|
Atari nation Technostalgia is a natural reaction to the flood of new video games on the market by COLIN MACKENZIE
"Big chunky pixels are where it's at," says Ninja Tunes employee and technostalgist John Ascensio. "It's aesthetic reductive synthesis--games like Space Invaders encapsulate all that is good about technology." Antique gamers might be trying to pry loose lost childhood memories, but more likely they just want to play a game that they can master without reading a manual or conducting a laborious research project. For many people, new games are too much like work, and the fact that many now reside on your computer--the office in a box--completes the association. What we forgot is that these games were damn good fun!
Newer games may be just too much, too fast for some enthusiasts, like Ascensio's collaborator Lucas Rupnik. New games, while more realistic, are "annoyingly complicated and pretentious," he says. Old games may even be more social: "We had a party and the biggest attraction was this crummy old Atari console." Rupnik has over 120 Atari game disks and prefers the "crappiest games"--if not so much to play, but to enjoy for their fantastic badness. Rupnik doesn't even want to know people who play contemporary games like Doom: "Those people scare me, y'know the guys with the peach-fuzz mustaches, I mean, kiss sex goodbye, eh?" Dustbin of history Reverse snobbery aside, lo-fi collectibles are getting increasingly hep. Eschewing the latest high-end 3D multimedia blastaramas, avid connoisseurs of obsolete media have been "thrifting" for years. Fortunately, the dustbin of history may be as close as the local junk shop. For as little as 50 cents you can enjoy pixel primitivism in Intellivision, Atari and Coleco cartridges. Among the best places to look for this stuff is your--or somebody's--mom's basement. Garage sales are good, but my favourite is the Salvation Army. Here you can find electro-junk in various stages of discombobulation. A lone Atari paddle, nestled up to that fried Intellivision console, doesn't sound like a great treasure, but doubtless somebody out there wants them. A good junk box with lots of spare parts is de rigueur at collector swap-meets. And for $15 or $20 you can build your own dedicated Family Fun Centre with that Sears-brand Pong™ rip-off mated to a groovy black-and-white period television in moulded plastic. Rescuing arcade games Although old video games are readily available, old arcade games are an endangered species. The original games are no longer profitable to operate and so have slowly dwindled in number. Even more disturbing for enthusiasts is the fact that the ROM is sometimes volatile and once the battery dies, the game is extinct. Those flashing, smashing but never crashing quarter-chugging shrines may now only be available on your desktop computer. Microchips salvaged from junked or abandoned arcade games are being sucked of their dying memories by enthusiasts committed to preserving our digital past. Chips smaller than a TicTac are ripped out from dusty cast-offs and mapped out, then recreated thanks to emulators which mimic the original hardware. However, by rescuing this lost code, cyber-archaeologists may be breaking the law. The material is copyrighted and many companies which developed the games are still around and could potentially prosecute--although there's not a lot of money to be made from suing for lost revenue over an obsolete game. In an Internet manifesto, German cyber-preservationist Christian Oliver defends the public's right to extract the material from defunct games, pointing out that it's the opposite of piracy because aficionados are actually keeping the games alive. "The development of emulators became the only chance to preserve this modern kind of art for future generations," he writes. He suggests that, much like the preservation of old buildings, these games are part of our cultural heritage. Good, cheap fun New stuff is coming down the pike faster and faster. Production of new toys has outstripped our ability to even know about them. "Expert cultures" have evolved around certain games as ways of improving play efficiency are perfected. The Internet is choked with these brain trusts, frantically pooling their resources to defeat the game designers. In the frantic attempt to keep up with new games, it almost seems like the fun of the games themselves has been lost. After playing Space Invaders in 1979, we probably imagined that by 1999 we might be zapping real aliens in outer space. Instead, we got Doom--a hyper-realistic game where we go to hell. Almost an act of sedition in the face of the gigantic marketing apparatuses of Nintendo and Sony, you can express your retro-cool to show up the chumps with the latest gear. Classical cachet projects an image of rugged individuality--as if to say, "I'd rather spend my money on drugs and my time getting laid" than admit to being an adult habitué of the electronic daycare of the Playstation. Besides, wait five years, and today's zillion-bit oracle will be a camp classic available for 35 cents, while new cartridge systems are inserted directly into your brainstem via a surgically installed port on your neck. Technostalgia is the natural accompaniment to reactionary movements like (shudder!) the swing revival. So after a swell evening of Lindy-hopping and cocktails, why not retreat to your space-age bachelor pad, fire up the lava lamp and settle in for a Battle of the Sexes on your Atari? |
Whether it's searching through cast-offs at the Salvation Army or emulating a long-lost video arcade game on your home computer, nostalgia for a simpler less pixilated time is in full swing these days. Aging hipsters can only stretch their neurons so far and, with the deluge of new toys on the market, many are looking for refuge.
Pong, a crude rendition of tennis, is the Zen of lost video. "Pong is like a little dance, it really can't be improved," says Ascensio. Here's a game you could play--and win--stoned out of your skull on your beanbag chaise. All the extraneous vanities of "realism" had yet to be invented, as we manipulated rectangular glyphs on a black and white court of jagged pixels. Born in 1973, Pong was the first migrant from the arcade to the television console and paved the way for what has now become the microcomputer.