On the 18th of January 2007 I grabbed my girlfriend and a digital camera that refuses to focus properly and jumped on a train to London, my most hated of cities.  The trip was necessary to visit Game On, a collection of exhibits designed to explore the history, technology and culture of computer games.

We couldn't have picked a worse day - Britain was battered by storms, meaning we were repeatedly stuck on the London Underground and were actually evacuated from Liverpool Street Station at one point.  But after successfully dealing with the consistently incorrect station announcements, we made it to the Science Museum and saw all this stuff.

Click on the photos to enlarge them, if you like that sort of thing.

Here my girlfriend is playing Dig Dug and complaining that she can't move down properly.  Some in-depth testing proved that the joystick was knackered, but I still played it for ages.  I am ace at Dig Dug, thanks to hours spent playing it near an American airbase in Lakenheath.

Sadly, the joysticks had trouble moving down on the Berzerk and Ms. Pac Man machines as well.  Possibly idiots had been hanging off them, as used to happen in my local arcade.

Notice that it is painted in that horrible off-blue colour that all school walls used to be in the seventies.  Apparently it plays Spacewar, one of the first ever video games.  Sadly it wasn't playable, or even turned on.  Bah.

I believe Computer Space was the first commercially sold coin-operated arcade machine, but it failed due to the horrifyingly over-complicated gameplay.  Not that I'd know - they weren't playable.  Or even switched on.  This exhibition was such a tease.

Were the Invaders insects?  I thought they were supposed to be modelled on sea creatures.  Although the original Invaders cabinet had big hairy yeti creatures falling out of the sky, so anything goes I suppose.

This is possibly the only arcade cabinet to look like an extra from Naked Lunch.

This one played Space Invaders, and was in front of two other Space Invaders machines.  An invasion of space rather than from space!  Hahahaha!

Sorry.

Moral:  Don't give my Dad any chemicals.  Or ask him to clean anything.  In fact, it's safer just to stay away from him all together.

Notice that the MAME version is 0.57, which was released over 4 years ago.  That was back in the heady days when MAME was a joyous mechanism for playing forgotten games. Now it's just an increasingly crippled plaything for antisocial technophile nerds.  Bah.

Disappointingly, they didn't have an Odyssey.  I wanted a go with one of those lightguns that registers a hit when you point it at a light bulb.

Also:  "Magnavox Odyssey" sounds like a concept album from Rick Wakeman.

How many people did I overhear saying that the graphics were just as good as a Playstation 2?  Several.  And, by gum, they were right.

The Saturn is grey, denoting a Japanese model.  I was disappointed to see it wasn't playable - but unknown to me, there was further Saturn related joy to come later.

They should have put some of the European Saturn games cases on display as an example of idiotic design.  They never stayed closed, the cardboard hinges wore out in weeks, and there was no holder for the manuals so they fell about.  Oh, and the mechanism for holding the discs didn't work properly so the games inside were scratched.  It was safer to carry your CD's around in a plastic bag full of gravel and razor blades.

Notice the old Atari joysticks connected to it.  They are some of the most robust items ever made by man - if there is a nuclear war the only survivors will be cockroaches and Atari joysticks.

Tragically, the proper joystick was secured behind perspex and you had to play on a Saturn joypad.  Why?  Because this was actually “Konami Antiques MSX Collection” running on a Saturn and the Spectravideo was just there for show.  THEY LIED TO ME, AND NOW I BELIEVE IN NOTHING.

It’s that mainstay of teenage boy’s bedrooms in 1992 – the Commodore Amiga 500.  And it’s rubbish mouse. 

Although the box for a Team 17 game was sitting on the machine, the disk poking out of the drive was Sensible Soccer.  As it should be. 

To add further confusion, the only game actually playable was Lemmings.

This was interesting – a PC Engine with CD-ROM add on.  And you actually got to play on the real thing, rather than an emulated version!  The game on offer is Fighting Street, a badly named conversion of the first Street Fighter arcade game from 1987.  A quick playtest confirmed that it is still almost unplayable and no fun whatsoever. 

Now that I think about it, I would have really liked to have seen an original Street Fighter cabinet with pressure sensitive buttons.  I suppose it was omitted from the exhibition for safety reasons – it was easy to miss the padded target whilst watching the screen, and break your hand on the case.  The best plan was to move the joystick and get someone else to pound the buttons.  Or not play it at all, because it was rubbish.

