Misc. links

• Video cards were originally much the same resolution as teletext. However whilst Video cards advanced teletext's format remained the same.

• Windows 3.0, released 1990, utilised a graphics card with over 1600 colours.
• An article from 1987 about teletext in the US. Shows how behind the times the American continent was with teletext: televisions with appropriate encoders were not widely available in 1987.
• It's always worth a look at the Lektrolab Flickr stream.
• About the first video game -'Spacewar' at inventors.com
• Windows 95 was a pretty popular Operating System in its time. It helped Internet Explorer dominate the web browser market for ages. WorldWideWeb, meanwhile, was the first web browser and HTML editor.
  
• An important landmark in the history of the BBC and indeed television - the Queen's coronation. 22 million people watched.
  

Super Mario Brothers recontextualised

Original - teletext art by Paul Davis - Mario 2600 - Super ASCII Brothers

ASCII Space Invaders

It's just the same as the original but in ASCII.

ASCII Space Invaders

See also

• Space Invaders ASCII animation
• Another ASCII Invaders game
• A simple Javascript ASCII Invaders game.

Hmm. It seems there are a lot of these around the Internet, with no two versions being precisely the same.

Paul Slocum/Cory Arcangel

Paul Slocum's website

I mentioned Paul Slocum in an earlier post when I wrote about his Atari Windows GUI. A lot of his work focuses on video game hacking, particularly through music. One particular piece, Combat (right), was actually exhibited at the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. It's another hacked cartridge in which the music is all glitched up:

Combat, 3 mins

I've never played the game before but in this version, the exisiting soundtrack is replaced by a house/garage/whatever funky soundtrack!

Cory Arcangel's website

...is fashionably unfashionable. Actually, I like the design better than most websites...

There's some interesting work on there, mostly conceptual but there's a long tutorial on how to recreate the 'clouds' piece, if you can get hold of a Nintendo.

Notice the great big chip pasted to the cart to modify the programming. It would have been much easier (but less fun I expect) to hack a ROM using computers... but that would probably be illegal, I suppose.

ASCII/glitched Super Mario

On my other weblog I'm exploring the possibilities of recreating classic video games in new ways. Mario might be a bit complicated for me yet but it's fun to experiment with this sort of stuff.

Here, someone has hacked the original Nintendo Super Mario game to be completely in ASCII.



I've had a go at hacking ROMs over Christmas but I can't seem to get my head round it. Oh well.



Something equally as interesting, however, is the idea of glitch art. I have explored this a bit previously in my post about Cory Arcangel but never really got onto expanding it. I like the idea of using existing commercial appliances such as video game consoles and exploring creation of glitches.

Pong Blogger

Pong is a strangely addictive game. I've been doing some experiments with the game engine in Flash recently and decided to put them into a blog format. The result is Pong Blogger, which you might like.

Pong Blogger

Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel is apparently part of the video game art community - a bit more research reveals that he is a bit more well-known than I first thought.

Cory Arcangel, Amazon entry
To start, he has a book. It's 'a hacker's nostalgia trip' documenting some of his (and his fellow programmers' activities).
More info on the book.

Here's a page of some of his exhibits, including the Landscape series projected in exhibition environment. The image to the right is one such installation, and includes his video game 'I Shot Andy Warhol'. There's a video of this on YouTube:



I just found it simply awesome. The pixellated version of Colonel Sanders is particularly brilliant.

I'll leave this post with a nice, relaxing GIF of Arcangel's. According to Uncyclopedia.org, it "is the world's 3rd most seen .GIF file off all time after LOTR.gif and POO.gif."

Donkey Kong - Arcade Classic

Today's featured article on Wikipedia is Donkey Kong, a classic of the coin-op era. The game was released in 1981 at the height of teletext's popularity. In fact, it was the same year that level two text was released and implemented across Europe and America.

The arcade game was so popular it brought threats of a lawsuit from the creators of King Kong, the lizard of film fame. Any publicity is good publicity and certainly arcade games were far more popular and indeed mentioned than teletext. Essentially, though, the two mediums are meant for different purposes despite the similarly pixellated graphics.

Donkey Kong was actually the first video game to feature Super Mario, who has since starred in an extremely popular series of games.

The game has since become cross-format, with versions released on many subsequent consoles and arcade machines. Also notable is the game and watch version (shown right) which is something of a cut down version on a hand held games console. This proves that, with effort, it would in fact be possible to transfer a teletext system to a hand held system for people on the move and also, if people cared, to continue the service to more up to date mediums. Maybe an advanced version of the existing one for mobile phones? I'll explore Teletext mobile in a future post.

Video Games & Internet timelines

Timeline of significant dates in the production of video games (selected).

1958: Physicist Willy Higinbotham invents the first "video game" at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. His game, a table tennis-like game, was played on an oscilloscope.
1966: Ralph Baer, an engineer at Sanders Associates, receives support from his company (a military electronics consulting firm in NH) to explore his idea of creating interactive games using a television.
1967: Baer and team are successful in creating two interactive TV games—a chase game and a tennis game. They are also able to manipulate a toy gun so that it detects spots of light on the TV screen.
1970: Computer Space becomes first video arcade game ever released. 1500 games are distributed. Public consensus is that it is too difficult to play.
1972: Magnavox's Odyssey, the first home video game system, is showcased at a convention in Burlingame, CA, and is released to the public later that year.
1978: Midway introduces Space Invaders into arcades. It is the first arcade game that tracks and displays high scores.
1979: Asteroids is the first game to allow high scorers to enter three character initials to be stored in the machine.

Source: Infoplease , Ralphbaer.com

An abbreviated history of Internet graphics.

1884: Nipkow (Germany) devises scanner for scanning and transmitting images.
1970: Lilian Schwartz produces 'Pixellation'
1987: GIF and JPEG formats developed.

Source: History of internet graphics

If I can merge this timeline with the Teletext and an abbreviated Internet one then select the most significant, there should be enough content for an overall timeline. Fingers crossed for that.

Book Review - Video Game Art, Nic Kelman

http://www.assoulineusa.com/video_game_art.html
http://www.amazon.com/Video-Game-Art-Nic-Kelman/dp/2843237297

A couple of months ago I found this book was in the local library catalogue. So, I decided to loan it and see if there is anything worth taking into consideration for this project. Following is a brief overview of the book.

On the whole the book is quite disappointing, especially with regards to my project, devoting a whole four of its 350 pages to the development of video games pre-1993, the very era I would be looking to for inspiration and information regarding my project.

Nevertheless, it was a satisfactory lengthy essay on why video games could be considered 'art', concentrating on the development of characters, storylines and advanced CG graphics in modern video games. Some eye-catching images and demonstrations of the capabilities of video game graphics, in fact the book is very image-heavy. All very well and good for its target audience but not massively relevant to what I am looking into.

At the end of the book is a brief timeline of video game landmarks, with some references to three button controllers and simple dial interfaces maybe worth looking into and making parallels with remote control handsets. Also included is a two page spread explaining in simple terms the video game design process.

Further reading on this subject:

> 8-Bit - Video Game Art

> Video Game Box Art