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Raiford Guins & The History of Games - Episode 8
152 Plays7 years ago
Raiford Guins (Indiana University) joins Andrew Reinhard for a discussion on the history of video games.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. The Archaeology Podcast Network is sponsored by Codify, a California benefit corporation. Visit codify at www.codifi.com.
Gaming Group and Arcade History Interview
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everyone, this is Andrew Weihardt of 8-Bit Test Plan, and as you can hear the background we're reading today,
00:00:25
Speaker
While Tara tanks and Megan heals, I'm sitting back here being pretty ineffective with the DPS. So I might as well take this opportunity to share an interview I did with Professor Gregor Grims of Indiana University. We talked about arcade cabinets, preservation of physical game media, gaming nostalgia, and more. I'll check back in later with you all with an update on the progress of the Raiders test, which is luck.
Introduction to Professor Rayford Gwynns and 'Game After'
00:00:57
Speaker
Hello everyone, this is Andrew Reinhard for the 8-bit test bit podcast, and we're doing something new today. We actually have a guest, which is the first time in I guess about seven or eight episodes that we've had someone who is not Megan, Tara, and myself talking about video game archaeology and video game history, and his name is Professor Dr. Rayford Gwynns.
00:01:19
Speaker
And he is currently at Indiana University as a professor of cinema and media studies. Some of you might be familiar with Rayford's work, specifically the 2014 book from MIT Press, Game After, a Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife. And then in 2016, he co-edited a volume called Debugging Game History, a Critical Lexicon, and is currently hard at work
00:01:45
Speaker
at a new book, Atari Modern, a design history of Atari's coin-op cabinets, 1972 to 1979. And I know Rayford personally from working with him at the Atari Burial Ground Excavation back in 2014 in Alamogordo,
Understanding Coin-Op Cabinets in Museums
00:02:00
Speaker
New Mexico. So it's great to reconnect Rayford and welcome to the podcast.
00:02:03
Speaker
And it's an honor to be the first guest on the show. So I'm really excited to be here. No, thanks. Thanks for making the time. So with your work, I'm most familiar with what you're doing with the study of arcade cabinets, you know, for the listeners who are as old as we are. We kind of grew up with these things, basically stand up boxes, or if you went to the bars, you could actually put your drinks on these things.
00:02:27
Speaker
And I was wondering, you know, what lessons, you know, you've learned or what your research has kind of uncovered when you're talking about, you know, the materials and the materiality of early video game systems, specifically the ones that we used to play, you know, at these, you know, coin op arcades. Okay. I think that there was a takeaway for me with Game After. There was a question I posited that I couldn't answer the time. So I'm standing at a lot of different museums.
00:02:53
Speaker
And I'm constantly seeing coin-op cabinets, the large, upright coin-operated machines, in glass display cases. And then I would see a small title card that would have the name, Space Invaders, for example, the year, the company, the distributor, and that's about it. But now here's a game designed to be interacted with, designed to be played, but in the museum, I can't necessarily know it as a game.
Need for Comprehensive Design Documentation
00:03:19
Speaker
So the question for me was, what am I looking at?
00:03:21
Speaker
What do I actually see when I'm cut off from direct physical interaction from these games? Now I couldn't, as I said, I couldn't really give an answer to them, but I think what I'm, the answer I'm building to now is that I'm looking at a history of industrial, graphic, and mechanical design. And it's a history that does not exist in the history of games, nor is it a history that exists in the history of design. And that's what's really fascinating to me, is I feel like I've identified an artifact
00:03:51
Speaker
that is at the inner species between game history and the history of design. But yet, it doesn't exist in any of those spaces. And what I mean by that is nobody's written these histories. Nobody's really tried to think about a game as built from various different design practices and processes. And I think the reason for that is in the history of games and game studies, we tend to privilege what's on the screen.
00:04:17
Speaker
We're very interested in gameplay, and we're interested in thinking about the history of games tied primarily through hardware development and software development.
Research at Stanford and Strong Museum
00:04:27
Speaker
And what I've discovered, I think, in the research is that, well, those are only two design practices that are responsible or formative of this thing we call the coin-operated video game machine.
