Wednesday, May 3, 2006

Jason Scott’s New Documentary

Jason Scott of Textfiles.com and the BBS Documentary is now not only doing a new documentary on text adventures (titled GET LAMP), he’s also shooting one on arcades. Jason told me he’s trying to track down classic arcardes, but also said there might be quite a few “tragic shots” because a classic machine has been removed, or is now placed in a deserted location. (The official site is empty as of yet, as the project has just started.)

Can’t wait till this documentary’s finished... I’m also mourning the loss of good arcardes in Germany. I think there were a lot more around when I was a kid, but in Germany you’re not allowed to enter the arcades until you’re 18, so I could only enter those places in vacations in other countries. But by the time I turned 18, more and more of the arcades were replaced by money-machines and the same one or two pinball machines in every other place. This trend continues until today. I guess those games are being replaced by home video games (the C64, the Amiga, and the XBox and PlayStation today), which isn’t all too bad. Still, I think there must be some commercial niche in creating a “nostalgia arcades” parlor chain with classics like Pac-Man, Frogger, or Virtua Fighter... or new games with a focus on simplicity, game-play, and symbolic neutrality (Tetris, one of the most addictive games ever, mostly doesn’t represent anything, and is happy to be its own abstract world).

Jason Scott’s New Documen ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (3)

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