by Adrian Demleitner & Eugen Pfister

Setting the Stage
“The Vintage Computer Festival Zurich is committed to the preservation and revitalisation of historical computers and technologies and brings past eras of computer technology to life.” (https://vintagecomputerfestival.ch/ translated by the authors). The first Vintage Computer Festival (VCF) took place in 2013, originally in Winterthur. In 2016, the festival moved to Zurich, where it is still held annually today. Here former and current developers meet early adopters from the past millennium. And they are all increasingly taking their children with them so that they can share part of their own story with them. “Visitors can take a fascinating journey back in time to the early days of computing and experience the development of this ground-breaking technology at first hand” (Idem). This is why our colleagues from the ZHDK have naturally been regular guests at the festival even from before our project. With the start of our project, guests became exhibitors and speaker. In November 2023, Larissa Wild presented her CH Ludens sub-project for the first time at the VCF with the title “CH-Ludens: Exploring the game design scene in Switzerland in the 80s & 90s”. In addition, our colleagues from Zurich wo/manned a booth to draw attention to our project and find interview partners for our research. In fact, the VCF was and is an excellent opportunity for us to get in touch with people who have developed games over the past century. This is also the reason why we presented CH Ludens again at this year’s VCF in the Kraftwerk Selnau (that is 2025) with our own stand and a presentation.

Impressions
The former Selnau power station on the Sihl is an impressive venue and provides a fitting setting for the festival. Half of the large hall of the former industrial building was filled with containers, from which small, light-flooded rooms were cut. On our day of attendance, the halls were packed with visitors as well as all kinds of exhibitions. We found everything concerning vintage computing, from hobbyists displaying their 1970ies DIY electronic computing circuits attached to wooden boards, over analog computing and calculation devices to people trying to bring old machines like the Lilith back to life-in real or emulated. And what made us particularly happy was an above-average number of children attending the festival, as many parents from the field took the opportunity to show their young ones a part of their past and therefore of their identity. This alone is an indication of the importance that computers could play in individual biographies. Some of these exhibitions were quite playful and interactive, like for example a little stand with a GameBoy Camera that let visitors take selfies of themselves. The actual novelty was a little setup that enabled the transfer from the Gameboy Camera to an ordinary laptop, a feat that wasn’t possible originally.

Another highlight for us was Jos Dreesen and his restoration project of a Lilith computer (https://etheritage.ethz.ch/2022/03/04/i-am-a-lilith/). (The Lilith was a workstation computer created by a group led by Niklaus Wirth at the ETH Zurich). He was displaying the machine as well as enabling visitors to play some games on it. As we walked past, we noticed that a pinball game was being played on the Lilith. In conversation with Dreesen, it turned out that he actually had the source code for several more games for the Lilith computer, which he later shared with us.

And our research project was of course also present with an exhibition in one of the containers. Noemic Chow and Dave Krummenacher offered the public the possibility to play some swiss video games from our archives: Crack, Traps’ n’ Treasures and Insanity Fight, all three published for the Commodore Amiga. The second focus of our stand was on the Swiss Games Archive. The digital platform is the work of Noëmi Chao at the ZHdK and is a central output of Ludens. The archive is a well designed online publication of all known Swiss digital games, and is contextualising them as well. ZHdK offered a first glance at this digital publication and also gathered feedback on it.
Why we research the History of Swiss digital Games
Ludens introduces itself through the Necronom Case Study
We were happy to contribute to the festival. Since we were not too familiar with the Zurich scene we decided to introduce our research project as well as highlight the Necronom case study that we recently finished. That gave us the opportunity to explain how we work as a team, methodologically and what our specific perspective on video game history is. Doing this at the VCF was especially valuable, since we had the chance to do so with a public that was outside of our usual circles of interaction.

In the first part of our presentation, Eugen Pfister introduced the “Confoederatio Ludens” project, outlining how we’re examining the history of digital games in Switzerland from 1968-2000. For that, we’re looking not just at the games themselves but also at the surrounding game culture, media discourse, and the broader history of computerization. That framing also included showing how our teams are composed, what kind of methodologies we apply and what our research subjects and corporas are. In the second part, Adrian Demleitner presented our case study of Necronom, a 1991 shoot-em-up game for the Amiga published by the Swiss company Linel. We explored how this game represents what became known as a “Euroshmup” – our European interpretation of a genre inspired by Japanese arcade hits. Through the case study, we demonstrated why researching local video game histories helps us understand the diverse cultures and production models that contributed to the medium’s development and its specific form in Switzerland.

Through a stroke of luck, our presentation was followed by a show of vintage computing demos. Among other things, we highlighted how the Necronom developers were most probably connected to the demoscene, which promptly sparked the interest of some of our talks participants. What followed was a warm hearted and interesting discussion about the entanglement of the local demoscene and video game developers, which incidentally will be the focus of a paper from Adrian Demleitner and Pierre-Yves Hurel.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Eugen Pfister (April 17, 2025). CH Ludens at the Vintage Computer Festival Zurich 2025. Confoederatio Ludens. Retrieved December 6, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13rll