00:04:39
Speaker
So that's what's got me to this project, is that there was a question that was left unanswered, and I've been doing extensive research at Stanford University's archives. They have the Steve Bristow collection. He was VP of Atari's coin-op division, and also at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. They have a massive collection from Atari's Industrial Design. So I found materials that have allowed me to ask more informed questions
00:05:08
Speaker
And I also have, you know, at my access artifacts, so I can actually look at these games at different museums. If the curators are willing, under controlled conditions, they can disassemble the games so I can look inside of them. And this really helps me to try to materialize a history of design that I feel, you know, really expands how we can think about these particular artifacts and the cultural concepts in which they were developed.
00:05:33
Speaker
This is just fascinating stuff, and it really kind of resonates with the reading that I've been doing recently by Tim Engold. So you're talking about materials, you're talking about materiality, and you're also talking about design and materials intersecting to make a thing, which then takes on a life of its own, or doesn't, depending on whether or not it's being interacted with.
00:05:57
Speaker
And I'm wondering, as you're taking a look at the design, and I'm guessing that there are some designers who are still alive who you can talk to, how much of this work is taking a look at the actual materials that put together a cabinet?
Atari's Design Materials and Techniques
00:06:11
Speaker
I mean, what's a cabinet made of? And why were those materials chosen in order to present a game in a certain way? I'll start by answering. I have a long answer here. So if I start to wander off, drag me back in.
00:06:26
Speaker
I think part of it has to do with the organizational structure of Atari. So I'm looking at a chart, and I know you can't see this, but this is a chart that Peter Takahichi, he was head of industrial design in Atari. He was hired in 1973 when he just finished his degree at San Jose State University in industrial design. So this chart shows the divisional makeup of Atari's coin-op division. So we have electrical engineering.
00:06:54
Speaker
Underneath that, as you would expect, is software engineering, programmers, technicians, assemblers, electronic design. That's what often gets written into the history of games. Again, as I said, software and hardware development. If you kind of move across on this chart, then you see pinball design. Atari did have a pinball design division. I believe they did four or five pinball machines. Then you see industrial design. Underneath that, you have concept design, product design, the model shop.
00:07:21
Speaker
Then we have graphic design, so another division responsible for all the artwork we see on the side cabinets, the attraction panel, the control panel, plus all the cell sheets that were used to promote these games to different business venues, operators, arcade owners.
00:07:38
Speaker
We didn't have mechanical engineering and engineering services. Engineering services is interesting because they were responsible for writing the manuals that were shipped in these games. They also did harness design. That's sort of the electronic artery that wires together the entire machine and documentation control. Mechanical engineering is responsible for all the controls. These are the input devices that allow us to actually play the game. So, centipede print, for instance, the roller ball, night rider,
00:08:07
Speaker
or night driver, night driver, the memetic steering wheel. Okay, so that's one of the important things to begin my response to is that Atari understood the coin-out machine as a complex design process. Yes, of course, the idea of the game itself is what drove design, but the game itself by itself could not actually go out into the market. It needed designers to package this game so it could be played safely in different places of consumption.
00:08:37
Speaker
Now, in terms of the materials, you asked me a question about materials and you also asked me who's responsible for it. Particle board on the sides. Particle board was used. It's durable. It's also lightweight. The coin slot box in the front was backed by solid plywood. I suspect you would realize why plywood would be used in the front guarding the coin door so people can't kick them in to rob these machines.
00:09:04
Speaker
You also had, in the 1970s in particular, and that's why this period fascinates me so much, keep in mind the monitors were black and white.