The infinitely superior sequel, Street Fighter II, was playable elsewhere in the exhibit.  Unfortunately it was monopolised by two blokes who looked a bit like Laurel & Hardy.

Many years before the Vaio series and the Playstation, Sony made this MSX compatible computer.  Notice the similarity with the Spectravideo shown earlier – they ran the same software.  There were over 20 MSX compatible machines made by various manufacturers, and they all fell into the popular-in-Japan-but-not-really-anywhere-else niche.

Home versions of the Sony MSX generally had less coloured light reflected on them.

It is Tetris!  On the Super Game Boy!  Which wasn’t really very super!  Because the whole point of portable games is that you don’t need a TV!  And the games looked blocky and ugly when enlarged!  And it cost a lot of money!

I was very excited to see two digital Pachinko machines, as I’ve always wanted to play on one but never had the chance.  And I still haven’t had the chance as it transpired they were “DISPLAY ONLY.”

I suppose they couldn't be playable due to some gambling law, as children could visit the exhibition.

Well crikey.  Doug Bell’s original artwork for the box of seminal 16-bit game Dungeon Master.  I wanted to steal this so badly that my nose bled.

Notice that the word “Master” is missing.  Was the title unconfirmed when Bell painted this?  Perhaps it was originally going to be called ‘Dungeon Twizzler’ or something.

I must admit that the picture is spoiled by the ridiculous pose of Halk, the semi-naked bloke near the door.  He looks like he’s just seen a sword for the first time and is about to riverdance with it.

One of the funniest games ever made, The Secret of Monkey Island.  It’s almost an exercise in how to make a good adventure game - Clever, fun and atmospheric.  Ace music too.

Avert your eyes from the horrible cheap trackball, which is actually glowing blue with pure crapness.

An early character sketch for Guybrush Threepwood from The Secret of Monkey Island, in creepy paper-doll style.

Astute readers will notice that the dress and the blue coat made an appearance in Monkey Island 2.  Stupid readers will have stopped reading this by now and turned on the TV to watch a show where Z-list celebrities learn to roller-skate or something.

Old text adventures go like this:

Modern text adventures refer to themselves as 'Interactive Fiction' and emphasise story-telling over tedious object based puzzles.  That's probably a good idea.

It's always dangerous to leave this sort of thing open for public play, as the photo shows.  This was typed in by a young couple who had colourful scarves.  Pity I couldn't get a photo of it in focus.

It appears to be from that sadly neglected gaming genre, piscine dentistry.  Not that I'd know, because it wasn't turned on and visitors weren't allowed near it.  AGAIN.

At this stage I had to resist the urge to track down the exhibition’s organisers and kick their faces off.

I shouldn't have been excited though - it was sealed inside a perspex case.  And not switched on.  Have you noticed a pattern emerging?

Why did they exhibit items so valuable they can't let people use them?  A video game is meaningless if you can't play the bloody thing.  Parading them in front of us, switched off, is a fiendish torture. 

Couldn't they at least had a video of them running?

These days I am only scared of Governments and cancer.

I wasn't disappointed either.  A tremendously fun game, even better than the excellent Disc on Atari ST.

That reminds me - the Atari ST and Amstrad CPC were completely missing from the exhibition.  There is no excuse.

The first magazine I ever bought was the December 1986 issue of Crash.  It actually took about a week to read, due to it being jam-packed with well written editorial about every possible use of the Spectrum.  And play-by-mail games for some reason.  Every game review - even for those that cost £1.99 new - had the written opinions of three separate people.  Although, with hindsight, it's a fairly safe bet that only one of them played the game properly.  Crash was extremely comprehensive, but had a tendency to be po-faced.

Compare this with modern video games magazines - glossy pamphlets, costing £6, where every appalling game from a major publisher gets a high mark so they don't pull their advertising.  Actually, don't compare them as it's just depressing.

Game music could be listened to from several sets of ear-wax covered headphones.  There were various retro compilations and, pleasingly, a whole set dedicated to old Sega composer Richard Jacques.

Did the the insidious influence of Jacques obsessed website UK: Resistance have something to do with this?  Probably not.

It was good to see Jacques get recognition for being one of the outstanding composers in his field.  Or maybe Sega doesn't ask for much in royalties to reproduce their music, I don't know.

