Kieran Nolan

Here are the slides from the Hacking Toys Into Tangible Interfaces workshop that was held at DKIT last week for the ISEA 2009 conference. Thanks to everyone that participated :)

At the moment I'm reading 'Racing The Beam', an in-depth study of Atari's VCS console from 1977 (renamed the 2600 in 1982). The book traces the systems history and talks about how it's game designers creatively worked around the machines limitations. One major constraint been how it was designed to show just 2 sprites (objects, aliens or whatever) onscreen at once.

In the name of research I've scored a cheap woodgrain 2600 from ebay and will conduct some serious playtesting of the games mentioned in Racing The Beam, starting off with Combat, Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Then it's onto Empire Strikes Back. Even E.T. will be tested. It's gonna be a tough job :)

Anyhows, there are still applications been made for the 2600, albeit in a homebrew capacity. For instance, Atari 2600 OS, a point and click GUI with Pong embedded is a marvel of minimalism. While the 2600 Full Midi interface allows direct control of the VCS audio for making music, if you're into the gritty low-bit sound!

Many thanks to Arcade Heroes for featuring my Bionic Roshambo game on their blog. I definately recommend adding their site to your rss feed, an excellent resource.

A musical creation game from 1986 by Toshio Iwai, who created Electroplankton and most recently the Tenori-On for Yamaha. Octocky was released on the Famicom Disk System, the Japanese version of the 8-Bit NES console. The syncing of music, visuals and gameplay were groundbreaking at the time and it still stands out today. More information and a rom image to run in a suitable emulator are available here. Bonus review here.

'Zelda No Video' is a documentary about Nintendo's 'Legend of Zelda' series by Enterbrain in Japan. It was made in 2003 but was never officially translated into English. However earlier this year Zentendo released a fansub of the documentary, which took over a dozen volunteers nearly four years to complete. The documentary takes us from the series' roots on the 8bit Famicom / Nes console up to the 'The Wind Waker' on the Gamecube. A really interesting piece of videogame history and a great insight into Zelda as a cultural phenomenon in Japan and worldwide.