00:09:12
Speaker
Full color monitor really didn't start to emerge until the late 70s, early 80s. So the bezel surrounding the monitor were often die cut cardboard with different types of graphics illustration on them to add a sense of color surrounding that screen. So that's exactly why you would see the attraction panel often done an original type and it's brilliant color palette. A bezel would often have artwork on the bezel
00:09:40
Speaker
itself to try to drag the viewer in to get the impression that this is a very vibrant, rich, brilliant game when, in fact, it's a black and white monitor. So color really tried to assist the experience of gameplay. It also had a role of trying to market to promote these games to would-be owners, people who would buy these games, put them on a route, or put them on a specific location. And also the player. The attraction panel, I was told by Robert Plamante, who was part of the graphic design
00:10:11
Speaker
each job was to attract a potential user in three seconds. I guess Atari did these sort of studies, they found that that's how much time a person will spend looking up at a game before they decide to drop a quarter in or not. So we have a lot of durable products that were used, a lot of durable materials that were used for these machines. And keep in mind, the machine is not just there
00:10:35
Speaker
to enable or for gameplay, it has to protect and support all the electronic components inside. Now, this is something I think we often overlook because we're so interested in playing these things, right? It's that the wood has to be able to hold electronics components. That's not just the PC board or the monitor. It's also the power supply. And all the mechanical devices inside, they support the coin door, but also the controls. So it has to protect them in terms of shipment.
00:11:05
Speaker
So when these games are shipped to distributors, the actual cabinet provides its own type of packaging to make sure the internal sides are safe. But also the wear and tear in the field. One thing that I found that was quite interesting was that when Atari started to experiment with different types of laminates, they would actually be able to expand the actual control panel to kind of wrap it down, complete with artwork, because these new laminates allowed them to be more creative in terms of how they could actually package these games for potential players.
00:11:35
Speaker
So that's one of my responses to thinking about the materiality in terms of different materials that are actually used within these games. I'm surprised, you know, Andrew, one thing that really kind of opened my eyes to a lot of this research, which is how innovative Atari had to be in terms of some of the technical constraints influencing their games in the 1970s. For example, Warlords.
00:11:58
Speaker
The Warlords was a very, very popular game in the form of the cocktail table or the upright cabinet. It's a game I often remember as being very colorful when I would play the game.
00:12:07
Speaker
One of the things I found that was really intriguing is that it's not a color monitor. It's a black and white monitor. Well, then how does it give color? How does it present color? Well, it's an illusion. It's a very old sort of trick that a lot of electromechanical games would utilize. This is before video games were being used in upright cabins. They basically put multicolored cellophane, a cellophane film directly on top of the monitor held together by tape. So when I've seen Warlords Disassemble,
00:12:35
Speaker
I see this very thick kind of piece of plastic coating directly over the monitor. So you have the phosphorous glow of a capillary tube projecting through this multi-paneled color of plastic piece. That's how we have the illusion of color.
00:12:51
Speaker
And of course, around all of that is this really nice illustrated or graphic design bezel. So when all put together, the cabinet, in my mind, is the game. It's not just, it's a machine, it's a device or an apparatus that we play through, but you can take that monitor out of the cabinet and you can put it on a desk and you can play the monitor, connect it to its printed circuit board with some input device. But is that the same experience of standing up, having your body kind of
00:13:20
Speaker
work with the overall apparatus. We can still play the game, but is the game only that which appears on the screen, or is it the entire machine? I think this is what's really important for me is to use the word machine, because I think the actual game is one component in a much larger machine. And by using machine, I think it forces us to think about all of those component parts that feed into the overall game that we play. In terms of the people responsible,
00:13:49
Speaker
This is what's been a real driving, I guess a driving thread for my work, is that there's been a good deal of documenting the actual software developers. You know, their names often accompany games, for instance. So it's not uncommon to see, you know, an asteroid, an egg log's name is connected directly to that game. And it gives the impression that there was one person responsible for something we call asteroids, when in fact there was an entire design team behind it.
00:14:18
Speaker
So Tempest is another one where I've reached out and I've interviewed, I found the actual industrial designer responsible for the cabin of that game. His name is Mike Morillo. I've interviewed him for about six hours at his house. And it was amazing to hear somebody talk about how vital his role is in shaping the gameplay experience. So the thought that went into why the cabin looks the way it does, it's not accidental. It's not arbitrary.
00:14:48
Speaker
It's not only driven by marketing, but it involves a concept design that an industrial designer started to sketch with magic markers and colored pencils to get some type of semblance of what his vision would be. He would play the game, he would look at the game, he would draw certain attributes of the game and try to have his cabinet express or embody those attributes in the experience of gameplay. So there's a counter history of design
00:15:16
Speaker
If that's the correct word, counter history, maybe not, or maybe anonymous histories, that term might occur. There's an anonymous history of design practices, fields, and processes that doesn't get covered when we already terminate our understanding of the game to that which is on screen. I think you're really onto something there. And I'm thinking specifically of the treatment of video games, as you see them in museum collections, for example. So you go to MoMA and you take a look at the video game exhibit.
