of fewer than seven employees (Kang and Yi, 1987: 37). On the other hand, the Act was viewed as a potential catalyst for growth in the country’s hardware and software industries, as the article goes on to suggest: The case in favour of the software protection bill […] is roughly rooted in the following: […] If one goes out into the market and pays close attention to which country’s games students are playing, they will almost all be American and Japanese games […] What must these students think when they play games made in Japan and the US? Won’t they resent having been born in the Republic of Korea? […] Before we become all too accustomed to copying, we must cultivate our creativity. While we put several billion won into professional Baseball and Football, isn’t it unthinkable to just use other people’s cutting-edge technology for free? (Jeong, 1986: 36-37)

The comparison with baseball and football is significant because it highlights two important symbols of Japanese occupation that had been transformed into objects of decolonization in Korea. Indeed, as the article predicted, the copyright law did lead to the release of some of the earliest commercially available Korean-developed Zemmix videogame software (see Table 1). Students and hackers had developed several amateur MSX and Apple II

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videogames prior to the introduction of the CPPA, but it was not until after the CPPA that locally developed videogames were commercially available. Table 1: Korean-developed Zemmix software registered between the application of the Computer Programs Protection Act in July 1987 and November 1989, in chronological order of copyright registration.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Developer (original author/s)

Title

Publisher

Month/Year

Kim Eul-seok, Koo Eun-joong Jeong Chan-yong, Jeong Chan-il, Cheon Yong-min Jang Chang-su, Jeong Gyeongtaek, Kim Gwang-tae Kim Eul-seok, An Cheol-ho Lee Sang-hun, Lee Kyu-hwan Kim Eul-seok Park Seong-cheol, et al. Unknown Unknown Jeong Chan-yong Unknown Lee Sang-hun, Lee Kyu-hwan

Brother Adventure New Boggle Boggle

Zemina Zemina

12/87 5/88

Kkoedori

Mickey Soft

10/88

Super Boy 1 Double Dragon Super Boy 2 FA Tetris Django Tetris Super Bubble Bobble Hello Kangshi The Three Dragon Story

Zemina Zemina Zemina FA Prosoft Best Soft Zemina Clover Zemina

1/89 1/89 1/89 1/89 5/89 7/89 9/89 9/89 10/89

Source: Meeting with MSX (November 1989: 6). Translated by Sam Derboo.

The Act also had ramifications for the hardware and software industries more broadly. An article from the February 1989 issue of Computer Study describes a study undertaken by the Korean Information Industry Association, which involved interviews with 125 hardware and software businesses. The purpose of this study, according to the article, was to gauge industry responses to the CPPA (Computer Study, February 1989: 101-102). The study found that 52% of respondents agreed that the Act had been helpful in encouraging economic growth in the domestic industry. Yet, when it came to the question of the Act’s impact on ‘copyright violations’, only 8% of respondents said that there had been a significant decrease, while 48.8% said that there had been a mild decrease (Computer Study, February 1989: 101-102). While these figures are referring to the country’s media industries as a whole, they provide useful insight into the CPPA’s impact (or lack thereof) on videogame piracy. That is, although the CPPA was responsible for a marked increase in ‘creative’ programming, piracy was not suddenly rendered obsolete as a result. More accurately, ‘creativity’

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and piracy developed in synthesis. Since the Act only protected the code of computer programs and not the underlying IP, most developers opted to poach design concepts and development assets from popular Japanese videogames, rather than create wholly original videogames. These developments placed the Korean videogame industry somewhere at the intersection of local and global; an industry both dependent on but also resistant to the increasingly ‘glocal’ distribution strategies employed by Japanese videogame companies. Glocal is a term that gained currency in the scholarly literature on media and globalization in the 1990s (see, for example, Robertson, 1995). It is important to note, however, that the term glocal originated in Japan’s business culture of the 1980s, when companies such as Sony adopted glocalization as a micro-marketing tool for achieving a higher degree of media spreadability across regional markets (Robertson, 1995: 28; Iwabuchi, 2002: 88). To this extent, the term is useful less as a critical concept (indeed, it is quite limited to the extent that it neglects that which is situated between local and global—national, transnational, regional, and so on) but rather as a way of gaining insight into the business philosophies of Japanese videogame companies in the era in which it emerged. Nintendo, for example, clearly adopted a glocal strategy in the way it sought to extend its global reach in the 1990s. Nintendo’s success in this era was not due solely to the supposedly universal appeal of its products or because the West had become gradually acculturated to Japanese media (though it could be argued that Nintendo’s videogames were culturally odourless), but rather because of its capacity to tailor its products to particular regions by setting up local fan clubs and distributing national magazines. 8 ‘The strategy of global localization’, as Iwabuchi (2002: 88) argues, is not necessarily to prioritize the local but instead to ‘blur the distinction between the foreign and the local, making it irrelevant’. After July 1987, the Zemmix’s market dominance was challenged by a sudden influx of glocal home consoles. Rather than setting up national distributors in Korea, companies such as Nintendo, Sega, and NEC opted to hand their licenses over to Korean manufacturers such as Samsung, Hyundai, and Haitai. Subsequently, the Nintendo Famicom was localized as the Hyundai Comboy in 1989; the Sega Master System as the Samsung Gam*Boy in the same year; and NEC’s PC Engine was sold by Daewoo under the guise of the Zemmix PC Shuttle in 1990, and later as the Haitai Vistar in 1993. Glocalization was adopted by Japanese companies as a means of 8 See Consalvo (2006; 2009) for critical analyses of how Japanese videogame companies maximize profits by controlling the flow of their videogames into other regions.

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Figure 8. The Zemina team in January of 1988. From Computer Study (January 1988: n.p.). By permission of Sam Derboo (photographer).

circumnavigating Korea’s strict regulations on Japanese media imports. As such, their platforms often arrived in the country as a result of quite complex transnational circulations. The Haitai Vistar, for example, was manufactured

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using printed circuit boards from surplus TurboGrafx consoles—the North American equivalent of the PC Engine—while the majority of its videogames were sourced from Japan. Of course, unofficial clones of these consoles still circulated via informal networks, but for the first time, companies such as Nintendo were able to establish an official presence in the country. Samsung even began to officially localize Nintendo videogames for the Gam*Boy by translating them or giving them Korean titles. Korean developers continued to support the Zemmix in the midst of these processes, only now they could not rely on importing, hacking, or copying MSX software. Instead, developers began creating unofficial ports (or ‘clones’) of popular Japanese arcade and console videogames. In August 1987, Computer Study identified four key MSX developers who were transitioning into the post-copyright Korean videogame industry: Topia, Prosoft, Zemina, and Clover (Kang and Yi, 1987: 39-45). By far the most prolific of these developers was Zemina (pictured in 1988 in Figure 8). Zemina developed more MSX videogames than any other Korean company during the Zemmix’s lifespan. They also released several peripherals for the Zemmix and other MSX-based computers, such as the popular ‘Zemina Card’, which allowed MSX1 software to be executed on MSX2-based hardware (Kang and Yi, 1987: 4). The next section looks at Korea’s post-CPPA videogame industry through the lens of Zemina’s commercial Zemmix software.

Zemina, Mario clones, and copyright discourses To borrow terminology from Jaroslav Švelch’s (2018: 154, italics in original) book Gaming the Iron Curtain, the majority of Korean videogames produced in the post-CPPA industry were ‘ports, conversions, or clones of existing works’. While videogame ‘ports’ and ‘conversions’ are commonly recognized as legitimate types of software, ‘clones’ are more often derided as unworthy imitations. And yet, as Švelch (2018: 153) notes, many of the most celebrated videogames are ‘based on imitation of foreign templates’. The developers of Final Fantasy (Square, 1987), for example, sought to imitate non-digital Western role-playing games and text adventure computer games, while Doom (id Software, 1993) was influenced by Nintendo’s platforming videogames and, as discussed in Chapter One, cinematic techniques for structuring embodied vision. Building on Švelch’s (2018: 155) observations, this section dispenses with ‘the purity of the original’ and instead aims to set in context the ‘productive ambiguity’ (O’Donnell, 2014a) of post-CPPA Korean ‘clones’ of Japanese videogames. It does this by analysing Zemina’s videogames in

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relation to an international ‘copyright discourse’ that emerged in videogame culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which, in Brendan Keogh’s (2018a: 9) words, ‘deliberately and aggressively suppressed informal videogame development practices’. Zemina’s first independently programmed videogame, Brother Adventure (Zemina, 1987), took Nintendo’s single-screen arcade videogame Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1983) as its inspiration. Brother Adventure was advertised as a product developed in Korea, with no mention of its Japanese foundations (Computer Study, November 1987: 104). In an article from the November 1987 issue of Computer Study, Koo Eun-joong, one of the videogame’s two programmers, discussed the diff iculty involved in programming the videogame without the support of a seonbae (an experienced colleague or teacher): ‘[w]e got the idea from the Japanese videogame Mario Bros., but it is quite different from that. As this was the f irst game we made, everything was difficult’ (Computer Study, November 1987: 108). Kim Eulseok, Brother Adventure’s second programmer, made similar remarks in a separate interview: ‘[w]ithout the necessary know-how and without anyone to teach us, we just made it by fumbling around’ (Gye, 1989: 140). The result is a videogame with a structure and setting that is practically identical to the Mario Bros. arcade videogame. In Brother Adventure, pipes are positioned at each corner of the play area, from which enemies, fireballs, and coins emerge onto a series of platforms. The player gains points by defeating enemies, collecting coins, and progressing through the videogame’s phases. There is also a ‘POW’ block at the base of the screen, whose sprite appears to be lifted directly from the Nintendo original. A character named Titan, who wears a wide-brimmed feathered hat, replaces Mario as the main character. As with most of Zemina’s MSX videogames, Brother Adventure’s physics feel somewhat less refined than the videogame it derived inspiration from. For instance, while in the original version Mario ‘skids’ to a halt as he changes direction, Titan’s movements feel quite stilted and clunky by comparison. These design limitations were a result of significant financial and technical constraints. The Zemina team consisted of only two programmers whose labour was constrained by tight budgets and short development cycles. In an interview from the August 1990 issue of MyCom, Kim Eul-seok, then-head of the company’s development section, mentioned that production costs ranged from three to four million won (approximately USD $4,500-$6,000 in 1990) for a single Zemmix videogame (MyCom, June 1990: 164). There was also the challenge of porting software originally designed for arcade-based or home console hardware to the ageing MSX-based Zemmix technology. It

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is also worth remembering that, at the time, Zemina did not have access to a robust community of players and professionals from which to draw support or inspiration. Magazines were beginning to cultivate this community, but they had yet to establish a robust vocabulary for appraising videogames (strategy guides were more common than videogame reviews). Conceivably, there was a lack of consensus regarding what made a videogame ‘good’ or ‘well programmed’. With this in mind, it is no surprise that Zemina turned to existing IPs for inspiration. In his MyCom interview, El-seok even singled out the ‘idea’ as the most elusive part of the design process: ‘[t]he idea is the most important thing [in videogame development] and the thing that causes me the most headaches. I mostly tend to take ideas from other games, and when developing with two people, one game takes about three months’ (MyCom, June 1990: 164). Despite these constraints, Zemina often managed to incorporate novel mechanics and design concepts into their clones of Japanese videogames. In Brother Adventure, for example, enemies can be launched onto higher platforms when bumped from below by Titan, whereas in Nintendo’s version they only hop into the air briefly. In a similar vein, Zemina’s 1989 shooting videogame The Three Dragon Story (Zemina, 1989a) arguably improves on the videogame it derives inspiration from—Konami’s Knightmare (Konami, 1986)—by adding new enemy patterns, bosses, weapon upgrades, and a status bar. Notable for its uncompromising difficulty, The Three Dragon Story even experiments with what could be called ‘bullet hell’ or danmaku design features, years before bullet hell became an established shooting sub-genre in the early 1990s.9 Much like the hardware on which their videogames were programmed, Zemina adopted a bricolage approach to videogame development that involved copying design concepts and development assets from multiple videogames. As an example, the title screen of Brother Adventure displays an image of Mario that is clearly poached from the box art of the Japanese videogame Family Computer Golf: Japan Course (Nintendo Research and Development 2, 1987), while the music bears similarities to the 1982 arcade videogame Dig Dug (Namco, 1982). Zemina is best known for its Super Boy videogames, which started out as Zemmix ports of Nintendo’s Famicom-based Super Mario Bros. series. The company’s programmers clearly faced numerous difficulties in porting Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985) to the MSX-based Zemmix hardware. For 9 ‘Bullet hell’ shooting videogames are, as the name implies, characterized by large numbers of enemy bullets present on the screen at any given time, which players must navigate by memorizing intricate patterns.

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example, the first Super Boy videogame (Zemina, 1989b) consists of only the first four Super Mario Bros. levels. The iconic ‘koopa trooper’ turtle enemies fall off the screen when stomped on, rather than leaving their shells behind as in the original version. Similarly, ‘piranha plant’ enemies bounce on the surface of pipes rather than emerge from them intermittently. Perhaps the most notorious omission that Zemina made to the Super Mario Bros. formula was the interaction the player has with the character ‘Toad’ at the end of a castle-themed stage, the final hurdle in each of the videogame’s ‘worlds’. After defeating Bowser, the castle boss, Mario is normally greeted by Toad and informed that ‘the princess is in another castle’. After defeating the castle boss in Super Boy, the player is led into an empty room and confronted with a much more economical message: ‘SORRY NOTHING’. The humour of this message lies in the self-reflexive acknowledgement of the difference between original and copy, exemplifying the ambiguous and often playful or parodic nature of videogame piracy in Korea. Many of these limitations nevertheless created possibilities for reflexive creativity that, conceptually speaking, exceeded some of the design elements of the original Super Mario Bros. videogames. In Super Boy 2 (Zemina, 1989c), for example, there is a stage where the player must hop across a series of platforms suspended over a bottomless pit. Fish enemies (called ‘cheep cheeps’ in the original version) emerge from the base of the pit, while flying koopas occupy the space above. The level is clearly influenced by level 2-3 in the original Super Mario Bros. videogame. However, what makes the Super Boy 2 variation particularly tricky is that the platforms suspended above the pit begin to fall the moment the player lands on them. In the original Mario videogames, platforms tend to move in pre-determined sequences, so it is difficult to say with certainty whether Super Boy 2’s falling platforms were a result of programming difficulties or simply because Zemina decided to experiment with the established Mario design principles. In any case, the company’s programmers took advantage of the flying fish enemies in quite unique ways. In the level, the fish can serve as emergency platforms for the player to bounce on if they miss a platform. The whole stage creates a sense of frantic momentum and precariousness that both borrows but also diverges from the original Super Mario Bros. levels. In this sense, it resembles the ROM hacks of Mario videogames that became popular in the 1990s, in that it recycles development assets from the original videogames for experimental design purposes. To quote Benjamin Wai-ming Ng’s (2009: 93) research on the ‘low-class’ appropriation of Japanese videogame franchises in Hong Kong, the fusion of Korean and Japanese programming in this context ‘should not be interpreted as a corruption of “Japanese-ness” or authenticity’, but instead

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as ‘a hybrid culture that enriches the content of and adds new dimensions to Japanese games in transnational cultural flows’.10 Despite the influential hybrid culture they created, videogames such as Super Boy were (and still are) stigmatized as unworthy imitations. These sentiments are stoked by what Laikwan Pang (2006: 64) in her analysis of Hollywood’s pirating of East Asian cinematic tropes calls a ‘copyright discourse’ that serves to ‘reinforce [the] global interests’ of hegemonic culture industries. In her discussion of the Hollywood film Kill Bill (Tarantino, 2003), Pang rightly points out that Hollywood operates according to a double standard of copyright infringement. Although films such as Kill Bill draw extensively on cinematic techniques developed by East Asian film directors, Hollywood is quick to condemn the pirating of American films in Asian countries such as Hong Kong, where amateurs creatively subtitle and informally distribute such films for a local audience. For Pang (2006: 79), this ‘copyright discourse’ is a symptom of treating film as ‘just a commodity instead of a system of representation’. The Japanese and North American videogame industries exhibit similar qualities in that they actively oppose the patenting of software—to the extent that videogame companies are, for the most part, free to ‘imitate’ and endlessly reproduce candy-themed mobile puzzle videogames or world war-themed shooting videogames (see Methenitis, 2016: 13)—yet, when these videogames are copied, cloned, or creatively remixed in peripheral media industries, it is labelled a criminal act. Once Nintendo, Sega, and NEC established a foothold in the Korean market with their ‘glocal’ home consoles, they were able to enforce a copyright discourse through the use of proprietary software development kits (SDKs). Unlike the MSX standard, most Japanese consoles had closed hardware environments, meaning that developers would need to acquire SDKs directly from the console manufacturers if they were to have any hope of developing or publishing software on Japanese consoles. Software development kits are toolsets that enable videogame content to run on specific platforms and devices. On top of this, Nintendo infamously implemented a semiconductor ‘lock-and-key’ in their Famicom, wherein the hardware would remain ‘locked’ until the developer sought out a ‘key’ from Nintendo, which consisted of a licensing agreement and an SDK (see O’Donnell, 2014b: 193-194). For Graeme Kirkpatrick (2013: 104), the introduction of proprietary hardware 10 It is worth noting that these informal practices of remixing and appropriation often become formalized by dominant media industries, as is the case with Nintendo’s Wii U videogame Super Mario Maker (Nintendo EAD, 2015), which enables players to create hybrid Mario content in a similar fashion to ROM hacking.

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and software in the early 1990s had the effect of standardizing the craft of videogame development, thus ‘containing’ potentially subversive or commercially undesirable uses of previously open microcomputer platforms. Some Korean companies came up with workaround methods for unofficially porting MSX software to consoles such as the Gam*Boy. Zemina, for instance, released the final instalment in their Super Boy series, Super Boy 4, for the Gam*Boy as an unofficial MSX port. Despite these efforts, it became increasingly difficult for Korean videogame companies to survive amidst the spread of glocalized proprietary hardware and software. According to an article from Game World, the market share of officially imported videogames in Korea increased from 21.2% in 1988 to 91.7% in 1990 (Game World, June 1991: 210). The other issue was that Korean-developed software was just as expensive as officially imported Japanese software, and it seems that young people in particular were reluctant to invest in it for this reason. A high school student interviewed in the September 1988 issue of Meeting with MSX put it this way: From the standpoint of a student, the prices of software are the biggest problem […] a few thousand won is a lot of money—especially to me. Korean games are so expensive I can’t even dream of buying them. It would be good if the companies wouldn’t charge the high sales price, but rather copy their developed games for a small additional fee. (Meeting with MSX, September 1988: 20)

Perhaps Zemina’s Kim Eul-seok captured these sentiments best in an interview from the March 1989 issue of Computer Study: ‘[i]t’s easy to copy a fun foreign game [and sell it] for 1,000 won [approximately USD $1.50 in 1989], so there aren’t many who want to pay 8,000 or 5,000 won for Korean games [approximately USD $7-12 in 1989], which still have some deficiencies’ (Gye, 1989: 140). As Lobato (2012: 69) argues, piracy may reveal many possible ‘faces’ when analysed from the perspectives of different objects, practices, cultures, and histories. Piracy can be understood as a form of theft, a type of creative expression and/or a deliberate tactic of resistance, a means of accessing otherwise inaccessible cultural products, or an indirect way of expanding the formal networks of hegemonic culture industries. Like f ilms, videogames can be understood as ‘systems of representation’ that are subject to specific patterns of use, reception, and articulation as they circulate regional markets. Yet, because they are software-based, videogames are also grounded in systems of code and the materiality of hardware,

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which has a unique bearing on the way they are made legible to IP law (see Methenitis, 2016: 11). If understood only from the perspective of the copyright discourse described above, pirated videogames are rendered as illegitimate commodities. Conversely, when understood as systems of representation and code, pirated videogames can be viewed as important cultural documents that reflect the regionally specific structures of feeling they inhabit. To borrow Thierry Lenain’s (2012: 45) words on art forgery, taking the latter approach to videogame piracy means crediting pirates with an ‘authentic point of view, a perspective of [their] own which would deserve consideration’.

Conclusion What makes a videogame platform successful? As discussed in the introduction to this book, the success or failure of a technology is rarely a matter of ‘rational efficiency’ but is instead connected to what Graeme Gooday (1998: 268) calls ‘socio-technical relations of usage’ and ‘expectations’. To put it more simply, the question should not be ‘what is a failed platform?’ but rather ‘for whom does the platform fail?’ (cf. Arsenault, 2017: 3). Videogame platforms tend to be considered successful when they exhibit qualities of creative innovation, financial performance, and global interpenetration. A platform needs to inspire creative programming, to register on the radar of global capitalism, and to articulate formal partnerships across multiple media markets. These criteria are obviously inadequate for evaluating the success of the Zemmix, a platform that wore its ‘leaky’ technical construction on its sleeve; whose software catalogue was primarily imported or poached from Japan; and whose market reach never really extended beyond its place of origin. The Zemmix was important in the development of an informal development scene that enabled Korean developers to negotiate the ‘double bind’ of Microsoft’s MSX standard and begin a decolonization process in the country’s videogame and computer industries. The Zemmix should not be omitted from narratives of successful videogames simply because the cultural practices it supported do not align with a specific set of copyright discourses. If we adjust these expectations to encompass the myriad examples of pirated hardware and software from countries other than Japan and North America—technologies that were once copied, appropriated, or playfully remixed by amateur programmers, hobbyists, and students—then the history of videogames would need to be substantially rewritten. Indeed,

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the limited research in this area suggests that informal videogame industries proliferated throughout East Asia and Europe in the 1980s and 1990s (see Švelch, 2018), and continue to play a role in countries such as China today. In their critical overview of the contemporary Chinese videogame industry, Anthony Y.H. Fung and Sara Xueting Liao (2015: 121) point out that, although state regulation and censorship have historically influenced the flow of foreign videogames into China, piracy remains a widespread cultural practice among Chinese companies, ‘who conceive of it as a counterforce against giant multinational companies’. This is a good reminder that although piracy is often viewed as a ‘symptom’ of a country’s copyright-weak policies (such as Korea’s CPPA), it can also originate from culturally specific structures of feeling. For Korean developers, this structure of feeling was associated with a postcolonial consciousness and an acknowledgement of the country’s peripheral status in relation to the Japanese and North American videogame industries. The Zemmix provides archaeological insight into this historically marginalized structure of feeling. It enables us to rearticulate the ‘centre-periphery’ model of media growth, wherein platforms and power extend outward from North American and Japanese videogame industries and meet little or no resistance along the way. As a history of the Korean videogame industry from 1985-1992, this chapter has barely scratched the surface. My analysis has focused exclusively on the role of the Zemmix and Microsoft’s MSX standard in establishing the foundations of the country’s videogame industry, and as such I have been less attentive to platforms such as the Apple II. The developments that occurred before 1985 and after 1992 are obviously beyond the scope of this chapter, though they could be the focus of future studies. My reading of the magazine discourses suggests that the period of stagnation following the Zemmix’s decline was alleviated somewhat by the IBM PC. It would be revealing to look at the shift in industry dynamics that occurred during this period, which eventually led to the Korean PC gaming boom of the 1990s and 2000s. Ultimately, however, I hope to have demonstrated that the Zemmix was just as culturally signif icant for the Korean videogame industry as, for example, the ZX Spectrum was for the United Kingdom or the Atari 2600 was for North America. The Zemmix articulates an important rupture in videogame history: a time when regional videogame companies and communities were attempting to navigate a newly globalized videogame industry. The next chapter considers spatial transformations in the videogame industry in a different time and context—specifically, the migration of arcade videogames into the home in the early 1990s.

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Bibliography Arsenault D (2017) Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Baek SG (1983, 19 December) How far has the domestic performance of computers come? Kyunghyang Shinmun, p. 6. Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019) Benson-Allott C (2007) VCR Autopsy. Journal of Visual Culture 6(2): 175-181. Cao Y and Downing JDH (2008) The realities of virtual play: video games and their industry in China. Media, Culture & Society 30(4): 515-529. Chakravartty P and Mills M (2018) Virtual Roundtable on ‘Decolonial Computing’. Catalyst 4(2): 1-4. Retrieved from: (accessed 19 February 2019) Chee F (2006) The Games We Play Online and Offline: Making Wang-tta in Korea. Popular Communication 4(3): 225-239. Cho Y (2016) Double binding of Japanese colonialism: trajectories of baseball in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Cultural Studies 30(6): 926-948. Choi H (2017) The Social Construction of Imported Technologies: Reflections on the Social History of Technology in Modern Korea. Technology and Culture 58(4): 905-920. Chung P (2009) The Dynamics of New Media Globalization in Asia: A Comparative Study of the Online Gaming Industries in South Korea and Singapore. In: Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific, Hjorth L and Chan C (eds.) New York: Routledge, pp. 58-77. Chung P (2015) South Korea. In Wolf MJP (ed.) Video Games Around the World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 495-520. Clarke J (2015) Stuart Hall and the Theory and Practice of Articulation. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 36(2): 275-286. Computer Programs Protection Act 1986 (no. 3920, 1986). Consalvo M (2006) Console video games and global corporations: Creating a hybrid culture. New Media & Society 8(1): 117-137. Consalvo M (2009) Convergence and Globalization in the Japanese Videogame Industry. Cinema Journal 48(3): 135-141. Derboo S (2014a) Famicom clones (1989-2000). Retrieved from: (accessed 26 November 2015) Derboo S (2014b) Early 80’s non-standardized home computers. Retrieved from: (accessed 26 November 2015) Derboo S (2014c) A History of Korean Gaming: Part 1. Retrieved from: (accessed 26 November 2015) Ernkvist M and Ström P (2008) Enmeshed in Games with the Government: Governmental Policies and the Development of the Chinese Online Game Industry. Games and Culture 3(1): 98-126. Fung AYH and Liao SX (2015) China. In: Wolf MJP (ed.) Video Games Around the World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 119-135. Gooday G (1998) Re-writing the ‘book of blots’: Critical reflections on histories of technological ‘failure’. History and Technology 14(4): 265-291. Gye JR (1989, March) The current state of Korean game software. Computer Study, pp. 139-144. Hall S (1986) On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall. Journal of Communication Inquiry 10(2): 45-60. Hjorth L and Chan C (2009) Locating the Game: Gaming Cultures in/and the Asia-Pacif ic. In: Hjorth L and Chan C (eds.) Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 1-14.

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Huhh JS (2009) The ‘Bang’ Where Korean Online Gaming Began: The Culture and Business of the PC bang in Korea. In: Hjorth L and Chan D (eds.) Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific. New York: Routledge, pp. 102-116. Iwabuchi K (2002) Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham: Durham University Press. Jeong YB (1986, May) Do we need a software protection law? Computer Study, pp. 36-37. Jin DY (2010) Korea’s Online Gaming Empire. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jin DY and Chee F (2009) The Politics of Online Gaming. In: Hjorth L and Chan C (eds.) Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific. New York: Routledge: pp. 19-38. Jo D (2016, 23 May) 1984 년 청계천 전자상가의 십대 컴퓨터 이용자 | teen users at the Cheonggycheon electronics market in 1984. Weblog post. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Kang MO and Yi HW (1987, August) The game software market at a big turning point. Computer Study, pp. 34-45. Keogh B (2018a) From aggressively formalised to intensely in/formalised: accounting for a wider range of videogame development practices. Creative Industries Journal. DOI: 10.1080/17510694.2018.1532760. Kelly WH (2010) Censoring Violence in Virtual Dystopia: Issues in the Rating of Video Games in Japan and of Japanese Video Games Outside Japan. In: Wright TJ, Embrick DG, and Lukacs A (eds.) Utopic Dreams and Apocalyptic Fantasies: Critical Approaches to Researching Video Game Play. Lanham: Lexington Books, pp. 110-123. Kim TI (1991, January) Home video game software becoming an issue in court. MyCom, p. 71. Kline A, Dyer-Witheford N, and de Peuter G (2003) Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Kirkpatrick G (2013) Computer Games and the Social Imaginary. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Kwon S-H and Kim J (2014) The cultural industry policies of the Korean government and the Korean Wave. International Journal of Cultural Policy 20(4): 422-439. Lenain T (2012) The Forger’s Point of View. Journal of Art Crime 7 (Spring): 44-54. Liboriussen B and Martin P (2016) Regional Game Studies. Game Studies 16(1): n.p. Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019) Liboriussen B, White A, and Wang D (2016) The Ban on Gaming Consoles in China: Protecting National Culture, Morals, and Industry within an International Regulatory Framework. In: deWinter J and Conway S (eds.) Video Game Policy: Production, Distribution, and Consumption. New York: Routledge, pp. 230-243. Lobato R (2012) Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lütticken S (2010) Playtimes. New Left Review 66 (Nov/Dec): 125-140. Methenitis M (2016) Laws of the Game: Intellectual Property in the Video Game Industry. In: deWinter J and Conway S (eds.) Video Game Policy: Production, Distribution, and Consumption. New York: Routledge, pp. 11-26. Ng BWM (2009) Consuming and Localizing Japanese Combat Games in Hong Kong. In: Hjorth L and Chan C (eds.) Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific, New York: Routledge: pp. 83-101. O’Donnell C (2014a) Mixed messages: The ambiguity of the MOD chip and pirate cultural production for the Nintendo DS. New Media & Society 16(5): 737-752. O’Donnell C (2014b) Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Pang L (2006) Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia: Copyright, piracy, and cinema. New York: Routledge. Robertson R (1995) Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity. In: Lash S, Featherstone M, and Robertson R (eds.) Global Modernities. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, pp. 25-44. Son GH (1983, 20 October) Gestures derailing innocent minds… the spread arms of electronic entertainment rooms. Kyunghyang Shinmun, p. 9. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Švelch J (2018) Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 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. Verhoeff N (2012) Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Yi JS (1993, May) Jang Du-jin Baduk School Introduction. Game World, pp. 108-109. Yuk JS (1980, 7 February) Concentrated crackdown on unauthorized electronic entertainment rooms. Dong-a Ilbo. Retrieved from: (accessed 26 November 2015)

Gameography Capcom (1987) Street Fighter. Arcade: Capcom. id Software (1993) Doom. MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows: id Software. Konami (1986) Knightmare. MSX: Konami. Namco (1982) Dig Dug. Arcade: Namco. Nintendo (1983) Mario Bros. Arcade: Nintendo. Nintendo (1985) Super Mario Bros. Famicom: Nintendo. Nintendo EAD (2015) Super Mario Maker. Wii U: Nintendo. Nintendo Research and Development 2 (1987) Family Computer Gold: Japan Course. Famicom Disk System: Nintendo. Square (1987) Final Fantasy. Nintendo Entertainment System: Nintendo and Square. Wolf Team (1986) Valis. MSX: Telenet Japan. Zemina (1987) Brother Adventure. Zemmix, MSX: Zemina. Zemina (1989a) The Three Dragon Story. Zemmix, MSX: Zemina. Zemina (1989b) Super Boy 1. Zemmix, MSX: Zemina. Zemina (1989c) Super Boy 2. Zemmix, MSX: Zemina.

Filmography Tarantino Q (2003) Kill Bill: Volume I. Miramax.

3.

