[game_preservation] Wikipedia thoughts?

[Devin Monnens]

I think the most popular one was about Pac-Man. Game historians tend to add
multiple histories to indicate that nobody really knows the answer.
According to the lore, Toru Iwatani was eating pizza one day, took away a
slice, and saw 'Pac-Man'. Chris Kohler notes in Power-Up (another book that
is now ridiculously hard to find), that the actual origins of Pac-Man are
more vague - Iwatani says something like "I WISH I could say that this is
how it happened" but doesn't even remember how Pac-Man was made with true
certainty. Steve Kent acknowledges this too.

Another myth is that Adventure for the 2600 was the first game with an
easter egg - Star Fire actually contained easter eggs prior to this (special
messages from initials giving first names of the designers), as did the
PDP-11 version of Lunar Lander (a McDonald's on the Moon - pretty sure it
was the PDP-11 version, at least!). Both games predate Adventure, though
Adventure clearly deserves its notoriety through its ingenuity and
rule-breaking. I'm sure there were plenty more easter eggs, too.

The problem with game histories is that they rely mainly on quotes from the
people who made the things, people whose memories are porous and who may
have agendas to make themselves or somebody else look better or worse than
they really are. That's why The Ultimate History of Video Games and Game
Over are better as meta-studies than for actual quotes: what Nolan Bushnell
says about Pong and Atari are more things that feed his agenda than actual
truths. You understand more about the history of the industry not by what
they say but *how *they say it and about how those personalities (and far
too often their greed and hubris) shaped the industry.

Unfortunately, because game history is often founded on such poor
foundations, references go back to sources that were simply false,
untrustworthy, or doubtful. This means we need real peer-review or
cross-checking of sources, something that is kind of tough to do...



On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> wrote:


> Devin Monnens wrote:

>

>> even Steve Kent's book has errors and myths that now became history),

>>

>

> I would love to know what these are.  Any juicy tidbits?

> --

> Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)            http://www.oldskool.org/

> Help our electronic games project:           http://www.mobygames.com/

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> A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

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The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

"Until next time..."
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