00:15:43
Speaker
And you are basically looking at what's on the screen and is this art, et cetera. You kind of have that argument. And then you go to a place like the National Museum of Play or the Strong or the Vigama's Video Game Museum in Rome. And here are these things that are largely out in the open that are totally playable with your own quarters. They still work. And so you're getting that original gameplay experience as presented through the packaging, through the construction, as well as what's actually happening in front of you.
Challenges in Preserving Arcade Cabinets
00:16:16
Speaker
I have two questions actually that are going to stem from this. One is, how is preservation handled for these cabinets? How are they taken care of and kind of restored to their original glory? Or is restoration something that should be avoided and they should just be conserved in their original state? And then the other question is one of nostalgia.
00:16:38
Speaker
and how do we kind of separate the nostalgia of this kind of retro gaming environment that we seem to be occupying right now with an actual historical or archaeological take or interpretation of the games themselves. I'll jump into both of these. I'll say one word about MoMA quickly. I'll send you a piece. I've written on MoMA's game exhibition in the journal Design and Culture.
00:17:02
Speaker
And I agree with you, you basically have 90 degree LCD screens or plasma screens cut into the wall. It's very rare that we played games on a 90 degree angle in terms of the screen. And the reason for that is often screens are at a 45 or maybe a 20 or actually flat to deal with glare.
00:17:26
Speaker
that a player is inside the cabinet's body when they play, right? So MoMA undoes the actual mode of delivery within which we experience these games. And one thing that I think MoMA really fails at is that the curator of the Interaction Design Exhibition made a point of not including
00:17:44
Speaker
Consoles or any cabinets because she referred to those as peripheries. I believe a nostalgia So she thought that that might undo the kind of minimalist modern aesthetic that Loma really prides itself on in doing so that Very physical medium for interaction is removed the cabinet is part of interaction design those
00:18:06
Speaker
Input devices that were provided by a mechanical engineer. They were aerodynamically designed. They were designed so the body could work and play with them.
00:18:17
Speaker
something happened on the screen. So I don't quite understand how MoMA understands interaction design. It seems as if it's completely stripped away the physical encounter of interacting. And in place of that, we can only understand interactive design based upon what appears on the screen. And here's a case in point with MoMA. I think this might tie into preservation nostalgia very well. I don't know if you played this when you were there, Andrew, but you can play Space Invaders at MoMA.
00:18:46
Speaker
Space Invaders was a black and white monitor. Of course, we remembered the color because, again, there was that thick cellophane plastic put directly over the monitor to give the image of color. But MoMA is just completely in color. So it's emulation, but it's emulation that's been changed. Now, that raises huge questions because you would never be able to play that type of Space Invaders on a color screen in 1978 when it came out. So what is this I'm actually looking at? Well, what it is, it's MoMA's version of Space Invaders.
00:19:19
Speaker
version of Space Invaders. So since MOMA actually changed the artifact, but hasn't actually said that it's changed the artifact, it still utilizes a date of 1978, which gives the impressions that this is how the game looked in 1978, which is completely false. So there a change was made. MOMA seems more interested in telling its story of interaction design than actually recognizing the constraints of game history.
00:19:45
Speaker
I think MoMA is unusual in that respect because what I've seen in a lot of other museums is that they're very concerned about what type of changes they make. Here's a good example that Strong has shared with me.
00:20:00
Speaker
In the recreated arcade, they have a Pac-Man machine, I think I'm pretty sure it's Pac-Man, that you can play while you're there. So it's fantastically. You can actually interact with a cabinet. You can stand and play the game. Most young people, I would say, have only played this by way of emulators or by way of some anniversary Pac-Man or emulation one can download from Xbox Live, for instance. But to physically stand is an entirely different dynamic. If you played that game, you and I would notice something.
