New…Now?
Or Why a Design History of
Coin-op Video Game Machines•
Raiford Guins

The author asks what has occurred in game history scholarship to warrant
the use of the adjective “new” in “New Video Game History” and suggests
an awareness of process may now be influencing the study of games. In
support of this observation, he organizes the article along two interrelated
fronts. The first speaks to the on-going process of collection development at
cultural institutions while the second addresses a shift in how game history iscurrently being written. The latter, he argues, demonstrates why we ought toconsider carefully what “new” might signal for the critical historical study ofgames. At length, the article concludes by making a case for turning to design
history to write a historical study of Atari’s coin-operated machines. Key
words: Atari; coin-ops; design history; graphic design; game history; industrial design; New Video Game History

I cringe when I see the adjective “new” affixed to subjects like media,

materialism, museology, heritage, art history, or cultural history. I much preferto think about paradigm reconstruction as a sensitivity or sensibility in need offurther assemblage to better comprehend an intellectual problem or particular
moment rather than invoke a word with so much ideological cargo as in “NewWorld” let alone branding power—think laundry detergent.
Certainly, in academia, new as a modifier seldom travels alone. The opportunistic “studies ” quickly sneaks up from behind so that, for example, in theearly 2000s, we had to scratch our heads over what “new media studies” actually meant (at least those not satisfied with the answer “digital” did). The word
new harbors loftier goals. We often now expect an object bestowed the status of
new to become an academic field, at least a subfield. We gift it with introductions, readers, dictionaries, and journals. Voila! Centers, departments, societies,
degrees, graduate students, professional positions, all spring up (not to mention
big bucks for academic publishers). Luckily for those of us taking stock of the20
American Journal of Play, volume 10, number 1 © The Strong
Contact Raiford Guins at rgun81@gmail.com

New. . . Now?

scholarly study of game history, the American Journal of Play has nothing so
grandiose in mind with its themed issue on the subject.
In lieu of pinning the word “studies” to “new video game” we are offered
the word “history.” How then are we meant to read this? Do we regard it as an
idiom? Is its meaning axiomatic? Does it hold the status of an appellation? Is ita new maxim for a distinct type of historical research? A conviction? A different
involvement with the history of video games compared to something we canidentify as old video game history? Or perhaps the phrase is nothing more thana lesson in periphrasis? Do we examine each word etymologically and in relation to one another to debate the phrase’s collective meaning? Is history someform of suffix applied to the phrase “new video game” with the aim of shifting its
meaning or value? The shift in that sense would be that new video game points
to an emergent techno-cultural form and that the addition of history is meant
to account for this momentous rupture warranting an altogether fundamentallydifferent historical consideration for an altogether different object. But surely any
historian would balk at such an absurd suggestion and challenge any assertion
that a phrase like “new video game” encapsulates only today’s video games toremind her or his audience that, as Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree didso well in their introduction to New Media, 1740–1915 written over a decadeago, “all media were once ‘new media’, and our purpose … is to consider such
emergent media within their historical contexts—to seek out the past on its own
passed terms.”1 I agree wholeheartedly.
My sense here is that the mysterious New Video Game History has less to
do with specific, game-related artifacts or even with budding topics of inquiry
than with how scholars of game history now conduct their research and what
they write. My eyebrows fail to rise with the wording video game history. The
phrase is no stranger to common parlance, a phenomenon to which my jampacked bookshelves evidence in their amalgamation of the subject (more about
my bookshelves later). My eyebrows do, however, form a quizzical arc and myreading glasses slide further down my nose when the word “new” elbows its
way into video game history. The once familiar now demands careful intellectual footing to avoid triggering all of the troublesome encumbrance profferedby the new. Best to tread lightly here. I also sense that the word “historiography” is implied by “history” so that the “new” assigned to video game history
becomes a conversation about the myriad practices of writing game histories
accompanied by the act of writing about game history writing, an evocationof research and composition of historical discourse on video games. I will

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indulge this sensation. Ergo, my article asks not what is New Video Game History but what has happened to game historical writing and research to warrant
the descriptor “new”… now?
To hit this question head on, I treat New Video Game History like one of
Marshall McLuhan’s probes pushed out into the world for those captivated by
the historical study of video games to make sense of, to describe and debate,
and ultimately to adopt or reject. McLuhan designed his linguistic probes (e.g.
“the medium is the message”) as exploratory devices to enhance awareness.
Their aim, as W. Terrence Gordon explains, is “testing the forms and limits ofan idea.”2 Let us treat New Video Game History as such a device, a means toseek out the observable changes now affecting the writing of game history notfrom the vantage of any suprahistorical perspective, not from the confidence
gained from an emergent, homologous school of thought, or not even from theassurance that such a probe will yield a consensus from its efforts. Its audacity inparticular affords an opportunity for such an exploration, and perhaps you, likeme, cringe at the possibility of the phrase itself or roll your eyes at yet another“turn” emanating out of the humanities and social sciences. Perhaps you applaud
its very presumptuousness or feel that it is long overdue. Or maybe you choose
to ignore it altogether. Pick the response that fits best. But let us neither rush to
any hastily drawn conclusions nor impose an ultimate meaning on our probe.
Leave it unresolved while we test what it may offer with a closer inspection of therecent past and histories written about it. I embrace the uncertainty our probe
affords, especially if part of its design is to unsettle the figurative grounds thathave long supported the writing of game history.
So, I ask again: What has occurred in the research and scholarly writing ofgame history to warrant “new”… now? Here is my take: the probe New Video
Game History suggests an awareness of process affecting the current study ofvideo game history. I mummer this response based on my observations on
two interrelated fronts. The first speaks to the on-going process of collection
development at cultural institutions while the second addresses a shift in thewriting of game history that marks a distinction from predominant forms ofgame history writing. The latter, I believe, demonstrates best why we ought toconsider carefully what new might signal for the historical study of games.3 By
way of an extended conclusion, I discuss why I have turned to design history
and what design history can offer to the historical study of games. Finally, I
contend that much can be gained from a union between the history of gamesand design history.

New. . . Now?

Era of Collection Revisited
I have claimed that an era of collection has followed what Erkki Huhtamo oncelabeled an “era of chronicle” to demarcate the historical surveys accounting
for the bulk of historical writing devoted to video games.4 I will not rehash thelitany of works that composed the era of chronicle or offer additional examples
to fit Huhtamo’s criticism.5 My claim for the category of era of collection neither
insists that institutional collections draw a curtain on the writing of descriptive
historical chronologies (for they still constitute large chunks of game history
writing) nor highlights the notable efforts of specific institutions actively collecting and supporting public research. Instead, I mean to convey a general ethos of
the need to document and preserve the recent past with video games that havebecome particularly vulnerable not only because of technological obsolescenceand fragility, but also due to IP restrictions, game industry ineptitude in establishing or maintaining archives, and a paucity of materials publically available
from game companies.6
This new ethos, I note, has come about as members of the games industry
acknowledge their personal materials are of great value to cultural institutions
and to those researchers using such collections (something I personally benefit
from when former Atari designers share materials they’ve had stashed away formore than forty years). It accounts for (some) private collectors now partingwith their revered materials—via donation, auction, or direct sale—as well as for
those willing to grant public access to their collections in small, privately owned
museums, individual homes, and personal storage facilities, or offering digitizedversions of objects uploaded to a website (e.g., arcade flyers).7 Lastly, such an
ethos even stretches to researchers. At present researchers are not only awarethat video game collections exist at the Computer History Museum, Smithsonian
National Museum of American History, Stanford University, The Strong, andthe University of Texas at Austin, to name a few U.S. institutions, but are actively
using such collections to shape the histories they write.
This certainly widens who can write video game history. Previous efforts
benefitted from exclusive access to private collections or through direct connections to the game industry (not always easy to achieve), or come fromwriters who composed their histories from materials available to them andonly them. The absence of accessible collections and the archival materials
they provide still casts a shadow over the reliability of many current histories.
How were they written without such materials? Are primary sources limited

