Nintendo Entertainment System Research Articles

A Speedrun within a Rock Show

Bit Brigade is a five-piece band that combines hard-rock adaptations of classic-era Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) soundtracks with live speedruns of the game, performed in concert as a rock show. This article uses Bit Brigade as a case study to develop a conceptual model for multimedia analysis that investigates audiovisual integration in novel ways. The essay comes in four theoretical sections followed by a full analysis of Bit Brigade’s speedrun of The Legend of Zelda. The first section explores Johan Huizinga’s magic circle and Kofi Agawu’s region of play to describe types of semiotic play that involve the gamer, band, and audience at a show. The second and third sections focus on intertextuality and how adaptation and nostalgic recycling of the past yield meaning in this unique artform. The fourth segment unpacks intertextually enhanced agency and investigates audience immersion through the social act of performance. After developing this multi-part framework, the latter half of this article presents an analysis of Bit Brigade’s performance of The Legend of Zelda at MAGFest (2022), chosen because of the group’s unique musical and ludic approach to the game. Throughout, the goals of this study are to show how gaming performance parallels music making and to clarify the ways in which concepts associated with music theory can be reexamined through the study of video game performance art.

A transformers-based approach for fine and coarse-grained classification and generation of MIDI songs and soundtracks.

Music is an extremely subjective art form whose commodification via the recording industry in the 20th century has led to an increasingly subdivided set of genre labels that attempt to organize musical styles into definite categories. Music psychology has been studying the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life, and, modern artificial intelligence technology can be exploited in such a direction. Music classification and generation are emerging fields that gained much attention recently, especially with the latest discoveries within deep learning technologies. Self attention networks have in fact brought huge benefits for several tasks of classification and generation in different domains where data of different types were used (text, images, videos, sounds). In this article, we want to analyze the effectiveness of Transformers for both classification and generation tasks and study the performances of classification at different granularity and of generation using different human and automatic metrics. The input data consist of MIDI sounds that we have considered from different datasets: sounds from 397 Nintendo Entertainment System video games, classical pieces, and rock songs from different composers and bands. We have performed classification tasks within each dataset to identify the types or composers of each sample (fine-grained) and classification at a higher level. In the latter, we combined the three datasets together with the goal of identifying for each sample just NES, rock, or classical (coarse-grained) pieces. The proposed transformers-based approach outperformed competitors based on deep learning and machine learning approaches. Finally, the generation task has been carried out on each dataset and the resulting samples have been evaluated using human and automatic metrics (the local alignment).

Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality by Melanie Swalwell (review).

Reviewed by: Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality by Melanie Swalwell Anne Ladyem McDivitt (bio) Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality By Melanie Swalwell. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Pp. 256. In Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality, Melanie Swalwell sheds light on homebrew microcomputer game development in New Zealand and Australia in the 1980s, providing important insight into two topics that are typically outside the margins of video game studies. Swalwell argues that homebrew programmers engaged with their microcomputers as both consumers and producers, and this production of homebrew video games by users is the beginning of when digitality became a part of everyday life. Further, Swalwell states that this history is significant because of its inflection on the present. This study analyzes, recalls, and evaluates how everyday users engaged with home computing when it was new. The focus is on creators of games, even if they were not well-known or making very successful or influential games. Swalwell's attention to homebrew development instead tells the stories [End Page 1212] of those who made and learned gaming through their own tinkering with microcomputers. This provides a unique look into video game history and microcomputer usage. The author juxtaposes this work with many existing video game histories that focus primarily on home consoles and arcade games, as well as two scholars, Frank Veraart and Graeme Kirkpatrick, who have written about microcomputer usage in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, respectively. Swalwell looks to fill a gap on microcomputer usage and creation, as well as to disagree with Veraart and Kirkpatrick about the idea of a decline in microcomputer programming in the 1980s. The book shines when Swalwell expertly weaves in engaging anecdotes that provide insight into the microcomputer interests of ordinary people, demonstrating how people came to work with microcomputers and how some of them made small commercial businesses with their games. Some humor is thrown in, such as the anecdote of Ross Symons publishing programming books that taught his teachers how to code and then getting rewarded with a B in his computer science class. There are moments where the narrative leans heavily into the theoretical underpinnings Swalwell utilizes, and this can sometimes throw the reader off the track of the argument being made. Because of this, the book would be a difficult one to assign to undergraduates or for scholars new to the history of technology. This work is significant to the history of video games, but the broader relevance of the topic is somewhat limited for scholars of the history of technology. Sometimes the reader might question the overall goal of the book, as well as what the author means by "vernacular digitality." There is a fantastic section in Chapter 5 that addresses both, and it would have been helpful for the reader to have this appear earlier in the book. There is also a significant amount of signposting that points to other chapters throughout the book, which can be positive or negative depending on the reader. Swalwell mentions the releases of the Sega Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in context with microcomputing and changes to the gaming environment. There is either an error with the release dates on these systems, or it is unclear that we are looking ahead to the end of the 1980s and/or into the next decade (p. 115). For those familiar with video game history, this can be confusing and distracting. The analysis of homebrew game development as a cultural production on a microlevel is well argued and supported through archival sources, personal documents from homebrew developers, and interviews. It creates an engaging narrative about the period and style of game development. This ties into modern indie development, as well as the continued creation of games on microcomputers after the '80s, which Swalwell argues brings past development into relation with present and future gaming. [End Page 1213] Swalwell's focus on the homebrew creators in Australia and New Zealand is a fantastic contribution to the history of video games that focuses on users as creators. It is sure to be a model for those looking at engagement with video games beyond...

