Biella blogged about King of Kong, a movie about classic video games. I also enjoyed it, although I felt the rivalry and competition cheapened it (while also certianly giving it more of a story to tell).

I wish I could enjoy competition the way Bubulle so eloquently describes. For me though, getting to the end of a game is more like raching the end of a long hike, whether you beat someone to the end or not doesn't matter, it's the personal experience of getting there that counts. Anyway..

The reason I'm really responding to Biella's post is because of the question she asks:

But what I also found amazing was how the movie conveyed the persistence of the (older) game. They live on in the lives of individuals and collectives, despite the rise of a whole, new class of games that are much more popular today. I am not sure how much longer they will live on, or if the movie was also inadvertently portraying the rise and slow decline of an era that will, in another 50 years, become part of the archive of dead history.

My guess is that the classic games will persist past the lifetime of their hardware, and that they'll keep on appealing to at least a small percentage of new gamers. Actually, I think they're more popular now than they were fifteen years ago, partly because the commercial gaming industry has moved further away from what the old games are really good at, and partly because emulation is so good that they're available to everyone.

And maybe even partly because to really appreciate Kenta Cho's games or many of the other new non-commercial games that Miriam keeps finding and pushing into Debian, you need to know the classics. Even if you do suck at galaga, and even if the only version you've really played is xgalaga, which lacks ship capture. :-)

I never played games in machines that ate quarters as a kid, because I didn't have many quarters, and it didn't seem to be a good value. I put one of the few quarters I've ever spent into a video game machine earlier this summer, in the corner of the Musée Mécanique that's dedicated to sorta-old video machines (as opposed to ancient, lovingly restored arcade games). It was a metal slug machine. I've beat metal slug under emulation, but only at the expense of many emulated quarters. Another quarter went into vintage game of pong. I enjoyed playing them both on real hardware, but emulation was good enough for both of these and for many other games in between.