Archaeogaming: Computer Science Meets Archaeology

John Aycock

Why on earth would anyone study old computer games, and what can we learn from them? I tell the story of how the solution to a teaching problem accidentally became a line of interdisciplinary research. Along the way, this “retro game archaeology” intersected with real archaeology and the drafting of a manifesto in Europe, an activity that sounds more subversive than it really was. My collaborators and I have been (re)discovering the clever ways that game programmers would create games on highly constrained computers, and also seeing that human interactions with technology have changed little since stone tools were in vogue. This interdisciplinary work fits under the umbrella of “archaeogaming”, which has been defined as the archaeology in and of video games, but at the same time challenges traditional ideas of what an archaeological artifact is and how it can be studied. Multiple examples will be used to surprise and delight.

Low-tech by Design: Using Retro Tools for Green Game Dev

Charlotte Courtois

Graphic Adventure Creator as a 1986 Twine? Let’s take an ecologic activist stance on game creation by looking at a retro game creation tool: Graphic Adventure Creator (GAC), by Incentive Software (1986). The tool was thought to be accessible to beginners and can be used without any coding knowledge, as John Aycock highlighted in his precious interview with Sean Ellis in 2016; the now departed creator of the software. Similar to a 1986 Twine in its functioning, GAC is constructed by interconnected rooms, similar to the passages of Twine. The spatial approach to data and narration is classic of the 1980s text adventure genre but can be bent to other sorts of modes and interactive fictions. I will show you some of the games I created with this engine as well as the resources to hopefully enable you to build your own GAC games and take part in the low-tech movement of game creation.

Handheld Homebrew: An Intro to Hobbyist Game Boy Development

Alex Custodio

Nearly thirty-five years after its launch, the Game Boy persists as a significant cultural object, one that continues to be hacked, modified, repaired, redesigned, repurposed, upcycled, and, occasionally, actually played with. Online, hobbyists participate in a thriving cultural economy based around the beloved old, gray brick, modifying its hardware, software, and peripherals to create new afterlives for the platform. This presentation introduces hobbyist Game Boy development with a particular focus on various kinds of homebrew.

Homebrew refers to software developed for closed platforms rather than for systems that actively support user programming. When thinking about what homebrew for videogame consoles looks like, many of us think of independent (“indie”) games. But homebrew runs the gamut from amateur games to art pieces, from programming exercises to music synthesizers, from digital cameras to solar sensors. The first section of this talk offers an overview of some of the different ways we might use homebrew including but not limited to entertaining an audience, demonstrating technical knowledge, accruing cultural capital, and disseminating research findings.

Following this introduction, I’ll then turn to a practical demonstration of GB Studio, a free, open-source drag-and-drop game creation program for the Game Boy. GB Studio obfuscates much of the complexity of video game coding behind a simple and intuitive visual interface, allowing amateurs to program a game with minimal knowledge of the system’s technical specifications. The unprecedented accessibility of Game Boy development is furthered by creators who contribute free resources like fonts, pixel art, and sound bites on itch.io. Ultimately, this presentation is at once a talk and a demonstration, a toolkit that can be used for creative, hands-on exploration of residual videogame handhelds.

Trials & Tribulations of a British Game Dev in the 90’s

Chris Gibbs

I will walk through my personal journey, starting as a bedroom game coder in the early 80s, pirating cassettes at school, getting games printed in magazines, doing my first commercial game, Atari’s SuperSprint on the AtariST while at University, and then co-founding and growing Attention To Detail over 10 years, making games for LucasArts, Activision, Atari, US Gold, LEGO, Psygnosis, SONY, Gremlin Graphics and more, until selling to a larger game development group in 1998 and entering a corporate atmosphere for the first time.

The talk will explore three key themes: 1. The development process, 2. The games business, 3. The gaming audience, showing how I saw them each evolve rapidly (chaotically!) over that period. This was the time when games transitioned from 2D to 3D, there was the emergence of multiple successful (and unsuccessful) game consoles, and the cottage industry in the UK was overpowered by the serious industry leadership in the US and Japan.