Domesticating the arcade: The Neo Geo as an imaginary platform Abstract This chapter looks at the shift from public to private forms of play in videogame history through the lens of the Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System (AES). The Neo Geo AES is a ‘home arcade’ platform released by Japanese videogame company SNK in 1991. It promised to fulfil a long-term fantasy of bringing ‘arcade quality’ videogames into the home. Although the Neo Geo AES arguably succeeded in this goal, its magazine reception was overwhelmingly negative. Through an analysis of magazine discourses, I argue that the Neo Geo AES’s ‘failure’ was due to wider discursive, affective, and social shifts in videogame culture, as opposed to flaws in its hardware or software. Keywords: videogame arcade, domestication, Neo Geo, videogame magazines, gamer habitus

In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin (1999) chronicles various discourses, objects, and texts from the era in which the Paris arcades of the 1820s thrived. He presents these historical sources as constellated fragments that can be used to reconstruct the ruins of early modernity and identify the wellsprings of consumer capitalism. The arcades are treated as a relic of the moment when technologically propelled modes of industrial engineering fused with new forms of urban planning and architecture to create these burgeoning consumer environments. A key element of Benjamin’s project is to reawaken the media ‘imaginary’ of the 19th century in order to see what it can reveal about the lost and forgotten ‘dream worlds’ (Buck-Morss, 1991) that once enveloped the Paris arcades. As he writes, ‘all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream’ (Benjamin, 1999: 152 [F1a,2]). Taking influence from Benjamin, this chapter seeks to recover the popular imaginaries associated with the Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System (AES), a ‘home arcade’ console developed by Japanese videogame company

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SNK in 1991. The Neo Geo AES’s main drawcard is its alleged capacity to reproduce the experience of playing arcade videogames in the home. To this end, the platform is designed to support high-quality ports of software originally designed for use on arcade machines, and its controller features a joystick and button layout reminiscent of arcade-style control schemes. Videogame magazines of the 1980s and early 1990s often presented the arcade and its videogames as benchmarks against which home console hardware and software should be evaluated. The arcade was valorized as a cultural touchstone, tastemaker, and source of identity formation for videogame culture. The Neo Geo AES was subsequently viewed as a platform capable of bridging the gap between the ‘high-powered’ public space of the arcade and the ‘technologically inferior’ private space of the home. In this chapter, I treat the Neo Geo AES as an ‘imaginary’ platform. By this I do not mean that the platform is not real or never progressed beyond prototype phase. There are many examples of speculative videogame technologies that never materialized (one of which is examined in the next chapter), but the Neo Geo AES is not one of them. However, like any speculative technology, the Neo Geo AES captures the impossible dreams, unfulfilled expectations, and collective anxieties of its cultural period. At the time of its release, the platform’s promise to reproduce arcade-perfect videogame play in the home seemed to magazine writers like a veritable dream come true. But the console’s ensuing magazine reception—which was almost universally critical—suggests that SNK misdiagnosed the true nature of the arcade-home divide. The irony here is that, in terms of its underlying technology, the Neo Geo AES arguably succeeded in bridging the gap between the arcade and the home. But the arcade-home divide was not only technological; it was also social, discursive, and affective, reinforced by a decade-long recalibration of consumer expectations, habits, and tastes. It is often argued that people stopped playing arcade videogames in the 1980s and early 1990s simply because home consoles became powerful enough to absorb the arcade and its qualities. But my analysis suggests that the arcade’s destabilization was equally—if not primarily—predicated on a discursive shift, wherein the collective desire for frenzied and fast-paced arcade videogames was displaced by a desire for more sedate, long-term, and narrative-oriented home console experiences. Furthermore, many of the arcade’s most distinctive qualities—namely the social and competitive experience of playing videogames in a demarcated public space—were sacrificed in the process of porting arcade videogames to home consoles. It took a platform such as the Neo Geo AES to render this discursive shift a recognizable reality. The console’s ‘failure’ to secure autonomy in the

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fast-growing home console market was, therefore, symptomatic of the arcade’s fall from grace in videogame culture, and SNK’s mistimed entry into this critical juncture of videogame history. The Neo Geo AES therefore serves as a useful entry point into the desires and fantasies that accompanied the migration of arcade videogames into the home, as well as the expectations people had of home consoles in the early 1990s. In order to hone in on the imaginaries that helped shape the Neo Geo AES as a discursive object, in this chapter I draw on an archive of British and North American videogame magazines from the 1980s and 1990s. Compared to previous chapters, this chapter carries out a more comprehensive analysis of magazine advertisements, reviews, and feature articles. While a more geographically specific analysis could reveal insights into how the Neo Geo AES’s magazine reception differed in particular regions, I have chosen to analyse a wider sample in order to identify broader discursive constellations. The magazines help articulate how the Neo Geo AES’s failure was, in part, tied to its unsuccessful navigation of cultural tensions during a period in which the ‘habitus’ of videogame culture (Kirkpatrick, 2013; cf. Bourdieu, 1977) underwent a relocation from the arcade to the home. Much like the Vectrex, then, the Neo Geo AES can be seen as both continuous and discontinuous in its immediate historical context. It performed important narrative work for videogame history by, to borrow Carolyn Marvin’s (1988: 7-8) words, ‘determining what “consciousness” was in a particular age, what thoughts were possible, and what thoughts could not be entertained yet or anymore’. That is, although the Neo Geo AES misdiagnosed the social implications of the arcade-home divide, it pre-empted an emergent structure of feeling in videogame culture—one based on a gendered obsession with raw technological power and an aggressive reclaiming of the domestic space in which home consoles were played.

Out of the arcade, into the home The so-called ‘era’ of arcade videogames was actually rather drawn-out and geographically inconsistent. Arcade videogames possess a pre-history that stretches back to the use of coin-operated skill testers and entertainment machines in fairs (see Huhtamo, 2005 and Parisi, 2013) and gambling machines in pubs and bars (see Kirkpatrick, 2013). The first wave of recognizable arcade videogames arrived in the era of the Vectrex, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In most regions, arcades inspired intense moral panics and were, in some cases, subject to state regulation (see Chapter Two). Michael Ryan

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Skolnik and Steven Conway (2017: 4) postulate that arcades were ‘viewed as politically threatening to conservative forces’ perhaps because they provided ‘common public spaces for the free social mixing of diverse racial and class constituents’ (cf. Williams, 2006). Indeed, Samuel Tobin (2016) observes that North American arcades of the 1980s were diverse environments that facilitated a range of activities and subject positions, beyond just playing videogames and videogame players. Arcades were, in his words, often ‘full of non-players: ditherers and loiterers, broke kids, little siblings […] parents […] bullies […] and kids making that pocket full of quarters last and last by not playing, not right away, not all the time’ (Tobin, 2016: n.p.). Arcades were—and still are—gendered spaces that foregrounded masculine social values and lifestyle traits. They typically demanded sufficient disposable income and spare time, as well as a propensity for technically complex and competitive videogame play. Yet, while arcades were gendered in this way, studies have shown that they were still frequented by women and girls. In her analysis of photographs of New Zealand arcades of the 1980s, for example, Melanie Swalwell (2011: n.p.) finds evidence to suggest that ‘young women and girls were players and participants—not simply onlookers—involved in playing games in public spaces […] whether they were congregating, playing, watching while their friends played, or gazing at things we can’t see in the photographer’s frame’. After a brief period of stagnation in the mid-1980s, arcade videogames again returned to prominence in North America and Japan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in part due to the widespread success of the Capcom fighting videogame Street Fighter II (Capcom, 1991) (Skolnik and Conway, 2017: 10). It was during this period that SNK—a prolific videogame developer known especially for their arcade fighting videogames—developed the Neo Geo Multi Video System (MVS), a somewhat unconventional proprietary arcade machine. The Neo Geo MVS features an interchangeable cartridge board that enables multiple videogames to be loaded onto a single cabinet. Prior to the release of the Neo Geo MVS, most arcade machines were custombuilt for individual arcade titles. They were typically sold complete with dedicated cabinets that housed single large circuit boards. These circuit boards contained the videogame’s read-only memory (ROM) as well as the system’s processing logic. For this reason, arcade operators would sometimes strip old cabinets of their circuits and artwork in order to switch in new videogames. The Neo Geo MVS could, by contrast, support between one and six different videogames in the same cabinet. Instead of using custom per-game hardware, Neo Geo videogames were distributed as individual cartridges that could be loaded onto an MVS’s interchangeable cartridge

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board. Much like a home console, the videogame ROM data is sourced exclusively from the cartridge(s), while the underlying processing logic remains integrated on the circuitry of the MVS cabinet. This hardware ostensibly provided arcade operators with a more cost and space-effective option for obtaining and exhibiting the latest arcade titles. Additionally, it gave players the option to choose between multiple videogames on the same unit. Much like the Vectrex, the MVS offers a snapshot of a medium in transition—from cabinets with custom-made circuit boards to standardized machines that can support multiple cartridges (see Figure 9). In 1991, SNK released the Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System (AES), a home console counterpart to the Neo Geo MVS and the main focus of this chapter. The Neo Geo AES was designed to domesticate the experience of arcade play (particularly MVS software) without compromising on graphics, sounds, or controls. Arcade videogames were, during this period, held in high esteem in videogame culture (Guins, 2014: 113). Their graphics and audio capabilities were generally more advanced than home console videogames, and they were seen to offer more immersive, challenging, and addictive play experiences. For this reason, videogame developers would often attempt to recreate arcade videogames for the less powerful home consoles through a process known as ‘porting’, discussed briefly in Chapter One. Porting arcade videogames to home consoles was a complicated undertaking, as the videogames usually had to be completely reprogrammed and redesigned to meet the constraints of the home console hardware. In a discussion of the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man (Atari, 1982), Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost (2009a) give a detailed account of the compromises and omissions that were often made in porting arcade videogames to home consoles. The Atari port of Pac-Man, which is often viewed as a catalyst for the North American industry crash of 1983 (Montfort and Bogost, 2009a: 76), is almost unrecognizably different to its coin-operated counterpart. Due to the specific limitations of the Atari hardware, many of the videogame’s most iconic visual features had to be restructured or simply substituted for less detailed alternatives in order to accommodate the platform’s lack of a frame buffer and RAM. Enemy ghosts, for example, flicker as the platform struggles to represent multiple sprites on the screen at once (Montfort and Bogost, 2009a: 74-75). This is, of course, a specific limitation of the Atari 2600, but it is indicative of the general challenges that were involved in porting arcade videogames to home consoles. The demand for adequate ports of arcade videogames intensified in the late 1980s and early 1990s, perhaps as a response to the proliferation of low-quality arcade-to-console conversions.

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Figure 9. Flyer depicting the Neo Geo AES home console (top right) and the Neo Geo MVS arcade machine variations (bottom) along with their interchangeable cartridge boards. Retrieved from: (accessed 13 April 2018). By permission of Greg McLemore.

The Neo Geo AES’s unprecedented technical specifications ensured that it was capable of facilitating the kind of high-quality arcade ports that other home consoles could only aspire to. The platform was designed to

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be technologically (but not cosmetically) indistinguishable from its MVS counterpart, as it shared an identical software catalogue. When a new Neo Geo videogame was released for MVS machines in arcades, an identical port would be made available for the AES home platform several months later. The Neo Geo AES was therefore capable of producing visuals and sounds that were, at the time, thought possible only on arcade technology, including clear voice recordings and high-quality sprites with detailed animations. This inspired one magazine writer to proclaim that the Neo Geo AES ‘rivals the arcade’ in terms of its graphics and audio capabilities (Olson, 1991: 14). Similarly, in a 1990 issue of the North American magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, one journalist wrote that ‘[o]ne look at [Neo Geo AES] games like Magician Lord and Cyber Lip will immediately convince any gamer that he or she is looking at the future!’ (‘SNK Announces Stateside Release of New Neo Geo System’, 1990: 29). SNK’s refusal to compromise on the AES’s technical specifications did have critical drawbacks, however. Neo Geo AES cartridges were exceptionally expensive to produce and would regularly retail for USD $200-$300. In 1990, one magazine predicted that the cost of Neo Geo AES videogames would become the platform’s ‘Achilles heel’ (Glancey and Rignall, 1990: 9). SNK attempted to remedy this situation by setting up a rental system whereby the platform and its videogames could be hired for a fraction of the cost of buying the system outright. However, as I will later explain, the Neo Geo AES never shook off its reputation as an unaffordable platform. Even in its design, the Neo Geo AES mimics the look and feel of an arcade machine. SNK wanted to distinguish the Neo Geo AES from the ‘toy-like’ aesthetic of competing home consoles, so they gave the platform a sleek appearance similar to that of modern ‘black box’ home consoles. Perhaps the most notable design feature of the Neo Geo AES is its enormous controller, which is designed to sit on the player’s lap or nearby table during play. With its eight-way ball top joystick and minimalist four-button layout, the controller exhibits strong affinities with arcade-style control schemes. Similarly, the console’s videocassette-sized cartridges are capable of storing hundreds of megabits—the largest being 716 (89.5 MB)—and closely resemble the shape and size of their MVS cartridge counterparts. The Neo Geo AES also supports an external memory card—the first of its kind in videogame history—that allows players to save their progress in any given videogame and pick up where they left off at a later time. The memory card is also compatible with Neo Geo arcade machines, meaning that players could, at the time, transfer data between the home console AES and the arcade MVS. Given that Neo Geo AES videogames retained the ‘meritocratic’ play

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structures (Skolnik and Conway, 2017: 4) of their MVS counterparts—that is, they placed an extreme emphasis on competition and high scores—the memory card provided a tool through which to traverse the arcade-home divide in both directions. According to a 1993 Neo Geo newsletter, the memory card also allowed players to download their progress from an MVS machine and continue on a rented AES as part of SNK’s console hiring initiative, providing a more economical alternative to buying new AES cartridges (‘Official Neo Geo Newsletter’, 1993: n.p.). As one writer from the magazine Computer and Video Games remarked, ‘[the memory card] allows you to store the high scores and position you racked up at home to drop those jaws when you slot it into your local arcade’s machine and play away on level six billion!’ (‘Inside the Amazing Big Box of Tricks’, 1991: 60). Between its unusually robust hardware design, premium price point, and arcade-influenced software catalogue, the Neo Geo AES sought not only to compete for the territory occupied by competing videogame technologies, but also to carve out its own unique space in the home console ecology. Videogame magazines helped facilitate the Neo Geo AES’s entry into this ecology and establish a cultural identity for the platform.

‘Bigger-Badder-Better’: The imagined expectations of the Neo Geo In the 1980s and 1990s, videogame magazines were the primary source of news and information about the latest videogames and platforms. They had a powerful influence on readers’ purchasing decisions and cultural values. As discussed in the previous chapter, official magazines such as Nintendo Power (and its regional variations) functioned to make Nintendo’s brand synonymous with an experience or ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991). Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter (2003: 126) argue that Nintendo used the magazine as a tool to ‘colonize [the] attention, time, desires, ambitions, and fantasies’ of the youth market, in an effort to cultivate a sense of brand loyalty and belonging among its child consumer base (cf. Arsenault, 2017: 80-81). For Graeme Kirkpatrick (2013), magazines played a key role in precipitating the autonomization of videogame culture in the 1980s. They established something of a ‘gamer lexicon’—a unique set of terms that could be used to describe and evaluate different videogames and, perhaps most importantly, differentiate the activity of playing videogames from other media practices. Magazine terms such as ‘gameplay’ and ‘gamer’ provided readers with a vocabulary to describe their practices,

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appraise different videogames, and identify as members of a new cultural habitus. Kirkpatrick (2013) uses the term ‘habitus’ (on loan from Bourdieu, 1977) to describe the discourses, dispositions, and practices that acted as coordinates for the demarcation of videogames as a unique cultural field. The emergence of this lexicon made it possible for certain people to be excluded from the habitus on the basis of their lack of familiarity with the magazine lingo. Early magazines were explicitly catered to a male audience, and the development of a distinct vocabulary and technological know-how created the perception that the culture was open to some (namely young males) and off limits to others. The autonomization of videogame culture was, therefore, marked by ‘symbolic violence’ to the extent that only those with the ‘embodied perceptions and skills necessary to play games’ were discursively acknowledged, while everyone else—most notably women and the elderly—were aggressively excluded from the field (Kirkpatrick, 2013: 72-73). To prepare the market for the arrival of the Neo Geo AES (hereafter referred to as the ‘Neo Geo’ or ‘AES’), SNK established an advertising strategy that leveraged the symbolic power of videogame magazines. SNK even had an equivalent to Nintendo Power; an advertising supplement known as Bigger-Badder-Better that circulated in North American between 1993 and 1994. The supplement contained an abundance of hyperbolic claims about the Neo Geo’s capacity to bring forth a new, perfected form of ‘home arcade’ videogame play. Readers were told (or perhaps even warned) of the platform’s ‘quite shocking’ arcade-quality graphics and the ‘huge memory capacities’ of its cartridges, and repeatedly reminded of its technical superiority over other home consoles. SNK attempted to woo readers by deploying an abundance of what Dominic Arsenault (2017: 77-79) calls ‘technobabble’—meaningless technical superlatives that were rife in videogame magazines and promotional discourses at the time—such as ‘100 MEGA SHOCK!’ and ‘GIGA POWER’, both of which were used in connection with Neo Geo cartridges capable of storing 100 MB and 500 MB respectively. This kind of hyperbole is typical of any new videogame platform or entertainment technology. As Eric Kluitenberg (2006: 9) argues, new media always come accompanied with exaggerated claims about how they will provide solutions to ‘age-old’ deficiencies in human communication, giving rise to utopian dreams of a perfectly mediated society. For Simone Natale and Gabriele Balbi (2014: 212), these ‘[p]rophecies and speculations about the future of media reveal not so much the possibilities of future technologies as they do contemporary thinking about communication and its possibilities’. SNK’s promise, then, was to bring the supposedly

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high-powered and high-testosterone environment of the arcade into the home. To do this, however, the home had to be symbolically coded as a site where it was culturally acceptable to play a home console that, because of its sheer size and power, demanded space and attention. By promising to carve out space in the domestic environment for such a console, SNK rearticulated a discursive project that had, for several years, been a fixation in videogame culture. Its emphasis on the power and size of the Neo Geo was deeply congruent with a broader (and often highly gendered) set of images, beliefs, and anxieties that permeated videogame magazines in the 1980s and early 1990s. For SNK, creating cultural space for the Neo Geo in the home meant tapping into long-standing anxieties regarding the low cultural status of videogames. For example, one image from Bigger-Badder-Better depicts several infants speaking with astonishment at the Neo Geo’s supposedly unrivalled graphics and audio capabilities (Figure 10). The text below the image reads ‘video games aren’t kidstuff anymore’ and calls on readers who ‘think that today’s home video games are designed for the just recently potty-trained pubescent’ to ‘quit whining and grow up’. This advertisement was attempting to exploit videogame culture’s ‘fragile masculinity’ (Vanderhoef, 2013) by simultaneously appealing to and undermining the idea that videogames were toys for children. The Neo Geo was released at a time when magazines were struggling to overcome the formative discourses that shaped the field in the 1970s and 1980s—that is, the belief that videogames were frivolous, toy-like things that parents would partake in with children. The magazine lexicon had, in the 1990s, failed to evolve and become more sophisticated. This had the effect of inhibiting the field’s overall development, leaving the medium still seeking approval as more than just a childish activity (Kirkpatrick, 2013: 73). SNK’s advertisements were attempting to tap into to this long-standing (and still ongoing) desire to surpass the medium’s adolescent phase, and to aggressively defend videogame culture from outsider criticism and parental mediation. The message of the below advertisement is clear: by purchasing Neo Geo hardware, young male readers can be viewed as adults and have their hobby treated more seriously by those around them. This also corresponds to a shift in consumer responsibilities in videogame culture where, according to Kirkpatrick (2013: 95) children are treated ‘less as passive recipients of cultural messages and more as collaborators and participants in their creation’. The appearance of terms such as gamer and gameplay in magazines in the mid-1980s signals a broader rupture in videogame culture. Before this period, videogames carried a different set of cultural connotations. Consider,

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Figure 10. ‘Video games aren’t kidstuff anymore!’. From SNK’s Bigger-Badder-Better advertisement supplement (date unknown). Retrieved from: (accessed 9 April 2018). By permission of Mike Melanson (scanner).

for example, a promotional image for the Vectrex from an article discussed in Chapter One (Figure 11). This image is targeted at parents and features a photo of a girl and boy playing the Vectrex, along with an adult man—a prototypical white family. The console is, in this way, presented as a nucleus

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Figure 11. ‘Vectrex—the revolution starts here’. From TV Gamer (Summer 1983: 68). Retrieved from: (accessed 9 April 2018).

for family togetherness and cross-generational bonding. In what would now be recognized as a reversal of gender norms, some videogame advertisements from the Vectrex’s era even depict women and girls outperforming men in videogames (see Huhtamo, 2012: 32). SNK’s Neo Geo advertisements are, by contrast, unapologetically targeted at an imagined male audience and, in some cases, even actively ridicule

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or sideline women. They frequently draw comparisons between Neo Geo hardware and male genitalia and, by doing so, naturalize the subject position of the solitary, male, hardcore gamer (I will discuss the term ‘hardcore’ in the next section). For example, one advertisement reads, ‘if you’re still playing Sega, NEC, or Nintendo you’re nothing but a weenie’, followed by an image of a hot dog and the text ‘if you’re playing the incredibly high-powered Neo Geo system you’re a real hot dog!’. Another advertisement depicts a man striking a masturbatory pose while playing a Neo Geo. A woman in lingerie is depicted in the foreground of the advertisement, coupled with text that reads, ‘I remember when he couldn’t keep his hands off me’. Adrienne Shaw (2015: 77) notes that, much like masturbation, solitary videogame play is often pathologized as a taboo practice; as something abnormal or unhealthy. The Neo Geo advertisements are attempting to take aggressive ownership of solitary male play. They are drawing a circle around this allegedly abnormal practice, reifying its subcultural status, coding it as a male, and demarcating it from parental mediation and feminized domesticity. By doing this, the advertisements are picking up on a pattern of symbolic violence that had already been discursively constructed by the magazines. As Lynn Spigel (1992: 7) writes in her book Make Room for TV, ‘[a]dvertising adopts the voice of an imaginary consumer’ in that it follows ‘certain discursive rules found in a media form’. More specifically, Kirkpatrick (2013) points out that, in the mid-1980s, videogames magazines established a discursive ruleset wherein women and girls were not only sidelined but deemed antithetical to the ‘gamer identity’ and its core values. As the Neo Geo advertisements illustrate, this identity was increasingly taking pride in its supposed abnormality or ‘otherness’ by, ironically, internalising and taking aggressive ownership of anxieties surrounding solitary male play. Given that SNK’s goal was not only to bridge the arcade-home divide but also to create cultural space for the Neo Geo in the home, their advertisements needed to aggressively reclaim the domestic space in which videogames were played. For example, one magazine image depicts a Neo Geo console and two controllers blasting through a domestic door—the symbolic border between public and private realms (Figure 12). In the 1990s and early 2000s, many console manufacturers avoided references to domesticity in their advertising campaigns, preferring instead to present their technologies as what Bernadette Flynn (2003: 557) calls ‘portal devices’ that were detached from the everyday, feminized environment of the home. More recently, the home has reappeared as an important signifier in home console advertisements. For example, the release of the Nintendo Wii in 2006 was accompanied by an advertising strategy that frequently portrayed the

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console in nuclear-style family settings. For Nintendo, the once-insular and male-dominated home console habitus had to be reframed as a space where it was culturally acceptable for women and older people to participate and move their bodies in overtly expressive—perhaps even transgressive—ways (see Kirkpatrick, 2011: 130). However, Nintendo’s discursive move also implied a more conservative politics of gender and domesticity. Women were, for example, frequently depicted using devices such as the Wii Fit as a means of improving their fitness and appearance, thus feeding into a broader ‘feminization’ of casual and kinaesthetic videogames (see Vanderhoef, 2013: n.p.). For SNK in 1991, the aim was simply to represent the Neo Geo in the home—thus naturalizing the concept of a home arcade console—and, in the process, to expunge the home of any references to femininity, adolescence, or wholesome ‘family fun’. Although the Neo Geo was quite eagerly anticipated—it was even described as ‘the future’ of videogames by two separate magazines (Olson, 1991: 14; ‘SNK Announces Stateside Release of New Neo Geo System’, 1990: 29)—it fell out of favour shortly after its release. It is tempting to blame the console’s commercial and critical stagnation solely on its exorbitant price. Indeed, as I will discuss in the next section, many critics at the time drew attention to the heavy financial burden of becoming a Neo Geo owner. Today, the console’s high price is often identified as the primary reason for its commercial failure. However, as Kenneth Lipartito (2003: 59) points out, price is rarely a determining factor in technological failure. Many media commodities (especially videogames) start out prohibitively expensive but become commercially successful in the long run. I have no doubt that the Neo Geo’s cost nevertheless contributed to its downfall, and I am not trying to excuse the console for its high price point. But I find more convincing the idea that the Neo Geo failed simply because it could not fulfil the impossible dream of a home arcade platform. AES videogames, being direct ports of MVS arcade videogames, were designed with the arcade in mind, and not the home. This became a critical problem for SNK, as magazine reviewers found that the console’s videogames seemed strangely out-of-place in the domestic environment. This was not because AES videogames were technically compromised as a result of the porting process, or because they were objectively ‘bad’ or ‘boring’. Indeed, although Neo Geo videogames received very poor magazine reviews when they were first released, many critics have retroactively labelled them ‘arcade classics’. The Neo Geo’s failure was, then, discursive: it misdiagnosed the shifting expectations and cultural values of the home console habitus in the early 1990s, and it promised to achieve the impossible task of reproducing an arcade experience in the home.

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Figure 12. ‘The only 24-bit home arcade system’. From SNK’s Bigger-Badder-Better advertisement supplement (date unknown). Retrieved from: (accessed 9 April 2018). By permission of Matthew Henzel (scanner).

The destabilization of arcade play Rather than licensing software from third-party developers, SNK opted to develop the vast majority of their Neo Geo videogames in-house. As a result, arcade genres such as action, sport, shooting, beat ‘em up, and fighting are vastly overrepresented in the Neo Geo’s software catalogue. SNK is particularly well known for its competitive two-dimensional fighting videogames. The company developed sequel upon sequel of fighting

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videogames over the course of the Neo Geo’s commercial lifespan. There are, for example, nine entries in the iconic King of Fighters series (one release per year from 1994 to 2003); eight entries in the Fatal Fury series; six entries in the Samurai Shodown series; and multiple entries in several other long-running franchises such as Art of Fighting, World Heroes, and Last Blade. Much like Capcom’s successful Street Fighter series—whose player base SNK competed for—SNK’s two-dimensional fighting videogames are characterized by close combat between two opposing players. As the name of the genre implies, players face off on a two-dimensional plane with the aim of depleting each other’s life gauges, which are usually represented at the top of the screen. To this end, players can attack each other with various combinations of punches, kicks, throws, and special techniques, and defend from incoming attacks when necessary. The joystick and button inputs required to execute special manoeuvres and chain together combos can become incredibly demanding and complex. As James Ash (2015: 69) observes, fighting videogames such as Street Fighter require ‘the player to develop intense sensitivities to units of time that fall well below conscious awareness’. Not only does this intense ‘homogenization’ of time apply to one’s own inputs, but also to the process of reading and responding to the opponent’s on-screen actions. The feedback loop of inputting commands and interpreting an opponent’s moves unfolds in an incredibly narrow temporal window that, as Ash highlights, often exceeds human capacities for perception and reaction. As a result, skilled players will often ‘predict’ how any given encounter will pan out by optimizing their inputs for multiple possible futures,1 as well as by drawing on knowledge of past match experiences. Two-dimensional fighting videogames therefore require a high degree of manual skill, mental concentration, internalised knowledge, and progressive training—not to mention copious amounts of spare time and, in an arcade context, disposable income. The target demographic for this specialized software catalogue was, quite clearly, the ‘hardcore’ subset of videogame culture. In Games of Empire, DyerWitheford and de Peuter (2009: 80) define the ‘hardcore’ as a demographic of predominantly ‘young men who play intensively, have disposable income, adopt new hardware platforms early, buy as many as twenty-five games a year, are literate about genres and conventions, read the game magazines, 1 This process of optimizing inputs for multiple possible futures is often referred to as an ‘option select’. When approaching certain situations in a match, skilled fighting videogame players will often input two recognizable button combinations simultaneously (for example, a block and a throw). The game will then ‘select’ the best ‘option’ based on the opponent’s inputs, thus alleviating the risk of committing to a single action at any given time.

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and form opinions, through word of mouth or online, about games and machines’. For Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009: 81), hardcore subjects are produced through software that emphasizes competitive play, actionoriented subject matter, and tactile knowledge of videogame controllers. In today’s videogame culture, hardcore players are often differentiated from ‘casual’ players on the basis of their tastes, identities, and consumption habits. While the hardcore/casual distinction can be critiqued for only capturing a limited range of possible subject positions,2 my sense is that Neo Geo videogames were designed quite clearly to appeal to an emergent hardcore disposition in the early 1990s, even before this disposition (and the hardcore/casual binary itself) had been discursively constructed. Almost every Neo Geo videogame foregrounds competition, action, and manual competency in its design. Even the Neo Geo’s hardware design reinforces its hardcore appeal. The huge controller, for instance, is obviously designed with hardcore dispositions and gendered subjectivities in mind. ‘Good gameplay’ was—and in many contexts, still is—the most coveted quality of a videogame for hardcore players. According to the magazine reviews, good gameplay was something that Neo Geo videogames routinely failed to provide. From the mid-1980s onwards, gameplay was the key concept in magazine review criteria. Gameplay is a nebulous and largely meaningless term that essentially describes whether a videogame is ‘fun’ (which is itself a nebulous and largely meaningless term) based on an elusive set of criteria; is the videogame sufficiently challenging, does it contain a requisite (though ill-defined) amount of interactivity and formal complexity, does it feel satisfying to play, and so on. Gameplay is often framed in opposition to graphics, sound, and narrative, even though it often seems dependent on the interplay between these different elements. According to the magazine lexicon, videogames either possess good gameplay or they do not, and only ‘authentic gamers’ can recognize good gameplay when they see it. Gameplay is thus a term that encapsulates the values and principles upheld by hardcore players, as Kirkpatrick (2013: 81, italics in original) observes: ‘[t]he true gamer […] is the player who is interested in games and not computers, gameplay and not stories, and graphics, insofar as they reward good, skilful play’. In magazine reviews of Neo Geo videogames, the console’s impressive sights and sounds were routinely overshadowed by the allegedly ‘disappointing’ 2 Casey O’Donnell (2014b: 63), for example, uses the term ‘instrumental players’ to refer to subjects who ‘may find it difficult to participate in either casual or hardcore attitudes, immersing themselves in a particularly complex game intensely until they feel adequately satisfied that they understand the underlying systems that make it function’. See also Vanderhoef, 2013.

