Volunteer events for DGM are suspended while we continue to work on our remodel.

If you are a returning volunteer, contact Dave to see if it’s possible to volunteer on the date you want to come.

A recent visit to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation found me chatting with one of the elderly volunteers who always staff the welcome/information desk. She admitted, with a little embarrassment, that she was on her phone all the time and with little prompting, she said that she uses Facebook constantly. She went on to say that she played games, mostly. Games! Well, I can relate to that! She plays Words with Friends with other people, but mostly with her sister. Her face lit up with pride at her sister, who always scores very high and invariably is the winner. She said she didn’t really care about winning, it was just playing with her sister that she liked so much. She beamed with pleasure just thinking about this word game uniting her with her sister, just as it had certainly done when they were young. The years and the miles fell away over a game remembered in another form from childhood.

I’m sure she would never think of herself as a gamer, but in reality, she represents a growing population of older, online gamers. According to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2015 report, 26% of people playing games are under 18 years old, 30% are 18-35 years old, 17% are in the 36-49 age range, and 27% are 50+ years of age. 56% are male, and 44% are female. And 155 million Americans play video games.

What we have known for a long time is that games build communities, whether it’s millennials getting together for a tournament, seniors keeping in touch with family through games, or parents playing games with their children. Gaming is community, sharing and friendship. She hadn’t thought of herself as a gamer – but now she does!

Image source

If you’ve joined us at the museum to do any accessioning you know how carefully we assess artifacts when they come to us. Part of that assessment is noting any specific differences within types of artifacts to make sure that our collection is representative as well as comprehensive. With the Atari 2600 (or colloquially, Atari Video Computer Systems) there are many variations beyond the standard wood grain console. Yet these systems are all essentially the same in terms of performance and options. While every serious 2600 fan has their own favorite version of the console, one of the most coveted examples is the “heavy sixer” version of the original Atari Video Computer System. Heavy sixers are an example of the earliest Atari VCS systems and like many early electronics have a few key identifiers that don’t require opening them up and reading chip codes or serials off the board.

Unlike later versions of the 2600, heavy sixers have six switches on the front of the console instead of four on the front and two on the back. Within the variants of six switch VCS systems, the heavy sixers are also, unsurprisingly, more heavy – about half a kilogram in fact. Taken together these two factors give us the name and its inverse “light sixer” to describe later runs of the VCS which don’t feature the heavier bottom half of the plastic shell which gave the units their additional weight. The heavy sixer in our collection (2016.014.002) comes from Harold M. Lee, who was the original owner and noted Atari employee. You can see the thick frame on the bottom half of the system and distinctive six-button configuration across the front of the system.

There are other less noticeable identifiers of Atari 2600 vintage as well. These include the shape and size of the bezels around the switch holes, and as mentioned earlier, screen printing, board revisions, and component choices inside the system.

Also notable is that heavy sixers were produced exclusively in the Bay Area. Later, when production expanded overseas to Hong Kong the heavy sixer didn’t make the transition. This means that if you have a Heavy Sixer (NTSC or PAL versions) it came from right here in Santa Clara County; the home of Atari and the birthplace of the video game industry.

Retro Game Collector has done a great writeup with comparison shots between heavy and light six switch Ataris, and if you’d like an even more comprehensive study of the differences between systems there is an excellent thread over at Atari Age that gets into the literal guts of the issue. If you’d like to see and compare light and heavy sixers, four switch, and other Atari systems, stop by the museum and see if you can spot the differences yourself!

2016.014.002 – Gift of Harold M. Lee

Is your company interested in helping DGM preserve the stories of gaming history? Become a corporate sponsor! Benefits include:

Publicity – Your company’s name on all DGM materials, and proudly displayed at the museum.

Named Positions – By sponsoring a paid position at DGM, your company’s name will be part of the position’s title for the duration of your sponsorship.

Collections – Name a digital collection of artifacts of your choice for the duration of your sponsorship.

Events – Partner with DGM to host themed events and tournaments open to the public. For private events at DGM, the suggested rental donation is waived. Additionally, our staff can help plan offsite events.

In addition to sponsorship, DGM is seeking active volunteers and board members. Interested in sponsorship or volunteer opportunities? Email season@digitalgamemuseum.org.

Sometimes where we get an artifact – its provenance – is as important as the artifact itself or adds importance to an already interesting item. That’s the case with this Tele-games Super Pong IV.

While researching the evolution of Pong from arcade machine to the familiar home “pedestal” Pong units, I learned that the task of converting the large boards that power the arcade game to an integrated circuit fell to Harold M. Lee, with the assistance of Al Alcorn. I was delighted to receive an email from Mr. Lee, who then visited DGM the following week and brought us his personal Tele-games Super Pong IV and an Atari 2600 “heavy sixer.” (We’ll have more about heavy sixers in a future post.)

The Super Pong IV, marketed under Sears’s brand name “Tele-Games and released in 1976,” is a four player version with 2 detachable controllers in addition to the two controllers wired to the base. It plays Catch for one to four players, Handball and Basketball for one to two players, and Pong and Super Pong for two to four players. You can see the original box and manual in our database entry for the artifact, and you can see the unit in our exhibit!

Thanks, Harold! It was a pleasure to meet you and we look forward to seeing you again soon.

Gift of Harold M. Lee – 2016.014.001

May 11 – Wednesday Accessioning, 7-10PM. Sign up at Eventbrite.