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to magazine advertisements, company catalogs, and PDFs of the Sear’s Wishbook? Was research more a result of dumpster diving and flea market picking
than of institutional visits? Can interviews alone suffice? Are such interviews
made available for public inspection? Were some histories solely reliant upon
an author’s memory of a particular period and on personal experience (I played
Pac-Man in an arcade back in 1980, therefore I am a historian)? Lastly, canbiography be an exclusive source of historical research, a master narrative of
irrefutable truth?
Writers of game history now have access to materials that were previously
unavailable, lying in the domain of private collectors or locked away in garages,
attics, or the memories of former game industry employees. Access will, in a highly
productive and maybe even provocative manner, help construct further criticism of existing claims made about the history of games and enable the writingof new arguments about how we know the past.8 I will add myself to this groupof users, one fortunate to have curators, librarians, and historians actively selecting materials from which to conduct historical research. A book that I am currently researching entitled, Atari Modern: A Design History of Atari’s Coin-Ops,
1972−1979, relies heavily on access to the Steve Bristow collection held at Stanford
University, and The Strong’s Atari arcade design collection, covering the years 1973
to 1991. Quite simply, without such collections, this history of Atari’s industrial andgraphic design process could not be written as an exercise in scholarly research.
Bristow’s papers resided at his personal residence spread across garage,
makeshift basement, and office before being gifted to Stanford University.9 The
Strong’s collection of industrial design documents, composite sketches, company
memos, marketing reports, promotional materials, video and audio recordings,
and photo-mechanicals baked in storage facilities in Chowchilla, California,
before being acquired from a private collector. In Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, Carolyn Steedman writes about the stillness experienced by “stuff ”
housed in an archive. “It just sits there,” she explains, “until it is read, and used,and narrativised.”10 Of course the administrative processes of an institution are
a form of narrativization as collection appraisal, transportation, acquisition,
processing, conservation, documentation, cataloguing, storing, retrieving, displaying (if applicable), copying, and reshelving divest objects of their quietude.
Given my interests in objects as they move across their life histories, I
cannot help but ask: what about this stuff, so meaningful to me, before it eventraversed the thresholds of Stanford University or The Strong? It aged in neglect.
Paper yellowed with corroded staples. Film negatives fused with their protective

New. . . Now?

plastic membranes. Mold grew. Water damaged some materials crammed into afiling cabinet. Other artifacts were left to deteriorate in rotting wooden cabinets.
These materials went unused too. Their presence as stuff—never meant for oureyes to glimpse, as Steedmen reminds us—served only to evidence the careerof their owner, as in the case of Atari/Key Games Vice President of Engineering Bristow (who passed away on February 22, 2015), or they lost their former
meaning altogether for their collector once they were padlocked in nondescript
storage lockers that placed them out-of-reach, and the one-time intimacy ofownership, the thrill of acquisition, had become a costly burden.
Walter Benjamin felt that the meaningfulness of objects was lost once they
were removed from the care of their personal owner and publically displayed ina museum, which deflated the enchantment of the collector’s magic circle. But
institutions actively collecting materials to help document the history of video
games perform their own rescue operations so that this stuff lives anew while
the labor of research—with an intimacy and magic circle of its own—bestows adifferent set of meanings and values onto the fate of these previously neglectedmaterials.11 Their life history continues as they enter into a new situation: their
institutional life is now part of their history, part of our history writing. “Therestory takes shape,” Arlette Farge stresses in her beautiful little book, The Allureof the Archive, when writing about the emotional pull of working with archival
materials, “only when you ask a specific type of question of them, not when you
first discover them, no matter how happy the discovery might have been.”12 Ourtask is to stir this stuff with our questioning touch.
Much as I regard the era of collection central to the conversation about
New Video Game History, I do not accept that access alone—though an irrefutable advantage gifted to researchers by libraries, archives, museums, databases, and those private collectors willing to grant it—sanctions this probe.
The labor of historians in general and across fields is premised upon performing continuous interpretative and methodological actions on materials housed
within collections.13 Additionally, working with such materials benefits fromprofessional training in theories and methods. If access—in all of its archival
intimacy, intrigue, fascination, frustration, restriction, tedium, exhaustion, andeven banality—were offered as the lone response to our probe, then the question concerning New Video Game History should have been asked long before
2017 and is easily answerable today by the industrious efforts of official andnonofficial collections that select and safeguard materials for researchers andposterity. Do be assured, though, that something new is at work here. Research-

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ers have materials to work with that were unavailable to them previously, andsuch materials are new to the discourse of game history: valued and treated ashistorical documents by institutional appraisal and official practices (e.g. deedsof gifts, letters of understanding), collection management, archival and curatorial processing, and, most notably, the diverse workings of historical analyses
texturing materials held in such collections. The phrase “awareness of process”
accounts for these invaluable efforts when attempting to understand our probe.
There is, however, more to it than what is stored in an acid-free box. Such materials certainly pique our awareness, help construct and document our arguments,
shape the claims we can make, evidence a past, and make the books and articles
we wish to write possible, but cultivating such an awareness is dependent on thequestions, disciplines, and methods of historical research brought to the tablein conversation with what rests upon it.

(Critical)14 Game Historiography“Awareness of process” is also found in McLuhan’s writing.15 The phrase, in its
high modernist splendor, accounts for the importance of studying the effects ofmedia to understand their involvement in transforming experience, and shaping
new environments, as opposed to restricting our definitions of media to thatof transporter of content. McLuhan was interested in form, and he accepted
this tenet as “more significant than the information or idea ‘transmitted.’”16 In
studying any medium we are left to ask not for its meaning but what it does,
to contemplate the effects of its processes to help determine how it enables
specific habits (e.g. print culture encouraged structure, order, linearity). This
allowed McLuhan to write many (questionable) lines like: “The effect of radioon literate or visual man was to reawaken his tribal memories, and the effectof sound added to motion pictures was to diminish the role of mime, tactility,and kinesthesis.”17 It is not necessary to adopt fully McLuhan’s thinking here or
to delve further into his works. With a light touch we can direct this emphasis
on form to our probe. This does not imply that content plays no role in shaping
the form historical writing may take. Rather than dwell on the content of thehistorical study of video games, let us consider the forms the writing of gamehistory has taken and the effects such writing may produce.
My slight detour through McLuhan arrives at a general position in historiography, though it ought to be noted, one rarely visited when writing video

New. . . Now?

game history. Hayden White, long interested in the literary qualities of historiography, has written on the “possible forms of historical representation” sincethe 1970s and, in subsequent works, has acknowledged what he calls the “double
representation” of historical discourse, whereby we have the object of a historian’s interest—the stuff sitting quietly in archives per Steedmen—as well as “thehistorian’s thought about the object.”18 Production of such historical discourse,White writes elsewhere, involves “interpretations of whatever information about
and knowledge of the past the historian commands.”19 It is the game scholar’sattention to the (tropological) form of her or his historical interpretations alongwith adherence to historical traditions (more often than not, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary) that elucidates an awareness actively reshaping ortransforming the environment of video game history—this word, also common
in McLuhan’s lexicon, seems much more fitting than field or subfield given thespace bestowed upon game collections in cultural institutions conjointly withspaces recently attributed to game history in themed issues of journals,20 academic presses,21 conferences,22 and social media user groups23 along with thesubject being welcomed into professional scholarly organizations long invested
in historical study.24We should note that not only are scholars trained in historical research writing game histories or about game history but also that they are
scrutinizing their own history-writing process. They are producing a criticalevaluation of their subject, historiography, theory, and method as they actively
consider the support as well as limitations of the research materials available.
Writing of this variety does not only produce histories of games but applies a
critical lens to the techniques of composing its history. Simply put, such writers utilize the research of historians and historical methods to construct their
history.25 These discerning eyes produce not only better histories of games but
also valuable critiques of the composing of history, reflective of subject matterand materials along with how they can be convincingly and astutely composed
into narratives of game history.
This may seem an anticlimax to my invocation of an awareness of process.
Being aware of the form one’s historical writing takes is standard in historicalscholarship, and it is of utmost importance that such an awareness become
standard in the historical study of video games. I do not pretend that this is a
profound or radical observation . On the contrary, its obviousness gives meaning
to the use of “new” to describe such history.
I have found that the process of writing history, or considering its form,
is rarely, if ever, attended to by those professing to write game history. The