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and ‘short-lived’ gameplay. In the February 1991 issue of The One magazine, one writer claimed that the early Neo Geo software offerings were ‘uniformly disappointing’, adding that ‘[t]he same care and attention paid to Neo Geo hardware construction is sadly lacking in its software catalogue’ (‘SNK’s Neo Geo’, 1991: n.p.). According to the same writer, even then-upcoming Neo Geo videogames ‘still lack the “WOW!” factor that the best Sega and Famicom software seems to have in abundance’ (‘SNK’s Neo Geo’, 1991: n.p.). As discussed earlier, the exorbitant price of Neo Geo software and hardware quickly became a sticking point in the magazine discourses. A review of the Neo Geo videogame Riding Hero (SNK, 1991) in the CVG Complete Guide to Consoles: Volume IV (CGIV) noted that the price of Riding Hero was roughly equivalent to the cost of a Sega Mega Drive and a copy of the Sega videogame Super Hang-On—a videogame that was, according to him, a superior alternative to Riding Hero (‘Riding Hero’, 1990: 88). Several reviewers also noted that Neo Geo videogames were cheaper to play on MVS arcade machines, and, as a writer from the CVG CGIV quipped, ‘you’d only need to spend between £10 and £20 before you get bored!’ (‘Neo Geo’, 1990: 15). The same writer commented that although Neo Geo videogames ‘look and sound stunning […] the problem with a lot of them is that their playability isn’t particularly brilliant and they’re too easy to complete, and consequently [they] become dull very, very quickly’ (‘Neo Geo’, 1990: 15). Neo Geo videogames were often criticized for being dull, conservative, and repetitive, as well as derivative of genres and conventions that had been more successful on other home consoles. A reviewer of the videogame Fatal Fury 2 (SNK, 1993) in the March 1993 issue of Video Games and Computer Entertainment (VGCE) suggested that ‘SNK should show diversity—and fewer fighting games’ (Bieniek, 1993a: 43). The same author made similar comments in his review of 3 Count Bout (SNK, 1993) four months later in the July 1993 issue of VGCE, where he expressed disappointment that ‘SNK’s fighting game-fixation’ continued to dominate the platform’s software line-up (Bieniek, 1993b: 58). While he praised 3 Count Bout’s graphics and especially its music and sound, he was not so enthusiastic about the ‘joystick tricks’ and ‘insane methods’ required to execute special techniques and combos in the videogame (Bieniek, 1993b: 58). He wrote that ‘the violent controller abuse undermines the subtlety of learning how to perform the attacks’ and noted that the complex controls were ‘great for the arcade’ but not so desirable for ‘home owners of the home version of the Neo Geo’ (Bieniek, 1993b: 58). For this reviewer, mastery of 3 Count Bout’s complex ‘joystick tricks’ would, conceivably, bolster one’s reputation in the social environment of the arcade, as well as increase one’s chances of playing on the same arcade

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machine for longer. But once brought into the home, the ‘insane controller methods’ simply become a source of frustration and indifference, especially with the absence of spectators and competing players. Reviewers also often criticized Neo Geo videogames for their short-lived single-player modes. For example, a reviewer from The One magazine critiqued the videogame NAM-1975 (SNK, 1991) for its lack of ‘replayability’. He singled out the Neo Geo’s memory card as a particularly problematic feature: ‘[t]he gameplay really isn’t up to much and with the combination of memory card saves and restarts it’s possible to finish the whole game without too much effort’ (‘NAM-1975’, 1991: n.p.). The reviewer of 3 Count Bout and the reviewer of NAM-1975 both highlight instances where the distinct affordances of the AES home console—namely the ability to play arcade videogames in the privacy of the home or save videogame progress—lay bare the limitations of arcade genres. What these reviewers were discovering was that their tastes and preferences had, perhaps unknowingly, shifted in the direction of videogames that provided more sedate, long-term, and narrative-oriented home console experiences. An emergent structure of feeling was beginning to take hold—one that favoured videogames that felt, played, and looked different to those associated with the once-dominant arcade. By December of 1992, CVG magazine had reduced their once quite substantial ‘Arcade Action’ section to a sporadic two-page spread, indicating that reader interest in the arcade was beginning to fade. But this recalibration of player tastes and preferences had been unfolding for over a decade, ever since the arrival of the first home consoles and microcomputers in the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s. What began in the mid-1980s as a desire to fuse the narrative-driven content of text-based adventure videogames (such as those played on microcomputers) with the visuals and sounds of arcade-style action videogames had, by the early 1990s, become a fully articulated approach to videogame development (Kirkpatrick, 2015: 60-61). Rather than attempting to replicate the blunt thrills and excessive spectacles of arcade videogames, home console videogames now aspired to provide long-term appeal with their engrossing stories and intellectually stimulating—but not unfair or overly challenging—play structures. Magazine review criteria were even adjusted to factor in the longevity of a videogame, often quantified under a ‘value’ or ‘replay-value’ rubric. Home console videogames began to break from established arcade genres and conventions and became more multifaceted in terms of their mechanics and modes of presentation. According to Kirkpatrick (2013: 93-94), it subsequently became difficult for magazines to categorize and describe videogames, thereby exposing the ‘discursive limitations’ of the

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magazine lexicon. In essence, this whole transition relates to a blurring of the distinction between arcade and home genres and imaginaries, rather than a wholesale subsumption of one within the other. The domestication of arcade videogames was not simply a matter of achieving an adequate technical reproduction of arcade-quality software on a home platform. Just as important, and what the Neo Geo struggled to recreate in the private space of the home, were the competitive, social, and performative dimensions of play made possible by the public nature of arcade spaces. In The Culture of Digital Fighting Games, Todd Harper (2013) observes that many self-identified members of the present-day fighting videogame community valorize and fetishize the arcade as the ideal environment for competitive play, and view the home as an inadequate alternative by comparison. Arcade spaces generate possibilities for unplanned social performances and competitive encounters, while domestic play is often viewed as a solitary activity. As Harper (2013: 41) suggests, part of the appeal of arcade play is exhibiting one’s finely tuned execution skills in a public setting, as well as learning from and admiring the skills of others. There is also a gendered component to this fetishization of the arcade, in that (predominantly) male players can partake in play communally, rather than in isolation. Competitive fighting videogames often attract spectators for this reason, and the activity of watching a match in the physical presence of competing players is often considered a form of participation in the communal experience of play (Harper, 2013: 40; cf. Taylor, 2012: 182-183). Perhaps the VGCE reviewer of 3 Count Bout, whom I quoted from earlier, had this aspect of performance in mind when he commented that the complex ‘joystick tricks’ demanded by the videogame made it suitable for play in an arcade environment, but not on the Neo Geo home console. The home lacked the communal qualities that made playing arcade videogames a worthwhile experience. Although the competitive and social elements of the arcade were noticeably absent in Neo Geo home console videogames, their trace continues to live on in today’s networked media environment, albeit in a somewhat compromised form. Developments in online multiplayer videogames and the subsequent remediation of arcade traits such as ‘leaderboards’ have led to a reinvigoration of the competitive impetus behind arcade play and a renewed investment in arcade genres. In particular, competitive fighting videogames, much like those released for the Neo Geo, have seen a recent resurgence in popularity. Contemporary fighting videogames such as SNK’s King of Fighters XIV (SNK Playmore, 2016) and Capcom’s Street Fighter V (Capcom, 2016) have attempted to recreate elements of the arcade experience by allowing players

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to challenge each other to online matches. Street Fighter V, for example, uses an online match-making feature that interrupts the single-player experience whenever ‘a new challenger approaches’. However, even with the ability to compete against players from around the world, online multiplayer is seen to compromise many of the underlying qualities of the arcade experience. Fighting videogame players often cite unpredictable connection speeds and the disembodied nature of social interaction between opponents as reasons why online play is detrimental to the arcade experience (Harper, 2013: 73, 36). According to Harper (2013: 23-24), the inadequacy of online play has, in part, inspired fighting videogame fans to recreate arcade-like spaces in local and international fighting videogame tournaments. A key element of the arcade experience, then, ‘is surrendering yourself to the unpredictable nature of play in a public space’ (Harper, 2013: 66). Although SNK had succeeded in porting arcade-authentic software to a home console, it was precisely this public element of the arcade experience that Neo Geo videogames lacked. Divorced from their social, competitive, and performative contexts, Neo Geo videogames forfeited what was arguably their fundamental appeal. If the imaginaries projected by the Neo Geo were initially successful in capturing the interests of magazine readers, they had by the mid-1990s faltered quite considerably. Due to its allegedly generic software catalogue, the Neo Geo gained a reputation as an outdated platform whose technical capabilities were largely underutilized by SNK’s in-house developers. Toward the end of its (unusually long) commercial life, the Neo Geo played host to several critically acclaimed titles such as The King of Fighters ‘98 (SNK, 1998) and Garou: Mark of the Wolves (SNK, 2000). However, it never fully recovered from its negative reception in the early 1990s. In 1994 SNK attempted to reinvigorate the Neo Geo brand by switching from silicon to optical storage with the release of the Neo Geo CD system. However, the Neo Geo CD failed to achieve mass-market penetration due to its supposedly poor hardware design (the disk-drive speed was extremely slow, which resulted in lengthy loading times) and limited range of software (its software catalogue was, like the AES’s, almost identical to the MVS’s). Seemingly aware of the fact that the habitus had begun to gravitate away from hardcore arcade genres, SNK attempted to imitate the successes of popular console adventure roleplaying videogames (RPGs) such as Final Fantasy by developing an RPG of their own. Based on their Samurai Shodown franchise, Samurai Shodown RPG (SNK, 1997) was released in 1997 as a Neo Geo CD exclusive. However, the videogame never saw the light of day outside of Japan, and much like the majority of SNK’s software, it was viewed by critics as too derivate of videogames that had been more successful on other home consoles.

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Although Neo Geo videogames were released throughout the 1990s and even into the early 2000s, magazine coverage became almost non-existent after 1995. A review of Samurai Shodown V (SNK Playmore, 2003)—one of the last official Neo Geo videogames to be released—appeared in the April 2004 issue of GamesTM, where it received a score of 3/10 (‘Samurai Shodown V’, 2004: 112-113). The reviewer, who seemed perplexed as to why the videogame was even released, called it ‘dated’ and ‘disappointing from a technical point of view’, due largely to the ‘ageing AES technology’ (‘Samurai Shodown V’, 2004: 112). Yet, while the Neo Geo’s presence faded in magazines, it did not disappear completely from the collective imaginary. As Kluitenberg (2006) argues in Book of Imaginary Media, the dreams and fantasies associated with old and new media always contain the potential for reactivation at a later date. Marshall and Eric McLuhan (1988: 100) make a similar point in Laws of Media, where they argue that superseded technologies are often ‘retrieved’ at some stage in the future, at which point they may become a source of inspiration for artistic practice, or possibly even repossessed by the media industry as a marketing strategy for appealing to the nostalgic desires ascribed to dead media (cf. Natale and Balbi, 2014: 211). The Neo Geo is no exception here. Once arcade genres (especially two-dimensional fighting videogames) experienced a revival in popularity in the late 2000s, many Neo Geo videogames were reappraised and, subsequently, assigned astronomical exchange value on auction websites such as eBay. A number of online Neo Geo fan communities have also emerged since the console became obsolete, providing a space for fans to discuss Neo Geo videogames, share images of their collections, and archive various materials associated with the AES and MVS platforms. These communities are unified in their aim to reinvigorate the imaginaries associated with the Neo Geo and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they are dominated by people who self-identify as hardcore. Even homebrew Neo Geo videogames are still being developed and published. In 2015, a German independent developer known as NG:Dev.Team published Kraut Buster (NG:Dev.Team, 2015), a shooting videogame for the MVS and AES platforms that was published with a physical cartridge and box. Even SNK recently made another, arguably unsuccessful attempt to reinvigorate the Neo Geo brand by developing a handheld console known as the Neo Geo X in 2012. Much like the Neo Geo CD, the Neo Geo X received widespread criticism for its poor hardware design, though interestingly, not for the quality of its software catalogue, which was identical to its predecessors. The Neo Geo can, therefore, be understood through multiple conceptual lenses discussed in this book. As discussed in this chapter, it can be usefully understood as an imaginary platform that channelled the impossible

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desires, unfulfilled expectations, and collective anxieties of its era. In addition to this, it can be viewed as a transitional platform (or family of transitional platforms) that weathered multiple ‘crises of technique’ in videogame history. The Neo Geo MVS, with its interior interchangeable cartridge board and arcade cabinet exterior, offers a snapshot of a medium in transition from the arcade to the home. The Neo Geo AES, meanwhile, signals more of a discursive transition in the attitudes held toward arcade and home console experiences. While the AES is not a decolonial platform, its software catalogue consists almost entirely of content that has been ‘poached’ from another platform. This makes it particularly difficult to study from a platform studies perspective, which tends to foreground the uniqueness of a platform based on its software catalogue. Finally, like the arcade itself, the Neo Geo can be understood as a residual platform that continues to defy its own obsolescence by ‘returning from the dead’ as ‘a nostalgic, valorized, and fetishized source of identity creation’ (Skolnik and Conway, 2017: 17). The notion of ‘residual platforms’ is discussed in more detail in the following chapter. Ultimately, the Neo Geo inhabits a distinct yet rather drawn-out moment of rupture and discontinuity in videogame history; it misdiagnosed the structures of feeling of its era; and it is useful as an epistemic tool for analysing the arcade-home transition from a discursive rather than technological standpoint.

Conclusion Taking influence from Benedict Anderson’s (1991) oft-cited book Imagined Communities, Kluitenberg (2006: 8) argues in the Book of Imaginary Media that ‘all media are partly real and partly imagined’. From when they are first conceptualized to when they grow old, he argues, media technologies tap into various imaginaries—some dominant or long-standing, some emergent or yet to be fully articulated, some residual or dormant (cf. Williams, 1977: 121)—in a process that shapes their identities as cultural objects. In Kluitenberg’s account, the ‘media imaginary’ is a two-way exchange wherein media project imaginaries onto social communities, while members of those communities codify media with their collective desires and fears about technological change. As Natale and Balbi (2014: 212) suggest, although new media always inevitably fall short of the dream worlds they promise, their imaginaries can nevertheless ‘tell a great deal about what societies of the past thought of media and which horizons of possibility were believed to be real or impending’. The media imaginary can therefore

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be characterized as a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2009) that responds to the shifting values, ideas, and beliefs voiced by those living under its spell. Retrieving minor technological imaginaries can, then, form the basis of a cultural critique of past and present media situations, as well as a theoretical approach for intervening in and re-envisioning media history. Such an approach is less concerned with the materialities of media than it is with the discursive formations that envelop them. As Kluitenberg (2011: 53, 57) argues, the study of media imaginaries aims ‘not to reveal an object, a physical substrate, underneath a particular writing of media history’ but rather ‘technological imaginaries and discursive practices’ connected to moments of technological transition and instability. This approach is especially applicable to the Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System—a platform whose commercial ‘failure’ played out in a discursive rather than technological register. By facilitating the migration of arcade-quality software into the home, SNK managed to overcome a supposedly insurmountable technological barrier that had, since the era of the Vectrex, demarcated the boundaries between the arcade and the home. The Neo Geo’s capacity to reproduce the sights and sounds of arcade videogames was unrivalled. And yet, once ‘arcade perfect’ videogames arrived in the home, people discovered that the arcade-home divide was not one worth bridging. Arcade genres had fallen out of favour in a discursive formation that now favoured more sedate, long-term, and narrative-oriented home console experiences. The Neo Geo can therefore be viewed less as an outright failure and more as a victim of its own success. No home console could possibly recreate the competitive, social, and performative experiences of the arcade in full. The Neo Geo is a platform poised uncomfortably between the public and private realms of videogame culture. It is a direct outcome of long-standing fantasies of bringing arcade videogames into the home, and a signifier of the arcade’s fall from grace within what Kirkpatrick (2013: 72) calls the ‘gamer habitus’. Much like the Vectrex, the Neo Geo performed transitional work that was as vital as it was expendable for videogame history. Although the Neo Geo misdiagnosed a key discursive shift in videogame culture, it pre-empted a number of other affective shifts in the home console habitus. It sought to clearly demarcate the home console habitus from notions of parental mediation and feminized domesticity. It tapped into anxieties regarding the supposedly infantile nature of videogame play. It promised a solution to these anxieties in the form of a ‘hardcore’ black box console. It openly exploited the culture’s anxieties of ‘otherness’ and ‘abnormality’ through an aggressive marketing campaign. Unlike other minor platforms discussed in this book, the Neo Geo did not challenge

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‘normal’ ways of making or playing videogames. Indeed, aside from a handful of interesting features—such as its MVS-compatible memory card storage system—the Neo Geo’s identity was wholly based on a reinvigoration of conservative arcade values, tropes, and techniques. As a minor platform, then, the Neo Geo is valuable because it articulates the destabilization of one structure of feeling—the arcade’s once-elevated position in videogame culture; and the crystallization of another—the tastes, preferences, and values associated with the home console habitus. Once the dream of a ‘home arcade’ console became a reality, the arcade effectively lost touch with its material, historical basis and drifted into the realm of the symbolic. To borrow Skolnik and Conway’s (2017: 17) idea, the arcade became ‘a floating signifier’—a polysemous sign onto which various fantasies, expectations, and anxieties were projected. This is not to say that the arcade ceased to exist in any tangible form whatsoever, but rather that it became more prominent as a f igure in the collective imaginary of videogame culture. Today, the arcade is still prominent as a floating signifier, albeit one that attracts nostalgic desires for obsolesced arcade values, tropes, and genres. As Skolnik and Conway (2017: 17) write, the arcade is ‘projected now upon a variety of phenomena, from game controllers and console stencils to modes of discourse evident in […] attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and censorship’. Even the Neo Geo, once criticized for its stale and generic software catalogue, has been reappraised as a token of the arcade’s ‘golden era’. Yet, crucially, the Neo Geo is also an ongoing source of residual, paratextual, and creative productivity—it has inspired numerous fan websites and homebrew development projects, enabling players and hobbysit developers to entertain imaginaries of how things could have been (or could be) otherwise. The next chapter analyses these sorts of residual effects in more detail through an analysis of the Sega Saturn and its cancelled ‘flagship’ title, Sonic X-treme.

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Bieniek C (1993a, March) Fatal Fury 2. Video Games & Computer Entertainment, p. 43. Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019) Bieniek C (1993b, July) 3 Count Bout. Video Games & Computer Entertainment, p. 58. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Bourdieu P (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Buck-Morss S (1991) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dyer-Witheford N and de Peuter G (2009) Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Flynn B (2003) Geography of the Digital Hearth. Information, Communication & Society 6(4): 551-576. Glancey P and Rignall J (1990, July) A Whole New World. Computer and Video Games, pp. 8-9. Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019) Guins R (2014) Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harper T (2013) The Culture of Digital Fighting Games: Performance and Practice. New York: Routledge. Huhtamo E (2005) Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: An Archaeology of Arcade Gaming. In: Raessens J and Goldstein J (eds.) The Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: pp. 3-21. Huhtamo E (2012) What’s Victoria Got To Do with It? Toward an Archaeology of Domestic Gaming. In: Wolf MJP (ed.) Before the Crash: Early Video Game History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 30-52. ‘Inside the Amazing Big Box of Tricks’ (1991, October) Computer and Video Games, p. 60. Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019) Kirkpatrick G (2011) Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kirkpatrick G (2013) Computer Games and the Social Imaginary. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Kirkpatrick G (2015) The Formation of Gaming Culture: UK Gaming Magazines, 1981-1995. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kline A, Dyer-Witheford N, and de Peuter G (2003) Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Kluitenberg E (2006, ed.) Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Kluitenberg E (2011) On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media. In: Parikka J and Huhtamo E (eds.) Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 48-69. Lipartito K (2003) Picturephone and the Information Age: The Social Meaning of Failure. Technology and Culture 44(1): 50-81. Marvin C (1988) When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electronic Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. McLuhan M and McLuhan E (1988) Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Montfort N and Bogost I (2009a) Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ‘NAM-1975’ (1991, February) The One Magazine, n.p. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018)

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Natale S and Balbi G (2014) Media and the imaginary in history: The role of the fantastic in different stages of media change. Media History 20(2): 203-218. ‘Neo Geo’ (1990, no. 4) Computer and video games: Complete guide to consoles: Volume IV, p. 15. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) O’Donnell C (2014b) Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ‘Official Neo Geo Newsletter’ (1993, May) No. 4, n.p. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Olson E (1991, December) Neo Geo: The Shape of Things to Come? Game Informer, p. 14. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Parisi D (2013) Shocking grasps: An archaeology of electrotactile game mechanics. Game Studies 13(2): n.p. Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019) Rancière J (2009) Aesthetics and its Discontents. Cambridge, MA: Polity. ‘Riding Hero’ (1990, no. 4) Computer and Video Games: Complete Guide to Consoles: Volume IV, p. 88. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) ‘Samurai Shodown V’ (2004, April) GamesTM, pp. 112-113. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Shaw A (2015) Circles, Charmed and Magic: Queering Game Studies. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2(2): 64-97. Skolnik MR and Conway S (2017) Tusslers, Beatdowns, and Brothers: A Sociohistorical Overview of Video Game Arcades and the Street Fighter Community. Games and Culture. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1177/1555412017727687 ‘SNK Announces Stateside Release of New Neo Geo System!!’ (1990, no. 14) Electronic Gaming Monthly, pp. 28-29. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) ‘SNK’s Neo Geo’ (1991, February) The One, n.p. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Spigel L (1992) Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Swalwell M (2011) More than a craze: Photographs of New Zealand’s early digital games scene. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Taylor TL (2012) Raising the stakes: E-Sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tobin S (2016) Hanging in the Video Arcade. Journal of Games Criticism 3(A): n.p. Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019) Vanderhoef J (2013) Casual Threats: The Feminization of Casual Video Games. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology 2. Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019) Williams D (2006) A (brief) social history of play. In Vorderer P and Bryant J (eds.) Playing Computer Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019) Williams R (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Gameography Atari (1982) Pac-Man. Atari 2600: Atari. Capcom (1991) Street Fighter II. Arcade: Capcom. Capcom (2016) Street Fighter V. PlayStation 4: Capcom. NG:Dev.Team (2015) Kraut Buster. Neo Geo AES and MVS: NG:Dev.Team. SNK (1991) NAM-1975. Neo Geo AES: SNK. SNK (1991) Riding Hero. Neo Geo AES: SNK. SNK (1993) 3 Count Bout. Neo Geo AES: SNK. SNK (1993) Fatal Fury 2. Neo Geo AES: SNK. SNK (1998) King of Fighters ‘98. Neo Geo AES: SNK. SNK (1997) Samurai Shodown RPG. Neo Geo CD: SNK. SNK (2000) Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Neo Geo AES: SNK. SNK Playmore (2003) Samurai Shodown V. Neo Geo AES: SNK Playmore. SNK Playmore (2016) The King of Fighters XIV. PlayStation 4: SNK Playmore.

4. A dialectic of obsolescence? The Sega Saturn as a residual platform Abstract This chapter looks at how the imaginaries surrounding a commercially obsolesced ‘cult’ platform—the Sega Saturn—are reactivated and imbued with ‘residual’ value in the present. It takes as its starting point the media archaeological idea that obsolesced technologies, once liberated from their commercial contexts, are freed up for aesthetic experimentation. I argue that this media archaeological ‘impulse’ is often shot through with a ‘dialectic of obsolescence’ that hesitates between wanting to fetishize and salvage media history. In order to unpick this dialectic, I analyse the residual afterlife of the Sega Saturn’s cancelled ‘flagship’ title, Sonic X-treme, by looking at fan attempts to revive the videogame in the present. Keywords: archives, obsolescence, vapourware, fan revival, Sega, nostalgia

In the introduction to this book, I discussed media archaeology as an approach to historical description that, broadly defined, rejects teleology in favour of a ‘non-linear’ conception of media history. Media archaeology is, however, often shot through with a contradictory desire to make both a ‘poetics’ and ‘fetish’ of obsolesced technologies (cf. Elsaessser, 2016: 47). That is, media archaeology is motivated on the one hand by something of a ‘disinterested’ aesthetic impulse to liberate outmoded technologies from the grip of planned obsolescence (Elsaesser, 2016: 335). Practitioners of media archaeology—be they researchers or artists1—often seek to ascribe aesthetic value to technologies no longer defined by their economic utility but instead by their apparent uselessness. Yet, on the other hand, media archaeology often ‘digs up’ ostensibly weird and forgotten technologies without adequately justifying its methodological and analytical purposes for 1 It is generally acknowledged that media archaeology can be an applied artistic practice in addition to an academic pursuit (see Parikka, 2012: 138-141; Elsaesser, 2016: 46-48).

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doing so (cf. Nooney, 2013). Thomas Elsaesser (2016: 354) argues that media archaeology’s propensity to ‘go against the grain’ of history is a symptom of and response to the dizzying pace of technological development in the present. He writes, media archaeology, despite the brave calls for going against the grain, for making a last stand against the tyranny of the new, for digging into the past in order to discover there an as yet unrealized future, nonetheless does not escape our culture’s most prominent pathology: the need to preserve the past, to fetishize ‘memory’ and ‘materiality’ in the form of trauma and loss, even as we lose faith in history and make our lives every [sic] more dependent on the ‘virtual’. (Elsaesser, 2016: 383-384)

This contradictory desire to simultaneously fetishize and recuperate media history can be described as a ‘dialectic’ of obsolescence. As discussed in the previous chapter, this dialectic is clearly at work in videogame culture. Fans often retrieve the imaginaries of minor platforms in order to simultaneously fetishize the past and investigate how things could have been (or could be) otherwise. This chapter unpicks this dialectic through an analysis of the Sega Saturn’s ‘residual’ afterlife on fan-curated websites (or ‘fansites’) and online communities. Released in Japan in 1994, the Sega Saturn (or ‘Saturn’) is a CD-ROM-based successor to Sega’s Mega Drive home console. It attempted to navigate the transition from cartridge to CD-ROM-based software at a time when few home consoles had successfully bridged this divide. Perhaps as a result, many of its videogames possess an ‘avant-garde’ quality characteristic of Sega’s late console outputs (Montfort and Consalvo, 2012). Videogames such as Guardian Heroes (Treasure, 1996) and NiGHTS into Dreams… (Sonic Team, 1996) probed the boundaries of 2D and 3D design structures, and subsequently eluded magazine review criteria (see Kirkpatrick, 2012: n.p.). The Saturn precipitated Sega’s fall from grace prior to the release of the fabled Dreamcast in 1999. It was promised a saviour in the form of Sonic X-treme—a ‘killer app’ that, despite promises of an autumn 1996 release in North America and Europe, was never commercially released. Although the Saturn has a fascinating history, my focus in this chapter is more on the platform’s social construction in the present—its residual afterlife. Much like the Neo Geo, the Saturn cultivated a loyal fan following in the wake of its obsolescence. Of particular interest is the platform’s unreleased ‘flagship’ title, Sonic X-treme. Sonic X-treme is an imaginary object in a very literal sense. It never came close to being completed (let alone published),

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and today exists in multiple fragmented states that have been resurrected through the coordinated efforts of fans. In this chapter, I discuss the Sonic X-treme revival as an example of what I call ‘residual mediation’ surrounding a minor platform. In doing so, I draw on Raymond Williams’s (1977) framework of emergent, dominant, and residual cultural forms. For Williams (1977: 122), any given cultural period is defined by a tension between emergent and dominant cultures. Dominant cultures dictate the experiences, meanings, and values—or structures of feeling—that are permissible in any given social formation. Emergent cultures threaten to undermine or overtake the dominant, but as Williams (1977: 123) points out, it can be difficult to distinguish which among the emergent cultures will merely take forward pre-existing power structures and social relations, and which will oppose the status quo. For example, Williams (1977: 124) discusses an emergent working class that demands new societal arrangements (such as, for example, access to particular institutions) so as to ease its incorporation into the dominant culture. But this emergent working class may carry ‘oppositional’ class elements such as, for example, trade unions. This interplay between emergent and dominant forms is especially evident in the media industry, where, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2006: 3) observes, media are always constructed as new, in the process of being ‘made anew’, or otherwise in need of replacement. Williams introduces a third element into his framework—the residual—that interrupts the dialectic of dominant and emergent. Residual forms and practices ‘[reach] back to those meanings and values which were created in actual societies and actual situations in the past’ (Williams, 1977: 123). They can possess ‘an alternative or even oppositional relation to the dominant culture’ (Williams, 1977: 123). For Williams (1977: 123), residual forms and practices may be actively sought out or recuperated because they ‘represent areas of human experience, aspiration, and achievement which the dominant culture neglects, undervalues, opposes, represses, or even cannot recognize’. Once liberated from the hype-cycle of emergent and dominant media commodities, an obsolesced technology may become a source of residual mediation in the present. In artistic practice, this usually means that the technology is subjected to the ‘disinterestedness’ of aesthetic experimentation. A similar process takes place on specialist videogame fansites, where fans engage in practices of residual mediation in order to investigate unrealized structures of feeling that have been neglected or suppressed by the incessantly forward-looking dominant culture. Yet, as Williams observes, the residual does not always stand in strict opposition to the dominant. In fact, residual practices may be actively co-opted by the dominant culture and

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‘reinterpreted’, ‘diluted’, or diffused of their oppositional status (Williams, 1977: 122). This process is articulated quite clearly in the growing market for throwback videogame consoles and videogames, wherein obsolesced videogames are reanimated (often on newer and thus more culturally dominant platforms) and folded back into a system of exchange. The Sonic X-treme revival involves practices of residual mediation that elude these processes of reinterpretation and dilution. The cultural practices surrounding the videogame’s revival disrupt the institutional logic of the archive, providing a means by which to renegotiate the dialectic of obsolescence described above. In institutional contexts, videogame history is mediated through selective processes of ‘archivization’ that determine how the past is recorded, stored, accessed, and made legible (Derrida, 1996). This occurs not only in public institutions such as museums and galleries, but also in the videogame industry itself, where retro compilations, webstore collections, and throwback consoles establish an official ‘provenance’ of videogame history. Institutionalized actors such as curators, archivists, and professional videogame developers hold administrative power over these processes of archivization. They have authority to make curatorial decisions about, for example, which videogames to include in retro compilations, or whose voices and stories to privilege in exhibits. These decisions legitimize certain narratives of videogame history, thus giving shape to our knowledge of the medium in the present. In the process, the archive becomes ensconced in institutional space, where it orients videogame history toward a fixed point of origin and a ‘safe’ or predictable destination (cf. Ruffino, 2018: 92-93). For Sven Spieker (2008: 175), this leads to an assumption that ‘archives function as a kind of technological correlative of memory’—that they literally tell the ‘truth’ about our collective experience of history—and that their authority cannot be challenged. The Sonic X-treme revival dislodges the archive from institutional space and disrupts its linear organization. It represents an attempt by fans to stabilize what is essentially an ‘unarchiveable’ object through relational practices of residual mediation. Sonic X-treme is unarchiveable because it is, strictly speaking, non-existent. It is an incomplete videogame that relies on the resurrection of technical and discursive fragments such as design documents, assets, prototypes, and source code. It also relies on ‘archives of the unconscious’ to fill in its ‘missing’ pieces—that is, imaginaries about what Sonic X-treme was, is, or could become. Fans have created multiple playable builds of Sonic X-treme by drawing on these technical, discursive, and imaginary archives. The videogame is, however, irreparably fragmented; it can never be totally resurrected, only reassembled into new sets of relations.

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The ‘object’ of aesthetic and residual significance is, therefore, not a singular thing, but rather a curatorial process that holds Sonic X-treme together in ‘montage’ form (Benjamin 1999: 461 [N2,6]). Difference and discontinuity are therefore expressed through a relational aesthetic that, in a Benjaminian sense, produces a new dialectical image of history. Due to its theoretical aims and objects of study, this chapter is structured somewhat differently to the previous chapters. I begin with a broad theoretical discussion of the dialectic of obsolescence, identifying its key contradictions in fan practices, media archaeology, and the fetishization of loss, provenance, and materiality. I then unpick this dialectic through a discussion of the Sonic X-treme revival. The practices of residual mediation surrounding Sonic X-treme offer insight into alternative methods of archiving, curating, and aestheticizing videogame history. It is worth acknowledging that, in this chapter, I am more interested in the practices of residual mediation surrounding the Saturn rather than the Saturn itself. However, I want to argue that these practices are still very much part of the platform’s remit. As discussed in the introduction to this book, platforms are not just discrete pieces of hardware, and nor are they simply products of the dead labour of their (very often male) inventors and manufacturers. Rather, they are spaces of affective intermediation that encompass a variety of practices—practices that, moreover, can extend far into a platform’s commercial afterlife. The resurrection of Sonic X-treme is closely linked to the Saturn’s minor status in videogame history, and emerges partly out of a desire to intervene in the platform’s history.

The dialectic of obsolescence Media archaeology and fan practices alike often hesitate between making a fetish and poetics of obsolescence. Admittedly, this dialectic brought me a certain amount of anxiety when writing this book—to what extent was my own fascination with minor platforms symptomatic of the medium’s supposed ‘identity crisis’ in the present (Ruffino, 2018)? My deliberations here have especially been influenced by Matt Hills’s (2002) dialectical approach to fan consumption in his book Fan Cultures. Here, Hills (2002: 34) aims to restore what he calls ‘dialectical thinking’ to the oftentimescelebratory nature of fan studies research. In the early 2000s, scholars such as Henry Jenkins described fans as ‘textual poachers’ who, by virtue of their supposedly resistant attitudes toward consumption, were able to remove the ‘taint of consumerism’ from their objects of pleasure (Hills, 2002: 30). According to Hills, Jenkins’s celebratory approach to fandom gains traction

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partly because it implies that scholars of popular culture can salvage their own research interests from the taint of consumerism. If fan practices can be understood as resistant, then scholarly research on popular culture can also be legitimized as more than just an exercise in self-indulgence. Yet, for Hills, fan practices can never be picked apart from more fundamental economic processes of use value and exchange value. As he writes, The fan’s appropriation of a text is therefore an act of ‘final consumption’ which pulls this text away from (intersubjective and public) exchangevalue towards (private, personal) use-value, but without ever cleanly or clearly being able to separate out the two. It is for this reason that fan ‘appropriations’ of texts or ‘resistances’ to consumption can always be reclaimed as instances of new exchange-value. (Hills, 2002: 35)

Hills’s (2002: 34) aim, therefore, is to restore ‘dialectical thinking to the consumer (subject) and the law-of-value (object)’. He argues that ‘“use-value” and “exchange-value” cannot ever be fully separated out from one another’ (Hills, 2002: 35). This dialectic of value is quite clearly at work in second-hand markets for media collectibles. On auction websites such as eBay, many retro videogames sell for exorbitantly high prices, but not usually because they are in short supply.2 Instead, many of these videogames attract high prices because they are caught up in a system of fan consumption and use value. By collecting, discussing, and valorizing obsolesced videogames, fans imbue old (and oftentimes minor) videogames with residual value, which has the flow-on effect of inflating exchange value. Through practices of residual consumption, mass-produced videogames can acquire something of an ‘aura’ normally denied to them through processes of mechanical reproduction (Swalwell, 2017: 218; cf. Benjamin, 1969b [1940]). Hills draws much of his theoretical inspiration from Theodor Adorno, and Adorno’s dialectical approach to culture and history. This is a bold move because Adorno—and the Frankfurt School with which he was associated—is often seen as a soft target for fan studies research. Adorno is often viewed as a dark cynic who thought media audiences were powerless in the face of a manipulative, coercive, and all-encompassing culture industry. But Adorno dedicated much of his thought to deconstructing (rather than 2 Some videogames are indeed quite scarce, which drives up their exchange value. For instance, the Sega Saturn game Panzer Dragoon Saga (Team Andromeda, 1998) only received a limited production run in North America and Europe, which is (partly, though not entirely) why it often demands such an exorbitant fee at auction.

