Technologizer

Fifteen Classic Game Console Design Mistakes

Monday, August 10, 2009

Video game systems may be toys of a sort, but they’re also complicated machines. They require precision engineering, specialized hardware design, and careful industrial design to successfully achieve what seems like a simple goal: to play games on a television set. Throughout the history of home game consoles, each generation of machines has [...]

Forty Years of Lunar Lander

Sunday, July 19, 2009

33 Comments

Lunar Lander games abound on every platform. Along with Tetris and Pac-Man, the game–in which your mission is to safely maneuver your lunar module onto the moon’s surface–is one of the most widely cloned computer games of all time. But did you know that game players began touching down on the moon in [...]

Seriously, Asteroids The Movie?

Thursday, July 2, 2009

5 Comments

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the classic 1979 arcade game Asteroids will be made into a movie. No joke, Universal has picked up the film rights, prevailing in a bidding war against three other studios. Matthew Lopez, whose writing credits include Race to Witch Mountain and Bedtime Stories, will pen the script. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who [...]

What Computer Graphics Were in 1984

Monday, January 19, 2009

3 Comments

It’s not multi-touch. Hey, it’s not even single touch by modern standards. But the Atari Touch Tablet that Vintage Computing and Gaming’s Benj Edwards recently bought was still in its original, unopened packaging. And so Benj took the opportunity to do a new unboxing of a really old gadget–and we’re delighted to publish it here. View [...]

Atari’s 1984 Touch Tablet: A Retro-Unboxing

Monday, January 19, 2009

101 Comments

The next time you use your shiny new Wacom tablet and Adobe Photoshop CS4, think back to a time before time–a time before blends, morphs, heal brushes, and 10-megapixel images. A time like 1984, which, for computer graphics, was darker than the Dark Ages. It was a time when you could buy an $89.95 Atari [...]

Patentmania: The Golden Age of Electronic Games

Monday, December 29, 2008

45 Comments

The first three decades of digital gaming saw a flurry of concepts, technologies, and products that were groundbreaking in their era and still matter today. And the drawings their inventors used to document them in patent filings are a nostalgic, charming blast. Here are thirty-two of those sketches–including ones for some the most successful games [...]

The Twelve Weird Old Electronics Commercials of Christmas

Thursday, December 25, 2008

3 Comments

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m kind of addicted to watching old TV commercials on YouTube. Especially ones involving computers and electronics. And today, I have an excuse to share a bunch of them with you, in no particular order. 1. Mattel Electronics, early 1980s. Hal “Otis the Town Drunk” Smith plays a Santa who [...]

It’s a Slow News Day! Let’s Talk About Atari and DOS 5.0!

Friday, August 22, 2008

2 Comments

It’s a Friday in August, and there’s not a whole lotta shaking goin’ on in the tech world. So I’m not too sheepish about giving you a T-List that includes almost as much stuff from the 1980s as from 2008.