Story Photos
 Photo by Roger Werth Young people can learn about the history, science and creation of video games this summer at the Game On exhibit at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. |
Game On -- Seattle exhibition gives hands on view of video game history
Saturday, July 1, 2006 10:24 PM PDT
By Michael Andersen
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E-mail this articleCould a video game make you cry?
That was the question Electronic Arts asked in an iconic 1982 ad, featuring eight long-haired geeks gazing solemnly into the glorious future of electronic gaming.
Well, to judge from a beeping, booping new exhibit at Seattle's Pacific Science Center, they were about half right. Visitors can enjoy Game On through the end of August.
If the "Citizen Kane" of video games is coming, it's still years away. But "Tron" and "Dance Dance Revolution" sit in a museum, complete with production dates, historical notes and a crowd of people lined up to play -- if that's not cultural progress, what is?
Like many of the 100-odd games visitors can sample, Game On is almost too much fun to take seriously. The exhibit opens with a giant version of Pong, the two-player sensation from 1972 that vaguely resembles table tennis.
Then come the refrigerator-sized cabinets of the early 80s: "Galaxian," "Centipede," "Ms. Pac Man." This section of the exhibit seems to have a special draw on parents. They no doubt realize that it might provide the only opportunity they'll ever have to show their kids a thing or two about handling a trackball.
(Remember that guy with the pony tail who was always leaning over Space Invaders with a stack of quarters next to his right hand? He's still there. The quarters are gone, courtesy of the Pacific Science Center. The pony tail remains.)
After the cabinets come the console wars: Mario versus Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario versus Lara Croft, Mario versus Master Chief.
One vertigo-inducing room is lined with no less than 20 console hits and misses, from the game "Populous" to the 2002 party centerpiece "Super Monkeyball 2."
Every game in the exhibit is neatly labeled with set of bullet points, listing the way controls are used, the year released, the system, and a short attempt to describe the player's "aim."
The curators of Game On, first assembled by London's Barbican Art Gallery, have turned up some forgotten gems. Take "Bezerk," a piece of 1980 paranoia that puts you in a maze of taunting androids ("Come back and fight like a robot," the game taunts if you flee) and, on each screen, an invincible, bouncing smiley-face known, say the game notes, as "EVIL OTTO."
Then there are the cultural time machines like "Missile Command," also from 1980. Object: protect all your cities from a rain of descending ICBMs by sending well-placed explosives into the sky. Fail, and your screen will be covered by an ever-expanding red circle and a phrase that hovers just a little longer than you really want it to: THE END.
One section of Game On explores games that take commands in non-traditional ways. There's "Chillingham," a sound-only adventure game designed for blind gamers in 2004, and "Rez," a trippy 2002 attempt to merge sight and sound as you enter cyberspace to battle a computer virus.
"Beatmania" from 1998 (aim: "to have the grooves and be the DJ master") comes equipped with a tiny plastic turntable as well as buttons. And of course there's 1998's "Dance Dance Revolution," the mat-based party game that keeps track of your score on one side of the screen and "calories burned" on the other.
Finally, the adventurous can seat themselves at the cockpit of 2002's "Steel Battalion," a Japanese mech-warrior game sporting a control panel of two joysticks, five switches, 18 glowing buttons, a throttle, a tuner dial and one translucent orange "eject" button protected by a plastic flip-lid marked, satisfyingly, "Warning: Use only in Emergency."
Also threaded through Game On's careful documentation of its games are a few glimpses of the Olympian personalities behind the industry: here, a crayon sketch of Mario from Nintendo mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto; there, a corner for Sim-everything creator Will Wright, with his vision of open-ended simulations that would be more toy than game.
On one wall devoted to the creation of "Grand Theft Auto III," a huge whiteboard recreates the master plan for its sprawling plot.
Dozens of post-it notes -- yellow for quests, blue for game characters encountered, pink for the rewards of a job well done --- are spread across a grid, allowing designers to rearrange events in the game as it developed. You can almost smell the Dr. Pepper.
In the depth of its interaction, Game On is no Experience Music Project. Gamers will have to wait 30 years for a nostalgic billionaire of their own to sponsor a really revealing look into the guts of making a video game.
But the Pacific Center, with help from Microsoft, Nintendo and the Redmond DigiPen Institute of Technology, has made an interesting effort to put a Seattle spin on the traveling exhibit. The center has added Game U, a set of workshops on the creation of modern games.
Video tutorials let you fiddle with the decisions made in classic games --- the speed of "Pong's" paddles, the color of "Pac-Man's" background --- and asks which choices make for the best playing experience.
Richly detailed placards explain the different skills and duties of game producers, designers, programmers and artists. And literature from DigiPen, which describes itself as "the first institution to offer a four-year bachelor of science in real-time interactive simulation," makes the case for a career in the modern game industry.
It's a healthy dose of the real world, tacked onto the end of an exhibit that, for all its fun, can make you forget the ways that gaming has and hasn't changed as it's swelled into a $10 billion industry.
More than a third of video gamers are female. One in four is older than 50. And 25 years after its early, idealistic ad campaigns, Electronic Arts --- "EA" to football fans, "ERTS" to Wall Street --- specializes more in high fives than in tears, thanks to "Madden NFL" and the rest of EA's lovingly detailed, relentlessly up-to-date, monstrously profitable sports game empire.
As Game On shows, it may not really matter much whether those changes have been good or bad for the industry. For most people, what matters is that the industry now creates things that almost anyone can embrace.
As one expert puts it in a documentary shown at Game U, gaming is no longer just a hobby for teenage boys.
"It's like music," he explains. "It's like film. It's part of life."
Reporter Michael Andersen can be reached at mike.a@tdn.com
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