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reaffirming) the subject-object binary at the heart of consumer culture and capitalist alienation. His claim that the subject-object dialectic can only be overcome negatively in art and aesthetic experience—which he develops in Aesthetic Theory—is applicable to the dialectic of obsolescence described above, and especially to media archaeology’s ‘aestheticization’ of minor technologies. For this reason, Adorno’s thought is quite central to this chapter and the next one. For Adorno (1997), genuine aesthetic experience—which must exist outside the world of commerce—is often ‘mimetic’ in nature, which is to say that it often involves a temporary collapse of the reified distinction between subject and object. Aesthetic experience involves a kind of liquidation of our own humanity—a willingness, if only temporarily, to become mentally and physically assimilated with the artwork itself. In aesthetic experience, the subject and the object become dialectically intertwined in a struggle for mutual compatibility, and the result can be violently disorienting (cf. Nicholsen, 2010; Nicoll, 2016). Aesthetic experience of this kind is worth the effort, though, because it occasionally furnishes us with glimpses of utopian or redeemable worlds—not necessarily in a prescriptive or literal sense—but in a way that is directed negatively against the world we already inhabit. Just as ‘a musical composition compresses time’ or ‘as a painting folds spaces onto one another’, Adorno (1997: 138) writes, ‘so the possibility is concretized that the world could be other than it is’. Therefore, the emancipatory potential of mimetic aesthetic experience—of following a painting’s brush strokes with one’s eyes or performing a dramatic script—consists in its negative potential to envelop our bodies in alternative temporalities. The idea that the subject-object binary can only be resolved negatively is at the heart of the media archaeological impulse to aestheticize obsolesced technologies; to salvage them from the hype-cycle of emergent and dominant media commodities. Minor platforms possess residual significance insofar as they point negatively to alternative ‘images’ of videogame history. They provide us with glimpses of how things could be otherwise, even in questionable, undesirable, or potentially disconcerting ways. This is the basic idea informing much of what constitutes media archaeological research and art. However, problems arise when media archaeology loses sight of its negative orientation to media history, and aimlessly ‘digs through’ historical archives to retrieve the overlooked and the marginal without a clear agenda for doing so, thereby ‘cutting short dialectics in the moment of a final synthesis’ (Hills, 2002: 33). Specialist videogame fansites often grapple with a similar set of problems, especially when it comes to their approaches to the archives of videogame history. To this end, fansites are often dependent on what Helen Stuckey and

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Melanie Swalwell (2014: 528) call a ‘gift economy’ of collective knowledge production. Their ‘participatory archives’ (cf. Huvila, 2008; Manning, 2015) are positioned to capture as many fan activities and experiences as possible. Fans can often contribute magazine and box art scans, photos of collections, personal anecdotes, creative works, walkthroughs, modification guides, and other materials to the sites. Fansites thus destabilize traditional definitions of the archive as a storage facility fixed in institutional space, where official discourses can be filed away. As David S. Heineman (2014) observes in an article on ‘retrogaming’ and nostalgia, fans often perceive their own practices of curation, archivization, and appraisal as superior and thus antithetical to that of formal cultural institutions. For example, the enthusiast videogame history website ‘Hardcore Gaming 101’ (‘Submission Guidelines’, n.d.: n.p.) stipulates the following in its guidelines for prospective articles: Professional reviews answer the question ‘Is this game worth my money?’ You should be answering the question ‘Why is this game important and/ or interesting?’ Why, of all of the other tons of games that come out every week, is this game special? The object is, simply, to make [your writing] better and more detailed than professional reviews. Delve deep into the story, talk about specific scenarios or levels or situations, if they’ re worth discussing. Detail all of the characters, with pictures, and devote a lot of space to the graphical style or music. Talk about how the game fits into a genre, if at all, and how well it meets its goals compared to its brethren.

As these guidelines make clear, the fan’s ‘duty’ is not to provide advice on whether a particular videogame is worthy of investment. Rather, the guidelines state that prospective authors must account for a videogame’s historical and cultural relevance by situating it within a broader artistic canon. Moreover, the guidelines state that the fan’s writing should be ‘better and more detailed’ than that which is presented on official websites. In Heineman’s (2014: n.p.) words, this is evidence of the way fans construct ‘an identity for themselves that is grounded in nostalgia, expertise, and an agnostic relationship to the modern games industry’. Yet, by the same token, many fansites exhibit a fetishistic attachment to the objects they seek to preserve. Many fansites are, for example, primarily concerned with cultivating collector or investment communities: what videogames to buy, where to buy them from, and how much they are worth. Of course, information about where and how to acquire old videogames may be useful, but it also indirectly bolsters the dialectic of use and exchange value described by Hills. More broadly, many fansites suffer from what

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Jacques Derrida (1996: 91) calls archive fever: ‘a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the most archaic place of absolute commencement’. For Swalwell (2017), this archive fever is expressed most clearly in the desire to recapture the ‘original experience’ of a videogame. The fetishization of the original experience results in heated debates about, for example, the ideal CRT picture settings for old videogame consoles, or whether playing a videogame on original hardware as opposed to an emulator leads to a more ‘authentic’ encounter with the past. As Swalwell (2017: 219) points out, the original experience is ultimately unobtainable not only because of hardware and software degradation, but also because ‘“we” have changed’. As she writes, ‘[e]ven if it is possible to play a game on original hardware now, the player is not the same player who confronted this game in decades gone by’ (Swalwell, 2017: 219). Furthermore, as Jaako Suominen, Markku Reunanen, and Sami Remes (2015) observe, the ‘target’ of this nostalgia for the original experience is constantly shifting in videogame history. Nostalgia is not always reliant on first-hand experience of a specific place of origin, as in, for example, the baby boomer appreciation for videogames made in the 1970s and early 1980s (see Pearce, 2008). Rather, nostalgia is often inherited, adopted, or collectively imagined, and is therefore detached from real or lived experience. Swalwell (2017: 220) hypothesizes that the ‘purism’ exhibited by those who did experience a particular videogame or console in its original context is ‘probably motivated by quite benevolent attitudes: wanting others to be able to have the same joy and pleasure that they had, and to be able to appreciate and value the game in the way they do’. Slavoj Žižek (2009: 65, italics in original) provides some (indirect) insight into this fetishization of loss, provenance, and materiality when he observes that in contemporary society, ‘ideology functions more and more in a fetishistic mode as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode’. In its traditional symptomal mode, ideology is circulated and legitimized through mass media messages and commodities, but is ultimately repressed by its recipients (à la Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industries). It therefore expresses itself symptomatically through various neuroses and ‘irrational’ urges, ‘qua “returns of the repressed”‘ (Žižek, 2009: 65). In its fetishistic mode, ideology is not repressed but instead taken into account by its recipients, who nonetheless cling to objects that fully embody the ideological lies they ‘rationally’ acknowledge. ‘In some sense’, writes Žižek (2009: 65), a fetish can play the very constructive role of allowing us to cope with a harsh reality: fetishists are not dreamers lost in their own private worlds,

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they are thoroughgoing ‘realists,’ able to accept the way things are because by clinging to their fetish they are able to mitigate the full impact of reality.

This resonates with Thomas Elsaesser’s (2016: 383-384) claim that the media archaeologist’s fetishization of obsolescence is born out of a desire to mitigate the chaos of technological development in the present. Elsaesser understands media archaeology’s objects as fetishes that allow scholars to cope with the various crises that digital media pose to humanities research: [t]he almost overnight presence of digital tools—hardware and software—in work and play, information and communication came for many media scholars as a shock […] As a result, the idea of media archaeology, in the sense of presupposing a discontinuous, heterogeneous, differently caused, and interconnected emergence for digital media, seemed easier to accept, more intuitively plausible than linear histories and mono-causality. (Elsaesser, 2016: 39, italics in original)

In a similar vein, my sense is that many fans fully accept that their nostalgia for the past can never be sated. However, when confronted with a rapidly expanding digital culture, where videogames face an ‘identity crisis’ (Ruffino, 2018), fans knowingly fetishize objects that symbolically (re)connect them to a more stable historical time; that fully embody their ‘irrepressible desire to return to the origin’ (Derrida, 1996: 91). Can obsolesced technologies be aestheticized in such a way that their histories are not fetishized but instead brought into dialectical tension with the present? The following sections explore this question through an analysis of fan practices of residual mediation surrounding the Sega Saturn and Sonic X-treme. Sonic X-treme is a fragmented object whose multiplicity is stabilized through the coordinated efforts of fans. It is in this very process of coordination—or relationality—that the videogame’s aesthetic significance is articulated. Here, I develop the argument that the Sonic X-treme revival can be understood as a kind of call back to modernist aesthetics of collage, assemblage, and photomontage. Dadaist artists, for example, created fragmented and broken collages out of images, texts, and discourses as a means of subverting the linearity and order of the bureaucratic archive. As Spieker (2008: 9) writes, ‘[t]his has important consequences for our reception of [Dadaist] works, for our gaze is never quite at rest as it moves constantly (and erratically) between images and text, base layer and surface, in a movement that resolutely resists contemplation’. Benjamin (1999) adopted a similar photomontage method in his own historical writings as a means

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of capturing a dialectical image of the past. In a dialectical image, the past and the present are momentarily fused together in a ‘flash-like’ arrangement, defying linear narratives of progress and decline. The Sonic X-treme revival provides some insight into how this photomontage approach can be carried over into the curation and archivization of videogame history in the present.

‘X-Pect the X-Treme’: Sega’s downturn and the promise of a saviour The Sega Saturn was released in Japan in 1994, at a time when several videogame manufacturers were beginning to experiment with CD-ROM storage and 32-bit platform architectures. Since at least 1988, for example, Nintendo had been working with Sony to develop a CD-ROM attachment for their Super Nintendo console. However, Nintendo infamously withdrew from the collaboration following a miscommunication with Sony regarding the platform’s software-licensing model. Sony subsequently began working on the PlayStation, a console whose name was (somewhat cheekily) based on the botched Super Nintendo CD prototype. In 1992, Sega began plans to develop its own CD-ROM-based home console, which would later become the Sega Saturn. The Saturn was originally developed as a ‘2D powerhouse’ with only modest capabilities for 3D graphics. However, once Sony went public with its graphics specifications for the PlayStation in 1993, Sega responded by cramming a dual-processor into the Saturn in the final hour. As a result, programming the Saturn was, by all accounts, an extremely difficult and unintuitive process. To take full advantage of its dual-processing architecture, Saturn videogames had to be programmed in pure assembly language as opposed to the more intuitive C language supported by consoles such as the PlayStation. As a result, many Saturn videogames oscillate somewhat awkwardly between 2D and 3D design structures (colloquially known as ‘2.5D’). The Saturn is generally considered to have been a moderate success in Japan, but a commercial failure everywhere else. At the 1997 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Bernie Stolar, then-president of Sega America, infamously declared that the Saturn would not play a role in the company’s future. Fans have proposed various explanations for the Saturn’s commercial failure. Some claim that Sega was too haphazard in rushing out the Saturn for a 1994 release, and could have waited out the 2D-3D transition for several more years before developing a 3D console (much as Nintendo did). Others suggest that Sega overhyped the Saturn’s 3D capabilities, which paled in

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comparison to those offered by the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. As early as November 1996, an editorial on the sega-saturn.com fansite claimed that Sega ‘mismanaged its promotion of the Saturn’ in the West, and could have solicited more support from third-party developers (Provo, 1996: n.p.). Another editorial claims that the Saturn could have embraced its status as a 2D powerhouse, as opposed to masquerading as a console with 3D capabilities (Romanova, 1997). Perhaps the most enduring critique of the Saturn, however, is that it lacked a ‘killer app’ on the scale of a Super Mario 64 (Nintendo EAD, 1996) or Crash Bandicoot (Naughty Dog, 1996). Instead, the Saturn had NiGHTS into Dreams… (Sonic Team, 1996), an experimental 2.5D side-scrolling arcade videogame that, in one fan’s words, was ‘appealing to younger children […] but to the primary game playing audience of the time—post-adolescent males—Nights was practically anti-cool’ (Kalata, 2012: n.p.). For many, the real villain of the story is Sonic X-treme, which was planned for release on the Saturn in 1996 but was eventually cancelled by Sega in 1997. Sonic X-treme was to mark Sonic the Hedgehog’s first appearance in a 3D adventure videogame and, as such, it was marketed as a flagship product. Sega Technical Institute (STI), a North American subsidiary of Sega, was responsible for much of the videogame’s development. STI also enlisted the help of a company known as Point of View (POV) in programming development tools for the videogame. Early trailers, screenshots, and subsequent leaks suggest that Sonic X-treme was designed as a 2.5D side-scrolling adventure-platform videogame. It looked at the time to be shaping up as a ‘business as usual’ Sonic videogame, albeit in a hybrid 2D-3D environment. In reality, however, Sonic X-treme was a poorly managed piece of ‘vapourware’ that was constantly peddled by Sega as if further along in development than it actually was (Hodges, 2015; see also Bayus, Jain, and Rao, 2001). Its development was marred by miscommunication between the videogame’s various producers, designers, programmers, and artists. Yet, like any vapourware product, Sonic X-treme’s function was to act as a proverbial ‘carrot on a stick’. Its purpose was to maintain consumer enthusiasm for the Saturn and alleviate disillusionment with the Sega brand, thus deterring Saturn owners from ‘jumping ship’ and purchasing comparable products from Nintendo and Sony. Sonic X-treme was perpetually in prototype phase, as evidenced by the various test builds and engines that have surfaced since its cancellation. It was originally planned for release on the Saturn’s predecessor, the Mega Drive, as a conventional 2D side-scrolling videogame. Sega then decided to optimize the videogame for the ‘32-X’, an attachment that allowed the

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Mega Drive to play purpose-built 32-bit cartridges. In 1995, the project then moved to the Sega Saturn and was subsequently reconceived as a 3D adventure videogame. For the Saturn version, development was split between two separate teams, who were tasked with creating different sets of development tools that would be used to create the videogame. One team, which was led by STI staff, was tasked with creating the ‘boss level’ engine, which would be used to create the videogame’s boss encounter segments. The boss level engine was based on tools originally designed for the short-lived 32X version of the videogame, and therefore had to be ported to the Saturn. Meanwhile, a completely separate team—led by the soon-to-be director Chris Senn—was tasked with developing the videogame’s core engine. Senn and his team designed their tools on Windows, with the intention of later porting to the Saturn. Once ported to the Saturn, however, the Windowsdeveloped tools proved unstable. As such, the boss level engine was taken up as the core engine, which meant that the entire videogame needed to be redesigned around the affordances and constraints of that specific engine. In the meantime, numerous staff involved in the project were reshuffled or replaced, and POV (the tool development company mentioned earlier) were recruited to take over programming responsibilities. In the midst of all this, Sega reassured its consumerbase that Sonic X-treme was simply delayed and would be released in late 1996. In an article titled ‘X-Pect the X-Treme’ (1996: 33) from the July 1996 issue of Official Sega Saturn Magazine, Mike Wallis, Sonic X-treme’s producer, stated that the videogame would be ‘ready by around Autumn time’ in North America and Europe. When asked how Sonic X-treme would ‘measure up to something like Mario on the [Nintendo 64]’, he responded by stating that he was ‘working with a great team’ and that he was ‘conf ident that we are really going to do Sonic justice’ (‘X-Pect the X-Treme’, 1996: 33). When asked about whether he was under a lot of pressure, he simply replied, ‘[a]bsolutely’ (‘X-Pect the X-Treme’, 1996: 33). At the 1996 E3, Sega exhibited a trailer and playable demo that revealed just how far Sonic X-treme was from completion. The videogame was subsequently cancelled in early 1997. According to Senn (2008: n.p.), Sonic X-treme ultimately suffered from a ‘[l]ack of experience, poor business decisions, ego, politics, over-ambition, bad timing, [and] poor communication’. Despite its chequered history, however, Sonic X-treme was (and in some contexts still is) viewed as a videogame whose release could have prevented the Saturn’s commercial failure and restored Sega to its former dominant market position. Many fans ascribed a quasi-messianic potential to the videogame and were subsequently disillusioned with Sega following its

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cancellation. As one fan wrote in a July 1997 editorial for sega-saturn.com, ‘[h]ow many times were we promised a new Sonic game, and will never see a REAL sonic sequel on the Saturn? How many times did Sega fool themselves into thinking without advertising and hype that second rate 3D games would sell on a system that was meant for 2D?’ (Romanova, 1997: n.p.). More recently, an article on the website GamesRadar described Sonic X-treme as the ‘greatest Sonic game we never got to play’ and compared its cancellation to a ‘“[w]hat if…” situation on par with the dinosaurs not becoming extinct’ (Houghton, 2008: n.p.). The cancellation of Sonic X-treme is often viewed as a key reason for the Saturn’s failure and, more broadly, Sega’s financial downturn in the mid to late 1990s. For these reasons, Sonic X-treme has become a site of intense residual mediation in the present.

Sonic X-treme and the relational aesthetics of a fan revival As Paolo Ruffino (2012: 123) argues, the question with a cancelled videogame such as Sonic X-treme is not whether it exists but rather how it exists, which relates to its articulation in imaginary and residual contexts. Strictly speaking, Sonic X-treme does not exist as a singular object, but rather as a multiple object held together through collective strategies of curation (cf. Banks, 2013: 56; Mol, 2002: vii-viii). In the years since Sonic X-treme’s cancellation, a number of assets, design documents, and prototypes have either surfaced online or been leaked by former members of the videogame’s development team. There are also a number of self-appointed ‘network builders’ who attempt to stabilize Sonic X-treme’s multiplicity, including the videogame’s former director, Chris Senn; the videogame’s former lead artist, Ross Harris; and numerous fans, such as ‘jollyroger’, who resurrected an archive of original source code in 2014. These curatorial activities produce relational effects that, I argue, possess aesthetic and residual significance for videogame history. In the very process of attempting to revive Sonic X-treme, fans creatively intervene in institutionalized processes of archivization. When newly discovered prototypes, assets, and design documents are enrolled into the Sonic X-treme network, Sonic X-treme itself multiples. The first Sonic X-treme leak occurred in 1999, when Harris dumped his entire asset portfolio online. His portfolio included unreleased tilesets of playable characters, enemies, and bosses. In 2005, a disk of an early Sonic X-treme prototype sold at auction to an anonymous collector and was later leaked in 2007. The prototype turned out to be an early test build of STI’s ‘boss level’ engine. In 2006, Senn established ‘The Sonic Xtreme Compendium’, an online

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repository of leaked concept art, screenshots, storyline details, textures, and sound files. In 2014, jollyroger (2014: n.p.), a member of the ASSEMbler Games forum community, discovered an archive of Sonic X-treme source code on ‘some old disks from the defunct Point of View [POV] studio’. Jollyroger then solicited help from the ASSEMbler Games forum community in tracking down the tools necessary to resurrect the source code, which included a 1995 Nvidia NV1 video card and an original Sega Saturn software development kit. Once resurrected, the disks revealed several early builds of Sonic X-treme levels that were originally shown in the videogame’s 1996 E3 trailer, as well as Senn’s abandoned Windows test engine. Today, there are multiple playable versions of Sonic X-treme circulating online, each corresponding to the different prototypes discovered through the aforementioned leaks. Sonic X-treme is an object whose multiplicity produces tensions in the very network that seeks to stabilize it (Hodges, 2015). In her book The Body Multiple, Annemarie Mol (2002: 35-36) argues that a clinical object (which, in her case study, is a disease known as atherosclerosis) possesses a multiplicity whose ‘exigencies are incompatible, at least; they cannot be realized simultaneously’. Once brought into a medical environment, atherosclerosis is enacted, diagnosed, and treated by patients, doctors, and scientists, who each try to coordinate their conflicted experiences of the same object. In a similar vein, there are literally multiple ‘versions’ of Sonic X-treme in existence, which cannot be realized simultaneously. For example, some prototypes omit the fisheye lens perspective that was originally shown in the videogame’s 1996 trailer, leading to questions about whether it should be implemented in future builds. There is also the challenge of getting the prototypes to work on original Sega Saturn hardware. At one point, Senn even attempted to establish a more organized Sonic X-treme reconstruction strategy, which sought to coordinate the collective efforts of fans in order to produce a singular Sonic X-treme fan product. Ironically, this project suffered a similar fate to Sonic X-treme—it was eventually cancelled due to incompatibilities in ‘experience, skillsets, availability and dedication’ (Senn, n.d.: n.p.). This process reveals tensions in what John Banks (2013: 56; see also Latour, 1987: 103-106) calls ‘translation in network building’.3 By enlisting the help of fans in the reconstruction of Sonic X-treme—that is, by attempting to translate fans’ competing interests into a singular, 3 Banks’s (2013) research on actor network theory is not related to cancelled videogames or videogame history, but rather production processes within videogame studios. Nonetheless, I have found his use of ANT concepts—such as multiple objects and network building—incredibly insightful, and broadly applicable to the research presented in this chapter.

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unified project—Senn invited tensions into the Sonic X-treme network. As Banks (2013: 56) notes, ‘[t]he very process of enrolling others carries the risk of losing control of the network, and of its materials and objects heading off in unexpected directions and taking on different configurations and shapes’. Yet, by the same token, the network relies on the collaboration and cooperation of its participants in order to exist in the first place. When jollyroger resurrected the POV source code archive in 2014, debates about Sonic X-treme’s ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ state ensued. The POV source code archive contained multiple test builds as well as one previously unseen prototype (which turned out to be Senn’s abandoned Windows engine). Some of these builds featured levels originally shown in Sonic X-treme’s 1996 E3 trailer. Only one of the builds contained the fisheye perspective. Once resurrected, the prototypes proved to be quite unstable, and were subsequently patched based on community knowledge of how the videogame was meant to look and play. Some fans expressed concern about interfering with the original POV archive in this way. In a 2015 forum thread titled ‘Assembler Games member has sonic xtreme stuff’ from the Sonic Xtreme Compendium website, one user asked: ‘[is] anyone worried about losing the “original” state of the game though? It will be fun to play but how much of the game has been “fixed” or “added to”?’ (Vangar, 2015: n.p.). Another user responded with the following post: ‘to be honest it has to be patched up to even function, I would prefer playing that, [rather than] the unusable mess in a friggin museum/f ile archive purely for archival’s state [sic]’ (Chimera, 2015: n.p.). Here, the desire to archive, preserve, and restore an ‘original’ Sonic X-treme is drawn into tension with Sonic X-treme’s status as a fragmented and multiple object. This calls to mind the politics of conservation in museums: at what point should a broken or incomplete art object be left as is? Moreover, what constitutes an authentic experience of an object that possesses multiple configurations, such as Sonic X-treme? The dialectic of obsolescence comes into play here. On the one hand, there is a desire to liberate the Sonic X-treme archive for experimentation and playful subversion, to renegotiate the videogame’s textual authenticity and, therefore, to intervene in the Saturn’s history. On the other hand, there is a desire to return to a point of origin, to restore the videogame to its (non-existent) ‘original’ state. Given that Sonic X-treme was never mass-produced (or even completed), it has attained something of an aura normally associated with singular art objects. Playable builds of Sonic X-treme can be seen to possess a sort of provenance, in that it is possible to trace their version history back to the curatorial decisions made by those

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who resurrected them. However, my sense is that the true aesthetic and residual value of Sonic X-treme lies not in its as-yet undiscovered ‘original’ state or alleged ‘aura’, but rather in the curatorial processes through which its multiplicity is negotiated and stabilized. In other words, Sonic X-treme possesses residual value not for what it is, was, or should become, but rather for the relational practices that produce it. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how Sonic X-treme could be preserved or exhibited in a museum or gallery, as its relationality would, conceivably, render it illegible to institutionalized processes of curation, documentation, and archivization. In relational aesthetics, the ‘object’ of the aesthetic lies not in what Claire Bishop (2004: 61) calls the ‘detached opticality’ of appreciating a singular art object. Instead, it consists in the ‘intersubjective relations’ of collaboration and community participation, where the aesthetic experience is organized around particular social relations (Bishop, 2004: 61). Bishop (2004: 53) points out, however, that relational art often flips into the opposite of its intended function by ‘[enhancing] the status of the curator, who gains credit for stage-managing the overall laboratory experience’. Similarly, the Sonic X-treme revival is ‘stage-managed’ by several key network builders (or, indeed, gatekeepers), whose decisions are held to account by the wider fan base. Bishop (2004: 65) writes, ‘if relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?’. In other words, for Bishop, the relationality of relational art—which consists of community participation, education, engagement, and so on—should not simply be viewed as end unto itself; relational art also needs to inspire antagonism or, in Adorno’s sense, a negative orientation to the world. Scholarly debates about the preservation, curation, and exhibition of videogames are beginning to take these questions of relationality into account. Traditionally, videogame historians and archivists have focused on the preservation of hardware and software objects at the expense of more discursive or relational experiences. More recently, scholars such as James Newman (2012) have argued that software preservation is a lost cause for videogames, due simply to the sheer magnitude of technical objects and standards that would need to be coordinated in order to make such a project feasible. Instead, he says, we should turn our attention to the more pragmatic goal of documenting player experiences, emotions, and feelings, or what Helen Stuckey, Melanie Swalwell, and Angela Ndalianis (2013) call ‘popular memories’. Newman (2012: 160) sees this as a ‘shift away from conceiving of play as the outcome of preservation to a position that acknowledges play as an indivisible part of the object of preservation’. Raiford Guins (2014)

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extends the curatorial remit even further by suggesting that relational processes such as, for example, repairing broken videogames, could take on a more prominent role in videogame exhibits. It is common for videogames exhibited in museums to break down due to overuse, resulting in an ‘out of order’ label. This suggests that their use value is limited to their function as fully operating, playable objects. Yet, from the perspective of relational aesthetics, a social performance as simple as a repair process could take on a powerful curatorial function. ‘Instead of speaking of antiques’, writes Guins (2014: 141), ‘a word that often signals “hands-off,” why not reposition the games as demonstrative installations whereby visitors can observe and learn of the repair process and specialized skill set required to support these ageing machines[?]’. Likewise, the Sonic X-treme revival can offer insight into the relational methods of curation that fans use to stabilize an unarchiveable object and, in the process, offer insight into an alternative ‘image’ of videogame history. In summary, the Sonic X-treme revival opens several ‘modalities’ of nostalgia that are useful for moving beyond conceptions of nostalgia as fetishistic, unconstructive, and overly emotional (and thus gendered). I take my cue here from Natasha Whiteman (2008: 32), who argues for a need to think of nostalgia as a relational phenomenon. For Whiteman (2008: 32), thinking nostalgia relationally ‘[i]nvolves a consideration of the ways that gamers deal with the multiplicity of textual consumption by essentializing and constructing frames of reference in relation to their favoured “loved objects”‘. She identifies four modes of nostalgia that are relevant to the Sonic X-treme revival: explore, repeat, mod, and spectate. She describes each of these modes in the following way: The explore mode […] involves a form of synchronic nostalgia in which the fan desires a fixed universe, but one that can be investigated further through the fan’s agency. In contrast, the repeat mode stands for a form of nostalgia in which there is the impossible desire to reexperience something list. In contrast, the mod mode involves some transformation of the textual universe by the fan author, and the spectate mode, the transformation or development of the universe by an author other than the fan. (Whiteman, 2008: 46)

These modalities of nostalgia are useful for summarizing the (oftentimes conflicting) practices of residual mediation surrounding Sonic X-treme. Fans explore their visions of a ‘fixed’ Sonic X-treme universe by cooperating with others to stabilize the object’s multiplicity. The modality of repeat,

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however, ensures that this search for a fixed point of origin will always be fruitless. Even if as-yet undiscovered prototypes and source code continue to surface, a complete version of Sonic X-treme will always be out of reach. It is this fetishistic and ‘impossible desire to reexperience something lost’ that fuels much of the activity surrounding the videogame’s attempted revival (Whiteman, 2008: 46). Fans will, however, continue to mod and renegotiate Sonic X-treme’s textuality in the present, thus intervening in its history. A spectator can contemplate these relational effects from a distance, as well as the different curatorial decisions made by Sonic X-treme’s network builders.

Conclusion In The Arcades Project, Benjamin (1999) adopts a photomontage method in order to capture a constellational image of 19th-century Parisian commodity culture. In doing so, he assembles the arcades’ ‘smallest and most precisely cut components’—fashion, advertising, literature, architecture, dioramas, and panoramas—in order to discover what he terms ‘the crystal of the event’ (Benjamin, 1999: 461 [N2,6]). This photomontage method is mirrored in the aphoristic structure of The Arcades Project itself; the text is unfinished, and thus presents readers with what Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (2011: 6) call ‘a huge collection of notes, images, and ideas that constitute a database rather than a preorganized narrative’. Benjamin’s photomontage method can be seen to build on a Surrealist approach to the archive, which, as Spieker (2008: 96) describes, is less interested in collecting data that safeguard institutionalized knowledge, and more in collecting data that elucidate collective imaginaries, desires, and fears: Where traditional archives safeguard the preservation of historical facts, the archive of Surrealism collects events that, to the extent that they are unconscious, function as interruptions of historical process. The Surrealists wanted to establish an archive not of history but of its rupture, not of narrative but of its other.

The photomontage method therefore aims to provide an entry point into the unconscious itself—‘an archive of documents with an unknown provenance’ (Spieker, 2008: 92). Media archaeological art has a similar aim: it wants to put ‘the spectator/user/viewer into a new relation with the imaginary’, thus orienting them negatively toward dialectical images of difference and discontinuity in media history (Parikka, 2012: 43).

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Fans adopt a similar ‘photomontage’ method when coordinating Sonic X-treme’s multiplicity. As a fragmented object, Sonic X-treme is held together through relational practices of residual mediation. This involves fans collecting, curating, and resurrecting technical and discursive materials such as design documents, assets, prototypes, and source code. In the process, the videogame’s archive is liberated for experimentation and playful subversion. The archive’s ‘immunity from tampering’ is temporarily abandoned, laying bare its function as a process that gives shape to memory, nostalgia, and the materiality of historical objects in the present (Spieker, 2008: 175). At the same time, the archive is freed up to accommodate unconscious imaginaries about what Sonic X-treme could have become, were it realized. How could it have altered the Saturn’s history? How can it be resurrected in order to redeem or intervene in that history? As I have argued, the true aesthetic significance of Sonic X-treme lies not in its supposed aura, but rather in relational processes of curation and archivization that, in photomontage style, establish ‘an archive not of history but of its rupture’ (Spieker, 2008: 96). The Sega Saturn is therefore a minor platform whose difference and discontinuity is expressed not only in its historical status but also in the practices associated with its residual afterlife. Many cultural institutions are beginning to ask questions about what to archive from videogame history and how best to present or provide access to that history. In most exhibits, this usually means striking a balance between ‘object and concept-oriented’ curatorial experiences, wherein ‘conceptual’ documents (such as developer interviews, design sketches, and concept art) are placed alongside software and hardware ‘objects’ (Naskali, Suominen, and Saarikoski, 2013: 233). Yet, as the Sonic X-treme revival illustrates, there are other ways of coordinating and representing videogame history. Perhaps most importantly, a videogame can be presented as more than just a playful thing; it can also be presented as an affective archive (Anabale, 2018a) in itself, consisting of relational, imaginary, or residual practices and feelings. Sonic X-treme is an object whose recalcitrance disrupts the linear organization of the archive. It draws attention to the ‘missing links’ and ‘gaps’ in videogame history, revealing that the present is not an inevitable outcome of past events, but rather an unstable position from which to question the foundations of archival hermeneutics. In a discussion of Robert Smithson’s critique of museum spaces, Spieker (2008: 178) writes, The more museums demonstrate their own inefficacy and irrelevance for the representation of history […] the more they direct our attention to

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the empty spaces that are their true structuring element: not the objects, in other words, but the gap that separates one element from another, and not representation but empty surfaces.

