![]() So why not support these efforts when you can? ![]() Profits help make the world go round, as does ungodly wealth trickling down to preserve history and help create books like this. None of this is “free” because socialism doesn’t work and capitalism does. Somebody has to buy these consoles, clean them – and surely disinfect the grosser ones – and someone has to put in the work and effort photographing them for you to enjoy. We read the word “free” so much we tend to forget such a concept is really a one-way endeavor. It’s quite a collection which I’ll recommend fellow gaming history enthusiasts to visit at The Vanamo Online Game Museum entry over at the Wikimedia Commons.Īnd therein lay the dilemma inherent with published books like this: why purchase something you could easily view online? Apart from the gift-giving nature itself (hint, hint), there’s the chance to support the artist and their endeavors, in this case Evan Amos and his Pokémon-like quest to catch ‘em all. Still, the campaign struck gold and hit its target early on, and Amos stuck to his original intent and used the funds to preserve an impressive amount of gaming hardware in digital form, many of which have become difficult to find. Essentially, this would be a more curated Wiki-inside-Wikipedia catalog of the history of gaming consoles.Īs crowdfunded projects often do, the project seems to have taken longer than originally planned, with delays resulting in worried investors and broken links (if not broken promises). The genesis (pun!) of the book began as a Kickstarter campaign started way back in 2013 when Amos, chagrined at the crappy quality of most gaming console stock images, set upon an adventure to photo, catalog and share his efforts with the world in a project he dubbed the Vanamo Online Game Museum, promising potential backers “ an online archive of video game hardware in order to preserve the history of video games“. But there’s just something about the real thing, and that’s what Amos set out to do with The Game Console book. Any and all companies with a sizable cultural catalog of memorable hardware is doing their best to repackage and reintroduce famous designs for a new generation to get hooked on with heavy-hitters like Nintendo’s NES Classic and SNES Classic flavors, Ataris, Intellivision and Sony’s upcoming PlayStation Classic. Retro gaming is pretty hot right now, with retro gaming consoles particularly on the radar. Those honors would go to the Magnavox Odyssey (1972) and Nintendo’s Switch (2017), with plenty of other famous – and many others less so – throughout its 250+ photo-packed pages. ![]() Only docked controllers weren’t exclusively Nintendo concepts, as we’ll see time and time again throughout Amos’ visual stroll through gaming’s iterative history.Īctually, that title is something of a misnomer: Atari wasn’t the first gaming console and the Xbox certainly isn’t the last, either to appear on the scene or in Amos’ pictorial encyclopedia. Likewise, if you’ve never been lucky enough to visit the The National Videogame Museum in Texas or see one its roving exhibits at E3 (a highlight from an otherwise turgid show) chances are the only way to actually “see” many of the classic gaming consoles in photographer Evan Amos’s The Game Console: A Photographic History from Atari to Xbox, which showcases super high-quality photos – many in Gray’s Anatomy-like cross sections – of popular, unpopular or mostly forgotten oddities throughout the nearly 50-year history of interactive electronic entertainment.ĭo you remember when Nintendo first introduced their latest console, the hybrid Switch, by showing a slideshow of their greatest hardware hits through the years? The resulting machine, with its dockable controllers, was a lot closer to the original Japanese Famicom than modern consoles. What a shame, as the history of videogame consoles is nearly as interesting as the games themselves – sometimes even more so. So much of modern gaming has focused on digital delivery – or games-as-service – that the fancy configurations of plastic, silicon and microchips powering them doesn’t hold sway like they used to. I hadn’t seen one in years, at least not physically, or even thought much about the small device that I’d spent so much of my childhood playing. I’m talking about the Game Boy, Nintendo’s monochromed portable gameplayer whose shrewd combo-packaging with Alexey Pajitnov’s Russian sensation Tetris probably did more to help end Cold War hostilities than Ronald Reagan and Rocky did combined. Earlier this year I was visiting the National Museum of American History and was genuinely surprised to see an old friend entombed behind glass, destined never to be played again.
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