Retro gaming in the NY Times
there's an article on Homebrew games and retrogaming in today's NY Times. Unfortunately you have to log in to view it online. Not sure if it's ok to do this (feel free to delete this post if not DP) but here's the article:
September 26, 2002
For Game Makers, Inspiration in the Soul of an Old Machine
By DAVID KUSHNER
ONCE a year Malte Mundt and his friends in northern Germany party like it's 1982. That's the year the Commodore 64 hit the shelves, and Mr. Mundt and the other self-described C64 freaks stage an annual bash to celebrate their beloved, obsolete computers.
Commodore memorabilia is traded. Beer flows. And most of all, games are played. Not just the dusty old ones, but new titles that hard-core hobbyists have been programming for the old machine.
This is the subculture of home-brew gaming: games composed on modern computers but played on ancient and discontinued systems like the Commodore 64, the Amiga and the Atari 2600. The coders are the Dr. Frankensteins of their world, digging up dead hardware and inserting the brains of fresh software. Part nostalgia, part programming challenge, home-brew games offer a glimpse into not only the passion of players but also the staying power of the game industry's pioneering hardware. "They have a magic that no other systems can come up with," Mr. Mundt said.
The resurgence of interest in retro games comes as the modern game industry enjoys unprecedented success. Despite the poor economy and the dot-com crash, video games earned a record $10.8 billion last year in the United States alone. The trinity of leading video game consoles — Microsoft's Xbox, Nintendo's GameCube and Sony's PlayStation 2 — have seduced the mainstream with robust graphics and sophisticated characters.
But gamers old enough to remember the days of the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 are not necessarily won over by the newfangled wares. "Consoles are much more powerful and amusing for the general population," said Roman Chlebec, a 26-year-old Webmaster in Slovakia who runs a popular Commodore 64 site called the C64 Portal (www.c64.sk). "But those who grew up with C64 aren't so easily lured by computing power or number of colors."
"You can still make games that are fun and interesting even if they pale in comparison to the Xbox," said Albert Yarusso, of Austin, Tex., who runs Atari Age (www .atariage.com), a site for fans of that company's systems, including the 2600, which was introduced in 1977 and dominated the industry for many years. Classic games like Pong and Pac-Man delivered a pure kind of competition that did not require digesting a 40-page handbook. More important, Mr. Yarusso said, unlike many of today's games, which can cost millions of dollars to develop, classic games did not require the collaboration of dozens of people on a team but could be written by one person.
Mr. Mundt, who creates Commodore 64 games with a group of hobbyists who call themselves Protovision, is driven by a pragmatic appreciation of the wares. "The system architecture for the Commodore is so simple and straightforward," he said. "It's nothing like Windows." Protovision has created games like Metal Dust, a shoot-'em-up, and Reel Fishing, a rod-and-reel simulation.
Many home-brew creators are game industry employees looking for a diversionary test of their coding skills. Mike Mika, the 29-year-old creative director of Digital Extremes, a company in London, Ontario, that makes games for the Xbox, GameCube and PlayStation 2, is responsible for one of the current hits on the home-brew scene. Aiming to improve upon one of his favorite games for the Atari 2600, Berzerk, Mr. Mika re-engineered the game to include the voice-overs originally found only in the arcade version of Berzerk.
Making such games is a taxing labor of love, however, Mr. Mika said. "To get the 2600 to do anything requires a lot of research and digging," he said. Since the systems could support only a very small amount of data, they require the programmers to make the most out of bare-bones game play.
Those creating titles for the cartridge-based Atari systems have the added challenge of packaging their goods. This requires them to crack open old cartridges, rip out the chips, then solder in new ones containing their code. The home-brew programmers trade or sell their creations over the Internet, at gaming conventions and at specialty shops for around $20 to $50.
Infogrames, the company that now owns the Atari license, doesn't mind players' tinkering with the obsolete wares. "If they're making games that work on the system, then more power to them," said Steve Allison, a spokesman for the company in New York. In fact, Infogrames has been exploiting the vintage factor itself. Playable versions of classic Atari titles like Tempest and Centipede are now featured during the load-in screens of Xbox and PlayStation 2 games.
Of course, if the home-brew gamers were getting rich, this might be another story. At best, they said they make soda money. Protovision has sold about 1,000 games through its site and has gained a following within the expanding C64 scene. But the Protovision programmers are not looking to dethrone consoles anytime soon. Instead, they are content to share their creations with one another over a few drinks at a party with friends.
"With one megahertz and 0.064 megabytes of memory, it shouldn't be possible to do anything, according to the multimedia hype of today," Mr. Mundt said. He takes pleasure in proving those multimedia partisans wrong. "It's fascinating what can be done with this machine."
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Originally Posted by congobongo