00:20:28
Speaker
The screen looks too clear, it looks too crisp. It's not a calculator A2, it's not Master. It's a Plasma screen that's been turned horizontally to capture the actual gameplay space of Pac-Man. Now, from a person visiting the game's perspective, they're happy to be playing Pac-Man. They're not thinking so much about the technological attributes of this game. From a game preservationist's point of view, the strong has actually changed
00:20:57
Speaker
the integrity of the game by substituting a different display device. Now, I could say, well, I could halt the strong for that, but the strong is a public museum, and the strong wants to make sure that its visitors can have an experience with these artifacts. So it just raises so many questions. On one hand, I applaud the fact they're putting these games out into a space where visitors can interact
00:21:21
Speaker
breaks a lot of rules in traditional museums. But at the same time, to do that, it means they've actually had to alter the original artifact. I think one of the things that we find really important with preservation is that we can't cling to the idea of the original. We have to understand games is taking multiple versions over their life period. And that's a different experience of a person playing Pac-Man by way of a plasma or LCD screen than a person playing an old beat-up Pac-Man machine, a Catholic p2p3 health station.
00:21:50
Speaker
I'm not going to say one's better or one's less. I'm going to say they're different. I think this is the most positive way to think about how we can maintain these artifacts. We have to really move away from these notions of the original and the copy to be very accepting of multiple versions. I think they tell a collective story in my mind.
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Speaker
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00:23:01
Speaker
I think that you're absolutely right. I've been thinking about this a lot with the console software that I've been playing. You deal with build numbers, you deal with versioning, and it's the same game, but it does change over time, even though the message that's being conveyed is the same message or a very similar message than what was intended by the
00:23:24
Speaker
the creators of that particular thing. And I consider this to be stratigraphy in a very archaeological sense, where you might be dealing with a particular site, say Troy, but then you have all of these different levels. It's still Troy, but Troy changes over time. It still has the essence and the message of Troy as the city, but you're building on top of that. You're making more changes and modifications to it. You're preserving it. You're studying it.
00:23:48
Speaker
And you're using, I think, exactly the same kinds of methods of interpretation that you use in dirt archaeology as you would when you're taking a look at how the Strong is presenting Pac-Man to the public. I think what I like about that is that you put Troy in twirl. There are many Troy's. Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:24:08
Speaker
And I think Pac-Man, I treat the same way. There are many Pac-Men. And I think that to do game history, we have to be very aware of all the various versions of Pac-Man and try to make sense of them. Pac-Man's not just that game from 1980.
00:24:21
Speaker
There are multiple different versions, some good, some have a certain fidelity to the original, some don't, some are complete clones and ripoffs like Odyssey 2's Casey Munchkin, for instance, or this new air hockey game called Pac-Man that I've been loathing recently in public. But I think that's fascinating. We actually have a giant family resemblance of this game and I think we have to try to make sense of all of that. In terms of the hands-on
00:24:48
Speaker
sort of preservation techniques I've seen. I think the Strong does it very well. They have a full-time game technician. So if you're higher on staff for full time, so if one of their games goes down in the recreated arcade, they can pull it, replace it with another game, and then this person can actually do repairs. Now, of course, where does one go to school?
00:25:09
Speaker
for television engineering today. I don't think you do. So I think that this is kind of a finite model. Unless those skills are being transferred to a younger generation, like an apprentice network at a museum, I don't know how long the sustainability working with that model of somebody who has that knowledge base will last.
Museum and Collector Roles in Preservation
00:25:28
Speaker
I do think that as time moves on, if you imagine that video games are still of interest to cultural institutions in 50 years, I think it's pretty fair to say that we're going to see a lot of
00:25:40
Speaker
behind glass where we can't play them but we'll have really good emulation maybe right next to it so you can you can play the emulation get an experience of gameplay while you're looking at the actual point of you know the I guess the sarcophagus next to it right standing there yeah that's why design history becomes really important because I want I want that cabinet to be able to reveal more than just the names
00:26:04
Speaker
the year in the company, I want the industrial designer, the mechanical engineer, the graphic designer to get the same amount of credit that the software designer has been given historically.
00:26:15
Speaker
No, I agree with you there, too. Getting back to something that you said earlier about these emulators and whatnot, I mean, there's certainly, if you go online, you can go to different abandonware sites and you can download ROMs to be played in maine, for example, on your PC or whatever. And those are fun, and those do communicate somewhat of a gameplay experience. At least you can see what it looks like, separated from everything else, which is pretty cool.