My suggestion here is not that museums incorporate these missing links and gaps into their spaces by co-opting fan practices of residual mediation. Rather, my suggestion is that they attempt to bring these gaps, absences, and errors into dialectical tension with their own practices of archivization, so as to experiment with new ways of coordinating, curating, and knowing videogame history. This chapter has been premised on something of a dissatisfaction with media archaeology; that it can (perhaps inadvertently) promote a fetishization of obsolescence. Ruffino (2018: 93) argues that, despite its claims to the contrary, media archaeology tends to uphold a somewhat teleological conception of media history. That is, it tends to view the present as a ‘stable and safe destination point’ for the instability and heterogeneity of the past (Ruffino, 2018: 93). Yet, as Elsaesser (2016) points out, media archaeology’s ‘archive fever’ is symptomatic of a desire to suppress a more diff icult reality: that the present is just as chaotic and unstable as the past. This archaeological ‘impulse’—this attempt to stabilize the present through recourse to the heterogeneity of the past—has entered the collective cultural psyche. As Richard Grusin (2004) argues, contemporary media industries often seek to offset the ‘shock’ of technological development by preparing us for multiple possible futures. They do this by spinning out as many technological precedents as possible or by ‘maintaining a low level of anxiety’ through the news, such that when the future does arrive, it will already possess a clear and identifiable provenance; it will already have been ‘premediated’ (Grusin, 2004: 26). Institutionalized processes of archivization dictate a similar logic. However multi-layered, discontinuous, and contradictory the past may be, it will always f ind a f ixed address in the archive. However, as the Sonic X-treme revival illustrates, the residue of the past can be recuperated in such a way that it disrupts the stability of the present and undermines the linearity and order of the archive. As Ruffino (2018: 101) writes, ‘[w]hen confronted with the multiple narratives that make sense of their present, solid objects tend to evaporate’. Ruffino (2018: 96) therefore encourages media archaeologists to focus on ‘the ground on which the excavation is carried out’ as opposed to the excavation’s actual findings. This idea of focusing on the ‘surface’ of videogame history and its ‘arrival’ in the present is the subject of the next chapter.

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Latour B (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. Manning J (2017) Unusable Archives: Everyday Play and the Everyplay Archives. In: Swalwell M, Stuckey H, and Ndalianis A (eds.) Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives. New York: Routledge, pp. 197-212. Mol A (2002) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Montfort N and Consalvo M (2012) The Dreamcast, console of the avant-garde. Loading… The Journal of Canadian Game Studies Association 6(9): 82-99. Naskali T, Suominen J, and Saarikoski P (2013) The Introduction of Computer and Video Games in Museums—Experiences and Possibilities. In: Tatnall A, Blyth T, and Johnson R (eds.) Making the History of Computing Relevant. Berlin: Springer, pp. 226-245. Newman J (2012) Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence. New York: Routledge. Nicholsen S (2010) The Mutilated Subject Extinguished in the Arena of Aesthetic Experience: Adorno and Aesthetic Violence. Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie 30(31): 9-25. Nicoll B (2016) Mimesis as Mediation: A Dialectical Conception of the Videogame Interface. Thesis Eleven 137(1): 22-38. Nooney L (2013) A Pedestal, A Table, A Love-Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History. Game Studies 13(2): n.p. Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019) Parikka J (2012) What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge, MA: Polity. Pearce C (2008) The truth about Baby Boomer gamers. A study of over-forty computer game players. Games and Culture 3(2): 142-174. Provo F (1996, November) Has Sega Mismanaged its Promotion of the Saturn? Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Romanova N (1997, July) I’m tired of this, I quit. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Ruff ino P (2012) A Theory of Non-Existent Video Games: Semiotic and Video Game Theory. In: Fromme A and Unger A (eds.) Computer Games and New Media Cultures: A Handbook of Digital Game Studies. Dordrecht: Springer. Ruffino P (2018) Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Senn C (n.d.) Sonic X-treme. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Senn C (2008, December) Sonic Xtreme FAQ. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Spieker S (2008) The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stuckey H and Swalwell M (2014) Retro-Computing Community Sites and the Museum. In: Angelides MC and Agius H (eds.) Handbook of Digital Games. Piscataway: IEEE Press, pp. 523-547. Stuckey H, Swalwell M, and Ndalianis A (2013) The Popular Memory Archive: Collecting and Exhibiting Player Culture from the 1980s. In: Tatnall A, Blyth T, and Johnson R (eds.) Making the History of Computing Relevant. Berlin: Springer, pp. 215-255. ‘Submission Guidelines’ (n.d.) Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Suominen J, Reunanen M, and Remes S (2015) Return in Play: The Emergence of Retrogaming in Finnish Computer Hobbyist and Game Magazines from the 1980s to the 2000s. Kinephanos: n.p. Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019)

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Swalwell M (2017) Moving on from the Original Experience: Philosophies of Preservation and Dis/play in Game History. In: Swalwell M, Stuckey H, and Ndalianis A (eds.) Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives. New York: Routledge, pp. 213-233. Vangar (2015, 7 February) Re: Assembler Games member has sonic xtreme POV stuff [online forum comment]. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Whiteman N (2008) Homesick for Silent Hill: Modalities of Nostalgia in Fan Responses to Silent Hill 4: The Room. In: Whalen Z and Taylor L (eds.) Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 32-50. Williams R (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ‘X-Pect the X-Treme’ (1996, July) Official Sega Saturn Magazine, pp. 34-35. Retrieved from: (accessed 7 April 2018) Žižek S (2009) First as Tragedy, then as Farce. London and New York: Verso.

Gameography Naughty Dog (1996) Crash Bandicoot. Sony PlayStation: Sony Computer Entertainment. Nintendo EAD (1996) Super Mario 64. Nintendo 64: Nintendo. Sonic Team (1996) NiGHTS into Dreams…. Sega Saturn: Sega. Team Andromeda (1998) Panzer Dragoon Saga. Sega Saturn: Sega. Treasure (1996) Guardian Heroes. Sega Saturn: Sega.

5.

‘How history arrives’: Twine as a minor platform Abstract In this chapter, I discuss videogame history’s ‘arrival’ in the present through an analysis of Twine. Twine is an HTML-based software tool for creating and playing hypertext fiction. Twine is, perhaps, the clearest expression of what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘minor literature’. Its practitioners actively undermine expectations of how videogames should be played, who should make them, and what kinds of narrative themes they should explore. Many of its videogames directly challenge the perceived normativity of the ‘gamer’ identity. In this way, Twine articulates an ‘archaeology of possible futures’ for videogame history. Drawing on interviews with three Twine developers, this chapter argues that Twine is best understood as a minor platform. Keywords: Twine, minor platform, queer temporality, democratization, game engine

The question of ‘what counts’ in videogame history should not simply be answered by taking a shovel to the past and digging up marginalized subjects and objects. As Laine Nooney (2013: n.p.) argues, the question of what counts in videogame history should also involve an interrogation of ‘how history arrives’ in the present; how the dominant construction of videogame history gives shape to certain subject positions and ways of knowing or feeling. Nooney (2013: n.p.) asks, ‘[h]ow do spaces, bodies, and objects entangle to produce a historical subject—and why do we presume that this subject is a “gamer”?’. Asking these questions means paying attention to what Nooney (2013: n.p.) calls the ‘ghostly realities of privilege, access, affect, and identity that constitute the dirt from which we “excavate” media archaeology’s objects’. Videogame history arrives in the present with significant wreckage piled at its feet, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s metaphor. From this wreckage emerges a dominant identity (the gamer), a master

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narrative of videogame history (which informs said identity), a singular structure of feeling (which dictates what is thinkable, sayable, or doable in videogame culture), and institutional gatekeepers (that have power over who has access to said culture). For Nooney, videogame historians should not simply brush aside this wreckage in their search for the marginal, the overlooked, and the forgotten. Rather, they should ask how this wreckage came to be, and how it ensured that the marginal, the overlooked, and the forgotten were written out of videogame history in the first place. This chapter looks at minor narratives, voices, and technologies that contest the arrival of videogame history in the present. It does this through an analysis of Twine. Twine is a free open source HTML-based interactive fiction editor that enables users to create and publish hypertext narratives. Twine was created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and, at the time of writing, continues to support an active community of developers and players. Although Twine differs from the previous case studies in a number of important ways—it is not, for example, an ‘obsolete’ hardware platform, and its videogames appear to have a closer family resemblance to hypertext fiction than they do to conventional videogame software—it also shares with them a similar status as a minor platform. Very broadly speaking, Twine exists on the margins of videogame culture. Its developer and player communities are largely made up of people whose voices have, historically, been diminutized or excluded in this culture. These communities have mobilized Twine as a videogame-making tool partly in response to the exclusionary values, cultural discourses, and gendered subjectivities that took root in videogame culture in the 1980s and 1990s (as discussed in Chapter Four), but that still remain active today. Twine videogames (or ‘twines’) are often written by women, people of colour, people with disabilities, and/or LGBTIQA+ people. They often explore themes unacknowledged (or deliberately avoided) by mainstream videogames, such as sexuality, gender, mental health, identity, race, and discrimination. Often, their play structures focus on experiences of disempowerment and marginalization as opposed to agency and power. Twine is thus strongly identified as a minor platform for minor voices, albeit one that has enabled previously marginalized social groups to intervene in the dominant paradigms of videogame culture and destabilize its normative structures of feeling. Twine is perhaps the clearest expression of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986) call a ‘minor literature’, a concept introduced at the beginning of this book. That is, Twine is characterized by a sort of territorial unruliness. It adopts a minor ‘language’ of videogame design in the text adventure genre—which was once popular on 1980s microcomputers—and

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it leverages that genre to radicalize the making and playing of videogames in the present. Twine possesses a collective or perhaps even emancipatory value, in that it opens up the playing and making of videogames to a more diverse group of people. This is a contested claim, however. As Twine author and critic merritt kopas points out in her 2015 edited collection Videogames for Humans, Twine’s emancipatory potential has been overhyped in the mainstream media, putting the platform at risk of being co-opted by more powerful institutional forces. However, as she writes, long after Twine’s supposed ‘revolution’ took place, people are still producing ‘powerful, unique works with the tool […] Twine has been the site of an incredible artistic flourishing at the intersections of digital games and fiction’ (kopas, 2015: 8, 10). Twine is often ascribed ‘revolutionary’ potential by virtue of its alleged capacity to ‘democratize’ the tools of videogame development. The Twine software can be downloaded for free1 and operated on a low-end computer. Its editing interface requires only a basic familiarity with the visual structure of hypertext. Twines can be published for free, distributed online, and played within a web browser. 2 Twine’s openness is now somewhat less remarkable than it was when videogame developers f irst took up the platform several years ago. In the intervening years, a number of free and ‘easy-to-use’ videogame-making tools or ‘engines’ have effectively monopolized the labour and craft of videogame development in amateur and professional contexts. Game engines are software tools that enable videogame content to be created, and code frameworks that enable that content to run on different platforms and devices (see Nicoll and Keogh, 2019). Engines such as ‘Unity’ are, much like Twine, ‘free’3 to download, easy to use, and have gained a reputation for demystifying the process of videogame development. As kopas (2015: 8) predicted in her aforementioned edited collection on Twine, game engines such as Unity have depoliticized the discourse of democratization once attributed to Twine’s ‘revolution’: 1 Scholars in the ‘political economic’ tradition of media studies have long noted that there is no such thing as ‘free’ in the media industries. Media that seem free—such as free-to-air television or freemium apps—are usually designed in a way to commoditize other aspects of our media activities (our attention, our time, our labour, and so on). However, to my knowledge, Twine lays claim to no such commercial ambitions. 2 Twines normally save as TWS files, but can be exported to HTML-based web files, which is how the majority of twines are published. 3 Unlike Twine, Unity is offered for ‘free’ as a means of monopolizing its network effects, collecting data from end users, and soliciting venture capital investment.

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This is what an artistic revolution looks like: some people get a little famous, nobody gets rich, and years later, people who have more resources than you steal your ideas and use them to get richer and more famous than they already were.

However, unlike engines such as Unity, Twine and its proponents explicitly reject the business structures and market logics of the mainstream videogame industry, preferring instead to source income from donations and crowd funding. They also tend to challenge the normative subject positions of videogame culture by questioning who videogames are made for, how they are made, and what they feel like to play. This is, perhaps, one reason why Twine (and, occasionally, even platforms like Unity) attract fierce criticism from socially conservative videogame players, developers, and commentators. Twine allows anyone to partake in the making and playing of videogames, not just those already inculcated in the culture. This is fundamentally unsettling to a dominant culture and identity that prides itself on its otherness and, frequently, its ‘straightness’. Twine is thus a minor platform—a language, community, and technology—that exists within, and parasitically disrupts, a major monoculture. To make these claims, in this chapter I draw on interviews with several Australian videogame development students and recent graduates who are experimenting with Twine in their videogame-making practices. 4 Much like previous case studies, Twine contains a potential to expose ruptures in videogame history, to orient us toward alternative ways of knowing our object of study, and to articulate alternative structures of feeling. Yet, Twine is also quite different to the previous case studies in a number of important ways. The Vectrex, the Neo Geo, and the Sega Saturn each attempted to become major platforms in their respective cultural periods, yet ultimately attained a minor status as a result of their ‘failure’ to do so. Conversely, Twine does not lay claim to any commercial ambitions. It is a non-videogame platform, originally developed for the explicit purpose of creating hypertext fiction, which was taken up by marginal demographics 4 The interviews referenced in this chapter took place in January and February of 2018. The interviews were semi-structured and lasted for approximately one hour. During this period, I interviewed around 17 professional videogame developers, amateurs, ‘indies’, students, and educators. I asked participants primarily about their use of game engines such as Unity, Unreal, and Twine. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and then analysed for key themes. The student participants were often quite keen to discuss Twine, which is why I have included some of their comments in this chapter. Each of the participants discussed in this chapter agreed to be referred to by their real names.

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as a minor platform. It is, in other words, a minor platform by choice. This is precisely what makes it useful as an epistemic tool for investigating—and contesting—the arrival of videogame history in the present. Importantly, by positioning Twine at the end of the book’s chapter trajectory, and by framing it in terms of videogame history’s arrival in the present, I am not claiming that the fringe developer and player communities associated with the platform emerged overnight. LGBTIQA+ people in particular have always made and played videogames, as initiatives such as Adrienne Shaw’s LGBTQ Video Game Archive have shown. Nor am I claiming that Twine represents the ‘end’ of videogame history or some kind of fetishized, platonic ideal of a minor platform. Videogame history is always arriving, and Twine, like other minor platforms, is an important site for its (re)articulation and (re)negotiation. I proceed by considering Twine through each of the key arguments developed in this book; first, in terms of the rupture it inhabits; second, in terms of the alternative structures of feeling it articulates; and finally, in terms of its status as a theoretical object. This discussion points to what I see as the fundamental value of studying minor platforms, and thus leads into the conclusion to this book.

Twine’s ‘revolution’ Twine’s rise to prominence in the early 2010s was accompanied by a groundswell of voices calling for the ‘democratization’ of videogame-making tools. Scholars (e.g. Bogost, 2011) and developers (e.g. Anthropy, 2012) alike argued for the need to recast videogames as a medium for everyday creative expression, as opposed to a highly technical and institutionalized craft. This ‘discourse’ of democratization was congruent with a broader utopianism surrounding promises of ‘openness’ and ‘participation’ in digital culture, espoused by platforms such as Wikipedia (Tckaz, 2014; Jenkins, 2006). Democratization took on symbolic power in software culture at a time when an underlying ‘hatred of democracy’ (Rancière, 2014) took root in Western politics, wherein state welfare and policy support for media creatives was withdrawn in favour of neoliberal models of self-governance and entrepreneurship (see Chun, 2011; McRobbie, 2016; Nicoll and Keogh, 2019). Twine was and still is often seen as a ‘proof of concept’ for the supposed value of democratized videogame-making tools. One reason for this is that the Twine software has a notably low barrier to entry. A fully customized twine can be developed with very little programming knowledge. This is not to say that all Twine developers are unskilled or lack programming

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knowledge; on the contrary, many Twine developers possess extensive knowledge of programming as well as expertise in narrative design (cf. Ruberg, 2019). However, as a videogame-making tool, Twine is arguably more accessible than the alternatives (namely engines such as Unity), especially for people from non-programming and non-videogame backgrounds and disciplines. Twine’s editing interface provides an intuitive visual map of the user’s project, and design errors can be identified and resolved by switching rapidly between testing and editing modes. As Jane Friedhoff (2013: 4) points out in her ‘platform study’ of Twine, the software’s editing interface ‘most closely emulates the brainstorming, content generation, and organizational process of writing’ as opposed to the more complex interfaces of engines such as Unity and Unreal (which, at a certain level, require competency in programming languages such as C# and the like). However, unlike a platform such as the Neo Geo AES, Twine was not imbued with imaginaries about its democratizing potential from the beginning. It attained this status as a result of its positioning within cultural discourses and its adoption by certain social groups as a videogame-making tool. Twine can be seen as both a distillation and an offshoot of the ‘indie videogames’ ethos, which gained traction in the mid-2000s. ‘Indie’ (short for independent) is a nebulous and largely contradictory term in videogame culture. It can refer to a mode of production, an approach to videogame design, or a subject position. At its core, however, it implies an alternative or perhaps even oppositional orientation to the mainstream videogame industry. Paolo Ruffino (2013: 111) describes the indie ethos succinctly: independent games are usually made without the help of a publisher, have a limited budget, are not usually for profit, but are also groundbreaking and beyond what is proposed by the mainstream industry. Such movement is, allegedly, a process of emancipation, of progressive liberation that goes beyond technical, economic, social, and cultural constraints.

One of the fundamental tenets of indie development is freedom from the economic and institutional pressures of formal videogame development. However, as Ruffino (2013: 118) notes, the concept of independence is, in reality, often ‘used to justify the emergence of a new sort of supply chain or production process’. That is, the indie ethos often recapitulates a neoliberal logic underpinning creative labour in the knowledge economy: if you do what you love and pour your heart and soul into your work, then you only have yourself to blame if things go wrong. As Angela McRobbie (2002: 521)

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highlights, this kind of logic ‘serves the interests of the new capitalism well, ensuring the absence of social critique’ (cf. Ruffino, 2013: 116-117). The indie ethos has never been a stable concept, as it encompasses such a wide (and at times incompatible) range of practices and discourses.5 Furthermore, independent, alternative, or oppositional videogame-making practices and communities have existed for decades—Korea’s informal videogame industry, examined in Chapter Two, is one such example. Bart Simon (2013: 1) captures the multiplicities and contradictions of the term well when he asks, ‘[w]hat is this Indie thing? Are we talking about a social movement, an art movement, a cultural scene, a fad, an ethics, a value orientation, a social identity, an assertion of authority, a cultural politics, an accident, [or] a new form of capitalism[?]’. While I agree with Felan Parker (2013: 2) when he asserts that we should investigate the dialectical relations among these competing definitions rather than attempt to come up with a single definition, there is at least one strand that unites these contradictory definitions. And that is that indie videogames and their makers are often constructed as an alternative to their formal counterparts. Since its inception, the indie ethos has carried the promise that anyone can bypass the institutional structures of professional videogame development and independently publish their own videogames. The 2008 videogame Braid (Number None, 2008), created by self-identified indie developer Jonathan Blow, was a major catalyst that contributed to the development of an indie ‘scene’ in the mid-2000s. While it was certainly not the first videogame to be categorized as indie, and Blow was not the first videogame developer to self-identify as independent, Braid nevertheless became a prototypical example of the indie ethos. The videogame was a huge commercial and critical success. It was widely acclaimed for synthesizing novel puzzle-solving mechanics with an enigmatic yet conceptually rich narrative. The Atlantic even went so far as to call it a ‘bona fide phenomenon’ in 2012 (Clark, 2012). Blow subsequently became something of a figurehead for the indie development scene. He appeared in documentaries, at conferences, and in newspaper interviews. Publications such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker presented him as a kind of rogue auteur in an industry overrun with artistically bankrupt content. He came to embody what we 5 Ruff ino (2018: 55) argues that ‘[t]his process of moving and contesting the boundaries of independence is […] what constitutes independent gaming: it produces and incites verbal performances; it facilitates the production of games, events, articles and festivals, as well as forms of hospitality (such as inviting gamers to play for free or inviting designers to distribute their games through dedicated online channels), all of which contribute to defining who and what is included in the independent territory’.

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might call the indie ‘imaginary’—someone who existed outside the formal industry and was able to ‘make it big’, who publicly expressed disdain for contemporary trends in videogame development and design, and whose videogames possessed a distinctive ‘personal touch’. Yet, while Blow is often viewed as a paragon of the indie ethos, he can just as easily be seen as the epitome of its contradictions. Beyond Blow’s somewhat unorthodox approach to videogame development and the fact that he works independently, it is difficult to describe him or his practices as genuinely alternative or oppositional. He has a formal education in computer science, his videogames are sold on major platforms, and the discourses that surround him are undeniably gendered, celebrating his ‘genius’ and the intellectual complexity of his output. The labour practices and design philosophies he espoused in lectures and interviews may have seemed somewhat alternative in the 2000s, but in the intervening years, they have become institutionalized features of vieogame development. Indeed, many of the fundamental tenets of indie development—such as casual and self-driven labour practices, the revival of ‘retro’ genres and aesthetics, and discourses of auteur vision—have been co-opted by the formal industry (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009; Martin and Deuze, 2009; McCrea, 2013). At the same time, the indie scene has reified many of the inequalities attributed to mainstream videogame development, such as self-exploitation and structural discrimination, rather than alleviating them as it once promised it would (Fisher and Harvey, 2013; Westecott, 2013). While the indie movement inevitably fell short of its imagined expectations, it nevertheless produced an ‘opening’ in videogame culture—what Felan Parker (2012: 42; cf. Baumann, 2007) calls an ‘opportunity space’—for the Twine scene to emerge. The foundations of this opportunity space were not only technological but also social and discursive. Prior to Twine’s emergence, people were already pushing for alternative ways of making and playing videogames. Twine was subsequently taken up as a videogamemaking tool, even though it was never intended to be used as such. Ironically, once Twine began gaining momentum in videogame culture, people often made sense of it through the lens of the indie movement and its unfulfilled promises. In fact, much of the rhetoric that surrounds Twine is similar to the rhetoric that emerged alongside the indie movement. Twines are, for example, often framed as a ‘better class’ of videogame because they deal with more intricate, personal, and political themes than conventional videogames (cf. Parker, 2012: 56). It is also remarkably common for twines to be evaluated in terms of whether they make players cry (see, for example, Hudson, 2014), which, as Parker (2012: 53) notes, is often deployed as a ‘litmus

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test’ in reviews of indie videogames. Much like the indie movement, Twine is often celebrated for its utopian potential to dismantle the institutional barriers of professional videogame development. Publications such as The New York Times Magazine have described that platform as a ‘video-game technology for all’ (Hudson, 2014), and academics and journalists alike have celebrated its revolutionary and democratizing potential (Ellison, 2013; Keogh, 2013; Harvey, 2014) The so-called democratization of videogame development is often described as a process determined by the availability of low-cost and lowbarrier-to-entry videogame-making tools. This reinforces a ‘production/ consumption dichotomy’ (Gitelman, 2006: 61) wherein accessible tools emerge from the ‘centre’ of the videogame industry and cause various ‘effects’ at the fringes of videogame culture. However, as the above discussion illustrates, the supposed democratization of videogame development—if we can call it that—did not happen overnight (if at all), and it was not only technological. It can also be understood as a social or discursive project, driven in large part by the collective efforts and long-term agitations of marginalized players and developers. I discussed these questions with several of my interview participants, who are (at the time of writing) current or recent university students. They describe witnessing first-hand a shift in the culture of videogame development, which for them was brought about not only by tools such as Twine but also broader social changes in videogame culture. Grace Bruxner, a Melbourne-based videogame developer and undergraduate student, explained that the tools of videogame development are, in her experience, ‘irrelevant’. As she told me, ‘I think that the problem with diversity in creating interesting and unique games isn’t an issue with the engine. I think it’s an issue with the culture around games’. Noni Och, a videogame developer and recent videogame development graduate based in Sydney, explained that the process of democratization is, in her view, both technological and cultural: I’m really glad that I found Twine when I was 16, because I suddenly had this outlet for making all these stories that I had in my head and didn’t know what to do with […] There is a cultural shift, this idea that anyone can make games, but having those resources like Twine […] Having those things available, having those things easy to download, things that are free. Having a free version of things is really great, because there are people who are not going to be able to afford pricey engines. Having these things available to them and

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spreading the word, having that cultural shift, especially in the game development industry […] This is for everyone […] This is something that anyone can do and everyone can sort of join in. Yeah, I do think it’s a bit of both. I think it’s a bit of cultural shift and a bit of engines making their things more accessible and more available.

My sense is that many videogame developers—including the students quoted above—have collectively pushed for Twine to be adopted as a videogamemaking tool. This long-term grassroots movement was bolstered by a number of key proponents of Twine, including Anna Anthropy, Porpentine, merritt kopas, Mattie Brice, Naomi Clark, and Lana Polansky. Anthropy (2012) and kopas (2015), for example, have theorized Twine’s political potential in publications such as Rise of the Videogame Zinesters and Videogames for Humans. They both describe organizing public forums and workshops on Twine, as well as giving presentations at festivals, conferences, schools, and community centres. Twine is, therefore, a theoretical tool that enables its authors to explore alternative ways of thinking, playing, and making videogames. It has arguably been much more successful than the indie movement in facilitating a symbolic shift in the making and playing of videogames in this way. Twine’s symbolic power is particularly evident in the reactionary discourses that have emerged in response to it. Some people view Twine as a threat to traditional definitions of who can make and play videogames, as well as what videogames ‘should’ feel like to play. My interview participants described witnessing this backlash in their undergraduate degrees, where their peers tended to develop strong allegiances to particular engines, programming languages, and tools, and were often dismissive of more accessible platforms such as Twine. Noni, for example, described ‘encountering harassment’ both online and at her university, where people accused her of not being ‘a real developer’ because of her preference for Twine. Erika Verkaaik, an independent videogame developer, educator, and master’s student based in Brisbane, also explained that their peers would automatically dismiss Twine because of its accessibility: It’s this weird thing where game development is […] It is a creative medium, but it has a technical part of it with the coding […] And because it has that technical part and coding there’s a lot of ‘I’m better than you’ sort of attitude with that. It’s odd because Twine is based on HTML. You could do so much with the coding, and I’ve seen people do amazing things, but

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if you say, ‘Oh, I’m using Twine’, people are like, ‘Oh, you’re just using click and point. It’s going to be so basic.’ They have this kind of automatic idea of what it’s going to be […] So when you say, ‘I’m making something in Twine’, people are like, ‘Oh, it’s just that.’ I guess other engines like Unity and Unreal have an affordance where you can make anything in them, or they don’t have a specific genre that they’re typically used for. So, if you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m making something in Unity’, they’d be like, ‘Oh, what are you making?’. They wouldn’t just stop the conversation there.

Erika went on to explain that, in their experience, discussions among students and early career developers often focused on which tools and engines were best for ‘graphics and […] efficiency and proficiency’ as opposed to ‘more meaningful conversations about game engines and like, ways to make them more accessible’. Noni even described a learning environment wherein certain lecturers and teachers would often discourage students from using certain software tools. Students would often develop allegiances to particular engines as a result, and dismiss anything that deviated from the ‘norm’. It is no coincidence that these reactionary discourses have calcified around a platform that has been successful in attracting a more diverse and gender-balanced community of players and developers. In their book Game Cultures, Jon Dovey and Helen Kennedy (2006: 37) point out that, historically, videogames that have captured a more diverse demographic of players— particularly female players—are almost universally decried as ‘deviations from the “classic game model” […] which implicitly works to reinforce the notion that these are not really games and their players are not really gamers’. Indeed, much like ‘casual’ and ‘social’ videogames—which are typically played on mobile phones or social networking sites—twines are often viewed as what John Vanderhoef (2013: n.p.) calls ‘discursive representations of passive consumption and femininity’. As Vanderhoef (2013: n.p.) explains, casual and social videogames are often ‘treated by a significant number in the gaming community as either threatening because they supposedly herald the end of so-called hardcore games or irrelevant because [they] do not count as legitimate game experiences’. In these contexts, platforms such as Twine are often feared as a kind of ‘Trojan horse’ for femininity, queerness, or political correctness to ‘creep in[to videogame culture] and fundamentally alter the gendered game experiences that culture values’ (Vanderhoef, 2013: n.p.).

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In 2014, these reactionary discourses snowballed into a semi-coordinated harassment campaign known as ‘gamergate’. The campaign was orchestrated primarily on social media. It targeted several outspoken critics of sexism and misogyny in videogame culture, most of them female videogame journalists and developers. One of the main catalysts for this campaign was a widely acclaimed twine known as Depression Quest (Quinn, 2013). The campaign’s supporters took issue with the fact that a Twine videogame, written and developed by a woman, could receive such widespread critical acclaim. As such, they deemed it to be a conspiracy wherein videogame journalists and Twine authors were colluding in an effort to collectively undermine the core values, meanings, and identities of videogame culture. These kinds of anxieties have existed in videogame culture since at least the mid-1980s, as illustrated in Chapter Three. However, gamergate was particularly notable for generating a significant following and receiving widespread coverage in mainstream media outlets. Some videogame developers and critics—many of them Twine authors—even received threats that forced them to leave their homes or avoid appearing in public spaces. As commentators observed at the time (Alexander, 2014; Golding, 2014), this movement was, perhaps, a response to the disintegration of the gamer identity and the structures of power that have traditionally supported it. Twine’s success, which was brought about by a community of players and developers who were collectively calling for change, posed a serious threat to the gamer identity and its habitus, and a malicious countermovement emerged as a result. Yet, it is important to recognize that although Twine is at the centre of a significant rupture in videogame history, it has not completely achieved the utopian goals often ascribed to it, nor is it the only platform or movement associated with these cultural instabilities. Although Twine created an opportunity space for the diversification and democratization of videogame development, the reality is that women, people of colour, people with disabilities, and LGBTIQA+ people still often occupy highly precarious and marginal positions in the industry. As Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell argue (2018: 12), although marginalized groups are becoming increasingly visible in videogame culture, and although some of the older power structures are beginning to give way as a result, conservative masculinity is nonetheless ‘enjoying a significant resurgence of control’ in other, emergent areas such as e-sports. Furthermore, Twine’s emancipatory potential has, in a sense, been co-opted by an emergent market for free and accessible videogamemaking tools and engines. The Unity game engine, one of the key players in this market, has adopted a very similar language of ‘democratization’ in its marketing strategies. In their 2018 keynote for the Game Developers

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Conference, Unity’s representatives repeatedly emphasized ‘democratization of development’ as a key agenda for the company. Unlike Twine, Unity is in a position to leverage this discourse as a means of ‘enrolling’ more users into its software ecology, thus monopolizing its network effects (Nicoll and Keogh, 2019). It is also important to note that videogame-making tools that have ostensibly ‘democratized’ videogame development—which include not only engines but also ‘free’ analytics tools used in, for example, mobile videogame development—have, in Jennifer R. Whitson’s (2019: 9) words, ‘create[d] new resource barriers and literacies that restrict who is able to collect, analyse, and make data actionable, limiting which studios enter the mobile sector’. In deploying a similar discourse of democratization, however, Twine and its authors lay claim to a different set of aspirations. They do not seek to gain more power in the existing culture of videogame development, but rather to restructure the very institutions, values, and identities that the existing culture is built on. All technologies have real and imagined effects, the latter of which almost always go unrealized. However, as discussed in Chapter Three, the important question is not whether a technology actually succeeds in its promise to revolutionize the means of production and communication. Instead, the important question is what these imaginaries reveal about contemporary fantasies, anxieties, and apprehensions regarding technological and social change. Much like the Neo Geo, Twine forecasts a shift in videogame culture that is both discursive and technical; a shift where the tools of videogame development are becoming more accessible (with varied outcomes); where marginalized members of the community are becoming increasingly vocal about their desire for change; and where the core values that once defined videogame culture are being questioned. Twine is thus a minor platform that prompts me (and its developers and players) to reflect on videogame history’s arrival in the present—to challenge videogame history’s major narratives, meanings, and subject positions—and, in the process, to open up alternative possibilities for a future yet to come.