Efficacy of Using Retro Games in Multimodal Biofeedback Systems for Mental Relaxation

Video games are used to increase the engagement of biofeedback systems. For cost-effectiveness, the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games can be used. Therefore, a multimodal biofeedback system was developed to leverage the NES games for biofeedback. This study aims to test the efficacy of the developed system, the motivation of participants, and the usability of the system. A within-group design study was conducted with 16 participants followed through four interventions: deep breathing, stress-test, non-biofeedback game (control), and biofeedback game (experiment), where their HRV was recorded. Participants showed significantly different HRV during interventions (F(1.60, 23.93) = 11.94, p < 0.001) and reported higher HRV when using biofeedback game than the non-biofeedback game (t(15) = 9.14, p < 0.0001). The motivation was reported to be the same with biofeedback and non-biofeedback version of the game, and the overall system was reported as usable. The results of this study support the efficacy of using original NES games in biofeedback for mental relaxation.

Towards General RPG Playing

General videogame playing has come a long way in a short period of time, but remains at the level of solving relatively short games made up of distinct and isolated episodes. Even simple console role-playing games (RPGs) are far beyond the reach of current techniques, requiring the synthesis of cultural knowledge with compositional reasoning over several interconnected sub-games. We explore how the challenges of playing these games could spark new advances in compositional analysis of games and common-sense reasoning. General RPG playing can leverage advances in episodic general game playing and in areas like text understanding, image classification, and automated game design learning. It has direct applications in design support and AI-based game design, and the techniques used to enable it could generalize to other families of games such as adventure, open-world, and simulation games. In this paper, we describe the motivation behind general RPG playing in a sub-domain of Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) RPGs, some promising approaches to some of its fundamental issues, and immediate next steps; we conclude by describing a few concrete benchmark problems on the path towards automated play of these complex games.

General Deep Reinforcement Learning in NES Games

The techniques involved in general game playing with Artificial Intelligence (AI) have advanced to meet the challenges of the most popular video game and board game domains. Until recently, the video game domains used as testbeds have been relatively simple. That is, the most complex console-wide domain that has been solved using Deep Reinforcement Learning is the Atari domain, which is decades behind modern video game domains. This work explores a more complex domain (the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES) and the associated difficulties in developing deep reinforcement learning agents for it. To understand these difficulties, we trained agents on NES games with little to no expert knowledge provided to the agents. After developing some understanding of the challenges of the domain, we suggest areas on which to focus to solve this domain, work which will hopefully lead the field to solving ever more complex environments both real world and theoretical. This paper determines some of the necessary changes in hyperparameters and reward functions to solve the NES domain compared to the more popular Atari domain while using game pixel data as the only inputs to the agents’ neural networks.

