For various reasons, I feel I need to take a bit of a break here on Dirty Feed. No, not a six month break. But I do want a bit of a rest from the endless posting. Partly because I’m a little burnt out with my job and need to clear my head, and partly because I want to spend some time researching and writing some more in-depth pieces than I’ve published on here of late.
So rather than leave you with an obnoxious and self-serving list of my own favourite articles on here as a holding pattern, instead I thought I’d link to a few other sites putting out some consistently good work. In particular: those writing about videogame history.
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The Digital Antiquarian by Jimmy Maher
Some websites, like mine, simply post exactly what the writer feels like writing about at any given moment. Others are rather more ambitious. The Digital Antiquarian purports to be nothing less than “an historical chronicle of interactive entertainment”, in order. Of course, as I’m sure Jimmy Maher would be the first to admit, this historical chronicle is filtered through his own personal biases and interests. You won’t find much on consoles here, for instance, while every single game Infocom ever published gets its own article. This is very much not a problem.
The best place to start with the site isn’t on the front page: it’s the table of contents. You can either scroll down and pick the pieces which look interesting, or start right at the very beginning. One of my personal favourites is “What’s the Matter with Covert Action?”, about a game which I had never even heard of before I read the article, let alone played. You need precisely zero familiarity with the game in order to fully appreciate the argument the piece makes. And Jimmy’s writing really does go out of its way to avoid the boring, obvious arguments.
I love The Digital Antiquarian so much that I support Jimmy’s Patreon. If you have the means and enjoy the site, it might be worth doing the same.
All the Adventures by Jason Dyer
If the ambition of The Digital Antiquarian is startling, then the project All the Adventures is thoroughly ridiculous. Jason Dyer has promised nothing less than to “play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order”. There are hundreds of posts on the site already, and he’s only up to 1982. This might take a while.
Again, I highly suggest that you start on the chronological list of games rather than the front page, and see whether you want to skip around, or just start at the beginning. I especially loved his investigation into Time Zone – a famous, formidable, daunting game which I was never, ever, ever going to play… but sure loved reading someone else doing the hard work instead.
Revs on the BBC Micro by Mark Moxon
My last suggestion is a little different from the others. For a start, it’s far more technical – perhaps impenetrably so for many. But blame the old BBC Micro user in me, I find it utterly irresistible.1
The Beeb got a surprising amount of highly innovative games, considering its reputation among some people; Elite, Exile, and Aviator, to name but three. Some of those games are even covered elsewhere on the site I’m linking to here. But I was particularly taken by Mark Moxon’s articles about Revs, an extremely early racing sim. Mark’s work actually involves a complete documentation of the source code of the game, which I’m sure is fascinating for those people it’s aimed at, but for me it’s the articles which make the whole thing accessible to the lay person, albeit the technically-minded lay person.
My favourite piece on the whole site is this examination of the custom screen mode in Revs, which is the kind of thing I had a vague kind of idea about, but not how complex it actually was. It’s such a delight to find out brand new things about something decades old. While some people sit there pretending to write, it’s people like Mark who are calmly getting shit done.
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I’ve only scratched the surface here of the fun stuff going on in retro gaming right now. There’s the Video Game History Foundation, who recently published this search for an important female pioneer in gaming. There’s The Genesis Temple, which takes a particular look at the oft-forgotten European side of gaming. There’s also the superlative 50 Years of Text Games, with the quite astonishing tale behind Silverwolf. I really do mean utterly astonishing. And so on and so on, across what must be hundreds of sites. And I’ve not even started on all the various podcasts or YouTube.
There seems to me right now to be some extraordinary work going in terms of retro gaming, both in terms of analysis, and pure software preservation. There has been for years, of course, but I feel it more than ever right now. In fact, I might almost be tempted to use that dreaded phrase “golden age”. If you want to know all about the games of your childhood – or even the games of somebody else’s childhood – there’s a quite astonishing amount of material out there.
So there you go. Plenty to be getting on with away from here. I hope at least one of the sites above is new to you. As for this place, the fact that this post has been a struggle to write, when it’s literally just a few links bunged together, probably tells you all you need to know about how well my brain is working at the moment.
See you on the other side. Toodle-oo.
Old time BBC Micro users will get the headine of this article, for instance. Yes, Yellow River Kingdom… ↩