§ The AP is running a nice profile of the webcomics collective Act-i-vate:
Artists in the year-old, invitation-only collective upload a new comic or installment to their graphic novels each week, making the content on the daily anthology highly diverse. ACT-I-VATE members draw upon a host of influences including Japanese comic book artists, music, film, literature and their own psyches.
The elaborately rendered comics cover a broad swath of genres ranging from horror and post-punk, to cliffhanging romance and extreme adventure. The stories are irreverent and hysterical, a blend of the tragic and pathological. They range from dark (take Nikki Cook’s “Sack of Puppies,” which is about “pretty nasty evil things and mean little kids”) to surrealistic (there’s Pedro Camargo’s “Glam,” which chronicles a “grungy cyberpunk trash universe that’s almost like Candyland with little stuffed animals running around.”)
§ An elite gang of academics have justified their time spent with Gameboys by naming “The Ten Most Important Video Games” :
“Creating this list is an assertion that digital games have a cultural significance and a historical significance,” Mr. Lowood said in an interview. And if that is acknowledged, he said, “maybe we should do something about preserving them.”
Mr. Lowood and the four members of his committee — the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist — announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).
Click on the link to find out which game is “one of the most important art works of the 20th century”!
§ The New York Comic-Con site is putting up various Audio Podcasts of panels, including “Review and Outlook 2007 for Comics Publishing”. Virtual confab!
I was an electronic fanboy before I discovered comics (c. 1980 – 1984).
Not a bad list. Not familiar with “Sensible World of Soccer”, but it probably features some revolutionary gameplay.
What would I add? Pong, a game so hugely popular that the prototype broke down when the quarter box became overloaded. The precursor (sorry) was actually invented on Long Island by government employees to showcase the technology during an open house. Not only did Pong fuel the coin-op industry, but it also created the home videogame market. (As a sidebar, the very first Atari coin-op game was Space War, with a very stylish fiberglass cabinet. An example is on display at the Museum of the Movie Image in Queens, NY.)
Tecnologically, Tempest should be included, as it was the first color quadrascan vector game. (Vector screens draw lines from point to point, resulting in faster graphic processing. Quadrascan divides the screen into four smaller screens.)
Another tecnological marvel was “Dragon’s Lair”, the first successful arcade game to use laserdisc technology and traditional cel animation.
Culturally, Space Invaders took the coin-op game from the poorly lit and questionable arcades of the mid-1970s (my mother knew of one which had been busted for drug dealing) and brought it into the pop culture.
Pac-Man then fueled the arcade boom and bust of the early 1980s. After this, there are numerous popular games which deserve “Hall Of Fame” status (Donkey Kong, Defender, Centipede (one of the first to be popular with women) Mortal Kombat…) .
Heh… I’m probably one of the few people who gave up videogames to read comics, not the other way around!
Not just you: I had to stop playing console games in order to free up more time for making comics. Plus, there’s the whole question of RSI. I play the odd Flash game online, but that’s it.
I’m still buying Spider-Man 3 for the PS2, though. I’M ONLY HUMAN, GOSH DARN IT!
*splits infinitive*
*glances nervously at calendar*
//Oo/\
Sensible World of Soccer does seem an odd choice, it was a top-down footie game that was great fun but technically limited even in it’s time. The only innovation I can think of was the use of real players & team names from around the world which was then used in the FIFA games.