Last Friday, Sarah and I went to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry to see the Body Worlds and Game On exhibits. Read about Body Worlds in Part I.
—
One of the other things that drew us to the museum was the Game On exhibit. Unfortunately, you couldn’t take pictures with a flash or tripod, so my images from it are a bit blurry.
In any case, it was a nice walk down memory lane, and it had a few things in it I’ve read about and never seen. They had an original Pong machine. You could play Pong, just not on the original cabinet. They had recreated/reconstituted guts set up in a different case. I assume it was to protect the original machine.
The coolest piece of history was a PDP-1. Of course, it wasn’t running, but it was sitting there and they had some information on Spacewar. If you don’t know about Spacewar you can read The origin of Spacewar on-line or Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
They also had a MAME machine set up with controls a good distance from the display projected on the wall. It was a pretty sweet setup, I may have to get one for home. The MAME machine was supposed to be running Dave’s Game Launcher front end for emulators. Unfortunately, the controls weren’t responding, so I couldn’t verify. Dave said other people he knows have gone there and verified its Game Launcher. I’m sorry I missed it.
There was a small section on console companies that released products that let you write your own games. Nintendo apparently released such a kit in Japan. However, as part of this display was the Linux for the Playstation2 kit that Sony put out. As a Linux geek, I was surprised to see it. It was also fun to see something I own in a museum.
There was a round table with portable games arranged in chronological order. I was inspired to take the picture above where the newest kid on the block was meeting the old timer. I’m really way too amused by it.
Unfortunately, many of the games and consoles were in bad shape. They’ve taken a lot of abuse by all the visitors to the exhibit. But there was enough playable to keep you busy for hours. There’s also many games that were a joy to see and play for a short bit again, but I won’t mention them here. I’ll leave some mystery for your visit.
I’m just glad I got to play two of my favorites from back in the day: Discs of Tron and the old sit-down vector Star Wars game.
Ah, the old sit-down Star Wars vector game. Sub City had one of those, before it closed… That and the sit-down Star Trek game are two of my favorites, partly for the stereo sound from speakers mounted behind your ears. There’s something about dropping in a quarter and being greeted by Mr. Sulu that you can’t reproduce in a stand-up console.