Twine’s queer utopian hermeneutics Twine was originally created as a tool for writing hypertext fiction. Hypertext fiction is a form of electronic storytelling that makes use of hypertext links to construct ‘interactive’ and non-linear narrative texts. In a Twine videogame, hyperlinks can serve a variety of functions. They may, for example, enable players to act in a narrative, elaborate on a detail in the

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text, or simply move from one screen of text to another. Twines often make use of branching paths in order to provide players with some semblance of freedom to determine a path through the narrative. To borrow Espen Aarseth’s (1997: 98) term, twines can be characterized as ‘heterarchical’ texts in that no individual hyperlink or ‘node’ in the overall narrative structure has hierarchical power over another. Many twines also share an affinity with text-based adventure videogames, which predate hypertext fiction. Many early computer games were text-driven. They often required players to enter command-line style prompts in order to make their ‘character’ perform different tasks in the videogame. Much like these early text-driven computer videogames, many twines adopt a second-person perspective in their narratives, and some even invite players to enter their own prompts. By adopting Twine as a videogame-making tool, then, Twine authors are recuperating minor languages of videogame design, visualization, and interfacing, and bringing those minor languages into dialectical tension with videogame culture’s major structures of feeling. Many Twine authors describe Twine as a videogame platform (see Anthropy, 2012; kopas, 2015). However, twines give new meaning to many of the concepts traditionally associated with videogame play, such as interactivity, controls, mechanics, and challenge. Unlike the ‘playful’ virtual worlds often associated with contemporary ‘triple-a’ videogames, twines are primarily experienced as written and representational texts, and are often highly authorial. Many Twine authors treat the videogame industry itself as a kind of muse, by writing videogames that deliberately subvert or undermine experiences of immersion, agency, and even ‘fun’. Twines are at once both like and unlike conventional videogames and any analysis of them needs to be sensitive to their awkward and oftentimes antagonistic position in relation to videogame culture’s dominant structures of feeling. Twines eschew the preoccupations of conventional videogame design by, for example, deliberately stripping players of the kind of agency usually privileged in triple-a titles. By subverting player agency, many Twine authors seek to reconfigure established power relations between players and developers. For example, the twine Depression Quest (Quinn, 2013), discussed in the previous section, actively withdraws hyperlinks from the text as a means of communicating the debilitative symptoms of depression. It does this by displaying certain hyperlinks in strikethrough text. Ironically, the distinct lack of agency in Depression Quest creates a more embodied and affective relation between the player, the text, and the author’s narrative voice. Consider the following passage, where the main character deliberates

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about calling a therapist the morning after a friend (Amanda) offers her a recommendation and phone number via email: The next morning, you check your email again with blurry eyes. Amanda’s email is still there, seemingly waiting for you. You are no more decided than you were yesterday. What now? 1. Just call already—it can’t hurt to check it out. 2. Call after wrestling with it for a few minutes longer. 3. Don’t call. This is way too much for you to be able to deal with right now.

This is a key scenario in Depression Quest, as it is one of the few occasions where someone succeeds in reaching out to the character in a meaningful way, and one of the few storyline threads where the player is offered a promising lead for taking active steps toward dealing with the character’s depression. Two out of three hyperlinks are made unavailable at this pivotal moment, and as such, the scenario is experienced as particularly disempowering.6 For Twine authors such as Mattie Brice (2013) and Lana Polansky (2014), this process of undermining player agency is a deliberate tactic for diverting power away from the player and back to the developer. In conventional videogames, the player is usually positioned as the ‘subject’ of the designed experience, whereas in many Twine videogames, the player’s agency is very often destabilized, and the author instead has agency in determining the pace and flow of the narrative. This reconfiguration of power puts the Twine author in a position to have their voice and their story heard. As merritt kopas (2015: 14) writes, ‘Twine has occasionally been mocked for the number of games about physical and mental ailments that it’s been used to produce. But these works exist in the context of a medium that historically hasn’t made any space for explorations of weakness, hurt, or struggle’. In his article ‘Hackers and Cyborgs’, Brendan Keogh (2015) argues that this reconfiguration of power implies an alternative ‘technicity’ of player embodiment. For Keogh, videogames have developed alongside two dialectically intertwined conceptions of player identity: the hacker and 6 This extract is quoted from my own play-through of Depression Quest, so other players’ experiences of this scene may differ depending on actions taken prior to the scenario.

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the cyborg. The hacker identity was forged in the early 1960s, when MIT students created some of the first recognizable videogames by playfully experimenting with computers. In Keogh’s account, the hacker identity burrowed deep into the psyche of videogame culture, and was further consolidated by magazines in the mid-1980s (as illustrated in Chapter Three). With the recent shift in power dynamics associated with platforms such as Twine, however, Keogh suggests that an alternative technicity of player embodiment has emerged: that of the cyborg. For Keogh, the cyborg has always existed in videogame culture as a kind of ur-identity, but it is only now becoming properly articulated. Unlike the hacker identity, which has its roots in a culture ‘that is masculinist and hostile to women […] that focuses on “playing with” computers rather than using them [… and] that appreciates formal complexity for its own sake’ (Keogh, 2015: 5), the cyborg is more focused on ‘participation and integration’ (Keogh, 2015: 10) with and through videogame technologies, thereby effacing the hierarchical dichotomy of player and videogame. Defined in opposition to the hacker, it is clear that the cyborgian mode of player embodiment strongly resonates with Twine videogames. One issue with Keogh’s approach, however, is that it does not go into detail about what, specifically, it means for players to take on a cyborg identity.7 The cyborg is primarily defined negatively, as in not the hacker. But what does ‘participating in’ or becoming more ‘integrated’ with technology actually entail? In Chapter One, I described the player-Vectrex-stereoscope arrangement through Jonathan Crary’s (1992: 126) metaphor of ‘corporeal adjacency’. The Vectrex player is, in this arrangement, less of a detached and individualized observer and more of an immobile participant whose cooperation with the technology enables the 3D ‘conjuration’ to take place. Twine videogames create a similar kind of corporeal adjacency between player and platform, but with different results for players. Before describing this alternative mode of embodiment, it is necessary to first establish how the Twine interface differs from that of conventional videogames. In terms of commonalities, twines share with most videogames an interest in what James Ash (2015) calls the ‘resolution’ of on-screen objects. In Ash’s definition (2015: 36), the term resolution refers not to the graphical clarity of an object (though graphics can influence resolution) bur rather to the player’s ‘ability to determine what an object is and what it does through the way in which the object transduces particular qualities to the player’s 7 Keogh (2018b) explores these questions in more detail in his book, A Play of Bodies: How we Perceive Videogames.

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senses’. The resolution of on-screen objects in some sense determines the player’s ability to intuit, through the help of ‘visual, audio, and haptic information’, what can be interacted with in a videogame and how (Ash, 2015: 36). Objects with high resolution appear more ‘determinate’ to the player, which is to say that they are designed to appear more capable to be interacted with or manipulated in a way that is productive or meaningful in relation to a videogame’s overall mechanics or objectives. Objects with low resolution, on the other hand, do not typically possess the same qualities and are therefore designed to appear ‘indeterminate’ to the player. Ash analyses the PlayStation videogame Metal Gear Solid (Konami, 1998) as an example. In most videogames, everyday environmental objects such as tables, lockers, and boxes normally emit ‘low’ resolution, insofar as they are usually part of the scenery, and therefore appear indeterminate to the player. However, Metal Gear Solid is a third-person espionage videogame, meaning that players often find themselves hiding behind, beneath, or within everyday objects in order to evade enemy detection. Therefore, in Metal Gear Solid, tables, lockers, and boxes emit high resolution, because they can be interacted with in a way that coheres with the videogame’s designed affordances. There is also an element of habitus or internalized knowledge at play here, in that players already familiar with the Metal Gear Solid franchise (or espionage videogames more generally) will likely possess the requisite dispositions for gauging the resolution of on-screen objects, even with limited exposure to the videogame. In a Twine videogame, hyperlinks appear more graphically and textually determinate to players, and thus emit higher resolution. This is a slightly banal observation, but many hyperlinks are quite transparent about their function. The term ‘back’, for example, often appears at the end of a tangential branch of text, signalling that it will return the player to the previous screen. Other twines utilize colour as a way of communicating the resolution of certain hyperlinks. In With Those We Love Alive (Porpentine, 2014), for example, purple hyperlinks change into different words when clicked, and pink hyperlinks move the narrative forward. More broadly, twines also generate high and low resolution through written expression and structure. In Videogames for Humans (kopas, 2015), several authors discuss the process of becoming attuned to the resolution of different hyperlinks. A hyperlink can, in this sense, be more than just a signpost or a way of advancing the narrative; it can also transduce affective qualities to the player. As an example of this, consider Mangia (Freeman, 2014), a twine about a person experiencing severe body-image anxieties, which manifest in her physiological aversion to eating. In the follow scenario, the protagonist

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is on her way to a doctor’s appointment after experiencing a constricting sensation in her throat—a recurring issue she has yet to properly diagnose. Her boyfriend (Emmett) accompanies her for part of the train journey to the doctor. He [Emmett] takes the subway with you for a few stops, but has to get off before you. He kisses you, and tells you that he’ll come over again tonight. He wants you to let him know what happens as soon as you get out of the doctor’s appointment. You wave goodbye.

In her discussion of this passage, Polansky (2015: 289) points out that the separation between the main body of text and the hyperlink transduces a sense of the ‘daunting’ and ‘intimidating’ prospect of suddenly being left on one’s own in a moment of intense vulnerability. The dynamic between high and low resolution text creates what Ash (2015: 43) calls a ‘synaesthetic’ effect that creates a visceral, nervous, and affective modality that mirrors the experience of Mangia’s protagonist. Designers of triple-a videogames attempt to modulate resolution as a means of amplifying what Ash (2015) calls ‘neuropower’. Neuropower refers to the synaptic connections etched into player’s brains as a result of long and repeated sessions of play with any given videogame, which serve to make the player feel more corporeally connected to the videogame and thus more likely to invest in future products. Often, a videogame’s resolution (and the subsequent neuropower) is cultivated and carefully refined over a series of videogames. Take, for example, EA’s popular FIFA series of football videogames. With each new FIFA iteration (usually one release per year on major platforms), the franchise’s core consumerbase becomes more attuned to the resolution of on-screen objects. This includes interactions such as dribbling the ball; holding and releasing buttons so as to execute passes and lobs with the right timing and trajectory; and visually oscillating between the field ‘map’ (often positioned at the corner of the screen) and the main view. FIFA’s developers are undoubtedly aware that committed players are highly attuned to the resolution of on-screen FIFA objects. As such, they only implement minor adjustments in each new FIFA release. Dramatic changes to controls or mechanics could disrupt the neuropower they have cultivated over the years and thus compromise their core consumer base. Of course, as Ash (2015: 10) stresses, this does not mean that popular videogames such as FIFA cannot be pleasurable, rewarding, or meaningful

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to players. In fact, he suggests that the cultivation of neuropower is associated with an enhancement of our embodied capacities. But ultimately, the goal of neuropower is to mobilize and monetize affective attention. The cultivation of neuropower therefore goes hand-in-hand with the hacker identity in that it relies on players who are willing and able to spend time and capital rewiring their embodied capacities in order to master formally complex systems. The cultivation of neuropower also implies a high degree of ‘interactivity’, broadly defined. High resolution objects transduce a high degree of visual, tactile, or sonic information. They make players feel more empowered and corporeally connected to the videogame and, in the process, they trap players in circuits of consumption. Although twines possess similar qualities of resolution, their aim is not to cultivate neuropower but rather to destabilize, disorient, and often undermine the player’s experiences and expectations (see Vist, 2015). Perhaps the most obvious way twines do this is by limiting player choice, as discussed earlier. However, as kopas (2014a) argues, undermining interactivity is just one technique that Twine authors typically use to destabilize and disorient the player. Twine authors also often make use of what she calls ‘queer mechanics’. According to kopas, queer mechanics deliberately draw attention to the conspicuous absence of traditional videogame design techniques. They may, for example, disrupt or subvert linear progression, make use of non-standard visuals, or recuperate neglected design techniques. Grace Bruxner, one of my interview participants, makes what she calls non-interactive ‘museum’ videogames that, in my view, exhibit some of these queer mechanics. Her videogames, which are not developed on Twine but nonetheless share similar sensibilities, openly embrace the ‘default’ look and feel of game engines such as Unity. Most videogame-making tools—such as Unity or Twine—have default or ‘placeholder’ settings that determine the ‘look and feel’ of the content made in them (see Nicoll and Keogh, 2019). These placeholder aesthetics and mechanics are meant to be customized by the developer. As Grace explained to me, any videogame that bears the ‘scent’ of these placeholder qualities is usually heavily derided (both inside and outside her university), perhaps because it implies that the creator lacks programming or design skills. Although Grace does spend time refining the aesthetics and mechanics of her videogames, she emphasized that by embracing the default look and feel of Unity, she is able to create videogames that deliberately undermine player expectations. In Grace’s videogame Alien Caseno (Bruxner, 2016), players can ‘tour’ a 3D alien casino, which (in the videogame’s fictional universe) is a kind of open-air museum of a human casino, albeit intended for alien patrons. Beyond walking and looking

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around, the player is a largely invisible spectator with limited options for interaction. Grace explained her approach to videogame development in the following way: There’s something about Unity’s default aesthetic that I find really funny because it looks like a videogame but I’ve changed it, and it looks really weird. It’s funny to go into a space that looks like a videogame and just have it subvert those expectations. You play a 3D game and you expect, you have a certain expectation of what’s going to happen when you enter that space. It’s funny to me that someone would download a game that looks like a 3D basic game and just have nothing to do, but it turns out that exploring that environment is fun anyway, I guess […] You would often expect in a game that looks like mine that there would be even talking to the characters in the scene or some sort of puzzle you have to solve […] a lot of YouTubers do play the games that I make but they either really like it or they hate it because they just don’t know what to do with it. The games work as a spectacle. They work as something to look at, but a lot of YouTubers rely on having some sort of mechanic that they can go back to.

It seems that, for Grace, the ultimate outcome of her videogames is to draw the player into a disoriented affective state—in some sense negatively opposed to a state of captivation—wherein their values, outlooks, and structures of feeling can be questioned. She does this by drawing attention to the default aesthetics and mechanics of Unity, which are largely neglected and derided in the mainstream culture and industry of videogame development. Perhaps the most provocative queer mechanic highlighted by kopas, and one that I want to explore here, is that of ‘queer utopian hermeneutics’ (cf. Muñoz, 2009: 25). Many twines evoke visions of worlds and subjectivities radically different to our own. Their narratives often take place in fictional worlds where the dominant structures and hierarchies of contemporary society are reversed, undermined, or eroded. For instance, Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive (2014) is set in a nightmarish citadel, where the player takes the role of a transgender woman who defies a monstrous Empress. Tom McHenry’s Horse Master (McHenry, 2013) takes place in a dystopian future where equestrian dressage has developed into a horrific yet bizarrely revered ritual. Anna Anthropy’s And the Robot Horse You Rode in On (Anthropy, 2013) tells the story of a trans-cyborg ‘bandita’ attempting to double-cross her

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partner in a futuristic Western setting. The ‘utopian’ in these videogames does not necessarily translate into what is typically thought of as ‘ideal’ visions of society. In fact, many of the above videogames contain scenes that are quite shocking, confronting, and, despite their fantastic content, grounded in the real struggles of marginalized people. As a result, they present us with queer temporalities that are difficult to reconcile with the world we inhabit today. In his book Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz (2009: 1) points out that the utopian has consistently been a core tenet of queer relationality: ‘queerness’, he writes, ‘is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’. For Muñoz, queer temporalities are present in a range of aesthetic objects, cultural forms, and narrative texts. They are not only limited to narrativebased texts that feature LGBTIQA+ characters. In his terms, a text can be characterized as queer if it produces an alternative temporality that disrupts the ‘linearity of straight time’, if it goes against the uniformity, normativity, and ‘presentness’ of ‘reproductive majoritarian heterosexuality’ (Muñoz, 2009: 22). Twine authors seek to destabilize the straight temporalities of videogame culture not only by rejecting institutionalized processes of videogame development, but also by presenting players with images of difference and otherness that, in Muñoz’s terms (2009: 25), signal ‘a queerness to come, a way of being in the world that is glimpsed through reveries in quotidian life that challenges the dominance of an affective world, as present, full of anxiousness and fear’. This is not to say that participation in queer temporalities equates to what Lisa Nakamura (2002) calls ‘identity tourism’. The point is not to encourage a consumerist identification with the ‘other’, which implies a white, cisgendered, heterosexual, or otherwise ‘normal’ orientation to the text. To borrow Muñoz’s (1999) terms, participating in queer temporalities often involves recognizing the ‘disjuncture’ between one’s own subjectivity or temporal orientation and those communicated by the queer text, and thus a kind of ‘disidentification’ (cf. Rancière, 2009: 73). It is no surprise that Muñoz (2009: 2) cites the importance of the Frankfurt School critical theory to his work. As discussed in the previous chapter, Adorno argues that genuine aesthetic experience involves a temporary collapse of the subject-object distinction, and thus a negative orientation to the world. As an example of these queer utopian hermeneutics, consider the twine With Those We Love Alive (Porpentine, 2014). With Those We Love Alive narrates the courtly life of a royal artificer—a transgender woman—under the employ of a malevolent and literally monstrous Empress. On occasion, the

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protagonist is commissioned by the Empress to manufacture decorative artifacts from rare materials, which are then used as centrepieces in unsettling rituals and ceremonies. One of the opening scenes narrates an event where the Empress hunts humans in the city surrounding the palace—a recurring custom that persists because, according to the narrative, ‘people are afraid to question it’. The Empress’s power looms large over the city and its inhabitants, whose lives seem to lack meaning and direction. Even the protagonist cannot escape the Empress’s powerful presence. The protagonist—and, by extension, the player—can only derive a sense of personal autonomy (and ‘interaction’) from the Empress’s jewellery commissions. In these moments, players are given quite a lot of agency to customize their decorative artifacts. This contrasts quite starkly with the core videogame, where the artificer’s life is characterized by a lack of control and a generalized malaise. The twine thus deals with the struggle for creativity and autonomy in a society that only accepts rigid complicity. It communicates something of the queer temporalities often inhabited by queer bodies—a life of difference, discontinuity, and alternative structures of feeling. Much of the videogame follows the day-to-day monotony of the artificer’s courtly life. The player is free to wander around the palace chambers, sit by the lake, venture into the city, work on her telescope, or reapply hormones in the form of ‘estroglyph’ and ‘sprioglyph’. These activities become quite monotonous after several days, at which point it becomes tempting to simply sleep until a new commission or ceremony rolls around. At a particular point in the videogame, a character named Sedina visits the palace and plots to assassinate the Empress. We learn that Sedina is an ex-lover of the protagonist, and their secretive interactions within the palace hint at a traumatic past. After a failed assassination attempt, Sedina is left severely maimed and imprisoned. The protagonist resolves to free Sedina and flee the palace with her, thus escaping the cruel and manipulative confines of her life as an artificer. At the beginning of With Those We Love Alive, the player is instructed to ‘have a pen or sharpie nearby, something that can write on skin’, and to ‘leave room to draw’. The reason for this is that the videogame encourages players to draw ‘sigils’ on their skin at certain moments in the narrative. After the human hunting festival, for example, the player is instructed to ‘draw a sigil of new beginnings’, while an emotional encounter with Sedina prompts a ‘sigil of shame’. The videogame does not provide instructions for how these markings should appear or on what part of the body they should be drawn, and neither does it ask for confirmation or proof that the sigils have been drawn before moving on with the narrative. The sigils nevertheless became

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one of the most distinctive features of With Those We Love Alive. Since the videogame’s release, players have uploaded photos of their sigils, etched onto various bodily surfaces, on blogs and social media platforms. Rather than players leaving their ‘mark’ on the videogame through exploration and interaction, the videogame literally leaves its mark on players, and therefore encourages a different kind of interaction between player and platform. With Those We Love Alive envelops players’ bodies in alternative structures of feeling—quite literally—that orient them toward queer temporalities and redeemable futures. Jack Halberstam (2005: 2) writes that queer texts tend to allow ‘their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’. While it could be argued that all videogames present players with alternative temporalities simply by virtue of the fact that they allow us to experience worlds unlike our own, the reality is that most videogames recapitulate the straight temporalities, gendered subjectivities, and power structures of the dominant culture. That is, they position players as empowered and individualized ‘hackers’, free to navigate and master their virtual environments. By contrast, the aim of a twine such as With Those We Love Alive is to produce what Marshall McLuhan (1966; cf. Tyler, 2013) calls ‘anti-environments’. For McLuhan, anti-environmental media produce forms of mediation that dramatically alert their users to the false naturalness of the surrounding environment. Twine’s anti-environmental effect is to jolt players out of the hacker mentality and leave them feeling that an alternative temporality, negatively opposed to the one they currently inhabit, is possible. The term ‘queer’ is frequently invoked in discussions of Twine, but I do want to acknowledge that this could be seen as a point of contention. Keogh (2013: n.p.), for example, speaks of the ‘queer games scene’ brought about by the ‘Twine revolution’. Alison Harvey (2014), in one of the few available scholarly articles on Twine, argues that Twine and its communities are ‘queering’ the normative spaces of videogame culture. As Adrienne Shaw (2014) suggests, queer theory is useful not only for thinking about how certain videogame-related practices can be (and perhaps always were) queer, but also for bringing queer meanings and methodologies to the largely normative field of game studies. However, several Twine authors (kopas, 2014b; Yang, 2015; see also Ryerson, 2014) are critical of the notion of a ‘queer scene’ surrounding Twine, as it either cordons Twine off into a specific historical moment or diminishes the radical foundations of the term queer. Just as Shaw (2010; cf. 2015: 75) warns against the uncritical deployment of cultural

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studies theories in game studies research—in which scholars often ‘draw on the language of cultural studies but not the conflicts’—scholars (such as myself) must remain sensitive to queer theory’s political foundations and its connection to queer bodies. Harvey (2014: 105) acknowledges these tensions in her article on Twine: We must be attuned to other kinds of game-makers and the challenge their participation can make, but academic validation is in its own way a conservative, normative frame with which to understand these communities and practices, as we too often reaffirm increasingly depoliticized concepts such as diversity and accessibility in our examinations of the peripheries. The alternative, however, is still unclear.

With these reflections in mind, the following section aims to establish a more rigorous connection between the academic study of Twine and the political struggles and critical practices of the people who actually write Twine videogames. It does this by positioning the activities of Twine authors at the intersection of videogame development and cultural criticism.

Twine as a political and intellectual tool In Chapter Two, I looked at how the Zemmix was once used as a theoretical object for navigating the double bind of North American and Japanese neocolonialism. I also tried to demonstrate how the Zemmix can be used as an epistemic tool for decolonial critique by using it to ‘rearticulate’ (in Stuart Hall’s sense) the seemingly fixed distinction between formality and informality in videogame history. In a similar vein, Twine is a theoretical tool often leveraged by developers and critics to spur critical discussions and debates about videogame culture. As discussed earlier, many Twine authors engage in practices that extend far beyond their roles as videogame developers. Authors such as kopas and Anthropy have organized workshops and conference presentations that seek to solicit support and participation in Twine’s political project. Twine authors are, therefore, key participants in the cultural study of videogames. Their work is analogous, but not reducible, to the work of cultural studies. What is the work of cultural studies? Despite 50-odd years of history, the question of what cultural studies is, was, or should be remains contentious. That Birmingham’s CCCS scholars established the core tenets of cultural studies in the 1950s and 1960s remains a relatively undisputed

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claim, but there is ongoing debate about the legacy and relevance of these formative moments for cultural studies today. For some, cultural studies is closely bound to the study of ‘ordinary’ culture. For others, it is more of a political project that seeks to understand, intervene in, and alleviate the political struggles of subcultures and minorities. Others take this political project more literally, by studying the impact of cultural policies on the creative industries. As discussed in the previous chapter, much cultural studies research in the mid-2000s is preoccupied with the arguably false dichotomy of audience ‘resistance’ and mass media ‘manipulation’. There is also the claim that cultural studies’ methods, theories, and languages (though perhaps not its conflicts, as Shaw claims) have ossified and floated off into other research areas, such as game studies. For Gilbert Rodman (2015: 149), who provides a remarkably clear definition of the field, cultural studies ‘is a project dedicated to the blending of political and intellectual work [… whose] agenda needs to be grounded in those intertwined concerns’. In his words, the aim of cultural studies is twofold: (1) to produce detailed, contextualized analyses of the ways that power and social relations are created, structured, and maintained through culture; and (2) to circulate those analyses in public forums suitable to the tasks of pedagogy, provocation, and political intervention. (Rodman, 2015: 39-40)

In Rodman’s definition, cultural studies involves more than simply researching the various articulations of any given cultural object or situation. It also involves openly embracing a progressive political stance in relation to one’s objects or subjects of study. For Rodman, it is not enough for cultural theorists to simply identify the loci of power in society. Cultural theorists also need to address these issues in a pragmatic capacity, by venturing into the ‘real world’, as he puts it. Furthermore, one of Rodman’s key recommendations is that scholars need to be more willing to recognize, acknowledge, and embrace the work of cultural studies in its manifestations outside of university contexts. The point of cultural studies has always been to ‘de-institutionalize’ in this way. Twine authors perform the work of cultural studies not only by creating unconventional videogames; many authors also theorize their work in public forums as a means of encouraging intellectual and political participation. Authors such as Brice (2014) and Polansky (2014), for example, have written articles and manifestos that aim to intervene in videogame culture at a more discursive level. Twine is often viewed as a theoretical object—a tool

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to think with—that enables its users to articulate the project of alleviating videogame culture’s unjust hierarchies and power structures. In saying that Twine authors are doing the work of cultural studies, my argument may be misconstrued as a conservative attempt to validate Twine authorship and activity in an academic sphere. Indeed, as Harvey (2014: 105) notes, the interventionist spirit of cultural studies implies a paternalistic desire to co-opt the political struggles of marginalized groups that, if acted upon, may have the effect of ‘reaffirming their marginality’. But my intention is definitely not to co-opt the intellectual and political struggles of Twine authors. Rather, by suggesting that Twine authors are already engaged in the work of cultural studies, my recommendation is that we should ask how we, as game studies scholars, could be doing a better job of identifying cultural studies’ manifestations outside of the institutionalized contexts of the academy, as well as establishing more productive dialogues with its practitioners. This does not mean soliciting academic labour from Twine authors in the form of conference presentations or research contributions. Rather, it means recognizing that Twine authors share with cultural studies scholars the aim of identifying and redistributing the dominant structures of power in society. Minor platforms such as Twine can be used as tools to articulate this shared political project. It is also worth problematizing my use of the term ‘work’ in these contexts. Just as Twine authors attempt to produce alternative textual temporalities, they often operate in alternative—yet highly precarious—modes of production. Many Twine authors reject traditional publishing processes and retail models and prefer instead to solicit financial support from donations or crowd funding. They often share their work informally. Often, this comes out of a genuine desire to demarcate the creative process of making twines from the financial pressures and incentives of the videogame industry. As Erika explained to me: I’m doing this master’s degree so I can get employed in web development, and get employed basically, and get paid money. But I don’t think I’m ever going to stop making games, and I absolutely love that. But the stuff that I want to make for me is not really profitable. And I also don’t necessarily want to make it profitable. Not like, ‘Oh, I don’t want anyone to see my games.’ But I always want my stuff to be free, or relatively cheap. I have no interest in working on triple-a titles or making a game for the sake of making money. I don’t want to ever do that. I want to always be making what I want to make, and I want to keep pushing my own art forward with that.

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This alternative orientation to the formal industry is often fraught with precarious realities that are perhaps best captured by Porpentine (2013a: n.p.) in her introduction to the twine Parasite (Porpentine, 2013b): ‘[w]hat does it mean to make games when we’re unhealthy? When we’re under threat of violence? When we’re hungry? When we have no money?’. These realities throw Twine’s queer utopian hermeneutics into sharp relief. They also remind us, in Bonnie Ruberg’s (2019: 3) words, that videogames made by marginalized developers ‘[entail] considerable labor, including forms of labor, such as emotional labor, that often go unacknowledged [… and un]compenstated’. Ultimately, the realites decribed by Porpentine reinforce that Twine authorship is often a deeply antagonistic and political practice. Any attempt to co-opt that practice or make sense of it through neoliberal logics risks depoliticizing Twine and normalizing the lives of its practitioners. When academics, journalists, or industry professionals attempt to leverage Twine for their own intellectual or political agendas, they must ask themselves: whose interests are being served here? In her book Gaming at the Edge, Shaw (2014) observes that videogame companies often pursue diversity in representation not as an end unto itself, but rather as a means of tapping into a potentially lucrative market niche or appearing more progressive than they actually are. Likewise, whenever the case is made for diversifying the industry’s workforce, it is often on the basis on some kind of argued ‘need’—again, rather than an end unto itself. There is a problematic yet quite pervasive assumption, for example, that female videogame developers are the only people capable of making videogames that appeal to female players, and that this is the main reason they should be hired. Of course, a greater plurality of developers in the videogame industry will inevitably lead to a greater plurality of videogame content, and is of utmost importance. As Erika put it to me in a discussion of Twine and related engines: ‘making [game engines] super accessible for everyone means we get more games, and the more games we have the more interesting content we have, the more different content we have, the more different perspectives’. However, achieving great diversity in videogames—whether in representation or in the workforce—is a project that everyone should be committed to, rather than just those who are already marginalized (see Shaw, 2014: 11). Twines are often described as ‘empathy videogames’ that allow players to vicariously experience another person’s everyday struggles and experiences. The problem with this idea is that it treats twines (and related videogames) as a form of identity tourism for privileged audiences to momentarily partake in and subsequently dispose of. It also assumes that the player is at the

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centre of the experience—that the videogame is made solely for the player rather than the developer; the latter of whom may prefer to treat their work as a vehicle through which to communicate with an audience. The intellectual and political work required to alleviate problems of diversity, representation, and inclusiveness in videogame culture will take more than just a momentary and consumerist identification with the ‘other’. Adorno’s (1997: 229-230) critique of socialist realism is instructive in this regard. According to Adorno, socialist realism co-opts art for the supposedly strategic purpose of expressing concrete political statements. It attempts to solicit empathy and support for a political cause through a kind of ‘show and tell’. However, for Adorno, genuine aesthetic experience should point negatively to utopian visions of how the world could be different, rather than provide literal or prescriptive statements about how to achieve political emancipation. In other words, aesthetic experience should envelop our bodies in queer temporalities and alternative structures of feeling that orient us toward redeemable futures. As scholars and players, we need to ‘think with’ Twine and its authors in order to participate in their project of imagining how videogames could be otherwise, rather than relying on them to ‘tell us’ how this project can be realized.