I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer by Nathan Altice

Reviewed by: I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer by Nathan Altice Casey O’Donnell (bio) I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer. By Nathan Altice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Pp. 440. Paperback $30. I desperately wanted to write this book. Of course, then it wouldn’t have been this book. When I was told someone else was going to be writing “the NES book,” I was intensely jealous. Consequently, I went into my reading of the text with unreasonable expectations. I have critiqued the atheoretical perspective of many of the platform studies texts, and I have an intense sense of care for the object of this text. Nathan Altice does an exceptional job of overcoming my unreasonable expectations, making this jilted lover of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) appreciate his take on the project. The NES and its Japanese counterpart the Nintendo Famicom (Famicom) sit central in this Platform Studies series text published by MIT Press, [End Page 378] edited by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. The series draws heavily on a conceptual framework rooted in object-oriented ontology. What is most intriguing in the choice of studying both the NES and Famicom simultaneously is that Altice runs the perfect gambit by destabilizing the “objectness” of the NES/Famicom from the very beginning. While it does not run explicitly throughout the text, he leverages “translation” in an explicitly Derridean sense, which again defuses some of my critiques of the platform studies approach. Most importantly, the book also explores the NES/Famicom as an object not ready made, but rather an object becoming. Throughout the text, the NES/Famicom shifts and swerves over time. On the one hand, we have the opportunity to learn of the history of the Famicom and its simultaneously limited and yet innovative design and construction. The nuances of this device have come to have lasting impacts on videogame design and development and an entire generation of developers that drew heavily on the resulting “8-bit” aesthetics. Altice gives us a distinct perspective on the NES/Famicom and the games produced for these systems through the lens of translation: PAL/NTSC, Japanese/English, and PRG-ROM/CHR-ROM. While on the one hand the book can feel at times overly technical, Altice decodes the objects and ushers the reader through a very nuanced and detailed unpacking of a device almost constantly under translation. The author walks readers through the construction of things like levels of Super Mario Bros., which becomes a kind of translational object for understanding game design and development practice. “Design data” is as much a part of a game as its “engine” or pixelated art “assets.” There is a sense of contingency and lack of closure, which at its core troubles the foundations of platform studies. The NES/Famicom as a platform under translation and manipulation sits at the core of the text. Altice draws on Mark Sample’s notion of the “pre-platform,” or as I might say, the object-becoming. Early versions of a North American bound version of the NES trouble the idea of a kind of steady or self-assured product development cycle. The Famicom’s strange set of peripheral devices that made the device’s lifespan in Japan significantly longer than that of its American-bound counterpart encourage us to see every port on the device as an opportunity for platforms to swerve out of control. Clearly this level of attention tells us something new about platforms, particularly those like the NES/Famicom. Ever present in the text is the figure of the emulator, to which members of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) would be well suited to pay heed. The history and archival future of videogames is intimately tied to software systems that they would rather classify as the tools of pirates. Throughout the text, FCEUX (an NES/Famicom/Famicom Disk System emulator) and Macifom (an NES emulator) loom large. [End Page 379] Piracy and ideas about software and development become encoded into the platform in interesting ways, as I have written about in my work as well. Altice’s devotion to the device makes it clear that this is a kind of labor of love...

Bits and Pieces: A History of Chiptunes, by Kenneth B. McAlpine

<i>Bits and Pieces: A History of Chiptunes</i>, by Kenneth B. McAlpine

The Wrong Tool for the Right Job: Composition on 8-bit Machines

An artist’s medium can inspire them to reach new heights with its possibilities or curtail their ambitions with its limitations—but, ultimately, it is what gives shape to their artistic vision. Few artistic mediums exemplify the conflict between possibilities and limitations, and the sheer ingenuity of artists as they balance these two forces, as well as computer music does. This paper will delve into the rich tradition of demoscene and videogame music, that flourished in the early days of personal computers and gaming consoles, to examine how the hardware used by different composers affected their processes. This paper discusses the technical specs and rich library of music of three very different pieces of hardware: the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. The C64, with its powerful and revolutionary “SID chip” sound card, demonstrates the amazing potential computer music offers to those determined enough to surmount the technical challenges. The ZX Spectrum, with its one-channel beeper speaker, shows how a resourceful artist can wring brilliance from even the most limited of mediums. And the NES, with its five channels of pure nostalgia, teaches us that a couple of square waves and some heart can inspire a generation.

