Thursday, January 20, 2011

New Computer Game Museum: point, line, pain

There is a giant joystick, the first video game in the world - or a game, which distributes errors shocks: On Friday opens after eleven years of wrangling in Berlin finally a museum about the history and present of computer games. Martin Heller has already played out. A voluntary torture - if it is such a thing, then here.

The exhibit is right in the corner, almost ashamed to be a bit for the device. On the box, as big around as a table football game, are two faces to the laying on of hands, one for each counterparty. Instead of a reward for good performance, for example, by points, a new level, a more beautiful avatar, does the "pain station" through physical torture.

Participants need to catch on in the "Pong"-based game with a controllable line a point - in their virtual flying field - similar to tennis. Missed it, the machine prints a current surge. Who takes his hand first on the intended area has lost. Pong also plays in the front of the exhibition, the main role.

It stands for the commercialization of computer games in the sixties and seventies. It's about the first video game ever. Video game inventor and patron of the founding father of the young industry and the famous game is 88 years old. Ralph Baer, a Jew born in Germany, emigrated to the United States.

He was a television technician for the U.S. defense firm Sanders. In addition to his real work he developed in 1966 in-house a precursor of Pong, which he called ping pong or tennis. Baer developed the "Odyssey" the world's first gaming console. Later, the company has with the Atari Pong game and a Pong machine Baer's idea taken over and developed.

The makers of the revived computer game museum, which fell after successes in the nineties about a decade, an involuntary slumber could win Pong inventor Baer as a patron, the opening on Friday to come, he will - in the monumental "Stalinbau" in Berlin-Friedrichshain. Andreas Lange and his project of a computer game museum Baer joined a long, long organized recently in 2006 in Stuttgart, a much acclaimed exhibition to Baer's creation, Pong and its importance in the games history.

At about 670 square meters as the curator Andreas Lange is finally back in Berlin his collection: 14,000 games, 2300 hardware exhibits, 10,000 magazines. Many things can touch and try out the visitors, through play. The permanent exhibition will be professionally presented with security focal point number one for computer game fans who are interested not only in your own Highscore on your home computer.

The Vectrex and the first 3-D glasses, the objects in the showcases work from today's perspective, like exhibits from a bygone era, her technical and above all by design. And while they remember their own childhood, C64, Atari 400, Game Boy. There were just these game consoles, joysticks, keyboards, disk drives, which were sometimes just 20 years ago, millions of children's rooms.

In between is a compartment by mouse-gray with equipment that today would probably elicit no child behind the Playstation. Vectrex is the games console in 1982. The high-scale, black-white-monitor displays a vector graphic. This is an analog joystick, with four adjacent buttons. As a hardware extension, it is a "light pen" and a 3-D glasses.

Yes, you read correctly, a 3-D glasses in 1982. It comes with a mechanical breadboard plate. If the turns, alternating left and right eye is released. And because the disc is in color and still, the vector graphics not only appears in three dimensions, but also colorful. A few meters further kidnapped Polyplay machine in the limited game world of the GDR.

Made by VEB Polytechnic Karl-Marx-Stadt Polyplay could offer at least eight different games. The hot, for example, "Deer Hunting", "Rabbit and Wolf" or "shooting gallery". Next to a man-sized giant joystick, the first movement and the current game highlights the problems the industry will be discussed: gambling and the glorification of violence - with information panels, but also with a cute example.

It is clear from today's perspective would be "River Raid" will not be described as the worst shooting game. The eighties graphics can just imagine that you steer with the joystick combat aircraft. But because they constitute simple line symbols, the ships and helicopters are to be shot down, the game became better known in 1984 - as the first indexed in Germany Game.

Meanwhile, the ban is lifted long ago, "River Raid" is released for ages. Curator Andreas Lange wants his museum show, which have gained importance in the cultural history of computer games. "They are historically the first applications that have enabled non-specialists to deal with this central digital technology," says Lange.

Moreover, there are now many connections in the film and music. Long studied religious sciences, in his thesis he worked on computer games. As a result, he got a job at the "Entertainment Software Control (PSP). The interest was aroused, since the mid-forties collects everything from the area of computer games.

Even from 1997 to 2000 he was a permanent exhibition, then the nearby rooms were too small. What followed was a back-and-forth that lasted more than a decade: times it looked as if the world's only museum arises anew with public or private sector support, once again seemed the final out come.

Now Andreas Lange finally realized his dream. A separate large museum in Berlin, the world would have little competition in its subject area. On Friday he will open to the public.

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