The Gentrification of Video Game History

January 3, 2025 1:08 PM

"Even if we have things in common — and we often have — we rarely communicate directly. Over time we’re gaslighted into believing these shared elements aren’t that important, maybe they don’t even exist… our common history is erased as we submit to the default, US-centric one. There are many examples of this — one of the most common is how Europe’s home computer scene in the 80s is often erased and replaced by the events of The Video Game Crash of 1983, an event mostly restricted to North America. The Amstrad CPC, C64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, demoscenes, etc… all get replaced by the all-mighty NES. And if that’s happening to Europe, just imagine the rest of the world"
posted by simmering octagon (12 comments total)

I had a C64 as a kid, and I was an absolute outlier. I would have had an NES if my mom had allowed it. A couple of friends had C64s, but they were rare. And then I had an Amiga, which, well, I didn't know anyone else in my town who had one, though I was lucky enough to have a local Amiga store called "Amigo Computing." Even when I got to college, there was nobody else.

There are, of course, C64 emulators and mini C64s and those poor souls who long to keep the Amiga alive, but none of it is what I would call culturally relevant. See also: the 80s-90s BBS scene. Our own Jason Scott made that awesome documentary, which was awesome (even if I wasn't in it!), but nobody in the general public knows what a BBS is or was. So much information just gets lost to the sands of time and the myopic eye of commerce. And then on top of that you have the US cultural hegemony and what I consider toxic and weird AF gatekeeping about "real games."
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:32 PM on January 3 [2 favorites]

Gentrification seems like a not especially apt metaphor for what the author is talking about, but I hope that minor critique doesn't keep people from engaging with the article, because it's really an interesting perspective.

There's a lot of gatekeeping about what counts as a real game, and, for a long time, the games that counted were mostly the ones played by Americans and Western Europeans, mostly white men, on expensive PCs and state-of-the-art consoles.

You can see the same kind of dynamics play out in other kinds of media--movies, tv, pop music., etc., etc. And if something didn't make somebody a lot of money, there's a good chance it will be left out of the history.
posted by box at 2:46 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

My c64 had about 300 (mostly pirated) games. I feel bad for NES owners honestly.
posted by Popular Ethics at 2:57 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

It felt like NZ was mostly C64/Spectrum territory for gaming during the mid-80's to early-90's (tape/disk trading at school was massive - I suspect you picked your platform based on who had the biggest catalog of available games to trade/pirate). That type of thing was nigh on impossible with a console.

At the time, it felt like the best games came from the UK (Jeff Minter, Andrew Braybrook, David Braben etc). Then the Amiga and x86 PC's came along.

I'm not sure the NES or Consoles really took off and went mainstream in the home (Arcades were pretty big outside the home as a place to hang-out tho') here until the PS1. Then again, I was a poor Uni student so there was a awareness/knowledge gap between the C64 and being able to afford a PS1 or 2.
posted by phigmov at 3:12 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

One of the great classic bits of non-Anglosphere video game history is Sega's relationship with Tec Toy, a Brazilian toy and electronics company. Unable to import its products into Brazil, they instead worked with Tec Toy to manufacture their consoles there. In addition to existing games, Brazil received exclusive titles in three categories:

1. Master System ports of Game Gear games that didn't already have them, since Brazil never got the Game Gear
2. Modified versions of first-party Master System games featuring Brazilian characters like Monica and El Chapulin Colorado
3. Exclusive games, mostly based on Brazilian properties like Castelo Ra-Tim-Bum and Sítio do Picapau Amarelo (Yellow Woodpecker Farm - not the only beloved woodpecker-related work in Brazil, which is why Woody Woodpecker also get an exclusive game)

There was even an official Sega game show, Play Game, best known for spawning the Brazilian Eggman/QUATRO MIL PONTOS meme, but which also managed to pull a Nick Arcade by having a final round that green-screened players into a video game - achieved using at least two Alex Kidd games with the player's sprites erased from the ROM. The rest of the show even featured an interactive interface coded for the Sega Genesis.
posted by BiggerJ at 3:44 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

There is a common running joke in the UK retrocomputing/gaming scene, which is that Americans believe that video games went from Atari to Nintendo to PlayStation, and maybe there was something about home computers in there if you were some kind of nerd. But I noted in the year-end roundup of the Retro Adventurers (a podcast about old text adventures that is trying to avoid the US-centric "It was all Infocom" bias) that those of us who had Commodore 64-compatible systems into the early 90s noticed that all of the games advertised in the US magazines seemed to be produced by UK houses.