No Saturday Volunteer Day in May. If you want to come and help out and you’ve been to a Saturday or Wednesday work party before, email judith@digitalgamemuseum.org.

Pin-A-Go-Go, a pinball show
May 13-15 in Dixon, CA, 28 miles from the Sacramento International Airport and ~100 miles from DGM.

Maker Faire Bay Area, a combination of your high school science fair, the county fair, and Burning Man.
May 20-22 in San Mateo. Ticket prices here.

This month, DGM is taking its direction from Dr. Who’s TARDIS. The TARDIS is said to be “dimensionally transcendental,” so it’s bigger on the inside than the outside. That’s what we need because the spiraling rents in Silicon Valley, coupled with the demolition of inexpensive rentals for development, have made it impossible to find an affordable location that is larger than the present one. And, as you can see above, there’s no more room on the shelves. So we are expanding the space inside our existing facility to provide better storage and to create a gaming room that will have playable vintage consoles and hold enough people for tournaments and events – we already have an Indie roll-out party planned for August!

But it cost over $1000 to make the collection shelves movable and more space efficient. The timing comes as we gear up for Silicon Valley Gives on May 3. Last year our generous donors helped us with our archival storage costs, and this year we hope you will help convert our messy back storage room into a great space where gamers can meet and play. We are looking forward to entertaining our donors (that’s you!) in this new space as soon as it is ready!

Please visit our SVGives website and help us turn DGM into a TARDIS with more space on the inside than the outside!

Flowers smell like fish, orange juice smells like peanut butter, garbage smells like candy — it’s a malodorous mystery and you’re the detective in charge of the case.

Based on a Mercer Mayer book of the same title, The Smelly Mystery is an interactive storybook where a group of friends wake up from a sleepover to discover scents have been completely transformed. Little Monster and his assistant Detective Kerploppus are charged with identifying the culprit and fixing the smelly switch. Players gather clues on each page to solve the mystery.

This is a game that might have been featured in the weekly flyers from Scholastic that you brought home from school – or that your child pestered you to buy from one of those flyers! It’s easy to focus on the giant historically important games that need to be preserved; it’s also these smaller games, sometimes remembered only by the children who played them, that make up the wonderfully varied texture of the gaming world. In fact, an educational game was the beginning, decades ago, of DGM.

Playthrough options on The Smelly Mystery include “Play” to read the story and collect clues, “New” to restart the game with new clues and a new suspect, “Read” to read the story with no interaction, “Mug” for a face-building minigame, and “Page” to skip to a certain page of the storybook, view credits, and play game demos.

You can watch a full playthrough of the game (1.5 hours) here.

One day, we hope to play The Smelly Mystery using state-of-the-art scratch and sniff technology, but for now, you’ll have to use your imagination.

-Season

Gift of Don Apte – 2015.034.006

While we usually stress the preservation of artifacts over code, there are times when we receive a rare or unique physical artifact which also contains a digital aspect that should also be preserved. To meet the challenges we face archiving these games in their entirety, the Digital Game Museum has partnered with Kryoflux, a UK based company that specializes in magnetic media. Kryoflux has provided one of their systems to the museum for doing low level archival and forensic reads from digital media. Unlike simply copying code from the disk and transferring it to modern secure digital storage, Kryoflux allows us to take a snapshot of the magnetic charges of a disk’s surface, preserving it precisely as it was when we received it. From this archived copy, we can reproduce the content without risking further damage to the artifact. This code can also be run on an emulator content verification or research.

In the early days of computing, many games were self-published and sold at the local computer store (Richard Garriott got his start this way with one of his first games Akalabeth) or passed around close knit groups of programming and gaming enthusiasts. Our collection features many early indie games as well as beta-test and other non-commercially released versions of games that should be both physically and digitally archived. These games often predate the CD-ROM drive or even the smaller format 3.5″ floppy disk. Additionally we have disks which are formatted for systems like the Amiga, Commodore, or Atari home computers. Using a modern PC or Mac to archive much of this data isn’t really an option. Issues can arise in both data format, physical disk condition, and even early copy protection that relied on manipulation of the disk’s magnetic field.

One of the features of Kryoflux that we’re particularly excited about is the ability to pull low level data off a disk. So even if we don’t have a functioning system that could read a disk, we can make an identical digitization of that disk which could be archived until a system or software-based interpreter comes along that can translate the contents into modern machine or human readable code. This also means that a disk which is partially damaged or rapidly degrading can be stored digitally and any content that can be retrieved from it would still be available, independent of the condition of the artifact. Using Kryoflux we can preserve artifacts in the most consistent and safe way possible while maintaining the ability to partner with researchers and scientists around the world to examine unique digital collateral.

We’d like to thank Kryoflux for supporting the preservation and archival of the important digital artifacts of the game design community and look forward to sharing these digital artifacts with gamers, researchers, and students around the world.

April 9 – Saturday Volunteer Day will be held on the second Saturday of the month! Sign up at Eventbrite. If it’s full and you have volunteered here before, email Judith – we need you!

April 9 in West Sacramento – Sacramento Indie Arcade Gaming Expo, a local indie game developer showcase, will include a mini Atari-Party! Tell Bill we sent you!

April 20 – Wednesday Accessioning, 7-10PM. Sign up at Eventbrite.

May 7 – Saturday Volunteer Day. Sign up on Eventbrite after April 9.