How did game piracy shape Swiss gaming culture in the 1980s and 1990s? With interviews from the CH Ludens sub-project Swiss Gamescapes+, we dive deep into copy parties, floppy-disk economies, and the social, technological, and cultural grounds of early game sharing.
Continue reading Pirates of the Helvetian: Software Piracy and Swiss Gaming Cultures before 2000
GATE (Bright Software 1991 / Apple IIgs) is a Gauntlet-inspired action game that was developed by the Swiss studio Bright Software for the Apple IIgs in 1991, towards the very end of the platform’s lifespan. In this part two of our case study, we analyse the story, audio-visual aesthetics and game mechanics of the game as a historical source, its reception and conclude our case study.
This is the second part of our two-part case study on the game GATE. You can find the first part here.
Continue reading Emulators and Fantasy Villains: Case Study on GATE (Bright Software 1991) #2
At the end of the 1980s, four young people met in the Basel area and started developing a game called GATE for the Apple IIg in their free time. They came together partly through ice skating, a computer store and an early fascination with computers. The result was an unlikely reinterpretation of Gauntlet for the Apple IIgs, unlikely because the computer was already fourteen years old at the time of programming. The game itself even found a publisher, first in France and then in the USA, but it failed to achieve great success.
Continue reading Curiosity and Computer Stores: Case Study on GATE (Bright Software 1991) #1
In April 2024, the Bern Team of CH Ludens announced that we were starting to collect gaming magazines relevant to our research as part of our GameLab, which in turn is a collaboration between the Bern Academy of the Arts and the University of Bern at the Swiss Center for Game Design Studies. Since then, over a year has passed and much has happened. So much that we want to use this opportunity to reflect on the current status of our collection, the challenges we faced in first starting it, and what we have learned from this process so far. This blog post will go over our first steps in the making of the GameLab, our current magazine and game collections and, finally, our visions for the GameLab.
Continue reading From Zero to Kilo: Status report on the Bern GameLab
“I think I’ll be holding a controller in my hand until I drop dead. And you can’t take this from me anymore. It’s a bit of a way of life, all these cultures.” (Sascha Böhme, I29, 19.07.2024, 01:26:43)1
