(Image above by Daniel Love, from the Exhibit website)
As the year comes down to its final days, news in this sector tends to slow down as companies tend to close their doors for the last week of the year. But there is occasionally some things that do come up, like the news of a new museum exhibit in New York that has to do with arcade gaming in some degree.
It’s called SpaceWar! Video Games Blast Off and its at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY. This particular exhibit opened up on December 15th and if you find yourself in the area then you will have a chance to check it out until March 3, 2013. There are 20 games there which span 50 years of video games starting with the Spacewar game on a PDP-1 computer that inspired Nutting Associates’ Computer Space (which is also there to play) and it goes down to Child of Eden on the Xbox 360. Arcades have a strong presence at the exhibit, not just because they have the advantage of the arcade cabinet for the presentation but also because of the content and the effect that had. Other arcade titles to enjoy on site include Space Wars (Vectorbeam’s successful introduction of the Space War concept into arcades), Space Invaders, Asteroids, BattleZone, Defender, Missile Command, Tempest, Star Wars (Atari), and Galaxy Force II. After that the remaining titles are console based, which is probably partly due to the drawdown of sci-fi space games found over the past two decades or perhaps space or content available for the exhibit as you had titles like Starblade, Star Wars Trilogy Arcade and most recently Dariusburst Another Chronicle. Either way, it’s a great way to get some hands on time with the history of space/sci-fi games, an interest which I see continuing on the blog here as an article I wrote a few years back called Missing In Action: Space Games continues to draw in views to the site, much more so than any other of the MIA articles I wrote. In fact it is number ten out of the most viewed posts this year. Take that for what it is worth I suppose, I know its not a guarantee that a Starblade II or Galaxy Force III would be a quarter crunching hit, although with the right game design I think it would be possible.
Anyways, for more information you can visit the following websites:
[Museum of Moving Images – Spacewar! Exhibition] [Polygon Article With Interviews and More Photos]