The story has many highs and lows, from well-reviewed successful games to terrible games that didn’t ever get published, from high-dollar deals that promised early retirement, to near-bankruptcy. ATD went from being five friends living and working in the same house, to over 60 employees in a converted barn. I will adopt a conversational style, re-living many funny/unusual anecdotes with the larger-than-life characters I met at publishers and other developers, trying to share what it really felt like in those pioneering days when the games industry didn’t know yet if it was an industry or just a fad.

I’ll finish with things coming full circle in 2016 when once more, as an independent developer, I created and launched Smart Numbers on iPhone/Android, and realised that mobile development was again giving individuals the chance to be creative and get stuff out there, without needing the blessing of a publisher or the crazy costs of a large team, just like we did thirty-five years ago.

The talk will be supported by old video clips and images from back in the day, plus a variety of physical objects to look at (magazines, copies of games in original packaging, original ZX Spectrum with its DK Tronics keyboard, games on cassettes, games on floppy disks, artwork).

The Knot: Situating Old Game

Rilla Khaled and Darren Wershler

Our argument is that thinking about old games in an academic context involves considering three aspects of them more or less simultaneously: materiality; technique; and culture.

As in a trefoil knot, these aspects are deeply interrelated: technique produces both the subject employing the technique and the object on which it is being exercised; our sense of what something is and what we might do with it emerges out of the cultural — that is, interactions with (debates, arguments conversations) with others; materiality sets the conditions for our embodied experience of them, and what it is possible to do with them.

When working with old games, one can begin anywhere in untangling this knot, but researchers will eventually find they need to travel through all three aspects of its circuit to say anything meaningful.

During the talk, we will approach each of these aspects from our separate perspectives with examples from our own work, with particular attention to points of both agreement and debate.

From Code Lines to Creative Leaps: The Evolution of Game Development

By Carlos Pinto Gomez

In the keynote “From Code Lines to Creative Leaps: The Evolution of Game Development,” we will embark on a detailed exploration of how game development has evolved from the complex, code-centric approaches of its inception to today’s innovative methodologies like visual scripting that significantly lower the barrier to entry. The session will thoroughly examine pivotal moments in video game history, highlighting the evolution of game development methodologies and the technical challenges faced by pioneers in the field.

As we navigate the historical timeline, emphasis will be placed on the development of game systems, with a focus on comparing technologies used for integrating other systems such as sound, visual effects, and animations. We will explore how advancements such as visual scripting have simplified the use of these complex systems, particularly in versatile engines like Unreal, Unity, and Godot. Additionally, we will discuss how these technological shifts have influenced production methodologies, transitioning from traditional waterfall models to agile frameworks that facilitate rapid prototyping and iterative development.

These tools have not only streamlined the development process but also expanded the creative possibilities by enabling a diverse range of creators, including artists and designers without formal coding backgrounds, to bring their visions to life. This democratization of game development is accelerating time to market, allowing studios to gather player feedback earlier, and thereby enhancing game quality through real-world testing; as covered by our featured case studies of successful games that exemplify the impact of these modern methodologies on both the development workflow and the end product.

Join us as we trace the evolution from intricate code lines to expansive creative leaps, exploring how the advancement of development tools has transformed the way games are made and expanded the very horizons of the gaming industry.

Memoirs of an Accidental Digital Antiquarian

Jimmy Maher

I started my website The Digital Antiquarian just over thirteen years ago now, having no idea what it would eventually turn into or how big a space in my life it would come to fill. In this talk, I’ll tell how curiosity about one old game called The Oregon Trail and uncertainty about what I wanted to do next in life turned into an extended ramble through 25 years of gaming history (and counting). More importantly, I’ll share some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way, about how we received games back in the day versus how they appear to us today on websites like mine, and how we can balance the pull of nostalgia with the more critical perspective that we need to be able to adopt if we’re to call ourselves true cultural historians. I’ll tell how my personal history with games, dating back to the days of the Atari VCS, informs what I write, as well as the places where I’m careful not to let it fill too much. Finally, I’ll mount my favorite hobby horse to tell you why I believe that anyone who is interested in writing about games as a cultural phenomenon should nourish a broad range of interests, both in the interest of doing better work and in that of living a better life, and why loving games too much or too exclusively could actually be detrimental to both.