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self-conscious writing of history and questioning why specific forms of historical
writing are necessary to construct the history of a particular subject are absent inmuch game history.26 One might ask why even raise such an expectation considering that so many of those who wrote about games were neither trained historians
nor familiar with the methods of historical analysis? We know that game histories
have been mostly the works of journalists, enthusiasts, collectors, contributors togame magazines, free-lance writers, and a few academics (without vested interestin historiography). Regardless of cultural tradition, writers of popular game history
did not scrutinize their particular form of historical writing : they partook in theimagined naked act of writing “history itself.” This is not in itself a problem for
popular accounts, but when such accounts alone constitute the history of games,
history itself becomes treacherous as truth claims and excessive digging up of facts
collect on wet roads like autumn leaves. Such popular histories do not distinguishbetween the historical past as an active construction (qua White and others) fromthe writing of history as an action devoted exclusively to recording past events.
Theirs is an unprocessed history accepted and written as natural, organic, raw,
with the task of these historians being limited to recording inert facts.
In these cases, the erudition of writing history never becomes transparent.
A questioning of sources, of the subject and philosophy of history, or of the process of research never occurs. The inclusion of other histories—wrestling withthe labor of other historians—within one’s work is rare (as are full citations). Thiskind of historical writing regards the act itself not as a form of mediation but one
of conveying how something “really was.” It tries to realize what really happened
in often painstaking treatments of particular cases, sometimes recounted year by
year. Certainly, this way of writing game history, by way of the metaphors I used
above, seems healthier in our contemporary swirl of kale smoothies, cage-free
eggs, and almond-milk lattes. Nevertheless, this form of writing history is alsoheavily processed even if unaware of its own process. The superstition of fact
is all that this form of historicism can offer on its limited diet. Such descriptive
and fact-driven works have little room for further development in game history.
The effect? Constant discovery of ever more unaccounted-for facts overlookedby previous histories, endless fact checking and corrections, and a persistentpenchant for coverage. Historical writing of this flavor can only rely on the
updated volume, the expanded second edition, or the retrieved minutia that
constitutes the so-called “complete account” or “real history.”
Another way the bulk of these game histories contrast to what I hope acategory like New Video Game History seeks to cultivate is that most of themNew. . . Now?

seem uninterested in modest accounts: they all want to declaim the historically
epic nature of their tales. Surveys of global histories, the history of a nation’s
games smuggled into a lone chapter or article, histories of game companies thatspan decades (e.g. how many “complete” histories of Nintendo now exist?), ora “from-to” measure that fills in all the gaps with temporal markers typical inscale and scope of epic emplotment. Depending on origin narrative, many ofthem use as a plot device a specific beginning—typically, say, Tennis For Two,
Spacewar!, Magnavox Odyssey, Computer Space, Pong—and then attempt tocover fifty years in a single study. This epic style has thus far constituted muchof the writing of game history with only a handful of exceptions. The coverage
required by the writers of these histories leaves little room for an engagementwith the process of composing history.
The take away from the prevalent generation of game historical writing isthat milestones have been established (e.g. Ralph Baer’s Brown-Box prototype).
A canon of games deemed worthy of historical study has formed with certain
game designers hailed as revolutionary. Temporal markers have been declared(e.g., precrash and postcrash eras), tropes solidified into general knowledge (e.g.
console wars), a terrain mapped out supporting something that can be labeled“video game history” as opposed to other types of histories. The achievementof histories written by this generation is that they have successfully stimulated
more historical writing on video games.
If an awareness of process has been absent in this game history and if theepic tale has become dominant in game history writing , then one justification forusing the adjective “new” to distinguish a change in video game history may bethat different models for how game history can be constructed are emerging that
do not look like these reigning forms.27 At the risk of being reductive, I will saythat contemporary game histories abandon the epic for interstitial particularities.
Two examples are projects by Melanie Swalwell and Jaroslav Švelch, who offer anawareness of historical analysis and method (oral histories, interviews, materials
researched at traditional and nontraditional archives) in their respective studies
and who anchor their histories to specific places (microcomputer home brew
practices in New Zealand for Swalwell, and for Švelch amateur computer clubs
in former Czechoslovakia) and time periods (primarily the 1980s for both).
Thus their social histories eschew the generalist survey that proliferates in epic
histories.28 In doing so, however, neither loses contact with larger questions pertinent to the critical historical study of games from the perspective of our present.
They both manage to theorize on micro- and macroscales, and their analytical

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investments and historical research are not limited to highlighting the games ofa specific era or region but to configuring them in the much broader contextsof everyday life, politics, transnational and local history, cultural practices, andsocial relations with technology.
I cannot stress how important this kind of writing may prove for the critical historical analysis of video games. Consider Lynn Hunt’s introduction, now
a classic for the field of cultural history, to the collection, The New Cultural
History (1989), which forewarns that a “cultural history defined topically could
degenerate into an endless search for new cultural practices to describe.”29 Until
now, the history of games has been a history of, well, exactly that: histories ofgames, a few companies that produce them, developers that design them, and,more recently, considerations of the platforms that run them.
Game historians with an ear to the door of science and technology studies
and the history of technology now cite concerns over inventor-centric or innovator-centric narratives that overdetermine game history, but I would also cite
the pressure of the game-centric narrative that has proven equally restrictive.
Video game history must not be about only video games. This leads to what
Laine Nooney designates as “the itemization of particularly epic moments inthe ‘evolution’ of game play”30 (and, I would also add, the evolution in software
design). In place of ever-expanding topics of inquiry injected into the practiceof cultural history, Hunt urges for the development of a “sense of cohesion orinteraction between topics.”31 Situating a game or games into a historical narrative can serve as a material referent from which to conduct a wider analysis,
one with an eye to understanding contexts (even unforeseen ones), establishingand explaining relations between phenomena and practices, as well as drawing
connections otherwise elusive without the prism of video games.
What I read in our probe is that game history hovers on the verge of adifferent wave of much more critical scholarship with research focus, theoretical grounding, and methods aligned to produce cultural, social, feminist,
queer, material, technological, business, user, transnational, and local histories
to advance our understanding of video game history and historiography. Key
here, and perhaps this will provide the “cohesion” for game history that Huntdeems invaluable to her field of study, is that diverse historical traditions—their
methods, theories, debates, intellectual histories, teachings—are being brought
to bear on the reshaping of video game history. This is less about filling in gaps,
writing about forgotten games, or redeeming those that have been overlooked
than having a larger toolbox from which to reconstruct game histories.

New. . . Now?

