Any knowledgeable fan of the Star Wars films will tell you that the mighty science fiction saga has inspired its fair share of bizarre cultural artefacts. Some are close homages, some are parodies and others are more laterally stimulated by some aspect of George Lucas’ mythos. Surely one of the most surreal examples falls into this latter category and appeared almost 30 years ago: th ...

I step into the room beyond, and find myself surrounded by history. This is the Soviet Arcade Games Museum, where a small group of dedicated amateurs has collected a number of arcade machines dating from the late seventies.

Pitfall Harry is stuck in the jungle. He’s racing through, swinging from vines, jumping on alligator heads, grabbing treasures and looking for shortcuts. For David Crane, the creator and programmer of Pitfall!, one of the first Activision games for the Atari 2600, the hardest part of the game wasn’t avoiding the scorpions or coiled snakes, it was trying to jam a lot of game into on ...

Rewind through weeks, months, seasons, and the story of Populous begins with a simple misunderstanding. Commodore, fostering industry support for its fledgling Amiga during the mid-1980s, sought to contact Torus: a firm specialising in network solutions. An auspicious error led to an unexpected call for Taurus: a minor startup, barely founded, with a plan for a database program. Judici ...

Although never one for self-aggrandisement, Geoff Crammond is one of the few veterans of the early days of home videogaming whose moniker continued to sell product long after the turn of the millenium. His work on well-loved titles for the venerable BBC Micro Computer quickly ensured that journalists and, more crucially, gamers came to see his name as a badge of quality, while work on ...

Not all gamers are teenagers. Nor do they always hang out in arcades. Such was the thinking of Bally Midway, which in the early ’80s decided to sidestep its competition by building games for the untapped market of less competitive ‘street’ locations – any site that wasn’t an arcade, such as a pizza joint or a bar.

This is a story that isn’t just about the design of an object made from silicon, plastic and metal. Nor is it just the story of the corporate politics that allowed the project to commence. It’s also the story of sales forces and distribution systems, of marketing strategies and product evangelists, of a confluence of social, economic and technological circumstances that allowed it ...