Conclusion It could be argued that Twine in no way warrants the designation of a ‘minor’ platform, given that its impact on videogame culture is undeniably significant. But my sense is that Twine is best understood in terms of its minor position in this culture, and that its very marginality is central to its identity. In the introduction to this book, I suggested that minor platforms contain a disruptive potential by virtue of their marginal status. They often carry a potential to undermine the dominant distribution of what is taken to be ‘sensible’ in any given social formation. Jacques Rancière describes the dominant distribution of the sensible as an agreed-upon set of expectations regarding how people should act, speak, and feel in any given society. In the videogame industry, the dominant ordering of the sensible manifests in the meanings, values, and identities linked to videogame history’s arrival in the present. These meanings, values, and identities determine, among other things, what videogames are; how they should look and feel; in what contexts they should be played; who can and cannot play them; and who can and cannot make them. As platforms such as the Neo Geo illustrate, minor platforms may not always threaten to unsettle the dominant culture

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in particularly progressive or desirable ways. But the point is that they articulate difference and discontinuity in videogame history, and thus ways of thinking about how videogame culture could be otherwise. Given that the dominant ordering of the sensible is, in Rancière’s view, aesthetic, it is always open to renegotiation; not only through what people do or say, but also through how they think and feel. Twine contains a real potential for what Rancière calls ‘dissensus’—that is, a capacity to radically transgress the dominant distribution of the sensible. It threatens to ‘change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible’ (Rancière, 2009: 72). Twine’s capacity for dissensus consists not in the notion that its videogames and authors can ‘educate’ players in concrete terms about how to achieve emancipation. Rather, Twine points negatively to utopian visions of how the world could be different, to queer structures of feeling and cyborgian subjectivities. Often, when people discuss Twine’s democratizing potential, they do so through a deterministic lens. This is by no means incorrect; Twine is, after all, a free-to-use and intuitive piece of software that encourages a highly specialized and authorial approach to videogame development. But Twine was never meant to be used as a videogame-making platform. It attained this status because it was taken up and developed by people whose voices had, historically, been marginalized by the dominant cultures of computing and videogaming. Through Twine, these marginalized groups have been able to intervene in videogame history and articulate an alternative structure of feeling. This has created significant reverberations in the dominant ordering of the sensible. This is most clearly expressed in the notion that the ‘gamer’ identity and the institutional structures that support it are beginning to unravel, and that Twine is central to this rupture. The irony of this, however, is that many of the destabilizing changes associated with Twine—changes brought about largely by the collective efforts and long-term agitations of the platform’s users—have been coopted by engines such as Unity. While the historically minor may critique, snipe at, or parasitically undermine major discourses and movements, its oppositional status may be ‘reinterpreted’ and ‘diluted’ by the dominant culture, as Williams (1977: 122) observes. Yet, as the interviews in this chapter illustrate, although Twine now exists in an environment where ‘free’ and (relatively) accessible videogame-making tools are the norm, and although the platform’s supposed ‘revolution’ has now passed, it still retains something of a different and discontinuous status in videogame culture. In kopas’s (2015: 10) words, Twine remains a ‘site of an incredible artistic flourishing at the intersections of digital games and fiction’.

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Just like any minor platform, Twine is often fetishized for its ‘otherness’, which in this case manifests in its supposed capacity to facilitate identity tourism. But my argument here—as it has been throughout the whole book—is that we need to avoid fetishizing the marginal and the overlooked, and instead ‘think with’ minor platforms. Thinking with minor platforms means coming up with approaches and ideas that can help us imagine the medium and its histories anew. Minor platforms can, for example, provide insight into the transitional nature of videogame history. They capture the cultural instabilities, discontinuities, and contradictions that inhabit any given historical moment. They may function as theoretical tools that enable their users and practitioners to decolonize and deterritorialize patterns of cultural, economic, and technological imperialism or violence. Because their commercial lives are very often cut short, minor platforms can articulate imaginary desires and anxieties about technological and social change. In their commercial afterlives, they are liberated for residual aesthetic experimentation, in ways that compel us to rethink the dialectic of obsolescence at the heart of digital culture. Each of the aforementioned approaches form a ‘constellation’ of ideas that coalesce around minor platforms such as Twine. They are by no means exhaustive, but they do provide a starting point for thinking through the narrative ‘work’ that minor platforms perform. They provide tools to contest the arrival of videogame history in the present, thus opening up what Thomas Elsaesser (2016: 99) calls an ‘archaeology of possible futures’ for making, playing, and researching videogames.

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Conclusion: ‘Something new in the old’ Abstract In the conclusion, I argue that minor platforms enable videogame scholars to re-encounter the ‘strangeness’ of their object of study. Game studies scholars often bring very normative frames of reference to bear upon their researched objects and subjects. The aim of this chapter is to reorient (or perhaps disorient) our relationship to an ostensibly ‘normal’ and everyday object in the study of videogames: the videogame platform. Minor platforms thus point not only to suppressed moments of transition and rupture in videogame history. They also disorient the present and point toward alternative possibilities for a future yet to come. Keywords: game studies, orientations, surface effects, queer phenomenology, platform studies

To do game studies, I think, is to watch the wheel of history grinding against our theoretical castles. And that’s enough. ‒ Jesper Juul, 2018: n.p.

In 2015, fourteen years after declaring ‘year one’ for game studies as a specialized area of scholarly research, Espen Aarseth (2015: n.p.) made an equally bold declaration in an editorial for the open-access web journal Game Studies: ‘game studies is a success. We did it’. For Aarseth (2015: n.p.), the proof of game studies’ success is in the proverbial pudding: there are, now, numerous international conferences, research centres, and publication venues dedicated to the study of videogames. Furthermore, claims Aarseth, videogames are now ‘accepted’ as a viable area of research in disciplines where they were previously shunned. Meanwhile, orthodox game studies conferences such as DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) are not nearly as widely attended as they were in the early 2000s—a good sign, according to Aarseth, because it indicates that the field’s early exponents have found homes in neighbouring disciplines.

Nicoll, B., Minor Platforms in Videogame History, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789462988286_concl

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For Aarseth, game studies is a ‘success’ because it has become successfully standardized, no longer defined by its difference within the academy but instead by its normality. Few would argue that this is a bad thing—after all, it implies that videogames are no longer cordoned off into their own special domain, their own ‘magic circle’. It also implies that the field has shed its preoccupations with formalism; that the medium can be brought into contact with a diverse range of perspectives, frameworks, and methodologies from other research areas. However, if anything has been lost in this shift toward normalization—this homogenization of game studies—it is that videogames have forfeited their status as inherently ‘awkward’ objects that defy disciplinary categorization (cf. Kirkpatrick, 2011). Game studies is nowadays treated as a floating sub-discipline that, much like cultural studies, can be readily co-opted by media studies, film studies, humancomputer interaction, and related disciplines. As a result, new orthodoxies have emerged about how ‘best’ to analyse the medium. My argument here, as it has been throughout the book, is that game studies can benefit from re-encountering the ‘strangeness’ of its object of study. Videogames are ‘radically contextual’ (Grossberg, 1995; 2010) objects that compel us to intermingle, modify, and adapt different disciplinary frameworks. I have illustrated this by going back to moments of difference and discontinuity in videogame history; by attempting to ‘think with’ the case studies and their various practitioners; and by developing a diverse set of approaches for accommodating the unruliness of the historically minor. In Chapter One, I brought ideas from art history and platform studies to bear upon the Vectrex and its unique random-scan interface. I used the Vectrex as a technical object and a discursive figure to investigate the transitional instabilities in videogame graphics and interfaces in the early 1980s. Similarly, in Chapter Two, I discussed the Zemmix by drawing on research on informal media networks and transnational flows in East Asian media industries. Chapter Three analysed the discourses surrounding the Neo Geo AES and the discursive shifts associated with the migration of arcade videogames into the home. In Chapter Four, I looked at the archivization, curation, and preservation of videogame history through a discussion of the Sega Saturn as a residual platform. This involved an analysis of the Saturn’s cancelled ‘flagship’ title, Sonic X-treme, and the ways in which fans have reassembled Sonic X-treme’s multiplicity in order to construct a new dialectical image of the past. Finally, in Chapter Five, I synthesized a number of the aforementioned approaches as a means of analysing Twine as a minor platform. In summary, there is no singular way to analyse and discuss each of the above platforms, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. As Siegfried Zielinksi (2006a:

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270) writes, ‘[t]he problem with imagining media worlds that intervene, of analysing and developing them creatively, is not so much finding an appropriate framework but rather allowing them to develop with and within time’. In this book, I have tried to let the case studies develop with and within their own time by ‘listening’ to them—by allowing myself to be led by their histories and their practitioners—rather than by bringing a totalizing methodology to bear upon them. The act of listening implies a more passive, flexible, and accommodating orientation to one’s object of study; it implies a method of ‘following the object’ and committing oneself to the unexpectedness of the journey (cf. Lash and Lury, 2007). By adopting this approach, I have tried to come up with methods and frameworks that can help us gain insight into the case studies’ unique differences and discontinuities. Discontinuity is not just a research method or a quality to be found in historical artefacts; it is also an alternative way of being disposed to history. Sara Ahmed (2006) describes ‘queer phenomenology’ in similar terms. For her, queer phenomenology is not just a method or a framework but rather a specific way of being oriented to history, performativity, and sexuality. Queer phenomenology reconfigures the researcher’s positionality in relation to their object of study and their field of research. ‘If orientations point us to the future, to what we are moving toward’, she writes, ‘then they also keep open the possibility of changing directions and of finding other paths, perhaps those that do not clear a common ground, where we can respond with joy to what goes astray’ (Ahmed, 2006: 178). Likewise, minor platforms orient us toward deviant paths in videogame history. They lead us astray, but in ways that result in a potentially negative realization of how things could be different. They open up ontological and epistemological questions—questions not only about our object of study, but also about the field of game studies more broadly. They do so by virtue of their capacities to expose ruptures in history, to orient us toward alternative structures of feeling, and to furnish us with new, creative ways of doing theory and historiography. The question is therefore not only ‘how can we understand difference, discontinuity, and marginality in videogame history,’ but perhaps more importantly: ‘how does game studies and its object of study change when oriented toward positions of difference, discontinuity, and marginality in videogame history’? By claiming that game studies can benefit from re-encountering the strangeness of its object of study, I am not calling for a return to the ‘ludological’ insistence on protecting game studies from disciplinary colonization. Ludology sought to demarcate game studies as a distinct research field

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on the misguided assumption that videogames possessed an irreducible, formal quality that other media objects did not. Likewise, I am not claiming that game studies itself should be seen as an inherently ‘marginal’ area of research. As Aarseth’s editorial makes clear, game studies has largely been driven by a desire to legitimize itself in the academy by proving just how ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ the study of videogames is. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why videogame scholars tend to unconsciously adopt a very normative or conservative orientation in their research practices. Adrienne Shaw (2015) provides an important take on these issues in her discussion of the ‘lonely gamer’ stereotype and its treatment in scholarly research. In academic and popular rhetoric, solitary videogame play is often pathologized as an antisocial, indulgent, or even queer activity.1 Shaw observes that videogame scholars are, for these reasons, often preoccupied with dispelling the lonely gamer as a ‘myth’. Similarly, many academic books and articles on videogames nowadays begin by citing statistics that prove just how normal or everyday videogames are; how much they are worth as an industry; or how they are culturally as important as films now. On one level, this normality is something to celebrate. That videogames are now considered normal (at least by academics) implies that anyone can partake in the making, playing, and theorizing of videogames. However, this urge to prove just how normal videogames are—to dispel long-standing stereotypes such as the lonely gamer—is also symptomatic of a desire to suppress anything that could be considered non-normative in videogame culture. By repressing non-normative practices such as lonesome play, scholars overlook more fundamental questions: why is solitary play so troubling in the first place? Why exactly does it need to be excised from the cultural imaginary? By adopting a queer orientation to these questions, Shaw shifts the perspective: the lonely gamer no longer comes across as a pathology that needs to be cured, but rather a non-normative practice that, much like masturbation, is brandished with a stigma of abnormality. In many ways, the aim of this book has been to bring an alternative orientation to bear upon an ostensibly normal and everyday object: the videogame platform. Platforms are often treated as background furnishings that 1 As discussed in Chapter Four, many (predominantly male) players have internalized this pathology and, ironically, used it to reify their subcultural status in society. Kirkpatrick (2016: 1448) argues that this contradictory logic was constitutive of gaming’s field in the 1980s: ‘[i]t presents gaming as breaking with the stigma of abnormality and pathology, which beset the pre-existing computer culture, yet finds itself incapable of locating games anywhere else […] The re-positioning is real but the destination is somewhere between the original location and the one aimed for’.

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are hidden ‘behind’ or ‘beneath’ more surface-oriented effects of reception, form, and function (Montfort and Bogost, 2009a). Yet, as Caetlin BensonAllott (2016: 343, second emphasis added) points out, the important thing to recognize about platforms is that their underlying materialities intersect with our subjectivities and structures of feeling: they are the ‘thingness of games that allows us to recognize how our thingness works with that of a console or operating system and by extension the larger material and political world of which we are all part’. Bringing background furnishings such as platforms to the forefront of phenomenological attention can create a disorienting effect. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed (2006) analyses background furnishings such as tables and chairs as technologies that orient our bodies toward gendered actions and experiences. Everyday objects such as tables and chairs possess histories of social use that function to orient their users toward what Ahmed calls the ‘straight line’. The straight line refers to a dominant lineage of social use that implies a normative orientation to these objects and their purposes. A table, for example, is usually treated as a surface to ‘do’ things on, such as eating or working. The straight line also imparts a heteronormative orientation to these objects, such that a table, for example, is often identif ied as something that supports nuclear-style family gatherings. Ahmed’s (2006: 172) aim is to deliberately disorient these objects such that they ‘slip’ from the straight line, thereby acquiring ‘new shapes and directions’ as they ‘retreat’ from normative frames of reference. In doing so, she argues, the histories of domesticated objects such as doorknobs, chairs, and beds ‘come alive’: Seeing such objects as if for the first time (before this is a doorknob, how might I encounter it?) involves wonder, it allows the object to breathe not through a forgetting of its history but by allowing this history to come alive: How did you get here? How did I come to have you in my hand? How did we arrive at this a place where such a handling is possible? How do you feel now that you are near? What does it do when I do this to you? (Ahmed: 2006: 163-164)

For Ahmed (2006: 168), making these objects more ‘visible’ means ‘making what is in the background, what is behind us, more available as “things” to “do” things with’. Minor platforms provoke similar questions: they compel us to step back, take stock of what we think we know about videogame history, and re-encounter these objects as if we were seeing and using them for the first time.

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They also encourage us to focus on the ‘surface effects’ of platforms. Aubrey Anable (2018b: 136) writes that platform studies’ preoccupation with what lies ‘beneath’ or ‘behind’ the platform is symptomatic of a ‘bacheloresque’ effect in media studies that seeks to ‘reproduce methodologies and epistemologies with no need for gender, race, sexuality, or other types of difference’. This is also indicative of an archaeological logic that treats a technology’s surface effects as predictable by-products of the underlying hardware, as opposed to more complex patterns of use, reception, and feeling that exceed (or confound) designed intentions and affordances. Raiford Guins (2016a: 182) makes a similar case when he argues that platform studies could benefit from focusing less on questions of materiality and programmability and more on the superf iciality of platforms. That is, why does a platform look the way it does, what does it feel like to play, and how is it advertised and packaged? What kinds of actions and experiences does it support and orient us toward? Minor platforms are useful as case studies because they already ‘slip’ from the straight line of history. The question, then, is how we orient ourselves to these platforms—do we attempt to bring them ‘back in line’ with straight temporalities of success and failure, progress and prof it? Or, as I have attempted to do in this book, do we let them go astray, and follow them into new and unexpected areas? Once again, this is not a call to reinvigorate the ludologist agenda of establishing a unique set of frameworks that can be used to study videogames. Instead, it is a much more modest call to rediscover what is genuinely different and discontinuous in our objects of study, and to use these discoveries to rework existing disciplinary frameworks, methodologies, and approaches. To this end, I have attempted to locate difference and discontinuity not only in the minor platforms themselves, but also in the minor structures of feeling that these objects orient us toward. In Chapter Three, for example, I discussed the migration of videogames into the home as a shift marked not only by technological change but also by a discursive transformation in the ‘habitus’ of videogame culture. Likewise, in Chapter Five, I discussed Twine’s ‘democratizing’ influence as something brought about by the intellectual and political activities of its users. My approach therefore contrasts with deterministic constructions of videogame history, which tend to assume that the history of a platform begins with its invention and ends with its market performance and software catalogue. Technological determinism renders a history in which, for example, people stopped playing arcade videogames simply because home console videogames grew powerful enough to surpass them, or that the democratization of videogame development only became

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possible once low-cost, accessible videogame-making tools became available. While I have not shied away from discussions of determinism—my discussion of the Vectrex, for example, looked at how a random-scan interface enabled developers to experiment with different forms of player-machine interaction—my sense is that structures of feeling often precede and inform these technological transitions. They may even forecast possible changes to come, as illustrated through the Neo Geo’s negative magazine reception and the ensuing destabilization of arcade videogames in the 1990s. Structures of feeling can be identified in the interfacing techniques solicited by a platform, as well as the subjectivities, identities, and discourses connected to the culture of a period. The fundamental value of studying the historically minor is that it can orient us toward alternative, oppositional, or unrealized structures of feeling, thus furnishing us with new ways of doing videogame history and theory. It is worth acknowledging here that while I have attempted to account for alternative industry dynamics and organizations of labour (in Chapters Two and Five, for example), the book as a whole has focused less on the political economy of minor platforms and more on their social and cultural dimensions. In his book Deep Time of the Media, Zielinski (2006a: 3) develops an ‘anarchaeological’ approach to media history that aims to ‘find something new in the old’ as opposed to seeking ‘the old in the new’. In doing so, he makes an important distinction. The motive of an inquiry into the margins of media history should not simply be to discover numerous precedents that can help stabilize the various crises of the present. One of the sideeffects of simply ‘searching for the old in the new’ is that it leads to the assumption that the present is a ‘stable and safe destination point’ for the past (Ruffino, 2018: 93), and that the future, by extension, can only contain the possibility for increased convergence and homogenization. For Zielinski, this formulation should be reversed such that the aim is to find something genuinely different or discontinuous in the old; something that can disorient the present and point toward alternative possibilities for a future yet to come. Zielinski (2006b: 54) describes his approach as a ‘variantology’ of the media: If archaeology is the principal method for this special form of historical research, then variantology is the tactic (in the Foucauldian sense) by which individual genealogies are to be unravelled from its wealth of varieties. The words variàre/variant have etymological links with deviation, diversity, colourfulness and shimmering, while in musical terms they also denote the modulation from minor to major key by a change of interval.

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The etymological root of archaeology (and archive, incidentally) is the Ancient Greek term arche, which refers to governance, ruling, and origin. Archaeology therefore implies a more-or-less straight line of history that originates from a place of authority. Zielinski’s move is to unravel diversity, variation, and difference from this straight line of history. In my own way, I hope to have done something similar in this book, by searching for something ‘new’ in the historically minor. I have no doubt that scholars will dismantle the major-minor binary I have (somewhat reluctantly) relied upon in this book. As Walter Benjamin (1969a [1940]: 254 [III]) notes, the distinction between major and minor will cease to be relevant once we recognize that history is anything but a linear or binary process. Videogame history is characterized by contradictions and tensions that are impossible to reconcile with the ideology of a smooth, evolutionary progression from old to new. My focus on minor platforms is thus meant as a critical move to reposition the very notion of ‘marginality’ in the study of videogames. Minor platforms do more than simply snipe or probe at majoritarian discourses and movements. They also provide tools for reorienting ourselves to the past, thus opening up alternative images of the present and future. Videogame history is, in this sense, not just a straight line dotted by major advancements, but a constellation of gaps, silences, and moments of deviation. These gaps and silences are the real structuring elements in what Benjamin (1969a [1940]: 255 [V]) calls the ‘true picture’ of the past.

Bibliography Aarseth E (2015) Meta-Game Studies [editorial]. Game Studies 15(1): n.p.). Retrieved from: (accessed 2 April 2019) Ahmed S (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Anable A (2018b) Platform Studies. Feminist Media Histories 4(2): 135-140. Benjamin W (1969a [1940]) Theses on the Philosophy of History. In: Arendt H (ed.) and Zohn H (trans.) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 253-264. Benson-Allott C (2016) Platform. In: Lowood H and Guins R (eds.) Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 343-349. Grossberg L (1995) Cultural studies: What’s in a name (one more time). Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education 1: 1-37. Grossberg L (2010) Cultural studies in the future tense. Durham: Duke University Press. Guins R (2016a) Platform studies as method for the critical historical study of electronic games. Digital Culture & Education 8(2): 178-184.

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Juul J (2018, 27 November) I have been doing this Thing for Twenty Years. Weblog post. Retrieved from: (accessed 28 November 2018) Kirkpatrick G (2011) Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kirkpatrick G (2016) Making games normal: Computer gaming discourse in the 1980s. New Media & Society 18(8): 1439-1454. Lash S and Lury C (2007) Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Montfort N and Bogost I (2009a) Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ruffino P (2018) Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shaw A (2015) Circles, Charmed and Magic: Queering Game Studies. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2(2): 64-97. Zielinski S (2006a) Deep Time of the Media. Towards an Archaeology of Seeing and Hearing by Technical Means. Custance G (trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zielinski S (2006b) Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola. A Case Study on Athanasius Kircher’s World of Apparatus between the Imaginary and the Real. In: Kluitenberg E (ed.) Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, pp. 28-55.

Index Note: page numbers in italics refer to images. action genre 119, 121, 123; see also fighting genre; shooting genre advertisements 29, 30, 94, 107 Neo Geo 110, 112, 113-117, 115, 119 Nintendo Wii 117–118 Vectrex 115-116, 116 aesthetics 31, 37, 45–46, 164, 185 experience 33–34, 139, 149, 177, 184 experimentation 38, 135, 186 relational aesthetics 30, 137, 142, 146, 149, 150, 152 Sega Saturn 133, 135 Sonic X-treme 137, 142, 146, 149, 150, 152 Unity 175–76 Vectrex 53, 55, 58, 59, 67, 68 Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game (book) 33 Aesthetic Theory (book) 139 Alamogordo (New Mexico) see Atari landfill Alien Caseno (Bruxner 2016) 175–76 alternative structures of feeling 11, 14, 17, 19, 24, 31, 32–36, 37, 135, 193, 196, 197 Neo Geo 127, 129 With Those We Love Alive (2014) 173, 176, 177–79 Twine 34, 158, 160, 161, 170, 176, 178, 184, 185 Vectrex 47, 53–54, 67 Zemmix 75, 77, 83, 99, 100 anarchaeology 16, 22, 30–31, 197 And the Robot Horse You Rode in On (Anthropy 2013) 176–77 Apple II computer 79, 81, 89–90, 100 Aproman (company) 82 arcade experience 106, 109, 118, 124–25, 128 floating signifier, as 129 Arcade Express (newsletter) 59, 60 n.7 arcade machines 29, 37, 64, 106, 108, 111 Neo Geo see Neo Geo MVS (arcade) arcade videogames 1970s to1980s 46, 50, 80, 107–8, 114, 141 Asteroids (1979) 48, 50, 52, 64, 69 Cosmic Chasm (1982) 66 Dig Dug (1982) 95 Donkey Kong (1981) 53 Magician Lord (1990) 111 Mario Bros. (1983) 94, 95 migration to home see Neo Geo AES platform (SNK 1991); Vectrex platform (GCE 1982) Pong (1972) 62, 66

porting to consoles see ports, porting (to home consoles) Q*bert (1982) 46, 46 n.2, 55 Solar Quest (1982) 66 South Korea 80 Space Invaders (1978) 65 Spacewars (1976) 50 n.5 Star Castle (1980, 83) 49, 65, 66–67, 69 Star Hawk (1982) 67 Street Fighter (1987) 79, 80, 108, 120, 124–25 Street Fighter II (1991) 108 Super Hang-On (1987) 122 Tempest (1981) 50 archeology see media archaeology archives, archivization 16–17, 28–30, 37, 39, 107, 126, 136, 139–40, 142, 152–53 ‘archive fever’ 141, 153 discursive, technical, affective 16, 23, 29–30, 32, 38, 128, 136, 149, 196; see also Neo Geo AES platform (SNK 1991); Twine platform (Klimas 2009) etymology of 198 photomontage 143, 151 Sonic X-treme 39, 136–37, 143, 146–47, 148, 149, 150–51, 152–53, 192 art 21, 37, 45, 68, 139, 163, 192 baroque 45 Dadaism 142 forgery 99 Japanese 46, 95 linear v painterly 58, 151 perspective in 54, 55, 58, 60, 68, 147, 148 relational art 149 Renaissance see Renaissance Surrealism 151 Art of Fighting series (SNK) 120 ASSEMbler Games forum (website) 147, 148 Asteroids (Atari 1979) 48, 50, 52, 64, 69 Atari: Game Over (doc. 2014) 12n1 Atari (company) Asteroids (1979) 48, 50, 52, 64, 69 Atari 2600 console (1977) 30, 48, 52, 63, 100, 109 crash (1983) 11, 12, 22, 25–26, 73 Pac-Man (1982) 109 Pong (1972) 62, 66 ports, porting 48, 52, 109 Racing the Beam (book) 28 Tempest (1981) 50 videogame trash dump see Atari landfill Atari landfill 11–12

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Bigger-Badder-Better (advert.supp.) 112, 113, 114, 115, 119 binary concepts 26 failure/success see success or failure local/global 26 pre-crash/post-crash 25–26 production/consumption see production/ consumption dichotomy Book of Imaginary Media 126, 127 Braid (Number None 2008) 163 Brother Adventure (Zemina 1987) 90, 94, 95

cult platform see Sega Saturn platform (1994) cultural studies 24, 73, 180–81, 192 definition of 181 twines 180, 181–82 curation see archives, archivization CVG (magazine) see Computer and Video Games (CVG) (magazine) Cyber Lip (SNK 1990) 111 cybernetics 25 cyborg identity 171–72, 176–77

camera obscura 23, 55, 69 discursive object, as 68 Capcom 86 Street Fighter series 79, 80, 108, 120, 124–25 Capitalism 13, 16, 75, 99, 105, 163 CD-ROMs 143 Nintendo 143 Sega Saturn 134, 143 censorship 79, 80 n.5, 100, 129 Chicken Run (film) 35 China 74, 79 n.4, 80 n.5, 83 Piracy 78–79, 100 regulation and censorship 80, 100 cinema see films Cinematronics Cosmic Chasm (1982) 66 Solar Quest (1982) 66 Spacewars (1976, 82) 50 n.5, 66 Star Castle (1980, 83) 49, 65, 66–67, 69 Star Hawk (1982) 67 clones see piracy (hardware/software) Clover (company) 82, 90, 93 Comboy console (Hyundai) 91 Commodore 64 computer 78 Computer and Video Games (CVG) (magazine) 112, 122, 123 Computer Games and the Social Imaginary (book) 33 Computer Kindergarten (Zemmix) 81 Computer Programs Protection Act (CPPA) 74, 82, 88–89, 90, 93, 100 Computer Study (magazine) 81, 82, 83, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 98; see also MyCom (magazine) constellational view (videogame history) 26–27, 36–37, 39, 105, 107, 186, 198; see also photomontage controllers 121, 129 Neo Geo 106, 111, 117, 120, 121, 122–23, 124 Vectrex 46, 49, 53, 67 Zemmix 82 copies see piracy (hardware/software) copyright 76, 87–88, 100 South Korea 74, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88–89, 90, 93–99 Cosmic Chasm (Cinematronics 1982) 66 CPPA see Computer Programs Protection Act (CPPA)

Daewoo 37, 69, 73, 74, 77, 81, 91 Zemmix see Zemmix platform (Daewoo 1985) decolonization 86, 127, 186 Japan, from see South Korea (decolonization) North America, from see South Korea (decolonization) platform see Zemmix platform (Daewoo 1985) Deep Time of the Media (book) 197 democratization Twine 15, 22, 157, 159, 161–69, 185, 196–97 Unity 168–69 Depression Quest (Quinn 2013) 168, 170–71 difference and discontinuity 11, 13, 14, 16, 22–24, 31, 127, 151, 178, 192, 193, 196, 197 magic lantern illustration 23–24, 24, 47 Neo Geo 127, 184–85 Sega Saturn 152 Sonic X-treme 137 The Archaeology of Knowledge (book) 23, 29 Twine 175, 185 Vectrex 37; see also moments of rupture Dig Dug (Namco 1982) 95 Digital Play (book) 87 DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) 191 disability 34, 158, 168 discontinuity see difference and discontinuity discrimination 158, 164 gender see gender norms marginality see marginality race 30, 158, 196 sexuality 30, 34, 68, 129, 158, 193, 196 Dong-a Ilbo (newspaper) 80 Donkey Kong (Nintendo 1981) 53 Doom (id Software 1993) 45, 93 Dreamcast platform (Sega 1999) 15, 134 E3 see Electronic Entertainment Expo (1997) East Asia (videogame industry) 74, 79, 100 bricolage development 38, 77, 78, 83, 95 piracy see piracy (hardware/software) regulation and censorship 80, 80 n.5, 92, 100, 102; see also China; Hong Kong; Japan; South Korea (videogame industry); Taiwan

Index

eBay 12, 126, 138 Electronic Entertainment Expo (1997) 143, 145, 147, 148 Electronic Gaming Monthly (magazine) 111 episteme 14 n.4, 16, 22 epistemic tools 11, 14, 14 n.4, 23, 24, 32, 35, 37, 161, 186, 193, 198 film history 16, 192 Neo Geo 127 Twine 39, 161, 180–84 Vectrex 47, 69 Zemmix 38, 69–70, 73, 76–77, 180 Facebook 13, 34 failure see success or failure Famicom console (Nintendo 1983) 20, 78, 79, 82, 83, 91, 95, 97, 122 Golden Bell clone 83 ‘lock-and-key’ 97 Family Computer Golf: Japan Course (Nintendo 1987) 95 Fan Cultures (book) 137 fans, fan practice 15, 37, 39, 125, 153 ‘archive fever’ 141, 153 clubs 91 fansites 15, 126, 129, 134, 135, 139–41, 142 media archaeology 137–38 Neo Geo 126, 134 online communities see fansites above Sega Saturn 134, 142, 145–46 Sonic X-Treme 39, 133, 134–35, 136, 137, 142, 146–51, 152, 192; see also fetish, fetishization; nostalgia; obsolescence; residual mediation Fatal Fury series (SNK) 120 Fatal Fury 2 (1993) 122 fetish, fetishization Neo Geo 124, 127 obsolescence, of 12, 15, 17, 39, 133, 134, 137, 139, 141–42, 153 Sonic X-treme 39, 133, 134, 137–43, 150, 151, 153 Twine 161, 186; see also fans, fan practice; nostalgia FIFA football series 174–75 fighting genre 80, 108, 119–20, 120 n.1, 122, 124–25, 126 The Culture of Digital Fighting Games (book) 124; see also hardcore gamer; shooting genre films 76, 98, 192, 194 East Asian tropes 97 history 16, 35, 69 piracy 97 techniques 16, 25, 45–46, 45 n.1, 54, 76, 93, 97 Final Fantasy (Square 1987) 93, 125 Finding Nemo (film) 35

203 Gam*Boy console (Samsung 1989) 91, 93, 98 Game Boy platform (Nintendo 1999) 63, 63 n.8 Game Cultures (book) 167 game engines 159, 167, 169, 183 Twine see Twine platform (Klimas 2009) Unity see Unity game engine gameplay 64, 66, 112, 114, 121–22, 123 good gameplay 121 gamergate campaign 168 gamer habitus 105, 107, 113, 118, 125, 128–29, 168, 173, 196 gamer identity 38, 117, 157–58, 168, 185 cyborg 171–72, 176–77 hacker 171–72, 175, 179 gamer lexicon 112–13, 114, 121, 123–24 gamers 20, 39, 111, 112, 114, 121, 150, 157, 163, 167 hardcore gamer 117, 120–21, 125, 126, 128, 167 lonely 194 GamesTM (magazine) 126 game studies 28, 30, 39–40, 179–80, 181, 182, 191–92, 193–94; see also platform studies Game Studies (web journal) 191 Game World (magazine) 83, 98 Gaming at the Edge (book) 183 Gaming the Iron Curtain (book) 93 Garou: Mark of the Wolves (SNK 2000) 125 GCE see General Consumer Electronics (GCE) gender norms 25, 107, 114, 116–17, 121, 124, 129, 150, 158, 164, 167, 179, 195, 196 women see women General Consumer Electronics (GCE) 46, 48, 51, 53, 59, 60 n.7 Mine Storm (1982) 48, 52, 53, 59–60, 64, 66, 69 Scramble (1982) 64–65 Spike (1983) 53, 66 genres 22, 120, 123, 129, 164 action 119, 121, 123 fighting 80, 108, 119–20, 120 n.1, 122, 124–25, 126 shooting 45, 52, 64, 67, 95, 95 n.9, 97, 119, 126 sports see sports genre text adventure 93, 123, 125, 128, 144, 145 glocalization 79, 91–92, 97, 98 software development kits 97–98 good gameplay 121 Google 13, 34 Guardian Heroes (Treasure 1996) 134 hackers 25, 75, 82, 88, 89–90, 93, 96, 97 n.10 identity 171–72, 175, 179 Haitai Electronics (company) 86, 91 Haitai Vistar console (1993) 91, 92–93 haptic screen see touchscreen hardcore gamer 117, 120–21, 125, 126, 128, 167 good gameplay 121 hardcore, definition of 120–21

