In “CH Ludens – The Podcast”, Arno Görgen and Eugen Pfister are sitting down each month to have a chat with a different member of “Confoederatio Ludens” to talk about how they got here, their research and what they learned about the history of Swiss games culture and game design as part of the project until now. You can also find the full podcast will all episodes here.
Continue reading CH Ludens – The Podcast: …talking with Pierre-Yves Hurel (UNIL)
In “CH Ludens – The Podcast”, Arno Görgen and Eugen Pfister are sitting down each month to have a chat with a different member of “Confoederatio Ludens” to talk about how they got here, their research and what they learned about the history of Swiss games culture and game design as part of the project until now. You can also find the full podcast will all episodes here.
Continue reading CH Ludens – The Podcast: …talking with Addrich Mauch (University of Bern)
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.
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
In “CH Ludens – The Podcast”, Arno Görgen and Eugen Pfister are sitting down each month to have a chat with a different member of “Confoederatio Ludens” to talk about how they got here, their research and what they learned about the history of Swiss games culture and game design as part of the project until now. You can also find the full podcast will all episodes here.
Continue reading CH Ludens – The Podcast: …talking with Yannick Rochat (UNIL)
In “CH Ludens – The Podcast”, Arno Görgen and Eugen Pfister are sitting down each month to have a chat with a different member of “Confoederatio Ludens” to talk about how they got here, their research and what they learned about the history of Swiss games culture and game design as part of the project until now. You can also find the full podcast will all episodes here.
Continue reading CH Ludens – The Podcast: What is Confoederatio Ludens?
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.
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
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.
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
