Research – Confoederatio Ludens

Teenies, Pimples and a Gaming Magazine: Case Study on Bravo Screenfun (1997-2007/2009)

by Aurelia Brandenburg, Arno Görgen, Corinne Hirter, and Eugen Pfister

By the late 1990s, gaming and gaming magazines had turned mainstream in the German-speaking countries. Popular characters like Lara Croft, Pikachu or Sonic were a cultural phenomenon in their own right, games and early digitisation had become a normal part of youth culture, and gaming magazines were as popular as they had never been before, but not quite mainstream yet. One of the first magazines to take that leap was Bravo Screenfun.

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Pirates of the Helvetian: Software Piracy and Swiss Gaming Cultures before 2000

by Arno Görgen, Addrich Mauch & Kevin Negele

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.

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“Sie sind ein typisches Produkt unserer Zeit in der das Technische überbewertet wird!” Der Computerspiel-Diskurs in Schweizer Medien in den 1980er Jahren

von Hiloko Kato und Eugen Pfister

Hiloko Kato beschäftigt sich seit mehr als 10 Jahren mit Games aus sprachwissenschaftlicher Sicht. Für das laufende SNF Sinergia Projekt CH Ludens sieht sie sich das Phänomen Computerspiele in den Schweizer Medien, insbesondere im Schweizer Fernsehen, genauer an. Zur gleichen Zeit hat sich Eugen Pfister mit der Berichterstattung Schweizer Zeitungen zu Computerspielen in den 1980er Jahren auseinandergesetzt. In einem Gespräch – das in einem Google Doc von Frühjahr bis Herbst 2025 stattfand – tauschen sich die beiden über ihre bisherigen Erkenntnisse aus und entwickeln gemeinsam neue Fragen.

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Gaming Magazine Covers From Afar

by Aurelia Brandenburg and Adrian Demleitner

Gaming magazines can be simultaneously a challenging and an invaluable source for early histories of digital games and gaming. They were often produced and sold at low costs to make them affordable to their often young reader base. Since magazines like these could and would be shared with friends, it is relatively safe to assume that their actual reach exceeded the number of sold copies of an individual issue. Furthermore, they also played a crucial part in facilitating and influencing the often very homosocial nature of what was perceived as mainstream gaming culture for a long time. Gaming magazines provided readers with tips on what to buy, how to beat certain games, and who to admire among developers and journalists. These magazines offered the readers a sense of belonging within specialised communities. Understanding the homosocial aspects of the culture that, in our case, German gaming magazines represented therefore means understanding gaming magazines not only in their written contents, but also in their style.

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Emulators and Fantasy Villains: Case Study on GATE (Bright Software 1991) #2

by Eugen Pfister, Aurelia Brandenburg, Adrian Demleitner, Arno Görgen, Addrich Mauch, and Kevin Negele. Additional research and editing by Corinne Hirter

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.

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Wanted: Swiss Atari Games

by Beat Suter

The CH-Ludens research project has compiled a corpus of video games from the period 1980–2000 that were either developed in Switzerland or have a close connection to Switzerland. In addition to many other games, this corpus contains a good two dozen Atari games. The Atari games listed are spread across various platforms that emerged during these years and were used for the development and release of console and computer games.

search for atari games — Figure 1: Searching for Atari games from Switzerland on old floppy disks – GameLab ZHdK. Source: Suter

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Curiosity and Computer Stores: Case Study on GATE (Bright Software 1991) #1

by Eugen Pfister, Aurelia Brandenburg, Adrian Demleitner, Arno Görgen, Addrich Mauch, and Kevin Negele. Additional research and editing by Corinne Hirter

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.

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What does it mean for a game to be a source?

by Tobias Winnerling

In June 2025, the CH Ludens team had the pleasure to welcome Tobias Winnerling (Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf) for a guest lecture at the University of Bern as part of our yearly workshop. This year’s workshop, organized by the Bern team of CH Ludens, focused on historical source criticism and the problems and possibilities of historical sources such as games, gaming magazines, and oral history interviews, and we started with said guest lecture, titled “Digital Games, Digital Born Sources, Discourses and Dispositifs”, and with this blogpost, we are publishing the written version of the first part of this talk.

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All known Swiss C64 Games

by Beat Suter

The research team CH-Ludens specialises in researching Swiss computer games from the 1980s and 1990s. While searching for Commodore C64 games developed in Switzerland, CH-Ludens discovered several interesting titles. Robox (1986), for example, is a graphic adventure game developed by Laro Schatzer and Marc Pilloud (fig. 1). Adrian Demleitner, PhD candidate of the HKB researched it in depth and made two interviews with the developers. The German-language game features numerous locations, a good parser and challenging puzzles. It was released in 1986 by the German publisher Markt & Technik and is well documented.

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From Zero to Kilo: Status report on the Bern GameLab

by Aurelia Brandenburg, Addrich Mauch, and Kevin Negele

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.

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