I own the poster version ("The Art of Atari, the poster collection") and it's great. I have three of their posters hanging in my office right now. It's not just nostalgia, the art is terrific.
EDIT: the poster collection now costs $600+ on Amazon. Wow.
Aargh. I've been wanting a large poster of Missile Command for a while now, but can't seem to find one at a decent price. Having one printed is difficult too as I can't find high-res, large image files of it.
Humanity has done a decent job at preserving artifacts from our past despite wars and the effects of time on our cultural output. Throughout history, books, paintings, sculptures, music, and other forms of art were the available outlets for artistic and creative people. With the rise of computers, video games joined the set of cultural works produced by our species. While one could argue that the artistic value of David and Pac-Man is not comparable, I prefer to adopt a more open-minded view of games. It's great that some people are giving video games proper attention, considering the enormous amount of time we spend playing them and the place they occupy in our childhood memories.
I don't see why Pac-Man should be valued less than the statue of David. Of course they're different, but they both contributed to the culture heritage of the human species.
The article focuses on games that were never released or never even completed. It could be argued that those (unlike Pac-Man) did not contribute to cultural heritage. This is obviously not to say that their preservation is unimportant; I just think it should be compared more to unfinished/unpublished works of art, not the statue of David. It's more like The Salmon of Doubt than it is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
You're right. My comparison was more about sculptures as art vs the games as art. If you don't believe them to be equivalent at some level, it would be difficult to find this preservation work worthwhile.
That said, unfinished games are similar to manuscripts of an unfinished book. Many such manuscripts have been published throughout history and are, in my opinion, part of our cultural heritage too.
I actually wrote my first toy multitasker on a Gameboy Advance, although that's ARM7... Great little project. It's a joy to develop on an emulator with good debugging tools.
If you like CYOA games, you may enjoy my upcoming game Outsider, a modern sci-fi take on dynamic narrative games. It will launch in 7 weeks and I'm working on it full-time!
If you like Puzzle Hunt puzzles, you might enjoy my upcoming game, Outsider, which contains a MIT-style Puzzle Hunt puzzle. You can complete the game without solving it, but the solution uncovers a whole new layer in the story: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider
Yeah, with those early machines it was inevitably about lookup tables, and producing the illusion of doing work which was otherwise impossible in the number of cpu cycles you had available. I did lots of this sort of thing for the C64, where similarly CPU cycles were short, and then you end up scratching around trying to find enough spare memory...
It's great to see people still exploring and pushing the boundaries of what these machines are capable of. Coding this on a more modern machine, getting the effect right, then back-porting to the Spectrum seems like a smart move and would have been a game changer during the prime of these machines!
Lots of commercial Spectrum games were coded on a 'more modern' machine, often an IBM PC with a better keyboard and a cross assembler to generate Z80 code.
It's a very common feeling and I'm no stranger to it as a solo game developer. But remember that the "grass is always greener on the other side". Chances are that, once you go back to the "nice job" at the end of the day, you'll miss the peace and ownership of your solo building days.
I always enjoyed chatting with my coworkers and learning from them. I do miss that. But I don't miss anything else from that environment, to be honest.
I've been remote and essentially on a solo projects even though I work on a team with 50+ offshore devs that it physically pains me when I have to get on a call and talk with coworkers.
Yeah, if it serves OP as consolation I've been in full time employment 9 yrs. Sick of 'socialising' and I'm building my own thing with 0 people to take with me. I need full agency, I'm done with death by thousand feedback. The grass is indeed greener and I'll probably miss working with people... in 2-3 years. We'll see.
I think text-only games have a certain special power that modern games can't quite emulate. Modern city planners are more accessible and better in most ways, but there is a raw gameplay elegance in games like Sumer that I think could make a comeback one day. Perhaps the game equivalent to vinyl records.
The main character is an old school hacker (AND a cracker, which is a different thing) and the game leans heavily on the community's culture.