Why Design History
To begin this article’s long conclusion (inconclusion may be more fitting), I wish
to muse on my own contribution to what we might adopt as “critical historicalstudies of games”32—a much more palatable means to punctuate the observabledifferences currently informing the construction of game histories. When hoursof writing drains productive thought that not even generous cups of Yorkshire
Gold tea can replenish, I often find myself staring hopefully (or desperately,
pending the situation) at my bookshelves for renewal. It is not necessarily theircontent that I seek but the constellation their organization forms. Shelving does
not factor prominently in Walter Benjamin’s short essay on book collecting. It
is the books and the tales of acquisition they rekindle that captures his interests
most—gleaned in the moment (and the mood) of reunion with their owneras they lie still in a state of disarray, “not yet touched by the mild boredom oforder”33 that their placement on shelves or inside a book case will inevitably
create. Alas, disarrangement proves brief. One’s treasured objects cannot remain
outside of the habit, maybe the habitat, of order for long before taking their(disciplined) place within an organizational system that helps bring meaning
to a collection. The inspiration I gain when I stare at my shelves finds a parallelin the conceptual frames (molded polypropylene orange) that help define mypersonal take on game history. You might say that I am less enamored at theprospect of unpacking my library than reconfiguring my shelves.
In the seedling years of Game After, around 2007 to 2008, I gifted myself
with a Cubitec Shelving System from Design Within Reach.34 This expandable
modular structure configures how I do game history. I used to arrange books
into author sections (e.g. McLuhan, Foucault, Benjamin, Latour, Ihde) as wellas subjects (e.g. cultural history, media theory, material culture, game studies).
This classificatory system felt constrictive for the research project that eventuallybecame Game After. Subjects, concepts, objects, authors, methods accumulated
in the lengthy span of research defied easy placement into the existing order, or
they consistently necessitated reorganization as some subjects bled over onto
nearby shelves, while others, once significant, were abandoned altogether. I
reconfigured my bookshelves to support a living biography for Game After andthe project’s research interest in the materials used to document and evidence
the past and from which to write game history.
The shelving’s interlocking cells became epistemological architecture forthe object its structure would eventually produce while continuing to structure

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my current project, Atari Modern. This latter project’s underlying premise is that
we know a great deal about game design as software and hardware development
but less about the industrial and graphic design processes and people responsible for the shapes and styles of Atari’s coin-op cabinets that, as the book aims
to demonstrate, played a constitutive role in helping define the product, situated and domesticated a new medium into an existing market place, supported
interaction between user and machine, and introduced transformative design
paradigms into the everyday visual and material culture of the 1970s. I haveturned to design history and the history of design because questions pertaining
to industrial, interaction, and graphic design cannot be sufficiently explored bygame studies, game design, and game history’s current areas of concentration.
I have learned from former Atari industrial as well as graphic designers interviewed for my book that a great deal is known about games but little about theartifacts designed for their play.
The mosaic supporting the writing of Atari Modern is formed by the interlockings of design history, design culture or design studies, history of technology,
science and technology studies, material culture studies, cultural history andsocial history, museum studies, media history, visual culture studies, and thenebulae we call theory and philosophy, which do not, I stress, rest comfortably
in separate cubes but spill over. For me a New Video Game History lives not inorderly shelves but in this disarray of complicated configurations (figure 1). On
my shelves, to share the contents of one cramped cube I have just visited, youwill observe unfiled archival documents pertaining to Atari’s industrial design
division resting on The Poetics of Space, Networks of Power, Reassembling theSocial, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Design for
the Real World, Theory of Colors, Industrial Design: Reflections of a Century,
Experimental Phenomenology, Where Stuff Comes From, Dust: The Archive andCultural History, The Democracy of Objects, Learning from Las Vegas, Does Technology Drive History, Designing Things, American Genesis: A Century of Invention
and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870−1970, Designing Interactions, The Shock of
the Old, The Industrial Design Reader, Make It New: The History of Silicon Valley
Design and various issues of Block. Writing a design history of Atari’s coin-op
cabinets requires the contents of this singular cube and others like it along withthe entire field of relations such mixed-disciplinary work engenders in orderto open up new questions and to address problems that are far from possible
within the present confines of game history.

New. . . Now?

Figure 1. One of the author’s bookshelves. Photo courtesy of the author.

I offer my final sections in the form of four statements that begin to
explain what design history can bring to the historical study of games. Suchstatements ought to be read as conceptive observations that I feel are warrantedeven at this early stage of my project, when crucial archival documents are
filed but are still being actively interpreted. In fact it is very fair to say that

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these observations are what propelled my interest in pursuing this project in
the first place.

Coin-op Video Game Machines Are Complex Artifacts
Many views can be applied to a machine’s cabinet to reveal its multiple functions.
I prefer the word “machine” to the more common term “game” to account for theentire material apparatus with its many components. Before we even arrive at themachine’s game, or perhaps even simultaneously with its development process,we may begin with the view of the cabinet as a concept (figure 2), one sketchedby industrial designers with colored pencils and markers (CAD was not used
at Atari until around 1982). Form, shape, graphics (if present), materials, andimagined human users are rendered to conceptualize the design of the cabinet.
Sketches are then evaluated, redrawn and approved. Foam core mock-ups arebuilt. Assembly drawings are drafted and revised many times. Materials are
priced. Prototypes are constructed by the model shop. These are then reviewed
by managers of different divisions including sales and marketing. More revisions
are made if needed. Cabinets are stuffed with their electronic and mechanicalcomponents. Prototypes are field tested. Focus group feedback prompts further
revision. Once finalized, a cabinet goes into production. Cabinets become acontainer to safely store and support electronics—not just printed circuit boards
and a monitor but also the machine’s power supply, the mechanicals of the coindoor and cash drawer, harnessing, assemblies for speakers, and the control panel.
In its function as container, the machine’s cabinet must also be reinforced bya solid plywood front panel and accompanying locking mechanism to make it
durable, safeguard its earnings from theft, and protect the internal components
from damage during transport and operator shifting at locations (arcade orstreet). In these functions, we might say, the cabinet as container takes on the
dual function of shipping container and safe-deposit box.
The cabinet is also an interactive system, a material apparatus that affords
the experience of play. Monitor orientation, side and top panels to reduce glarefrom overhead lights, sufficient width of a cabinet and nonobtrusive bezel tomaximize visual access to the monitor, realistic mimetic controllers (e.g. steering wheels, gas and brake pedals on racing games like the 1976 Night Driver)to express the feel of a game, intuitive and responsive joysticks and buttons(typically with lighter spring controls) positioned sufficiently on a control
panel to maximize comfort and accuracy,35 and a cabinet size that supports
user control while onlookers crowd around it are all attributes reminding us

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Figure 2. Atari Industrial Designer Mike Querio’s concept sketch for an unidentified
coin-op game cabinet.

that users interact with, through, and on the cabinet to play its game.
The views of concept, container, and interactive system are conjoined withthe cabinet as a product, one with the goal of turning a profit for the manufacturer as well as its operator. The game cabinet is marketed, branded, advertised,packaged with graphics, illustration, and type displayed on its exterior surfaces.36“We had to capture a person’s attention in three seconds,” Robert Flemate, former production art manager of Atari, told me when speaking of the task thata backlit attraction panel displaying his typeface performed in public spaces.37
The package design of a cabinet promoted the machine to would-be players andoperators alike (the graphically designed side panels are difficult to see whenmachines are lined-up along side one another but always visually prominent on
a machine’s sales sheet.)38
My aim with this cursory sketch is to suppress momentarily the view wefind most common when considering a coin-op machine: its game, or it as agame. By using the word “views,” I mean to indicate my continued interest in
Don Ihde’s concept of multistability as a helpful technique to show the different