From the Concert Hall to the Console: Three 8-Bit Translations of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

Thanks to frequent appearances in film and television throughout the twentieth century, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor has developed powerful significations ranging from the pious to the grotesque. The Toccata and Fugue is emblematic of the pipe organ’s power and majesty, frequently used in horror films and other media to convey that which is gothic and grand. The Toccata and Fugue is also featured in a number of video games for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Although it still often evokes the macabre, the work’s signifying function shifts in video games. The interactivity of the medium and the combination of the music with seemingly incongruous settings such as ancient Greek temples and alien planets make it more difficult to discern the relationship between music and the image onscreen.

Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System by Dominic Arsenault

Reviewed by: Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System by Dominic Arsenault Dal Yong Jin (bio) Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System. By Dominic Arsenault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Pp. 240. Hardcover $29.95. Once upon a time, Nintendo reigned supreme in the global video game markets. With the newly launched Nintendo Switch in 2017, Nintendo dreams of the golden age it enjoyed between 1985 and 1990. Dominic Arsenault's Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was published right before the introduction of Nintendo Switch and provides rich data and discussions on the rise and fall of Nintendo in the global console market. This book has several strengths, and three clever ideas (presaged in the title) make the book valuable. Unlike several other books that have focused on the celebratory and upbeat tones of successful game companies and video games, Arsenault emphasizes the failures of Nintendo in his analysis of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Based on his exhaustive research, which draws on trade journals, manuals, and advertisements from the 1980s and the 1990s, he clearly identifies key technological discourses and business models that formed what he calls Nintendo's Super Power—one that all too quickly encountered market kryptonite, though for a time enabled the company's short-term dominance over the console game sector. While they helped produce a period of ascendance, Arsenault argues that these same business models were the major reasons why Nintendo eventually lost its market share to other Japanese console companies, namely Sega and Sony. Arsenault examines the historical evolution of the SNES from diverse, but connected perspectives. After discussing the different meanings of a video game platform, from an early emphasis only on hardware architecture to the marketing forces and cultural spheres that later developed, he discusses the ways in which Nintendo has faced its dark age. Arsenault identifies a few key technological shifts that happened during the SNES's lifetime, and he contends that Nintendo refused to admit that such technological [End Page 652] shifts had implications for the future of certain traditionally strong game genres. He also argues that the company pursued inflexible business models and maps out the cultural changes in the game world that wore away users' fondness for the SNES. What Arsenault discusses are some of the most significant reasons for the fall of Nintendo, even if that fall is not permanent, and his arguments provide a good lesson not only to game companies but also to other digital media and platform corporations that emphasize innovation as one of the most significant virtues. Throughout, Arsenault uses the three key concepts alluded to in the tantalizing title. "Super Power," as noted above, encompasses marketing and strategy in a broad sense; in Nintendo's case, this meant conceiving, developing, and marketing the Super Nintendo as the super version of the original Nintendo, not as something markedly new. "Silverware" refers to a particular approach to technology via the analogy of using shinier utensils to make a meal fancier without improving the quality of the food. Finally, "Spoony Bards," refers to a particular culture, specifically that of people who would sing the praises of the Super Nintendo without acknowledging its deficiencies and downfalls. Arsenault dexterously structures his argument by combining the extended notions of platform and three metaphors from the title in detailing the reasons why Nintendo has lost its supreme power in the console market. Chapters two and three explore the video game market, explain the context in which the Super NES was conceived and marketed, and articulate the critical steps in the process of launching a video game console. Chapters four and five discuss the technology of the Super NES, describing its limited processing and memory units, audio system, controller, and hardware design while exploring the larger technological revolution that video games went through during the SNES's lifespan. Chapters six and seven address the cultural images and identity of Nintendo as a corporation and the trials and tribulations it faced during the SNES's life. Arsenault eventually chronicles the fall of the SNES by emphasizing its failure to adopt a CD-ROM player...