This sounded like a great idea, but a quick play convinced me otherwise.  There were far too many options so it took ages to cycle through them, and the whole experience ended up an overcomplicated chore.  And to add insult to injury, the person reading the options had a really grating voice.

Historical lie fact:  Van Gogh cut off his own ear so he didn't have to beta test this game.

GF:  What am I supposed to be doing?  I can only seem to go forward.
ME:  This is a train driving game.  You just have to drive a train.
GF:  What?  Just like a real train?  You just go forwards and pick up passengers?
ME:  Yes.
GF:  Why?  How is that fun?
ME:  Well... It's for people who like trains.   And it's possibly quite relaxing.
GF:  ...I see.

We then slowly stepped away from it, and ran when we got to a safe distance.

When we left the exhibition all the train services had been suspended.  Obviously our lack of understanding upset the God of Trains, who used his holy timetable-scuppering powers to smite us all.

The inset shows a slightly bizarre instruction from the event organisers - do not "move the left Joystick forwards or backwards."  I, of course, moved said joystick both forwards and backwards and it moved freely.  What was the big deal?  Did I unleash the dreaded ghost of the cursed joystick?

Amazingly, this was released for the Xbox - a home console.  Some people actually paid to have this in their houses.

Simplicity is the key to good design.  This monstrosity demonstrates the polar opposite.

The official idea was, and I quote, "Your route across the grid is recorded and combined with the movements of previous visitors to create sound and images."

What actually happened - I walked across the floor grid, and occasionally a single square would flash on the wall.  There was no sound that I could make out.  A mouse pointer was clearly visible on the projection.

Is something still art if it's broken?

I was impressed to see that modern homemade games were being shown.  I was less impressed with the horrible cheap joypad.

The game actually supports up to ten players simultaneously, but only six joypads had been set up.    This wasn't much of a problem, as I couldn't find anyone else willing to play it anyway.  Perhaps the FBI have declared that Bomberman is a terrorist training tool, and everyone was scared they'd be indefinitely detained if they played it.

Also in shot, just below the horrible flash glare, is a tiny cocktail cabinet thing that I didn't actually notice at the time.  Very odd.

It looks like a Gameboy Advance, but apparently it plays NES games.  Which is actually pretty good by my reckoning.

I love the name 'Game Theory Admiral'.  It conjures up images of an old man in nautical uniform, frantically barking orders to a group of programmers.  "This is a First Person Shooter, damn you!  There will be no platform jumping sections!!"

They can be bought on Ebay for tiny little sums of money, and are sent out in tiny little padded envelopes.

I can only assume that Nintendo bought shares in companies that produce painkillers before releasing the Virtual Boy.

My friend Martin used to have a Vectrex.  Its smooth vector graphics were very impressive at the time.  Best of all was a game he had called "Spike", which featured rudimentary digitised speech and used to shout "Darnit!" all the time.  I think it also featured a villain called "The Evil Spud Man", which is possibly the finest name ever.

The Nintendo Power Glove could apparently translate the tilting of your hand to movement on screen.  To my knowledge, a Power Sock and Power Jockstrap were never produced.

To quote from the movie:  "I love the Power Glove.  It's so bad."  In the literal sense, I imagine.

Notice the Barcode Battler to the extreme left of the photo.  I've got one of those for video review, but it's so bad it makes me want to vomit when I open the box.

No, wait - that one would go to one of Electronic Arts' sports franchises.

Did I hear people complaining about the frame rate?  I sure did.  Did I hear those people then say that it didn't look any different to the Xbox 360?  I sure did.  Did those people then say it was "amazing" anyway and that they really want one?  They sure did.  Were those people idiots?  They sure were.  Was one of them wearing a hat indoors?  He sure was.

Final anecdote:  In the area with the current generation of consoles was a young boy and his father.  The child was the next in line to play on the PS3, it seemed.  But he wasn't interested - he kept asking if he could go back and play on the old arcade machines at the start.  The father, however, told him that the "old stuff was boring" and that he must play on the PS3.

I would have expected the child to be interested in the new stuff and be bored by Dad's nostalgic attempts to interest him in Space Invaders, yet it was the other way round.  Were they the exception to the rule?  Almost certainly, but it's interesting none the less.  Perhaps there's just something about an old-fashioned upright arcade machine.

Stuart Ashen 2007