#romchip

The Bootleg Connection: Micro Genius and the Transnational Circulation of Early Clone Consoles Ian Larson (University California, Irvine)

In the first issue of ROMchip, the new online journal of video game history, Whitney Pow (@whitneypow) writes about how we can reimagine video game history to be about people rather than objects.

Whitney has been researching Danielle Bunten Berry, a prominent trans developer in the 80s who made groundbreaking multiplayer games. The Strong Museum of Play has an archival collection related to Berry’s work, but even in reading those documents, Whitney had trouble learning more about who Berry was as a person.

How can we look at video game history in a way that puts people at the center? This is a powerful article, and it’s a lot think about.

I find flashes of [Berry] occasionally, when I turn a page, or open a folder: in her tight and looped handwriting, there is a moment where Bunten writes about her day and her experience being misgendered by a postal worker, saved because it is on the same page as her last will and testament. [...] It is in these fleeting moments that I find her, and I imagine how she animated these documents and set them in motion. I try to imagine her as a set of verbs that did and saw and felt, rather than a carefully curated set of facts and documents, sitting motionless in a folder, in a box, in an archive.

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If you’re interested in gaming history, sign up for the mailing list for ROMchip, a new online scholarly journal. ROMchip is spearheaded by three historians who absolutely know their stuff, including Raiford Guins, author of Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife; and Laine Nooney, who is currently writing the business history of Sierra On-Line.

It’s exciting to see focused, scholarly, researched attention in this area, especially given how unorganized and flawed popular gaming history often is. I hope that the journal will focus not just on the big marquee names but the stories and experiences often left out of informal gaming canons – the garage developers, the companies that didn't make it past one or two games, and the unexamined bulk of games that provide the mortar for gaming history.