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variations of an artifact like the coin-op machine: what it really is remains uncertain, it can be regarded as many things at once, offering multiple variations.39
An emphasis on multiple variations on the same artifact demonstrates that asingle perspective of machine-as-game is privileged at the expense of alternative
points of view that are coformative of the artifact under consideration. The value
added to the historical study of games is that we set on hold the standard viewof a coin-op machine defined by, or reduced to, its game program so that otherrelations can come into focus, other variations can be expanded.
These views express a shift in the historical depth of field to sharpen design
processes and designed objects that have not manifested themselves within thehistory of games with the goal of treating them as actors coconstitutive of thecoin-op machine. In photography, depth of field concerns the distance between
the nearst and farthest objects in the camera’s range of focus. Adjusting a camera’s
aperture and focal length allows one to give priority to specific details in a shot,
deciding if an object in the foreground will be sharpened or blurred to highlightan object in the background. Depth of field adjusts the terrain to direct the eye
to a desired focal point in the shot. It is a particularly rich metaphor to illustrate formative interrelations involved in designing a coin-op machine because
nothing is being cropped from the big picture of Atari’s coin-op division, only
given different priority.
With this in mind, I present several leads to achieve a more holistic view—or at least one that can account for the many relations of dependency—of acoin-op machine compiled via a concentration on specific component parts
resulting from various design practices. Atari itself is such a system, one we canuse to help understand this assemblage. In 1974 the coin-op division consistedof the Model Shop, Industrial Design, Design Services, Electrical Engineering,and Cyan Engineering (responsible for game development)(see figure 3). Something we label the “coin-op game” emerges from the coordinated efforts of thesevarious divisions. By the late 1970s when microchips replaced the transistor-totransistor logic of a game circuit, we find even more divisions (complete witha graphics division that did not exist in the early 1970s) housed under Atari’s
Coin Operated Game Division: Electrical Engineering consisting of Special
Projects Engineering (Electronic Design, Electronic Engineers, Technicians,
Assemblers) and Components Engineering (Software Engineering, Programmers, Computer Systems); Pinball Design; Industrial Design (Concept Design,
Product Design, Model Shop); Graphics Design (Production Art); Mechanical Engineering (Drafting and Mechanical Design); and Engineering Services

Figure 3. Atari organizational chart of Coin-op Engineering Division, circa 1974. Image courtesy of Peter Takaichi.

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P L A Y • FA L L 2 0 1 7(Publications, Harness Design, P.C. Design, Documentation Control) (see figure4). Working your eyes across Atari’s visible organization of its coin-op engineering, it is apparent that our game histories have been silo-ed affairs, primarily
rooted to a particular division within this interlocking structure: namely, “software engineering.” Such a singular approach runs counter to how Atari actually
coordinated its multi-divisional heterogeneous process for the production of its
coin-op machines.
To materialize these processes into a history of design, I am, to borrow aslogan from actor-network theory, “following the actors,” to assemble the various vantage points that will explode our single view of the coin-op cabinet. To“explode a view” is to adopt a conceptual framework wherein the various actors(designers, design practices, materials) constitutive of a complex artifact like acoin-op video game machine can be identified and detailed to gain a much more
multidimensional view of the artifact. The game has been a privileged actor not,by any means, without due priority. However, when I pour over cabinet assembly
drawings by Atari’s industrial designers for Video Pinball (1978) that document
every washer, wooden panel, monitor chassis, cleat, and even indicate exact
locations of graphics, without mention of a game program, I find it impossible
to ignore this year-long process of development—a fact that, given our sharpened view, is much needed to enrich, if not trouble, our current understandingof game design. Coin-op video game machines are three-dimensional objects,
and our historical scholarship must also adopt multidimensional perspectives.

Cabinet Design is Design“Because Pete and I were industrial design students at San Jose State, we had a
lot of materials that we had to study. One of the big ones was Abitare. Abitare,
the Italian style, just made it more contemporary for us at that time. We wanted
that clean look: geometric shape with nice details. Modern. We never started
out saying that that was going to be our ‘look’ or ‘style,’ it just happened because
that’s the way we designed. We’d look at some Italian design stuff. Maybe somefurniture.”40 These words are from Regan Cheng who, along with Peter Takaichi,
were young industrial designers hired by Atari in 1973 while still students at
San Jose State University.41 When I asked Cheng about his approach to designing cabinets for the new medium of video games he did not reference competing forms from the amusement industry like pinball or electro-mechanicalmachines. He spoke instead of the influence that the Italian design magazine
Abitare had on his industrial design practice. How do you translate “that clean

Figure 4. Atari organizational chart of Coin-op Engineering Division, May 1980. Image courtesy of Peter Takaichi.

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Figure 5. The cabinet for Atari’s Gotcha (1973) reflected the Italian design influenceand contemporary look admired by designers Regan Cheng and Peter Takaichi.
Photo courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York.

look” that Cheng and Takaichi studied while routinely flipping through the pagesof Abitare and looking at late modern design for interiors, furniture, consumer
goods, and architecture to coin-op cabinets?
In my interviews with both, they bemoaned sales and marketing’s decisionNew. . . Now?

to adopt veneer wood grain on a number of cabinets to make Atari’s products
look “sophisticated” in bars and cocktail lounges. Their design sensibility relishedthe use of rounded corners produced in vacuum-formed plastic—as witnessedon the front bezel for Gotcha (1973)(see figure 5). Cheng recalls his enthusiasm at
the prospect of being able to design with vacuum-formed plastic: “What we were
doing we thought of as art. We really had to fight for anything with a curve. We
are big on ergonomics. For the overall design, we always tried to capture a feel.
That was tough to do with a wood cut-out. We felt like we were kings designingwhenever they’d say, ‘Okay, you can include a piece of vacuum-formed plastic.’
We’d all get really excited: Yes! We can have vacuum-formed plastic!”42
Takaichi shares Cheng’s excitement when discussing the cabinet design for
Gotcha, the first machine he worked on for his new employer.
It’s a very limiting medium to work with because everything, for the mostpart, is right-angles, rectangular shape. You can create a uniquely shapedside panel, but all of the cross panels are basically rectangular pieces of thewood. And to fill the gap in between you’ve got acrylic over the monitor.
You’ve got metal for speaker grills or control panels. But the idea of being
able to take the part of the cabinet that the player is interacting with: where
his hands are, where the controls are, what he’s looking at, what he’s hearing. . . if you could put that into a piece of molded plastic mounted to a particle
board cabinet, then the player sees the piece of molded plastic. And as adesigner, that gives you a great deal of freedom. You can do so much morewhen you’re able to form something, as opposed to having to cut somethingout of a sheet of flat material.43

Studying composite sketches by both Cheng and Takaichi at The Strong, I
witnessed many concept designs that looked far removed from the more standard cabinet that would become familiar. As both informed me, expense andtime of production often worked against such concepts. Their penchant for themodern, however, would take another form when molded forms proved too
costly or ran contrary to sales and marketing. All white vinyl side panels outlined
in black plastic T-molding provided that clean and minimal look they tried toachieve in their industrial design for Atari’s coin-op products.
Nearly all Atari’s up-right cabinets include white side panels.44 The decision
to use white on the exterior of a wooden cabinet may appear questionable atfirst, given the rough wear and tear machines experience at the hands of users
and at locations where smoking and drinking were once common. “We used
black T-Molding,” Cheng remarked, “because we wanted the white side panels