00:26:40
Speaker
The other thing is that you have kind of communities of practice or hobbyists who are kind of knowledgeable or skilled in the old ways of computer technology. I remember visiting in another life, I had clients at the Computer History Museum, and so if they ever had a question or kind of a WTF moment, they would be able to reach out to people in Silicon Valley or these old school dudes from IBM or HP or whatever, and they could come in
00:27:07
Speaker
and explain what's going on and sometimes actually fix these things as a matter of conservation. So maybe we'll see this as like car enthusiasts having a hobby club around Triumph automobiles. It's just people who love the stuff so much that they learned or are self-taught and they kind of share their knowledge. And that's what we might be seeing with these coin-op games 50 years ahead. I've seen it now because that's exactly the metaphor. When I interviewed Van Burnham,
00:27:37
Speaker
and Seamus Blakely, who have the Supercade collection in Pasadena, California, that's exactly the metaphor that she used. We're very much like car enthusiasts. Instead of hot-rodding a Mustang, we're hot-rodding Tempest or something like that. Those communities are very distributed. On Facebook, I'm kind of a lurker.
00:27:57
Speaker
on a coin-op collective, and they're constantly posting images of the games of just salvage, that you conduct conservation, some restoration too. For them, they're very concerned about original parts.
00:28:09
Speaker
Do you undermine the originality of the game if you change screws or if you swap out boards or screens? And those are issues, I think, that a hobby of some concerns itself. I think museums have to be a little more mindful of the public because a private collector is collecting for themselves and collecting for their social community. They don't have to think about a thousand people coming to the doors strong on a daily basis, for instance, right, that want to see stuff.
00:28:37
Speaker
have these vast collecting networks, and they can trade parts to make sure they can restore, I don't know, a quix to its cherry form and that kind of mentality of thinking around these types of games. But again, what I've seen with Gene Lewin, who runs Vintage Arcade Superstore, this wonderful warehouse in Glendale, California,
00:28:57
Speaker
He's got stacks and stacks of circuit boards, and he's got this day-dirty, dusty area which is capital-rate tubes stacked in there. But eventually, our stockpiles will run low. So perhaps for the moment, stockpiling works. But again, 50, 100, 200 years from now, I don't think we can really think about and rely upon our original parts in the same way. So that does raise a certain limitation.
00:29:25
Speaker
to these kind of private collecting networks. I think cultural institutions can really sustain the life of games over a longer period of time, because that's what museums do. They don't just take objects in for 10 years or 15 years, but they're thinking 100, 200, 300 years into the future.
Critique of Nostalgia in Game History
00:29:40
Speaker
Your question of nostalgia, this one I will confess, you've read Game After, and I'm pretty nasty about nostalgia in Game After. I say, let's just forget it. There's a reason I say that, and I'm not anti-nostalgia.
00:29:52
Speaker
an anti-the-influence nostalgia has had in the game histories that have been written. That's what really troubles me is that we've yet to produce very, very well-researched, methodologically-minded histories of games, and we've relied heavily upon linear histories, chronicles, descriptive accounts, and a lot of histories that seem to be populated just by one having played games in arcades when they were kids in the 1980s.
00:30:18
Speaker
So I'm distrustful of nostalgia as the only method for doing game history. That's sort of my gripe when it comes to nostalgia, is that it has been it when it comes to the history of games. I really want to see nostalgia as one approach among many others, and that's what I think
00:30:34
Speaker
I think having the game histories book series at MIT, writing a book like Game After, and even this design history that I'm doing, it's trying to really distribute the different ways we can think about the past in video games. So it's not only nostalgia that kind of has the, I guess it envelopes the entire way that we think of the past. So I really want to open up to more critical research. I think nostalgia does have a role to play. I think certainly personal memoir, autobiography.
00:31:00
Speaker
very valuable in trying to tell these histories. But from a person who's active in the field of nostalgia or has that disease as it used to be classified, unless they're documenting their own play and they're writing their own accounts and they're really trying to think about their personal experience in a broader social way, well, guess what? When they die, all of that history and that sense of remembrance is gone.