Fruits and vegetables embedded in classic video games: a health-promoting potential?

The proliferation of the video game era has increased sedentary behaviours among children and adolescents. Contemporary interventions involve the use of video games to introduce fruit and vegetable (F&V) consumption among children and adolescents. A comprehensive list of licenced video games (n = 671) released for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console were reviewed for thematic content and qualitative characteristics of the game’s activity relevant to F&V. Seventy-five video games were included in the study sample and categorised by release year, prevalence of F&V, and thematic content. Mild associations were found comparing release year to F&V totals (r = 0.21) and release year to theme (r = 0.19). F&V themes embedded within classic video games could serve as health-promoting lessons for forthcoming video games. Future games produced by the video gaming industry should continue to focus on nutrition-embedded messages promoting F&V. Video game development and marketing could be an avenue that incorporates healthy nutrition themes.

Parallel evolutionary approaches for game playing and verification using Intel Xeon Phi

Automatic generation of artificial players is an important subject for the videogames industry. Different strategies have been proposed to implement realistic and intelligent agents for gameplaying and verification. This article presents a parallel evolutionary approach for the automation of computer player generation for video games. A learning pipeline model is defined to study the generation problem for Nintendo Entertainment System games composed of three stages: objective inference, objective refinement and artificial intelligence generation. Two case studies based on the defined pipeline are presented: an evolutionary algorithm to learn how to play the game Pinball, offloading the evaluation of the fitness function to a Xeon Phi coprocessor, and a full pipeline implementation that uses neuroevolution to generate RNNs that can play different games successfully. Results show that the proposed pipeline can be applied for the automatic generation of artificial players for the studied games.

Playing with materiality: an agential-realist reading of SethBling's Super Mario World code-injection

ABSTRACTThis article takes inspiration from Youtuber and software developer ‘SethBling’ and his 2016 ‘code-injection’ (Bling, 2016), in which, using only a standard Super Nintendo Entertainment System controller and in-depth knowledge of the console, he ‘injected’ and executed the code of popular mobile game Flappy Bird (Nguyen, 2013) into a running instance of Super Mario World (Miyamoto, 1990), effectively transforming one game into another through play. Drawing from this I propose a performative understanding of videogames (and software in general) to reinvigorate discussions of software's materiality. Though it is possible to contrast Wendy Chun's (2008a) suggestion that one can view software as ‘vaporous’ against Friedrich Kittler's (1995) assertion that ‘there is no software’, I propose a more holistic approach. Academics and users alike should attempt to see software as living a double-life: as simultaneously solid as it is (metaphorically) gaseous. It then becomes possible to embrace software(s) as performative examples of the entangled ‘phenomena’, suggested by Barad (2007), that produce everyday reality through quantum activity. I explore SethBling's code-injection suggesting that actions clearly reveal software's double existence as both tangible ‘thing’, locatable on magnetic memory, and as a vaporous non-entity. Accepting these propositions together, software can be understood as continuously re-emerging through shared activities. Following Barad, I conclude that this quality is not unique to software, but software – and videogames above all – are a useful tool for understanding a vision of reality that favours activity over materiality as the basis of our existence.

Playing SNES Games With NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies

Teaching a computer to play video games has generally been seen as a reasonable benchmark for developing new AI techniques. In recent years, extensive research has been completed to develop reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to play various Atari 2600 games, resulting in new applications of algorithms such as Deep Q-Learning or Policy Gradient that outperform humans. However, games from Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) are far more complicated than Atari 2600 games as many of these state-of-the-art algorithms still struggle to perform on this platform. In this paper, we present a new platform to research algorithms on SNES games and investigate NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) as a possible approach to develop algorithms that outperform humans in SNES games.

Nintendo Co., Inc.

Describes Nintendo's rise to dominance in the home video game industry in the late 1980s. Then presents the challenges Nintendo faced in 1990 as 16-bit processors entered the market against the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System.