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as a background for the graphics. It looked nice. Really, clean.”45 Not only did theside panels achieve the desired clean look, but as Takaichi insists, “when you put
colorful, well-done graphics on it, it popped.”46 These well-done graphics were
the work of George Opperman who Atari commissioned to do graphic designfor their coin-op cabinets beginning with his pronounced typography spelling
Gotcha’s name vertically along the cabinet’s polygonal side panels outlined inblack T-molding.47 Opperman quickly established the graphic design style of
Atari’s coin-ops along with the new company’s promotional materials, like thesales sheets used to showcase its products to operators and at trade shows (e.g.
Amusement and Music Operators Association, AMOA). Opperman joined Atariin 1976 to manage its Graphics Division. From 1973 until his untimely deathin 1985, Opperman’s graphic design and illustration helped stylishly define thecompany’s products in a rich palette of brilliant colors and detailed line work,
which conveyed the action players experienced when standing in between thosewhite side panels to insert a coin.
A mountain of research presents itself here if those white side panels andaccompanying silk-screen graphics are to provide anything meaningful to thehistory of games. From this view—intentionally suppressing the content of Gotcha, that is, the maze game the cabinet supports—I want to draw attention toother actors formative of the machine we call Gotcha by treating industrial andgraphic design as content for game history. Current scholarship on game design
would prove far too narrow because its treatment of Gotcha would concern itself
only with its circuit. To generate space for other constitutive design practices,
I also want to move well beyond trivia that tends to focus on Gotcha’s cabinet
only to draw attention to its prototype controllers that were not released on
the market. They were designed by Atari product designer George Faraco toresemble female breasts in the misguided attempt to attract female players. Neither Opperman’s typography (the first instance of large-scale graphics applied
to a coin-op video game) nor vacuum-formed plastic—designed to convey anergonomic experience through modern style—are afforded sustained consideration for their active role in helping define the game, let alone for the histories
of design they embody.
Repositioning the electronics responsible for the game—and couplingthem with its “boob controls” as the only remarkable aspect of the cabinet into
the background—provides a glimpse into the type of work a design history ofcoin-ops might offer. For instance, I do not wish to celebrate Opperman as an
unsung, talented designer. To do so would maintain the “great men” narrativeNew. . . Now?

that plagues the history of games, design, and technology. Instead, we requirea reference system to obtain context within which to interpret the work: what
was happening in graphic design during the 1970s, and how might we position
Opperman’s work as well as that produced by members of his department into
this particular epoch of commercial/vernacular pop alongside such artists as
Peter Max, John Alcorn, Pat Dypold, Milton Glaser, and others? Only within acomparative context between Atari’s graphic design artifacts and graphic design
history can we make any meaningful contribution to game history—and it ishighly permissible that graphic design will be exposed to artifacts, designers,
and practices not currently given attention within its canon.48
A last point here: the emphasis on modern design championed by Cheng
and Takaichi was directed not at artifacts that would appear in the pages ofAbitare or on pillars within galleries as icons of design. Coin-op machines may
have offered the extraordinary in the form of interactive screen-based gameplay yet these products occupied, maybe even transformed, ordinary spaces
like bars, pizza parlors, roller-skating rinks, game rooms, restaurants, and bus
stations. Given their status as mass-produced consumer entertainment, it will
be necessary as this research progresses to attend to the influential role location
played in their design. Contexts of design and use cannot be easily separated.
In quotidian spaces where users played a chase game like Gotcha by moving asquare and plus sign around a maze with stick controllers, they would come toexperience the interaction design played out on and through Atari’s cabinets.
The ubiquity of such interactive products, with their large-scale supergraphiclike images applied to their external surfaces, alerts us to social experienceswith designed artifacts that, once public, cease to occupy such spaces within ourpresent everyday life. Working through the design processes at Atari will serve
to enrich game histories by offering invaluable insights to better understand user
experience, interaction, and industrial and graphic design.

Platform Studies Does Not Scratch These Surfaces
Platform studies’ emphasis on closely studying the relationships between
computational architecture and software design for creative development isa much-welcomed focus that has influenced the history of games. And it willcontinue do so, especially because it provides a method of understanding thesignificance of technological constraints and support in software and hardware
development. It offers a highly insightful means of producing game histories
in which platforms are studied within the context of their historical develop-

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ment and their technical specificities. Before Montfort and Bogost’s Racing theBeam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009), these aspects had been largely
overlooked by the field of game studies. Moreover, we can readily imagine howsuch investigations will radically open up game design so that design decisions
and processes become better documented, interpreted, and explained for the
benefit of historical study.
Elsewhere I have explored the relationship between platform studies andgame history.49 So here, I wish to only touch upon what I hope leads to a more
expansive approach to artifacts in game history when platform studies anddesign history work together. Platform studies evokes metaphors of depth tohelp illustrate the aims of its method. They purport to “dig down to the code” or“to the metal” in their analyses.50 This focus, I should point out, bypasses otherdesign processes and histories that must be removed, literally and figuratively,
so that the “metal” can be revealed. Of course, this is the intent of platformstudies, but it also begs the question: what about those other intricate design
assemblies housing, supporting the metal? Can they be cast aside so easily
when they, too, demonstrate creative practices and the negotiation of physical and technical constraints? As Montfort and Bogost insist in their study of
the VCS, “a platform must take a material form” and “other components …
make up the hardware of a physical computer system.”51 Dual considerationsof platform and cabinet would prove an excellent way to realize platform studies’ goal to attend to “the connection between technical specifics and culture,”
with both being explored in the wider parameters that design history enables.52
The specification of a platform certainly supports the exploded view that myresearch favors to adhere to the complexity of an artifact such as a coin-op
video game machine. Still I worry that, as platform studies increasingly gains
traction in historical research about games, its approach to arcade platforms
may reduce the coin-op video game machine to its printed-circuit boards andmonitor.53 The point of an exploded view is to show relationships between individual components, to disassemble to reassemble. Ideally, scholars interested
in arcade platforms could team with design history scholars to consider theunexplored relationships between a coin-op’s operational system, packaging,and industrial and interaction design. An analogy may be helpful to grasp
why a broader approach to design in the history of games is necessary: would
you accept histories of car design if all you ever read about was the internal
combustion engine ? Why accept software and hardware design as the only
design of significance in the history of games?

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Game History Can Learn from Design History
Intriguing parallels exist between the move toward critical historical studies ofgames and disciplinary debates that have shaped the field of design history.54
For instance, when Kjetil Fallan speaks of the importance of designers to design
history, he writes, “Design historians should not, cannot, and will never ignore
designers and practices.”55 In the very next sentence, he proceeds to caution
design historians not to become “merely the faithful, genuflecting chroniclers
of designers and their achievements.”56 We do not need to make a great leap toobserve a similar concern voiced by Huhtamo about game historians whose
work serves only to note individual achievement and establish game origins.
Celebrating “good” design and “great ” designers resembles too closely gamehistory’s penchant for tributary scholarship devoted to individual game designers
that always acclaims their achievements as landmarks.
In seeking such parallels in my reading, I simply substitute the word “game”
for “design” where it appears in a number of polemical debates about the practiceof design history. Thus, the opening lines of Fran Hannah and Tim Putnam’s“Taking Stock in Design History” in the British journal Block (1980) would
read: “What are games? How and for whom have they existed? What is a history of games a history of? What are its distinctive problems and methods?”57
Such questions are vital for interrogating the practice of game history as I havealready demonstrated. The question is about possibility. We must now ask what
is a history of games a history of because new models and methods will makeexisting histories increasingly untenable.
Hannah and Putnam also insist on the need to “open up the way to thinkhistorically about design as a complex social relation interconnected with otherrelations.”58 Here is where things get murky in current game history. The reigning histories of games, with their game-centric view, do not offer the complex
social relations advocated for by Hannah and Putnam nearly forty years ago forthe history of design, though we ought to remain hopeful given the signs of adifferent kind of game history already developing. Complex social relations canteam with Hunt’s aforementioned emphasis on cohesion or interaction between
topics for her field of cultural history so that the production of historical studies
of games are informed by and work through diverse forms of historical scholarship and subjects. My research for Atari Modern already teaches me, as Barry
Katz also observes in his history of Silicon Valley design, that “the foundations of
the new discipline of interaction design” can be located in the industrial designand engineering work found at Atari in the early 1970s.59 The study of game