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Hardcore Gaming 101 (website) 140 historically minor see minor histories historiography see platform historiography home arcade platforms 129 Neo Geo see Neo Geo AES platform (SNK 1991) Hong Kong piracy 79, 83, 96, 97 Horse Master (McHenry 2013) 176 HTML 39, 157, 158, 159 n.2, 166–67 hypertext links 169–71, 173–74 Hyundai 78 Comboy console 91

Korea see South Korea (decolonization); South Korea (videogame industry) Korean Information Industry Association study 90 Kraut Buster (NG:Dev.Team 2015) 126 Kyunghyang Shinmun (newspaper) 80

IBM PC 100 identity cyborg 171–72, 176–77, 185 gamer 38, 117, 157–58, 168, 171–72, 185 hacker 171–72, 175, 179 race 30, 158, 196 sexual 30, 34, 68, 129, 158, 193, 196; see also queerness tourism 177, 183–84, 186 Illusions in Motion (book) 29 imaginaries 12, 38, 67, 107, 123, 151, 162, 169, 186 indie imaginary 164 media imaginary 127–28 platform see Neo Geo AES platform (SNK 1991); Sega Saturn platform (1994) Sonic X-treme 134–35, 136, 146, 152 Imagined Communities (book) 127 indie videogames 162–65, 166 Braid (2008) 163; see also twines (videogames) intellectual property see copyright interface 33, 37, 46, 69, 78, 78 n.3, 197 Sketchpad 49–50, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60–61 Twine 39, 159, 162, 172–73 Vectrex see Vectrex (interface); see also perspective Japan art 46, 95 centre-periphery model 73–74 decolonization from see South Korea (decolonization) ‘glocal’ distribution see glocalization piracy, and see piracy (hardware/software) Joymax console 83 joystick see controllers Kill Bill (film) 97 King of Fighters series (SNK) 79, 120, 125 King of Fighters XIV (2016) 124 Knightmare (Konami 1986) 95 Konami 86 Knightmare (1986) 95 Metal Gear Solid (1998) 173 Scramble (1982) 64–65

Last Blade series (SNK) 120 Laws of Media (book) 126 LGBTQIA+ people 34, 158, 161, 168, 177 With Those We Love Alive (Porpentine 2014) 173, 176, 177–79; see also queerness Lincoln TX-2’s oscilloscope 49 lonely gamer 194 magazines 28 n.9, 30, 37, 83–85, 86, 88, 91, 100, 120, 140 Bigger-Badder-Better 112, 113, 114, 115, 119 Computer and Video Games (CVG) 112, 122, 123 Computer Study 81, 82, 83, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 98 Electronic Gaming Monthly 111 gamer lexicon 112–13, 114, 121, 123–24 GamesTM 126 Game World 83, 98 Meeting with MSX 83, 84, 90, 98 MyCom 81, 81, 83, 86, 87, 94, 95 Nintendo Power 112, 113 Official Sega Saturn Magazine 145 Science 81 66 The Atlantic 12, 163 The New Yorker 163 The One 122, 123 TV Gamer 48, 116 Video 65 Video Games and Computer Entertainment 122, 124; see also Neo Geo AES platform (SNK 1991); Sega Saturn platform (1994); Vectrex platform (GCE 1982); Zemmix platform (Daewoo 1985) Magician Lord (SNK 1990) 111 Magnavox Odyssey see Odyssey (console 1972) Table Tennis (1972) 66 Magnavox Odyssey see Odyssey (console 1972) Mangia (Freeman 2014) 173–74 marginality 17, 18–19, 27, 193, 194, 198 disability 34, 158, 168 LGBTQIA+ people see LGBTQIA+ people mental health 158 people of colour 34, 158, 168 Twine 34, 158, 161, 168, 172, 177, 182, 184 women see women Mario Bros. series (Nintendo) Mario Bros. (arcade 1983) 94, 95, 96 Super Mario Bros. (1985) 95–96 Super Mario 64 (1996) 144, 145 Super Mario Maker (2015) 97 n.10

Index

media archaeology 11, 28, 29, 38–39, 133–34, 151, 157, 186 anarchaeology 16, 22, 30–31, 197 archaeology, etymology of 198 archives see archives, archivization definition 16 fan practices 137–38 fetishization of obsolescence 12, 15, 17, 39, 133, 134, 137, 139, 141–42, 153 Illusions in Motion (book) 29 minor histories 16–24 media history 17, 36, 39, 128, 151, 153 anarchaeology 16, 22, 30–31, 197 approaches to 20–21, 22, 26–27 discursive, technical, affective 16, 23, 29–30, 32, 38, 128, 136, 149, 196; see also Neo Geo AES platform (SNK 1991); Twine platform (Klimas 2009) media archaeology see media archaeology Meeting with MSX (magazine) 83, 84, 90, 98 Mega Drive console (Sega 1988) 122, 134, 144–45 Metal Gear Solid (Konami 1998) 173 microcomputers 26, 38, 50, 73, 74, 77–78, 82, 98, 123, 158 Commodore 64 78 MSX see MSX standard ZX Spectrum 78, 100 Microsoft 38, 73, 74, 78, 83, 99, 100 MSX see MSX standard Windows platform 145, 147, 148 Mine Storm (GCE 1982) 48, 52, 53, 59–60, 64, 66, 69 minor histories 13, 13 n.2, 18, 27, 185, 192, 197, 198 media archaeology 16–24 platforms see minor platforms minor literature 19, 39, 157, 158 Twine, and 157, 158–59 minor platforms 32, 40 alternative structures of feeling see alternative structures of feeling decolonial platforms see decolonization discontinuity see difference and discontinuity epistemic tools, as see epistemic tools media archaeology 16–24 minor, definition of 11, 13, 18, 19 moments of rupture see moments of rupture Neo Geo see Neo Geo AES platform (SNK 1991) obsolescence see obsolescence parasite, as 13, 18, 18 n.6, 19, 160, 185 residual mediation see residual mediation Sega Saturn see Sega Saturn platform (1994) studies see platform studies theoretical objects, as see epistemic tools transitional instabilities see transitional instabilities Twine see Twine platform (Klimas 2009)

205 Vectrex see Vectrex platform (GCE 1982) videogame history 24–32, 35 Zemmix see Zemmix platform (Daewoo 1985) minor structures of feeling see alternative structures of feeling moments of rupture 11, 14, 16, 19, 21–22, 29, 31, 35, 37, 40, 191, 193 gamer, gameplay 114 linear v painterly (Renaissance) 58, 151 Neo Geo 114, 127 Sega Saturn 152 Twine 39, 160, 161, 168, 185 Vectrex 37, 47 Zemmix 100; see also difference and discontinuity MSX standard 37–38, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 89, 97, 98 Meeting with MSX (magazine) 83, 84, 90, 98 MSX1 81, 93 MSX2 81, 82, 93 MSX2+ 81 Zemmix 29, 38, 73, 74, 81–82, 93, 94, 95, 99, 100 Multi Video System (MVS) see Neo Geo MVS (arcade) MVS see Neo Geo MVS (arcade) MyCom (magazine) 81, 81, 83, 86, 87, 94, 95; see also Computer Study (magazine) Namco (Dig Dug 1982) 95 NAM-1975 (SNK 1991) 123 narrative texts see text adventure genre NEC 97, 117 glocalization 79, 91–92, 97, 98 PC Engine console (1990) 91, 93 Neo Geo AES platform (SNK 1991) 13, 105–32, 160, 169, 184 advertisements 110, 113-117, 115, 119 alternative structures of feeling 127, 129 arcade videogames, migration of 28–29, 49, 100, 106, 107–12, 127, 128, 192, 196 Art of Fighting series 120 Bigger-Badder-Better 112, 113, 114, 115, 119 controller 106, 111, 117, 120, 121, 122–23, 124 destabilization of arcade play 119–27 difference and discontinuity 127, 184–85 discursive object, as 105, 106–7, 113, 114, 117, 118, 121, 127, 128, 192 domesticity 105, 107, 114, 117, 118, 124, 128 epistemic tool, as 127 fans, fan practice 126, 134 Fatal Fury series 120, 122 fetish, fetishization 124, 127 fighting game-fixation 108, 119–23 Garou: Mark of the Wolves (2000) 125 high price point 111, 118, 122 home console 15, 105–7, 109–12, 110, 113–14, 117–18, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128–29

206 

Minor Pl atforms in Videogame History

imagined expectations 15, 49, 105, 106, 107, 112–18, 124, 125, 126–27, 129, 162 King of Fighters series 79, 120, 124, 125 Kraut Buster (2015) 126 Last Blade series 120 magazine reviews 38, 105, 106, 107, 111, 112, 114, 117, 118, 121–23, 125, 126, 197 Magician Lord (1990) 111 memory card 111–12, 123, 129 moments of rupture 114, 127 MVS see Neo Geo MVS (arcade) NAM-1975 (1991) 123 Neo Geo X console (2012) 126 nostalgia 127, 129 ports, porting 38, 110–11, 118, 125, 196 Riding Hero (1991) 122 Samurai Shodown series 120, 125, 126 solitary male target 116–17 see also hardcore gamer; lonely gamer success or failure 38, 105, 106–7, 118, 121–23, 125, 126, 128 The King of Fighters series (SNK) 125 3 Count Bout (1993) 122–23, 124 transitional instability 127 World Heroes series 120 Neo Geo CD (SNK) 125, 126 Neo Geo MVS (arcade) 29, 108–12, 118, 122, 125, 126, 127, 129 advertisements 110 Cyber Lip (SNK 1990) 111 Kraut Buster (2015) 126 Neo Geo X console (SNK 2012) 126 neuropower 174–75 NiGHTS into Dreams… (Sonic Team 1996) 134, 144 Nintendo 25, 73, 86, 93, 144 Donkey Kong (1981) 53 Family Computer Golf: Japan Course (1987) 95 Game Boy platform (1999) 63, 63 n.8 glocalization 79, 91–92, 97, 98 Mario Bros. see Mario Bros. series (Nintendo) Nintendo 64 console (1996) 144, 145 Nintendo DS console (2004) 64, 76 Nintendo Entertainment System see Famicom console (Nintendo 1983) Nintendo Wii console (2006) 117–18 Super Nintendo Entertainment System 20, 28 n.9, 78, 143 Virtual Boy platform (1995) 15 Wii Fit (2007) 118 Nintendo 64 console (1996) 144, 145 Nintendo DS console (2004) 64, 76 Nintendo Power (magazine) 112, 113 Nintendo Wii console (2006) 117–18 North America centre-periphery model 73–74

decolonization from see South Korea (decolonization) piracy, and see piracy (hardware/software) videogame industry crash (1983) 11, 12, 22, 25–26, 73 nostalgia 12, 126, 140, 141, 142 arcade videogames see Neo Geo MVS (arcade) modes of 150–51 Sonic X-treme 150–51, 152; see also fans, fan practice obsolescence 127, 135 dialectic of 15, 39, 133, 134, 136, 137–43, 148, 186 fetishization of 12, 15, 17, 39, 133, 134, 137, 139, 141–42, 153 residual mediation see residual mediation Odyssey (console 1972) plastic overlays 65–66 Official Sega Saturn Magazine 145 online videogames 75, 75 n.2, 80 n.5, 124–25 Pac-Man (Atari 1982) 109 Panzer Dragoon Saga (Team Andromeda 1998) 138 Parasite (Porpentine 2013) 183 PC Engine console (NEC 1990) 91, 93 people of colour 34, 158, 168 perspective 15, 46, 47, 53, 54–55, 56, 57, 59, 64 art, in 54, 55, 58, 60, 68, 147, 148 camera obscura 23, 55, 68, 69 film, in 45, 45 n.1, 54 phenomenology, queer see queerness photographic techniques 45–46, 108 photomontage archives 151–52 Sonic X-treme, and 142–43, 152 The Arcades Project (book) 39, 137, 142–43, 151; see also constellational view (videogame history) piracy (film) 97 piracy (hardware/software) China 78–79, 100 Hong Kong 79, 83, 96, 97 Joymax console 83 platform see Zemmix platform (Daewoo 1985) South Korea 15, 26, 74, 75, 79–80, 82–84, 93–99 Taiwan 78, 79 theory of articulation 76–77, 86–88 plastic overlays Odyssey 65–66 Vectrex 47, 52, 59, 60, 63, 64–67, 69 ‘platform capitalism’ 13 ‘platform governance’ 13 platform historiography 11, 12, 14, 16, 26, 28n9, 193

Index

‘platformization of cultural production’ 13 platforms/consoles 194–95 definition 11, 13, 31–32 Dreamcast (Sega 1999) 15, 134 Famicom see Famicom console (Nintendo 1983) Game Boy (Nintendo 1999) 63, 63 n.8 Mega Drive (Sega 1988) 122, 134, 144–45 minor see minor platforms obsolescence see obsolescence roles 31 surface effects 30–31, 191, 195, 196 Virtual Boy (Nintendo 1995) 15 ‘platform society’ 13, 31 platform studies 11, 13, 28–31, 28 n.9, 39–40, 45, 127, 196 feminist critique 30–31; see also game studies players see gamers Playing with Feelings (book) 29 PlayStation (Sony 1993) 143, 144, 173 Metal Gear Solid (1998) 173 Point of View (POV) (company) 144, 145, 147, 148 Pokémon (Nintendo, from 1995) 45–46 political constructs 13, 13 n.3, 14 n.4, 21, 31, 32, 33–34, 76, 159 n.1 decolonization see decolonization democratization see democratization minor literature 19, 39, 157, 158; see also marginality Pong (Atari 1972) 62, 66 ports, porting (to home consoles) 48, 93 Atari 48, 52, 109 compromises 106, 109, 123, 125 Neo Geo 38, 106, 110–11, 118, 125 Saturn Sega 145 Vectrex 49, 50 n.5, 64, 66, 67 Zemina 95–96, 98 Zemmix 94, 95–96 POV see Point of View (POV) (company) preservation see archives, archivization production/consumption dichotomy 25, 26, 31, 34, 79, 81, 121, 137–38, 165, 175 Prosoft (company) 82, 90, 93 punk archaeologists see Atari landfill Q*bert (Gottlieb 1982) 46, 46 n.2, 55 queerness failure, and 34–35 queer phenomenology 191, 193, 195 Queer phenomenology (book) 193, 195 The Queer Art of Failure (book) 35 Twine see Twine (queerness) videogame history 35, 167, 193; see also LGBTQIA+ people Queer phenomenology (book) 193, 195 queer utopian hermeneutics 169–80, 176–79, 183

207 Horse Master (2013) 176 Parasite (2013) 183 And the Robot Horse You Rode in On (2013) 176–77 With Those We Love Alive see With Those We Love Alive (Porpentine 2014) race norms 30, 158, 196 Racing the Beam (book) 28 random-scan cathode ray tube (CRT) 37, 45, 46, 47–54, 58, 62, 65, 66, 69, 192, 197 Williams tube (1946) 55–56, 56, 60 raster-scan cathode ray tube (CRT) 15, 46, 48, 49, 50–51, 52, 53, 57, 58, 63, 67, 69 random scan CRT, distinguished 46, 50–51, 52, 53, 65–66, 68 Remediation: Understanding New Media (book) 54 Renaissance camera obscura 23, 55, 68, 69 linear v painterly 58, 151 perspective in art 54, 55, 58, 60, 68 residual mediation 15, 135–36, 138, 153, 186 Sonic X-treme 15, 136, 137, 142, 146, 150, 152, 192; see also fans, fan practice residual platform Neo Geo 127, 129 Sega Saturn see Sega Saturn platform (1994) resolution and colour (screen) 172–75 Riding Hero (SNK 1991) 122 Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (book) 166 rupture see moments of rupture Saehan Sangsa (company) 81 Samsung 91 Gam*Boy console (1989) 91, 93, 98 SPC-1000 computer (1983) 79 Samurai Shodown series (SNK) 120, 125 Samurai Shodown RPG (1997) 125 Samurai Shodown V (2003) 126 Science 81 (magazine) 66 Scramble (Konami 1982) 64–65 Screen Software (company) 82 SDKs see software development kits (SDKs) Sega (company) 25, 79 Dreamcast platform (1999) 15, 134 Glocalization 79, 91–92, 97, 98 Mega Drive console (1988) 122, 134, 144–45 Official Sega Saturn Magazine 145 Sega Master System 91 Super Hang-On (1987) 122 Sega Saturn platform (1994) 13, 15, 38–39, 122, 129, 133–56, 160, 192 CD-ROM storage 134, 143 difference and discontinuity 152 downturn 134, 143–46 fans, fan practice 134, 142, 145–46 Guardian Heroes (1996) 134 Imaginaries 133, 134

208 

Minor Pl atforms in Videogame History

magazine reviews 134 moments of rupture 152 NiGHTS into Dreams… (1996) 134, 144 Official Sega Saturn Magazine 145 Panzer Dragoon Saga (1998) 138 ports, porting 145 residual mediation 134, 137, 142, 152, 192 Sonic X-treme see Sonic X-treme success or failure 143–44, 145–46 2D to 3D transition 134, 143–44, 145, 146 Sega Technical Institute (STI) 144, 145, 146 sexuality 30, 34, 68, 129, 158, 193, 196 Sharp MZ computer 79 shooting genre 45, 52, 64, 67, 95, 95 n.9, 97, 119, 126; see also fighting genre; hardcore gamer Sketchpad interface 49–50, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60–61 Smith Engineering 47 SNES see Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) SNK (company) Art of Fighting series 120 Fatal Fury series 120, 122 fighting game-fixation 108, 119–23 Garou: Mark of the Wolves (2000) 125 King of Fighters series 79, 120, 124, 125 Last Blade series 120 NAM-1975 (1991) 123 Neo Geo AES see Neo Geo AES platform (SNK 1991) Neo Geo CD 125, 126 Neo Geo MVS see Neo Geo MVS (arcade) Neo Geo X console (2012) 126 Riding Hero (1991) 122 Samurai Shodown series 120, 125, 126 The King of Fighters series 125 3 Count Bout (1993) 122–23, 124 World Heroes series 120 software development kits (SDKs) 97–98 Solar Quest (Cinematronics 1982) 66 Sonic X-treme archives, archivization 39, 136–37, 143, 146–47, 148, 149, 150–51, 152, 153, 192 cancellation (1997) 39, 129, 133, 144–46, 147, 192 difference and discontinuity 137 discursive materials 136, 152 fans/fansites 39, 133, 134–35, 136, 137, 142, 146–51, 152, 192 fetish, fetishization 39, 133, 134, 137–43, 150, 151, 153 imaginaries 134–35, 136, 146, 152 nostalgia 150–51, 152 photomontage, and 142–43, 152 relational aesthetics 30, 137, 142, 146, 149, 150, 152 residual mediation 15, 39, 136–37, 142, 146, 149, 150, 152, 192 vapourware product 144

Sonic Xtreme Compendium (website) 146–47, 148 Sony 78, 91, 143, 144 PlayStation (1993) 143, 144, 173 South Korea (decolonization) baseball, football 85–86, 89 double bind of neocolonialism 38, 73, 74, 75, 85–86, 88, 99, 180 postcolonial consciousness 38, 70, 73, 77, 85, 100 Zemmix as object of see Zemmix platform (Daewoo 1985) South Korea (videogame industry) Computer Programs Protection Act (CPPA) 74, 82, 86, 88–91, 93, 100 copyright 74, 82, 84, 85, 86–87, 87, 88–91, 93–99 formalization of industry 88–93 informal industry 15, 26, 38, 69, 74, 75, 76, 77–88, 99, 163, 180 Joymax console 83 magazines 83–85, 86, 95; see also Computer Study (magazine); Meeting with MSX (magazine); MyCom (magazine) piracy 74, 75, 79–80, 82–84, 93–99 regulation and censorship 80, 92 Space Invaders (Taito 1978) 65 Spacewar! (Russel 1962) 25, 50, 50 n.5 Spacewars (Cinematronics 1976) 50 n.5 Space Wars (Cinematronics 1982) 66 SPC-1000 computer (Samsung 1983) 79 Spike (GCE 1983) 53, 66 sports genre 25, 65, 119, 168 FIFA football series 174–75 Table Tennis (1972) 66 Star Castle (Cinematronics 1980, 83) 49, 65, 66–67, 69 Star Hawk (Cinematronics 1982) 67 Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (film) 59, 67 STI see Sega Technical Institute (STI) Street Fighter series (Capcom) Street Fighter (1987) 79, 80, 120, 124–25 Street Fighter II (1991) 108 Street Fighter V (2016) 124–25 structures of feeling 17, 19, 31–33, 36, 135, 195, 197 alternative see alternative structures of feeling success or failure 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 19–21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 78, 195 Neo Geo 38, 106, 107, 118, 125, 126, 128 queering history, and 34–35 Sega Saturn 143–44, 145–46 Zemmix 99–100 Super Boy series (Zemina) 95–97, 98 Super Boy 1 (1989) 90, 96 Super Boy 2 (1989) 90, 96 Super Boy 4 (1992) 98

Index

Super Hang-On (Sega 1987) 122 Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) 20, 28 n.9, 78, 143 Table Tennis (Magnavox 1972) 66 Taito (company) 86 Space Invaders (1978) 65 Taiwan 74, 83 piracy 78, 79 Techniques of the Observer (book) 68 Tempest (Atari 1981) 50 temporality, queer see queerness Tennis for Two (Higginbotham 1958) 25, 50 text adventure genre 93, 123, 125, 128, 144, 145 Twine see Twine platform (Klimas 2009) The Arcades Project (book) 18, 105, 142–43, 151 The Archaeology of Knowledge (book) 23, 29 The Atlantic (magazine) 12, 163 The Body Multiple (book) 147 The Culture of Digital Fighting Games (book) 124 The Great Art of Light and Shadow (book) 23 The King of Fighters series (SNK) 125 The King of Fighters ’98 (1998) 125 The New Yorker (magazine) 163 The New York Times Magazine 165 The One (magazine) 122, 123 theoretical objects see epistemic tools The Queer Art of Failure (book) 35 The Three Dragon Story (Zemina 1989) 90, 95 3 Count Bout (SNK 1993) 122–23, 124 3D imager headset (Vectrex) 46, 46 n.2, 51, 53, 60, 61–62, 63, 67, 69, 172 3D structure Alien Caseno (2016) 175–76 Sega Saturn 134, 143–44, 145, 146 tools (videogame development) 161, 165, 169, 175, 185, 197 Twine 39, 158, 159, 161–62, 165–66, 170, 175, 185 Topia (company) 82, 93 Toshiba 78 touchscreen 33, 64, 173 light pen (Vectrex) 46, 49, 59, 60–61, 61, 62, 63, 69 transitional instabilities 11, 14, 35, 128, 153, 186, 191 Neo Geo 127 Twine 15, 39 Vectrex 37, 45, 47, 53, 63, 68, 69, 192; see also moments of rupture triple-a videogames 170, 174, 182 Tron (film) 67 TurboGrafx console 93 TV Gamer (magazine) 48, 116 Twine platform (Klimas 2009) 13, 19, 39, 62, 157–89, 192 alternative structures of feeling 34, 158, 160, 161, 170, 176, 178, 184, 185

209 democratization 15, 22, 157, 159, 161–69, 185, 196–97 Depression Quest (2013) 168, 170–71 difference and discontinuity 175, 185 discursive object, as 164, 165, 167, 169, 181–82 dissensus 39, 185 epistemic tool, as 39, 161, 180–84 fetish, fetishization 161, 186 free platform 39, 158, 159–60, 159 n.3, 165–66, 168, 182, 185 Horse Master (2013) 176 HTML 39, 157, 158, 159 n.2, 166–67 hypertext fiction 39, 157, 158, 160, 169–70, 170–71, 173, 176; see also text adventure genre below hypertext links 169–71, 173–74 indie ethos 164–65, 166 interface 39, 159, 162, 172–73 Mangia (2014) 173–74 marginality 34, 158, 160, 161, 168, 172, 177, 182, 184 minor literature, and 157, 158–59 moments of rupture 39, 160, 161, 168, 185 Parasite (2013) 183 political/intellectual tool 164, 166, 167, 180–84, 196 queerness see Twine (queerness) revolution 159–60, 161–69, 179, 185 text adventure genre 19, 158, 162, 170, 177; see also hypertext fiction above And the Robot Horse You Rode in On (2013) 176–77 With Those We Love Alive see With Those We Love Alive (Porpentine 2014) transitional instability 15, 39 twines see twines (videogames) utopia 161, 165, 168, 185 videogame-making tool, as 39, 158, 159, 161–62, 165–66, 170, 175, 185 Twine (queerness) 34, 157, 167, 179–80, 183, 185 queer mechanics 175, 176 queer temporalities 34, 177, 178, 179, 184, 191, 193, 194 queer utopian hermeneutics see queer utopian hermeneutics twines (videogames) 158, 159, 159 n.2, 164–65, 167, 176 conventional videogames, distinguished from 170–71, 172; see also With Those We Love Alive (Porpentine 2014) corporeal adjacency 172 cultural studies 180, 181–82 Depression Quest (2013) 168, 170–71 heterarchical texts, as 170 Horse Master (2013) 176 identity tourism 177, 183–84, 186 Mangia (2014) 173–74 Parasite (2013) 183

210 

Minor Pl atforms in Videogame History

player agency, subversion of 170–71, 175–76 resolution and colour 172–75 text-based adventures 170 And the Robot Horse You Rode in On (2013) 176–77 With Those We Love Alive see With Those We Love Alive (Porpentine 2014) 2D structure (Sega Saturn) 134, 143–44, 146

Cosmic Chasm (1982) 66 Mine Storm (1982) 48, 52, 53, 59–60, 64, 66, 69 Scramble (1982) 64–65 Solar Quest (1982) 66 Space Wars (1982) 66 Spike (1983) 53, 66 Star Castle (1980, 83) 49, 65, 66–67, 69 Star Hawk (1982) 67 VGCE see Video Games and Computer Entertainment (VGCE) (magazine) videogame historiography see platform historiography videogame history alternative structures of feeling see alternative structures of feeling archives see archives, archivization binary concepts see binary concepts constellational view 26–27, 36, 39, 105, 107, 186, 198 dead, dead ends 17, 21, 37, 45, 126, 127, 137 deep time view 17, 26 difference and discontinuity see difference and discontinuity evolutionary approach 22, 25, 25 n.7, 198 forgotten 11, 17, 18, 21, 105, 133, 158 industry crash (1983) 11, 12, 22, 25–26 marginality see marginality media archaeology see media archaeology minor platforms see minor platforms moments of rupture see moments of rupture neglect 17, 19, 91, 135, 175, 176 overlooked objects 11, 17, 22, 139, 158, 186 photomontage see constellational view above queerness 35, 167, 193 suppression 11, 12, 14, 17, 22, 36, 40, 53, 94, 135, 153, 191, 194 transitional instabilities see transitional instabilities ways of seeing see ways of seeing videogame industry (North American) crash (1983) 11, 12, 22, 25–26, 73 videogame-making tools see tools (videogame development) videogames aesthetic traditions see aesthetics piracy see piracy (hardware/software) political construct, as see political constructs radically contextual, as 13, 31, 192 resolution and colour 172–75 triple-a videogames 170, 174, 182 Video Games and Computer Entertainment (VGCE) (magazine) 122, 124 Videogames for Humans (book) 159, 166, 173 videogames (online) 75, 75 n.2, 80 n.5, 124–25 Video (magazine) 65

Unity game engine 159–60, 159 n.3, 162, 167, 168–69, 185 aesthetic traditions 175–76 democratization 168–69 utopia 113, 139, 161, 165, 168, 177, 184, 185 queerness see queer utopian hermeneutics Twine 161, 165, 168, 185 Valis (Wolf Team 1986) 82 vector-based graphics 57–58 history 49–50 linear v painterly (art) 58, 151 Sketchpad 49–50, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60–61 Vectrex 15, 37, 45, 48 n.4, 49, 51, 53, 58, 67, 68 XY grid 49, 55, 58–59, 60, 64 Vectrex (interface) 45, 46, 49, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60 n.7, 64–67, 68, 69, 192, 197 3D imager headset 46, 51, 53, 60, 61–62, 63, 67, 69, 172 light pen 46, 49, 59, 60–61, 61, 62, 63, 69 Vectrex platform (GCE 1982) 45–72, 160 advertisements 115-116, 116 aesthetic traditions 53, 55, 58, 59, 67, 68 alternative structures of feeling 47, 53–54, 67 arcade videogames, migration of 50, 68, 69 controller 46, 49, 53, 67 corporeal adjacency 62, 172 difference and discontinuity 13, 36, 107 epistemic tool, as 47, 69 General Consumer Electronics 46, 48, 53 in-between-ness 22, 53 interface see Vectrex (interface) magazine reviews 48–49, 51–52, 62, 65, 66 moments of rupture 37, 47 plastic overlays 47, 52, 59, 60, 63, 64–67, 69 playing with vision 54–63, 68 ports, porting 49, 50 n.5, 64, 66, 67 random-scan CRT 37, 45, 46, 47–54, 58, 62, 65, 66, 69, 192, 197 Smith Engineering 47 transitional instability 14–15, 37, 45, 47, 53, 63, 68, 69, 109 vector-based home console 28, 37, 46–47, 48, 49–50 vector graphics 15, 37, 45, 48 n.4, 49, 51, 53, 67, 68 Western Technology 47 Vectrex videogames

Index

Virtual Boy platform (Nintendo 1995) 15 ways of seeing 36, 37, 45, 46, 47, 195 cinema history 16, 69, 76 Vectrex 54–63, 68 Western Technology 47 Wii Fit (Nintendo 2007) 118 Williams tube (1946) 55–56, 56, 60 Windows platform (Microsoft) 145, 147, 148 With Those We Love Alive (Porpentine 2014) 173, 176, 177–79 sigils 178–79 women 17, 34, 108, 113, 116–17, 118, 158, 172, 183 gamergate campaign 168; see also gender norms; sexuality World Heroes series (SNK) 120 Young Toys (company) 86 Zemina (company) 82, 90, 92, 93, 94–99 Brother Adventure (1987) 90, 94, 95 ports, porting 95–96, 98 Super Boy see Super Boy series (Zemina) The Three Dragon Story (1989) 90, 95 Zemina Card 93 Zemmix platform (Daewoo 1985) 13, 73–103

211 alternative structures of feeling 75, 77, 83, 99, 100 Computer Kindergarten 81 controller 82 CPC-50 77, 81, 82 CPC-51 ‘Zemmix V’ 81 CPC-61 ‘Super V’ 81 CPG-120 ‘Turbo’ 81 decolonization, as object of 15, 38, 73, 74–75, 76, 99, 180 epistemic tool, as 38, 69–70, 73, 76–77, 180 magazine reviews 75, 81, 82, 83 moments of rupture 100 MSX see MSX standard PC Shuttle console 91 piracy 15, 29, 32, 69, 83 ports, porting 94, 95–96 success or failure 99–100 Super V. 81 Zemmix software Aproman 82 Clover 82, 90, 93 Prosoft 82, 90, 93 Screen Software 82 Topia 82, 93 Zemina see Zemina (company) ZX Spectrum computer 78, 100