Channel F

[potatohead]

Better late then never huh?

 

Well, I like the thing. It's a real piece of history, poised right at the dawn of the golden age of video games. It and the Bally are interesting machines to own and play on because of that.

 

So much was to come...

[Rev. Rob]

OWN3D!!!

 

That brings me one step closer to a complete Channel F collection. Alien Invasion doesn't come up on auctions that often either (already have #3 and #9). What I really need now is Video Whizball, and then it's off to collecting the ones that I don't have and don't really care to play, like Casino Royale.

[e5frog]

20 and 25 are really hard to come by... but don't look for Casino Royale - it was called Casino Poker when it was released.

 

retrozoneorg: You're also missing Pac-Man...

Edited October 19, 2009 by e5frog

[FND]

OWN3D!!!

 

That brings me one step closer to a complete Channel F collection. Alien Invasion doesn't come up on auctions that often either (already have #3 and #9). What I really need now is Video Whizball, and then it's off to collecting the ones that I don't have and don't really care to play, like Casino Royale.

 

 

Cool, glad to see someone here got that set, I emailed early on and asked if it came with the insrtuctions and

was told it did congradulations nice score

 

FND

[Rev. Rob]

20 and 25 are really hard to come by... but don't look for Casino Royale - it was called Casino Poker when it was released.

 

 

Ugh... I knew that too. That's what I get for looking at a list on Wikipedia to find the name. Do'h!

 

Other than 20, I am also missing 14: Sonar Search. I've never come across one.

 

 

Cool, glad to see someone here got that set, I emailed early on and asked if it came with the insrtuctions and

was told it did congradulations nice score

 

FND

 

Thanks. Ya, in the second picture you can see the manual. As soon as it gets here I am going to fire it up.

[Dittohead Servbot #24]

Better late then never huh?

 

Well, I like the thing. It's a real piece of history, poised right at the dawn of the golden age of video games. It and the Bally are interesting machines to own and play on because of that.

 

So much was to come...

 

I thought the 16-bit era (fourth generation) was the golden age of video games?

[Bill Loguidice]

Better late then never huh?

 

Well, I like the thing. It's a real piece of history, poised right at the dawn of the golden age of video games. It and the Bally are interesting machines to own and play on because of that.

 

So much was to come...

 

I thought the 16-bit era (fourth generation) was the golden age of video games?

 

It's kind of a non-starter as a term, but it certainly wouldn't be the 16-bit era. It also depends on what your definition of videogames is. Do you include arcade games? Do you include computer games? etc. To me, the golden age would have to be roughly 1976 - 1984, right up to the crash, and be inclusive of all electronic games. Post crash, the landscape began to change dramatically, both in a business sense and in the types of games.

[SoulBlazer]

It also totally depends on how old you are, where you lived, what you got exposed to, even how much money your parents made, cause all of that factored in heavily on 'influencing' you and your perceptions of what the 'best' era of gaming was.

 

IMHO, the 'golden era' was the NES/SNES days -- from 1987 to 1994. Very different games then anything released before the crash, and from a time when gameplay was still seen as more important then graphics or anything else.

 

Sorry, didn't mean to hijack the thread any further then it has been.

[Bill Loguidice]

It also totally depends on how old you are, where you lived, what you got exposed to, even how much money your parents made, cause all of that factored in heavily on 'influencing' you and your perceptions of what the 'best' era of gaming was.

 

Again, it's a silly argument, but it really doesn't. There was only one "Golden Age" of Hollywood, for instance. A "Golden Age" is just that, a single age, generally fairly early on in a medium's mass market rise. It would be hard to argue that the Golden Age was post-NES when so many groundbreaking things happened before that. Relative success is not an indicator, because if that was the case, then today would be the Golden Age of videogames.

[SoulBlazer]

Well, I see where you're coming from. I think we're just interperting this different ways, which is fine by me. My training and background is as a historian, and we consider many countries in history as having 'golden ages' that were often periods of time that happened hundreds or thousands of years after a nation was created. So I was using that interpertation for things like video games. Someone could use that to make a argumnent that we're in the 'golden age' of video games right now, which wouldn't find much support on a retro forum like this one, I'm sure.

[potatohead]

Better late then never huh?

 

Well, I like the thing. It's a real piece of history, poised right at the dawn of the golden age of video games. It and the Bally are interesting machines to own and play on because of that.

 

So much was to come...

 

I thought the 16-bit era (fourth generation) was the golden age of video games?

 

It's kind of a non-starter as a term, but it certainly wouldn't be the 16-bit era. It also depends on what your definition of videogames is. Do you include arcade games? Do you include computer games? etc. To me, the golden age would have to be roughly 1976 - 1984, right up to the crash, and be inclusive of all electronic games. Post crash, the landscape began to change dramatically, both in a business sense and in the types of games.

 

I agree with this. Really, a whole lot about "golden age" has to do with when you encountered gaming, how old you were, and what your preferences were.

 

For me, "dawn of the golden age" is the '76 to '84 period, and is all games. At that time, many systems had just enough to really do games. Each new genre was really new, and often presented in a minimal way, due to hardware limitations at the time. This is a fun era to look back on because the "game" is often all there was, as opposed to a bit later on when graphics and sound really began to take off. Then there was "the game" and the media elements.

 

Also notable during this time was an awful lot of games were one person affairs.

 

Moving through the layers of gaming after that time, we see more often than not, "the game" with a new "skin" or theme, where the play elements that make it a game are often similar to earlier things.

 

It's my perception that the farther forward you move in time, complexity goes up, and the percentage of really unique things goes down, with less emphasis (most of the time) on actual core game elements.

 

Another thing is that the scope of a game was very small. Again, this is all about hardware. So "a game" often was all about a few elements, or even a single one, wrapped with a back story of some kind to spark the imagination. Many titles were very abstract, and often highly differentiated because of this.

 

As we move forward, hardware improved and so scope expanded, permitting combination of elements, better (or the beginning of non text adventure) stories, lots more graphics, etc... There were fewer new, what I call "pure" titles, where it's just abstract, or something really different.

 

For an example of a later day title, Wolf3D is one of those. That's a classic in that it just fit into the hardware, and the game was all about the elements of play, with visuals stripped down to the nubs, etc...

 

I'm not saying it's a "better" time, just different, where the roots of a lot of game play were planted to be expanded on later.

 

Re: Golden.

 

Yeah, in the historical context, maybe the term isn't apt with gaming. Of course, if you are a retro fan, the beginning of gaming is golden, and it happened rather quickly, because of the generally rapid state of things. I put "dawn" in there, because I really believe the Channel F was just "pre-golden".

 

Guess this comes down to a matter of scale and preferences / influences more than anything else. I was basically there for all but the very early roots, so to me it kind of fits on scale. To somebody 10 years younger, or perhaps older, they might put "golden" somewhere else!

 

Re: Golden right now!

 

Well, in some ways I think that's true. For retro fans, there is a lot not to like. But, in terms of gaming itself, it's booming, with it having general acceptance pretty much all across the board. To me, that seems like past "golden", where it's just all rather ordinary, but for the occasional surprise.

Edited October 22, 2009 by potatohead