Motherboard

Photos: Emi Spicer

Have you ever played a game on the Apple Bandai Pippin ? How about the JVC X’Eye ? Even if you’re a retro gaming diehard, chances are you haven’t. For most people, these consoles and many others like them remain, at best, dim memories — unreceived items from past Christmas wish lists that you thought you wanted at some point and can’t quite remember why. But now, two guys from San Francisco have taken it upon themselves to unearth these relics from the vaults of obscurity, allowing the world to see — and play — what they may have otherwise forgotten.

The MADE (Museum of Art & Digital Entertainment) isn’t aiming to be merely a nostalgic outlet, however. Last week at the Game Developers Conference, curator Nealon Ledbetter explained to us how a visit to their prospective museum, which is currently being funded on Kickstarter, would be more about learning than remembering.

“We’re trying to show the process of creation … how an artist goes from conception to product,” says Ledbetter, motioning to the far end of the MADE’s table in the GDC expo hall. Atop the black cloth sits Derek Yu’s indie hit Spelunky running in demo mode on a small netbook. Spelunky is one of most modern examples of procedural generation, a game design technique that allows events and environments to draw and unfold at random through player interaction rather than static, pre-scripted scenarios.

Next to Spelunky sit three more examples that trace the method all the way back to 1982 — Bomberman for the NES, ToeJam & Earl for the Sega Genesis (running on the aforementioned X’Eye) and Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain for the Intellivision, which Ledbetter explains was the very first licensed software product for the long-running roleplaying franchise.

The display is a miniscule sampling of the various forgotten treasures that have been gathered for exhibition when and if the museum reaches its fundraising goals. Since there’s been no lease signed yet for the space, a majority of the MADE’s gaming oddities have come directly from the personal collection of museum director Alex Handy, who first pitched the idea on Kickstarter not one month ago. Eventually, the museum plans on accepting hardware donations to expand their offerings even further.

Nealon Ledbetter and Alex Handy demonstrate procedural generation in videogames at GDC

Ledbetter says that aside from the opportunity to share knowledge and history, moving these videogame artifacts from the realm of private ownership to the public domain can also aid in their preservation — An ultra-rare score on eBay doesn’t mean much, after all, if you lack the means to keep that 30 year-old console from pooping out a couple years down the line.

“It definitely changes your perspective on the hardware because it’s now your job to maintain it and keep it fresh for new people to experience it,” he says, emphasizing the increased sense of duty from owning consoles that collect dust on a shelf in your apartment. Hardware upkeep is obviously not Ledbetter’s forté, but he sees it as a challenge that he’s more than willing to take on. “We’re collaborating with the Museum of Play in Rochester and they have a full-time restorationist person over there, so we’ll be borrowing some of their techniques.”

But even with the extra muscle, the job won’t be an easy one — Just like cars, paintings and Egyptian antiquities, some pieces are more troublesome than others. Ledbetter cites the GCE Vectrex as a console that in addition to being extremely hard to come by has a very particular build that makes restoration especially difficult.

“We have to be very cautious about how we’re preserving these things,” he says. “If we did get a Vectrex, we’d show it, but probably wouldn’t let people play it.” The issue arises from the console’s built-in monitor which projects video signals differently than most cathode ray TVs, causing the graphics to shine with sparkling silver light. “It just doesn’t make sense to leave something like that out on the floor for 8 hours.”

So is it always worth it? Will anyone shed a tear if the Casio Loopy or another such bastard child of videogame history is lost forever? To Ledbetter and the MADE, preserving and exhibiting everything, good and bad, has never been more important.

“One of the things we’d like to be is a place for future developers to learn about the creative process before they existed.” If more people took note of past tragedies like the low-quality parts used in the X’Eye and Intellivision, he suggests, maybe we wouldn’t have had to suffer through all those Xbox 360 hardware recalls. “We want all future developers to be successful, and if that means remembering the failures of the past, then so be it.”