Shane McMahon's Ass
09-22-2009, 11:35 AM
A GROUP of self-styled French "retrogamers" is calling for the creation of a special museum for the classic video arcade games that bewitched millions of teenagers in the 1980s.
"It's one thing to have a stock of old consoles, and of course we're happy with that, but what you really want to do is play the games," lobby group MO5 spokesman Guillaume Verdun said.
"A video game isn't there to be looked at like a painting or a sculpture, you only really get a feel for it with the joystick in your hand."
The retrogamers are lobbying the authorities to set up a National Institute of Digital Sciences that would include fully working versions of classics like Super Mario - the animated adventures of a moustachioed American plumber - or Pong, the primitive black-and-white ping-pong whose animated complexity ran to two movable white lines between which players bounced a slowly moving white square.
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Mr Verdun says his organisation had already been in touch with the French National Library and Paris's biggest science museum, the Cite des Sciences.
Visitors to a weekend video games festival in Paris got a taste of what the hoped-for museum could be like.
The festival was essentially a trade fair for the multi-billion dollar video games industry, which has fallen on hard times recently with sales down 14 per cent in the first five months or 2009.
But tucked away among fabulous displays of the latest 3D and "enhanced reality" games were the retrogamers, where many a 40-something former arcade ace could be found wistfully reliving his or her lost youth.
The creators of the retrogaming space went to great lengths to recreate the feel of the old arcade game and consoles, with all the games on display connected to old-style cathode ray television monitors rather than modern, flat liquid crystal screens.
The president of the video games festival, Jonathan Dumont, said he was happy to welcome the retrogamers amid all of the latest high-tech offerings.
He said he found the interest for the old games "encouraging", arguing that the enthusiasm showed that video games were "beginning to acquire the status of real works of art".
"Lots of people watch old films," he said, adding that the growing enthusiasm for old video games was a logical evolution of this and proof that video games had reached a certain maturity.
"It's one thing to have a stock of old consoles, and of course we're happy with that, but what you really want to do is play the games," lobby group MO5 spokesman Guillaume Verdun said.
"A video game isn't there to be looked at like a painting or a sculpture, you only really get a feel for it with the joystick in your hand."
The retrogamers are lobbying the authorities to set up a National Institute of Digital Sciences that would include fully working versions of classics like Super Mario - the animated adventures of a moustachioed American plumber - or Pong, the primitive black-and-white ping-pong whose animated complexity ran to two movable white lines between which players bounced a slowly moving white square.
Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.
Mr Verdun says his organisation had already been in touch with the French National Library and Paris's biggest science museum, the Cite des Sciences.
Visitors to a weekend video games festival in Paris got a taste of what the hoped-for museum could be like.
The festival was essentially a trade fair for the multi-billion dollar video games industry, which has fallen on hard times recently with sales down 14 per cent in the first five months or 2009.
But tucked away among fabulous displays of the latest 3D and "enhanced reality" games were the retrogamers, where many a 40-something former arcade ace could be found wistfully reliving his or her lost youth.
The creators of the retrogaming space went to great lengths to recreate the feel of the old arcade game and consoles, with all the games on display connected to old-style cathode ray television monitors rather than modern, flat liquid crystal screens.
The president of the video games festival, Jonathan Dumont, said he was happy to welcome the retrogamers amid all of the latest high-tech offerings.
He said he found the interest for the old games "encouraging", arguing that the enthusiasm showed that video games were "beginning to acquire the status of real works of art".
"Lots of people watch old films," he said, adding that the growing enthusiasm for old video games was a logical evolution of this and proof that video games had reached a certain maturity.