It's been a lot of fun (as an immigrant to the UK these past two decades) reviewing games that the British-born hosts remember from their youth, but which never made it to the US. Often the very platforms they ran on (such as the ZX Spectrum) were rare in the US.

A friend of mine who grew up in Brazil has fond memories of MSX systems, which I had to admit I'd never even heard of until he brought them up! It really seems like they defined what 8-bit home computing was in countries that hadn't had an Apple/Commodore or Acorn/Sinclair market battle in their front gardens.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:18 PM on January 3 [5 favorites]

Home computer popularity varied incredibly by location. Amongst my peers, more people had Dragon 32s than C64s, and as many people had Tatung Einsteins as had Apple IIs. The Atari VCS wasn't considered a computer or a form of gaming at all. If you couldn't swap games for it, what use was it?

There were some very niche computers or production methods, usually enlisted to prevent C64s and Apples from swamping the local markets. Spain briefly had high tariffs on machines with 64 K of RAM, but Amstrad supplied the CPC 472 to circumvent this. It was a regular CPC 464, except with a non-functional 8 K RAM chip on it.

Argentina had some real challenges, what with the cash-crunch after the fall of the dictatorship. They made their own Drean Commodore 64C, which was a locally-assembled C64 in a somewhat cobbled-together C64c case. Of course, it used the local PAL-N video standard, meaning it'll barely work with any display you can find these days.

I think the weirdest local clone I've seen was the ITT 2000. Because the Apple II's video circuitry was so tied to NTSC, it was almost impossible to get it to work in PAL countries. ITT in the UK produced a fully-licensed clone with Apple's blessing that produced PAL output. To do this, however, it had a slightly different memory map and display resolution. With Apple IIs, "slightly different" anything meant "wildly incompatible" in practice. Once Apple realized there was a market outside the USA and introduced the Europlus, the ITT 2000 vanished forever. It had a lovely silver case ...
posted by scruss at 5:18 PM on January 3 [2 favorites]

I clutch my memories of my parents' hand me down Atari 800XL with 5.25" floppy and drawing program (with drawing pad!) like one might pearls.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 6:27 PM on January 3 [2 favorites]

all of the games advertised in the US magazines seemed to be produced by UK houses

Psygnosis, anyone? And they had Roger Dean doing their art!
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:18 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

WUMPUS MOVES...
posted by flabdablet at 5:17 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]

It was interesting to see the juxtaposed photos of how players in different countries would gather to game together. Thanks for sharing this article!
posted by subocoyne at 10:40 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]

I think the author is making some very good points, but is really bad at picking examples.

For example: Real Cricket 20 is his first example. It is a sports game. It isn't being ignored due to it being from outside the US, it is ignored due to being a sports game. Even all-American sports games like Madden, NBA 2K23, Football Manager, etc don't get coverage on a regular basis, which is also a form of exclusion but not the one the author is attributing it to; and to be clear, these are all massive games that outsell pretty much everything else under the sun.

Then again, Bomba Patch, sports game. He does follow it up with some excellent examples that do support his point (PokéTibia, GTA Motovlog). But his comparisons...Counter-Strike, Day-Z, Garry’s Mod, DOTA...of those, all but Garry's Mod got independent, full game, releases.

Also isn't Gary's Mod more of a toolkit to make your own animations and such?

Anyway, it is full of excellent points about erasing the influence of LAN houses and gaming cafes as those were very popular worldwide. However, I think the author expands a few point to broadly, for example, claiming that gaming cafes lead to Free-To-Play; Lineage was a hugely popular MMO that was basically unknown in the west, and it was subscription based, and almost entirely played at gaming cafes in Korea. Gaming Cafes also lead to a lot of subscription-based games.

So yes, while I think there are excellent points about our games journalism being stuck in 2012, and very much aimed at the North American experience, I do think we need an examination that accounts for the industries other blind spots.
posted by Canageek at 12:25 PM on January 5