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history can be deepened—or, better yet, spread to different surfaces—throughits friendship with design history.
I offer a final passage (there are many to choose) modified, as I suggest,by replacing the word design with the word game. This one comes from John
A. Walker’s Design History and the History of Design: “Although the phrase ‘thehistory of games’ implies that there is a single, homogeneous object of study, inpractice game history never supplies us with a single, complete, homogeneous
account upon which we can all agree. There are always multiple histories, various
histories of games. These histories are the output, the product of the discipline
game history.”60 No discipline of game history exists. It will most likely be treatedas a specific focus in game studies or come to be regarded as an area of specialization within general historical studies, drawing from multiple disciplines. In
the future, once we have swallowed the mouthful of New Video Game History,
we will realize that we must make history plural to account for all of the diverse
histories constituting the subject.
These passages I have modified demonstrate that our thinking about thecurrent state of game history can learn a great deal from design history’s own
intellectual trajectory. Not only can scholars of game history open up the way tothinking historically about games by broadening, for instance, how we accountfor design within the context of game design but also by taking onboard insights
and perspectives from a field that has shaken itself free of the similarly restrictive approaches that once demarcated the objects of its history and the aims of
its historiography.

Notes
1. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds., New Media, 1740–1915 (2003), xi.
2. W. Terrence Gordon, McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed (2010), 127.
3. In seeking such possibilities, it pays to remain mindful that “new” does transform
its fellow words. Any repositioning or reorientation (or unthinking) gained from this
exploration turns back upon the words “Video Game History” so that “new” may achievesome significance (even minor) to justify its inclusion (otherwise it is nothing more thana new cover for an old book, a revised edition whose author could not be bothered toactually write an updated introduction).
4. See Erkki Huhtamo, “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: An Archaeology of Arcade
Gaming,” in Handbook of Computer Games Studies, eds. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (2005), 3–21; and Raiford Guins, Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game
Afterlife (2014), 18–26.
5. A tidy appraisal of existent historical studies of video games resides in the firstNew. . . Now?

few paragraphs of Laine Nooney’s “A Pedestal, A Table, A Love Letter: Archaeologies ofGender in Videogame History,” Game Studies 13 (2013), http://gamestudies.org/1302/
articles/nooney.
6. Examples of challenges facing the documentation of game history can be examinedin the two white paper reports produced by the Preserving Virtual Worlds Project and inJohn Andersen’s “Selecting Save on the Games We Make” (2012) hosted at gamasutra.com.
7. David Edgerton’s support for the contributions made by nonprofessional historians
to the history of technology can also be applied to the history of games. He writes, “Weshould take nonprofessional historical ideas seriously not merely as objects of study, butalso as contributions to our shared understanding of technology in history.” See David
Edgerton, “Innovation, Technology, or History: What is the Historiography of Technology About?” Technology and Culture 51(2010): 692.
8. I have grafted this point onto archival materials from one that Hayden Whiteobserves of F. R. Ankersmit’s treatment of the “great classics of historiography.” “Noneof them,” White applauds, “has ever wrapped up a historical problem definitively; rather,
they have always opened up a prospect on the past that inspires more study.” And in
the citation from Ankersmit that White comments on, the former offers the fitting line:“These books have proved to be the most powerful stimulators of the production of morewriting—their effect is this to estrange us from the past, instead of placing it upon a kindof pedestal in a historiographical museum so that we can inspect it from all possible
perspectives.” Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effects (1999), 7.
See also F. R. Ankersmit, “The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy ofHistory,” History and Theory 25 (1986).
9. The locations of the material collected at Steve Bristow’s home was conveyed tome by Stanford University Libraries Curator Henry Lowood, who acquired the items
directly from Bristow’s residence.
10. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2002), 68.
11. See Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” inIlluminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1992), 61–69. In instances wherevital research materials reside in the hands of collectors unwilling to share, it is hardto agree with Walter Benjamin’s view on the “real collector” whose “ownership is themost intimate relationship that one can have to objects,” Ibid., 69. Must we wait until acollector dies before we too can experience such a relationship by introducing this stuff
into the “tactical sphere” of the cultural institution? Would collectors be willing to try
an “open marriage” to benefit researchers? Furthermore, ought one’s personal intimacy
supplant the thirst of public knowledge?
12. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives (2013), 12.
13. I have employed the word “continuous” not to give the impression that suchmaterials are held as inestimable truths or discoveries. This inclusion also serves as a
nod to Foucault’s essay, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” where he writes: “If interpretation isa never-ending task, it is simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret because, when all is said and done, underneath it
all everything is already interpretation.” Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” in

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Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Writings of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed.
James D. Faubion (1998), 275.
14. “Critical” is an overused word. The goal is that it will no longer even be necessary
once game history raising its scholarly game.
15. W. Terrence Gordon references this particular phrase in his archival research on
McLuhan’s lexicon for the study of media. The specific phrase is found in a personal
letter addressed to Bonnie Brennan held at the National Archives of Canada and dated
28 October 1966. See Gordon, McLuhan, 136. The phrase reflects the influence that I.
A. Richard’s Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (orig. 1929) has had on
McLuhan’s thought.
16. Marshall McLuhan, “Notes on the Media as Art Forms,” in Explorations 2 (1954):
6–13; reprinted in Marshall McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan Unbound, Vol. 15, ed. Eric
McLuhan (2005).
17. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; repr.,
1994), 44.
18. Hayden White, “An Old Question Raised Again: Is Historiography Art or Science?
(Response to Iggers),” Rethinking History 4 (2000): 392.
19. Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999), 2.
20. Aside from this themed issue of the American Journal of Play, I would also point
to the landmark “The History of Computing,” themed issue of IEEE Annals of the Historyof Computing, Vol. 31, No. 3 (July-September 2009), Game Studies’ “Game History: A
Special Issue,” Vol. 13, No. 2 (December 2013), and Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture’s themed issue on the “Undead Arcade” coedited by Carly A. Kocurek andSamuel Tobin, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2014). I would also add the special issue of Kinephanos
entitled “Cultural History of Video Games” (June 2015). More recently we could include
the 2016 special section of Rethinking History (Vol. 21, No. 3) devoted to historical gamestudies edited by Adam Chapman, Anna Foka, and Jonathan Westin.
21. MIT Press’s willingness to support a Game Histories book series alongside its
highly influential Platform Studies and Playful Thinking book series is a major investment in the subject.
22. I will limit myself to listing one conference that I found incredibly diverse insubjects and historical methods: “Challenge the Past/Diversify the Future: A Critical
Approach to Visual and Multi-Sensory Representations for History and Culture” University of Gothenburg, Sweden, March 19–21, 2015.
23. See Facebook’s Media Archaeology and Historical Game Studies Network groups.
24. I am honored to have had my research on game history accepted at the Society for
the History of Technology (SHOT) annual conference in 2012 (Copenhagen, Denmark)and 2013 (Portland, ME). The 2015 SHOT conference considered history of video games
within the history of technology in the form of a roundtable consisting of myself, Lori
Emerson, Finn Arne Jørgensen, Elizabeth Losh, Henry Lowood, and Melanie Swalwell.
In addition to this inroad into a major historical society, Lowood, myself, and Carly
Kocurek and Jennifer de Winter organized a panel called “Video Games as Design
History” at the 2015 Design History Society Annual Conference (San Francisco, CA). I