I am error: the Nintendo family computer/entertainment system platform

In the 1987 Nintendo Entertainment System videogame Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a character famously declared: I AM ERROR. Puzzled players assumed that this cryptic mesage was a programming flaw, but it was actually a clumsy Japanese-English of My Name is Error, a benign programmer's joke. In I AM ERROR Nathan Altice explores the complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment System (and its Japanese predecessor, the Family Computer), offering a detailed analysis of its programming and engineering, its expressive affordances, and its cultural significance. Nintendo games were rife with mistranslated texts, but, as Altice explains, Nintendo's challenges were not just linguistic but also material, with consequences beyond simple misinterpretation. Emphasizing the technical and material evolution of Nintendo's first cartridge-based platform, Altice describes the development of the Family Computer (or Famicom) and its computational architecture; the translation problems faced while adapting the Famicom for the U.S. videogame market as the redesigned Entertainment System; Nintendo's breakthrough console title Super Mario Bros. and its remarkable software innovations; the introduction of Nintendo's short-lived proprietary disk format and the design repercussions on The Legend of Zelda; Nintendo's efforts to extend their console's lifespan through cartridge augmentations; the Famicom's Audio Processing Unit (APU) and its importance for the chiptunes genre; and the emergence of software emulators and the new kinds of play they enabled.

From NES-4021 to moSMB3.wmv: Speedrunning the Serial Interface

Although play is irreducible, games repeat. Beyond the serial repetition that characterizes industrial forms of mechanical reproduction like newspapers, comics, novels, and films, in the case of videogames the microtemporal speed of serial interfaces and massive scale of serial distribution operate both below and above the horizon of conscious experience. As such, the serial operations of videogames structure, enclose, and ultimately alienate the technical processes of play from the conscious knowledge of the player. In their essay, “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games,” Shane Denson and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann characterize the diachronic sequencing of serial interfaces and synchronic consumption of videogames as “digital seriality.” This essay explores digital seriality through the history and practice of tool-assisted speedrunning, a form of metagaming that stages a ludic intervention at the level of serial interfacing and subsequently disrupts the collective serialization of videogames as a mass medium. From the operations of the NES-4021, a parallel-to-serial shift register that governs controller input in Nintendo Entertainment System, to the history of moSMB.wmv, an early speedrunning video by Morimoto that went viral in 2003, tool-assisted speedruns transform twitch-based platform games into turn-based puzzles and single player experiences into massively multiplayer online games by playing the serial interface.

Vintage game consoles: an inside look at Apple, Atari, Commodore, Nintendo, and the greatest gaming platforms of all time

Vintage Game Consoles tells the story of the most influential videogame platforms of all time, including the Apple II, Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Sega Genesis, Sony PlayStation, and many more. It uncovers the details behind the consoles, computers, handhelds, and arcade machines that made videogames possible. Drawing on extensive research and the authors’ own lifelong experience with videogames, Vintage Game Consoles explores each system’s development, history, fan community, its most important games, and information for collectors and emulation enthusiasts. It also features hundreds of exclusive full-color screenshots and images that help bring each system’s unique story to life. Vintage Game Consoles is the ideal book for gamers, students, and professionals who want to know the story behind their favorite computers, handhelds, and consoles, without forgetting about why they play in the first place – the fun! Bill Loguidice is a critically acclaimed technology author who has worked on over a dozen books, including CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy’s Underdog Computer, written with Boisy G. Pitre. He’s also the co-founder and Managing Director for the popular Website, Armchair Arcade. A noted videogame and computer historian and subject matter expert, Bill personally owns and maintains well over 400 different systems from the 1970s to the present day, including a large volume of associated materials. Matt Barton is an associate professor of English at Saint Cloud State University in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where he lives with his wife Elizabeth. He’s the producer of the Matt Chat, a weekly YouTube series featuring in-depth interviews with notable game developers. In addition to the original Vintage Games, which he co-authored with Bill, he’s author of Dungeons & Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games and Honoring the Code: Conversations with Great Game Designers.

The potential of video games as a pedagogical tool.

The potential of video games as a pedagogical tool.