Word: video
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...surprisingly, the amnesic society behaves much like the amnesic individual. The Korsakoffian patient, for example, fills in his gaps with fiction. He makes up stories, often gigantic confabulations, to make historical ends meet. The video culture too fills in the gaps of real life with mountains of fiction. (The average American absorbs more make-believe drama in a year than his ancestors did in a lifetime.) And it ties history's loose ends with a form of fabrication it calls docudrama...
...much a part of TV history as Lucy, Uncle Miltie and the Great One. Their names were Pinky, Blinky, Inky and Clyde, but most people knew them simply as the squat, ghostlike monsters who scurried around a maze trying to gobble you up in the most popular video game of all time, Pac-Man. Remember the tinkly computer tune that signaled the start of each game? The "power pellets" that changed the monsters' color to blue and turned the chasers into the chased? The animated "half-time show" that appeared after two mazes were completed (and the even better...
Hold on to your joysticks, everyone. Video-game nostalgia has arrived. Never mind that the genre is less than two decades old. The first coin- operated video game -- a rather drab, black-and-white job called Computer Space -- was introduced in 1971, to a notably tepid reception. Since then, arcades have seen a parade of breakthrough hits, technological advances, a boom period and then a falloff in popularity. Enough has happened, in short, for the American Museum of the Moving Image to assemble a collection of nearly 50 classic video games and call it historical scholarship. The exhibit, Hot Circuits...
Putting together the retrospective was no easy task. Video games go in and out of fashion quickly, and many of the older models, it turned out, were close to extinction. The exhibit's organizers spent months canvassing dealers and manufacturers in an effort to locate surviving machines. "To the people we were dealing with, 1982 was ancient history," says Rochelle Slovin, the museum's director. "So many games were difficult to find. Many just got thrown out or were repainted...
...toughest finds was an original Pong machine, introduced by Atari in 1972 and considered the first successful video game. The search at one point led to a dealer in New York City reputed to have 21 games in his basement; unfortunately, the building had been torn down three months earlier, and all the games were buried under the rubble. The museum finally found a Pong machine in an arcade operator's collection in Great Neck, N.Y., a week and a half before the exhibit was to open. The museum also unearthed one of the last surviving copies of Death Race...