Dear readers of The Games Machine, happy 2025! We inaugurate a new year of TGM (and there are many now) with a new appointment with the Antica Libreria, the literary column dedicated to the world of video games. As you know, we like to go against the grain and if the New Year’s Eve tradition is to get rid of old things, we enter 2025 by recovering them from the damnatio memoriae to which time has condemned them thanks to a decidedly interesting volume, namely Curious Video Game Machines by Lewis Packwood, published by Pen & Sword Books (and therefore only available in English).
FILE 024 – Curious Video Game Machine di Lewis Packwood
Where to find it: Pen & Sword Books
The cover of Curious Video Game Machines.
History is made by the winners, says a famous adage, and in some way we are witnesses of this on a daily basis, but even without venturing into more dramatic themes, this is also demonstrated by the approximately half century of video games we have witnessed: the successes remain, the failures disappear like dust in the fog of memories. In an era in which retronostalgia is conceived only as a commercial category, Lewis Packwood had an almost revolutionary idea: to recover the history of all those gaming machines excluded from the official history of video games, but whose existence contributed in a decisive way to the evolution of the sector. Do you want an example? Did you know that the first portable console was not the Game Boy, as common belief would have it, but the Milton Bradley Microvision, launched in 1979 and a source of inspiration for Nintendo both for Game’n’Watch and for the subsequent (and glorious) portable console?
What Lewis Packwood proposes in his volume is a journey into the most remote corners of gaming history, populated both by legendary figures and by companies that entered and exited the sector with the speed of a comet.
Lewis Packwood with his book in hand.
The structure is as rigorous as the research work carried out: 18 chapters that explore the remote and forgotten corners of history, bringing to the surface machines and systems unknown to most, yet somehow fundamental for progress and the future, perhaps following tortuous and indecipherable. The standard-bearer of this missing army is the aforementioned MB Microvision, but the company is abundant and curious. For the video game history enthusiast, however, the first pages are a bit heavy, because Packwood takes several thick pages to tell the story of the emergence of video games from the military environment: scientists playing, supercomputers as big as walls, basically the usual things. Once the first chapter has been overcome, however, Curious Video Game Machines begins its brilliant journey into unexplored territories by more mainstream reconstructions.
An advertisement illustrating the cartridges available for the Interton.
The recovery of Atari’s forgotten consoles precedes one of the most interesting stages of the volume, that in Germany at the end of the 1970s, still divided by the Wall, where in the West people had fun with the Interton Video 2000, a cartridge console that merged the Magnavox with some features of programmable consoles yet to come, while in the east where the socialist party decided in 1977 that even young Germans from the Soviet bloc needed a console, the BSS 01 made with components important for smuggling.
It is not the only excursion on routes alien to the typical story focused on technological evolutions between the USA, Japan and sometimes the UK.
And finally the now famous Microvision.
Further on, Packwood takes the reader to Yugoslavia in 1983 to explore the semi-unknown (at least by me) Open Source scene of the early 1980s, reconstructed through a work that combines socio-political historiography with testimonies collected directly by interviewing the protagonists of the development scene he talks about.
Even when it moves into more well-known territories, however, Curious Video Game Machines can be interesting, as in the case of the large quantity of Famicon clones or the in-depth study on Vituality, one of the many attempts to make virtual reality a mass phenomenon. The greatest merit of Curious Video Game Machine by Lewis Packwood is the historical rigor of the narrative, often enriched by direct testimonies, yet never boring or aseptic. There is a delicate balance in Packwood’s writing through which the excitement of the enthusiast still succeeds to filter through an elegant and academic style. Curious Videogame Machines is a profound book, which delves into the origins of commercial experiments probably forgotten even by those who conceived them, and full of information and images, but above all of words. However, facades and facades of double columns fly away which is a pleasure.
A Galaksija built in Yugoslavia in the 1980s.
Were you wondering what the BSS 01 looked like?
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