"Grape Nuts are the Neo Geo of cereals: everyone knows one guy who likes them, usually an eccentric distant relative, but most people have never seen or tried them."
—
Marco Arment on Grape Nuts vs Grape Nuts Flakes. (this is the only videogame-related line from the piece, but I like the analogy)
(h/t to @fizzboy)
"If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture."
— Journalist and critic Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy, quoted in an counter-point article by Michael Mirasol posted on Roger Ebert’s blog, Why video games are indeed Art.
"In the same way a painting allows us to gaze upon the faces and souls of people from another age, or a book permits us to linger on the thoughts of great figures from history and fiction, videogames can expand our awareness of the world as it is, was, or might be."
—
Prescient words from Adam West (yes, that Adam West), in Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, July, 1983.
(Via 1Up’s Retro Gaming)
It’s interesting to look back at the hype and spectacle of the early CD-ROM games (with novelties like Myst flying off the shelf the medium was hailed as the savior of declining video game sales) as a parallel to the hype and spectacle of the real 18th Century phantasmagoria and magic lantern parlor theater. From classic gaming site GOG.com’s short editorial piece commemorating their recent addition of Roberta William’s popular 1995 FMV horror game Phantasmagoria:
In the mid-1700s, long before horror pioneers like Alfred Hitchcock, films such as Dracula and Frankenstein, and even cinema itself, the predecessor to horror cinema was born in a tiny coffee shop in Leipzig, Germany. The proprietor of the shop, Johann Schropfer, welcomed patrons with a warm beverage and an invitation to shoot the breeze and some stick in his adjoining billiards room. But the extra attraction of running a table after a long workday didn’t do much to boost Schropfer’s steadily declining patronage. In an effort to drum up business, Schropfer cast out pool tables and converted the billiards parlor into a séance chamber. […]
By the late 1760s, Schropfer’s once-deserted shop had evolved into a hotspot where patrons gasped in awe at ghostly images projected onto smoke, chilling music, ambient sounds, and burning incenses whose aromas were evocative of malevolent forces. The masterful performance put on by Schropfer proved so lucrative that the coffee-shop-owner-turned-showman took his show on the road throughout Europe until 1774, at which time Schropfer, perhaps haunted by the specters he alleged to call forth from the afterlife, took his own life.
From a recent interview with legendary game designers Jordan Mechner (the original Prince of Persia) and Eric Chahi (Another World) on being an auteur in the modern game development environment. Jordan Mechner’s advice to the young designer:
A good friend in another field gave me this piece of advice recently. He said that most people approach things “1-2-3.”
One is the first inspiration, the vision, the excitement. One is gold. One is touched with magic; everyone wants a piece of it.
Two is all the reasons it won’t work, or won’t sell, or could get screwed up; all the difficulties — technical, financial, logistical — that need to be solved.
Three is doing it.
Most people get stuck on two. My friend’s advice was to go in a different order: “1-3-2”. Skip two and go straight to three. I’d never heard it phrased quite this way before, but looking back, the things I’ve done in my life that I’m most glad of, I did them 1-3-2. So that’s my advice too.