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look forward to the day when the American Historical Association annual conference
hosts a game history panel.
25. It is so refreshing to see lines like those written by Thomas H. Rousse in his
article devoted to a historical analysis of Vectorbeam’s Warrior (1979): “Using archival
resources, personal correspondence, first-hand gameplay experience with a working
instance of the arcade cabinet and previously published interviews and listserv discussions with creators of the game, this article attempts to account for Warrior’s genesis
and lifespan. In so doing, it does not strive to be a definitive text of only undisputed
facts. Instead, it seeks to bring competing and contradictory accounts into conversation,
declining the veneer of unitary authority in favor of capturing and appreciating the valueof the ambiguity that exists at the time of writing.” Thomas H. Rousse, “Reconstructing
Warrior: Vectorbeams, Natural Magick, & Business Intrigue,” Kinephanos (2015): 152.
26. One important exception is a keynote address by Melanie Swalwell given at the2013 History of Games International Conference in Montreal, June 21–23. Swalwell’s
address took the writing of game history as its subject to examine the forms of historiography structuring how we know the history of games. Although not published, her talkhas been expanded and is available at academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/4803227/
Turning_Historical_Fragments_into_a_unique_expe rience_with_the_past_Reflections_on_conducting_writing_and_experiencing_games_his tory.
27. Jaako Suominen identities the following genres as most active in the writing ofgame history: enthusiasts, emancipations, genealogies, deep excavations, and pathologies. See Jaako Suominen, “How to Present the History of Digital Games: Enthusiast,
Emancipatory, Genealogical, and Pathological Approaches,” Games and Culture (2016).
28. I would also point to historical scholarship such as: Laine Nooney’s meticulous
research on Sierra-Online, Carly A. Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting
Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (2015); Chaim Gingold’s history of SimCity; Carlin
Wing’s dissertation that explores the history of “true bounce” in modern sport andcomputer simulation, and Henry Lowood’s long-term study on the history of the gameengine.
29. Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History: Essays (1989), 9.
30. Nooney, “A Pedestal, A Table, A Love Letter.”
31. Hunt, New Cultural History, 9.
32. It is my intention that the word “critical” has a short shelf life in this phrase. Ideally it will be absorbed within historical studies of games being produced. I should saythat such a phrase is not the only one in current circulation attempting to specify thestudy of game history. “Historical game studies” is offered as “the study of those games
that in some way represent the past or relate to discourses about it.” See Adam Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access toHistorical Practice (2016), 16. Such an approach appears mainly occupied with historicalsimulation, and there does not seem to be much overlap between the two camps. At therisk of being reductive, what I point to as “critical historical studies of games” looks to
Huhtamo’s “Slots of Fun” piece as foundational historiography on games while historical
game studies adopts William Uricchio’s “Simulation, History and Computer Games” as

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its foundational text. Both pieces, of course, appeared in the same collection, Handbookof Computer Games Studies (2005).
33. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 61.
34. The durable plastic shelving is sold as panels each measuring H 18.25” W 18.25”
D 10” for personal assembly.
35. The unique “nudge” control assembly on Atari’s Video Pinball (1978) to simulate
the play and feel of pinball caused confusion among participants taking part in Player
Survey during September 15–16, 1978, at a Time Out arcade, San Jose, CA. The reportfound that the new nudge feature was used by the test group however “observations
indicated many players thought that they were nudging the game, but were actuallyshaking or pushing it like a regular pinball game” (4). The owner of Time Out expressed
his concern of the durability of the nudge controller. “Strong use of the nudge feature,”
the report notes of the concern, “may cause the panel to break” (6). Marketing Services,“Player Survey Summary Report” (unpublished report, September 25, 1978), 1–10, Box
5, Folder 25, Atari Coin-Op Division corporate records, Brian Sutton-Smith Library andArchives of Play at The Strong.
36. I am not suggesting that graphic design occurs after a cabinet design has been
approved. Based on the industrial design documents held at The Strong, a machine’s
graphics are included in design assembly drawings, and mention of artwork concepts
in project notes is present at early stages of development.
37. Robert Flemate, interview with author, September 9, 2015.
38. Referring to the packaging of a machine, Flemate even states: “The side-panels
were done for the sales-sheets, for the operators who would buy the machines. The
player can’t even see the sides unless the machine is displayed prominently.” Flemante,interview, September 9, 2015.
39. See in particular Don Ihde books: Technology and The Lifeworld: From Garden
to Earth (1990); Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures(2009); Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives (2010); and Experimental Phenomenology: Multistabilities, 2nd ed. (2012).
40. Regan Cheng, interview with author, May 28, 2015.
41. San Jose State University’s Industrial Design program will occupy a significant
place within my project due to many of its students moving directly to Atari upon
graduation. On the heels of Takaichi and Cheng, SJSU alumni Carl Leplane, Barney
Huang, Mike Jang, and Mike Querio joined the Industrial Design division at Atari inthe mid-to-late 1970s.
42. Cheng, interview, May 28, 2015.
43. Peter Takaichi, interview with author, September 11, 2015.
44. Notable exceptions are the use of black vinyl sides to have the cabinet’s form
support the content of its game as in the case of the upright model for Night Driver(1976) as well as to provide an outer-space setting for cabinets displaying illustrationsof spaceships like Lunar Lander (1979), Asteroids (1979), and Star Wars (1983).
45. Cheng, interview, May 28, 2015.
46. Takaichi, interview, September 11, 2015.

New. . . Now?

47. George Opperman was originally with the industrial design firm and advertising
agency, GVO, which stood for the partnership of Dale Gruyé, Noland Vogt, and Opperman. According to Barry Katz, Opperman left GVO in 1971. Barry Katz, Make It New:The History of Silicon Valley Design (2015), 28. Opperman formed his next design firmwith Ursula Harrington as Opperman-Harrington. It is at this firm that he added Atarito his client roster.
48. Louise Sandhaus’s Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic
Design, 1936–1986 (2014) is the only book devoted to graphic design history that
includes coin-op video games. Unfortunately, she places them within her historicalsurvey of California graphic design as exemplars of motion graphics rather than attend
to the graphic design engulfing the monitor at which she focuses her attention.
49. See my “Platform Studies as Method for the Critical Historical Study of Electronic
Games?” Digital Culture & Education 8 (2016), http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/volume-8/platform-studies-as-method-for-the-critical-historical-study-ofelectronic-games.
50. See “Home”@platformstudies.com
51. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing The Beam: The Atari Video Computer
System, (2009), 2.
52. See Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, “Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned
Answers.” Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference (2009), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br.
53. This is exactly what we witness when Brett Camper stipulates that he “aims tobring Montfort and Bogost’s concept of platform studies to the realm of the early arcade”(italics original), via his discussion of Williams Electronics hardware for the company’s
Defender, hardly an “early arcade” title if we consider its nineteenth-century origins. See
Brett Camper, “Color-Cycled Space Fumes in the Pixel Particle Shockwave: The Technical Aesthetics of Defender and the Williams Arcade Platform, 1980–82”, in Before the
Crash: Early Video Game History, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf (2012), 169.
54. I began to identify parallels between the intellectual histories of design history
and game history in a recent article published on coin-op cabinet design and will include
a section in Atari Modern to share my full observations. See Raiford Guins, “Beyond
the Bezel: Coin-Op Arcade Video Game Cabinets as Design History,” Journal of Design
History 28 (2015): 405–426. An overview of the debates informing design history can befound in Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze, eds., The Design History Reader (2010).
The section, ‘Foundations, Debates, Historiography, 1980-95’, is particularly helpful.
55. Kjetil Fallan, “De-tooling Design History: To What Purpose and for Whom Do
We Write?” Design and Culture 5 (2013): 16.
56. Ibid.
57. Fran Hannah and Tim Putnam, “Taking Stock in Design History,” Block 3 (1980): 25.
58. Ibid., 26.
59. Katz, Make It New, 94.
60. John A. Walker, Design History and the History of Design excerpted in The Design
History Reader, eds. Lees-Maffei and Houze, 279.

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