Haunted Vertices and Low Poly Frights – PS1 Aesthetic as Zombie Media, Hauntology, and Glitch Horror

Frédérick Maheux

The original PlayStation console, despite ceasing production in 2006, continues to exert a profound influence on alternative games culture. New assets, shaders, and tools emulating its unique aesthetics are constantly proposed across various game engines. The popularity of demakes, and low poly reinterpretations of critically acclaimed games such as Bloodborne (From Software, 2015), is a testament to this enduring influence. This trend extends beyond video games. Petscop (Tony Domenico, 2017), a YouTube horror series presented as a Let’s Play of a fictional haunted game, is but one example of the lasting allure of PS1-era aesthetics. While the console saw the release of seminal horror games such as Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996) and Silent Hill (Konami, 1999), more obscure Japanese titles such as Germs Nerawareta Machi (KAF, 1999) and Kowai Sashin (Media Entertainment, 2002) are being fan translated and generating popular content for video creators on YouTube and Twitch.

This presentation will analyze the fascination with the original PlayStation console and how its unique 3D aesthetic still carries a massive affective appeal for horror fans and game creators. Three theoretical frames will be explored:

These three concepts will serve as a lens to understand the creations of various communities where PS1 aesthetics is central, such as Haunted PS1 and Domino Club. Titles from Modus Interactive, Colorfiction, and Valerie Dusk will be shared to vividly illustrate the limitless and captivating creative possibilities of the PS1.

Jordan Mechner’s Canabalt

Cindy Poremba

In 1989, a game was released that challenged film’s exclusive grip on the cinematic, bringing a fluidity of real-world motion and a “shimmer” of aliveness into video games. Jordan Mechner’s Canabalt drew from embodied performances inspired by cinema’s great action sequences, painstakingly translated by videogame auteur Jordan Mechner from the real world to the Commodore 64 computer.

Mechner’s Canabalt is a counterfactual game entangling two videogame histories: Mechner’s Prince of Persia (1989) for the Apple II, and the 2012 game C64anabalt, an official conversion of Adam Saltsman’s Canabalt (2009) by Paul Koller for the Commodore 64. This tangle of narratives weaves together new materialist rhetorics of motion capture with the retro design imaginary to ask: how does what we design dwell in the times and places that they do?

Speedrunning the Amiga legacy: 6605 games (and counting)

By Carl Therrien

This presentation will introduce fifteen video games selected to create an Amiga Arcade for ReAnimate. The objective is to get in touch with inspiring game designs that have disappeared from view despite their critical appreciation at the time of their release. Through this assemblage, the games enter into a dialogue, shedding light on each other. In the Amiga Arcade, a lot of folks run, gun, and slash; Arnold Schwarzenegger stands next to the Giana sisters and their punk superpowers; pinball becomes a funky tool to play with music samples; lemmings explode in a way that announces the fury of Grand Theft Auto; a raver girl fights off capitalism and pollution by shooting love; and Maria Renard revives nearly 30 years after her initial appearance in the Castlevania series, seeking revenge in a fan-made game released exclusively for the Amiga in 2023. Thanks to the Scorpion Engine, created by Erik Hogan from New Zealand, coding special effects on the platform has become easier than ever, thus opening up a new development cycle in the platform’s extended lifespan.

Fan-curated resources were essential to discover and connect with these games, for example, the Hall of Light database guiding us to original game reviews from the videogame press, and the “All Games” channel (emerging from Poland), providing video overviews of all titles released on a specific platform. For the Amiga, this visual synthesis runs for over seven hours and 25 minutes. These resources, among others, encouraged us to integrate as many titles as possible in the arcade and this presentation. Finally, each selected game will be related to specific academic contributions emerging in the last twenty years of game studies, hoping to put these games on our radar and, most importantly, hear what they say about video game culture.

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