00:31:26
Speaker
So I think that's something that's really important for nostalgia is that it tends to not publish. It's more about the love of a lost something or feeling or emotion. But unless you're actually doing the earnest work of documentation of your own self, well, that work's not going to live beyond you. I think whereas with any historical research part of doing that is doing the documentary side of it. That's a document the artifact you're using to write about them, to think about them, to interpret them. I don't see nostalgia sharing that same toolkit.
00:31:55
Speaker
It's not to say that it can't, of course, but at the moment, we don't see it having that sort of investment in trying to, I guess, document its own sense of nostalgia. Wow. No, that's a great argument. It's interesting that the modern remembrances of these older things get in the way of any kind of basic interpretation of original intent or something.
00:32:21
Speaker
you know, so we've got that going on.
Gwynns' Favorite Game and Design Focus
00:32:23
Speaker
But with nostalgia, I'm going to ask you, and this is something, you know, we'll likely be having other guests on the program, and we're going to ask them a couple of questions, too, and I wanted to start with you. And the first question is, what's your all-time favorite arcade game? And then the follow-up, of course, is what are you playing now?
00:32:52
Speaker
You used to go utterly apeshit in that game because you had two controllers, right? Two Joysticks, one for moving, one for firing. I just loved how chaotic the gameplay was. I loved feeling utterly overwhelmed with how much stuff is on the screen. That always excited me with that. But one of the things is I've
00:33:12
Speaker
as I find with this new research, and this started the happening game after, because I was so privileged. I could go to museums, I could go into the storage facility. That's something that the public will not see.
00:33:23
Speaker
And I found that I was interested in playing less and looking more. And that really changed my whole relationship to games. Because technically what this next book, or the current book that I'm really behind on, is that I'm looking at inert objects. I'm looking at particle board. I'm looking at plastic, plexiglass attraction panels. I'm looking at controllers, control panels. I'm not playing games. I'm looking at games. And I think that's really shifted
00:33:51
Speaker
a lot of my approach to how I think of my own personal relationships of these things. For example, when I look at Le Mans, which is a really wonderful race game to Atari, I think it's 1976, and I love it not for the gameplay, which is great for that era. I love it for the beautiful use of red and orange on the cabinet artwork. I love the cardboard and illustrated bezel that you see surrounding the frame. So I think what's happened, Andrew,
00:34:20
Speaker
is I'm taking a more formalist art historian approach where I'm applying it to a popular medium of video games. So for me, I'm thinking of myself looking like a design historian looking at Wedgwood flatware and trying to understand, you know, the affordances say that a plate provides or looking at the intricate and complex design associated with that. I'm taking that approach to how we look at these
00:34:44
Speaker
ordinary things, these objects, from applying it to games, to a medium that hasn't really had that critical lens applied to it. So I'm not really playing point-off games. I find myself playing less and looking more because I want somebody to open them up. And what I find happening so much is when I'm at the strong, my eyes are on the side of the game. It's not
Uncovering the Design Process Behind Cabinets
00:35:04
Speaker
the screen. I'm on the sides looking at
00:35:06
Speaker
the artwork. I'm going across the attraction panel. If there is a bezel, I'm taking pictures of the bezel. I'm trying to understand why did Atari use that color palette? What design choices were made for this particular style of a cabinet? So I'm asking a lot of formless questions. And I'm doing that not to sustain a formal analysis, but I want to really reveal a process. I think that's what's really missing in the history of games. If we're going to understand the point-out machine as part of the complex
00:35:37
Speaker
and represented by different design fields, I want to really tease that process out. How did these people, when tasked with designing a cabinet for a game, how did they go about doing it? What was their inspiration? How did they conceptualize it? What was their process of putting together these kind of concept sketches?
00:35:56
Speaker
And then what was the next phase? I really want to get that entire process out. At what point did the graphics department come in? Did the graphic design people actually play the game? What I was told was that from a graphic design point of view, they were interested in the measurements of the cabinet side panels because that was their tapestry, right? That's their blank slate that they have to work on in order to kind of do the art
00:36:24
Speaker
They're trying to really materialize that process that's been very obscure in the history of games. Now, but I will try to answer your question. I am a, I can't say lifelong, because it's only been since 94, but EA Sports FIFA, that's my game. I mean, that's, I would say daily on a regular basis. I play a lot of Fallout as well. If there's any contemporary game that's really captured my imagination, I love the post-apocalyptic narrative of Fallout.
00:36:58
Speaker
side of that game as well. I get caught up in the narrative as well. The narrative is very powerful. I play a lot of Fallout and FIFA 17 right now, so every year it is, that's in your feet I'm playing with. I have to say that I'm excited with Xbox Live, where I can download a lot of older 360 games, but a lot of so-called classic coin hop games, like Rally X. I downloaded that the other day, for instance. Atari has a lot of these great
00:37:22
Speaker
flashback patch. I can play Atari's Asteroids on my 63-inch plasma screen. So that's quite an experience because when I do that, in order to make that image, perhaps, render very well, you have to truncate the actual screen. If you expand it across the width of a contemporary plasma screen, the resolution is going to be horrible. They do so by including the cabinet artwork. I think that's intriguing that with all these emulators for
00:37:49
Speaker
going off games, they haven't abandoned the actual form. That form of the Calvin artwork kind of travels with these different forms of emulation. That's really intriguing to me to think about.
00:37:59
Speaker
We still have cabinets present, but they're not present in the same three-dimensional, physical way, but they're present in a more 2D, flat, artistic way of rendering. What used to be on the sides or above the screen, and that's fascinating to me. So, I guess Robotron would be for the back-in-the-day type experience.
Inspiration from Car Design and Architecture
00:38:16
Speaker
I have to say, one of the coin-op games that fascinates me the most is Pong. I know that sounds odd to say, but I think Pong is a wonderful example of modernist design.
00:38:26
Speaker
I'll leave that answer right there in intrigue and mystery. Well, Rayford, I wanted to thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today. This is terrific. And yeah, when your new book comes out, we'd definitely like to have you back on the show to talk more about the design history of Atari in the early days. So yeah, thanks again. Wonderful. I'd love to be back. And sorry, sorry. I'd love to be back. Fantastic. I think that one final thought on this is that
00:38:54
Speaker
One of the things that captivated me the most Andrew, when I was talking to Mike Horio about his work, he was on the Tempest cabinet, as I mentioned earlier. And he taught me how to look at a cabinet from his perspective. And that really opened up this artifact to me. You know, I've always asked myself, why does Tempest look the way it does? Who made that decision to have this really interesting triangular type of cabinet? So I was asking Mike a lot about, where did your form come from?
00:39:23
Speaker
He said, well, the game is there's a lot of geometrical shapes in the game. So I tried to capture that in my cabinet. Oh, so you have a lot of triangles that move around that screen. Hence, you have the cabinet expressive of its game content. I won't say more than that. But one of the things that really fascinated me was that black stripe.
00:39:41
Speaker
goes across the Calvin of templates. Why is it there? What is its function? I actually have an answer for that, but I don't want to share it yet since you're inviting me back. Once the book's done, I will then share that answer with you. What that answer does tell me is that
00:39:55
Speaker
There are other histories of design that these Atari industrial designers were looking from. They were interested in car design. They were interested in consumer electronics, furniture design, architecture. And what they always told me, and your friend was fascinating, when tasked with designing a new cabin, they never looked at other cabins. They looked at those other forms, those other fields of design. So Mike would say to me, you know, I was a big car guy.
00:40:19
Speaker
and he tried to bring certain elements of car design into a lot of the cabinets that he would design. I think that's absolutely intriguing. I think it really bodes well for why Atari's games, if you compare them to other point ops, why they really stand out design-wise in terms of their cabin artwork, but also their form and style. I'll stop there. Okay, thanks again, and yeah, every episode needs a cliffhanger, so stay tuned, everybody. Good luck with the series, and thank you very much for having me on today. Sure, thanks again.
Conclusion and Acknowledgements
00:40:58
Speaker
Well, I hope you all enjoyed the episode. To give you an update on our raid group's progress, as I promised earlier, we, um, seem to have found a secret 8-bit level. Until next time, this is Andrew Reinhard for 8-Bit Testament. This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle and edited by Chris Sims.
00:41:27
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com