Keith Feinstein Interview

How did you become interested in vintage video games?

I basically got interested in it in college – I’m one of the original video game generation kids. I began to have an interest in the old arcade games, they were really disappearing and at that point there was absolutely no interest in preserving them in any way shape or form. Games were not looked upon as an art form. I had bought a Star Wars arcade game for my dorm room – it was great, my friends were all thrilled and we had a lot of fun with it. I wanted to learn a little bit more about who had programmed the game, who had designed it – there was really nothing about it. In those days you were still in the early Atari hide the authorship mode of discussing video games.

When you looked at the books on computer technology video games were not mentioned. I started calling around to manufacturers to ask “who had designed this thing”, trying to get some information. By the time I was in grad school I had amassed a collection of about 20 or 30 arcade games. As I said, I was doing this first-hand, reporting on it by talking to a lot of these people.

People don't want computers in their houses to play spreadsheets, they want them to play games. This is shaping up to be a really important cultural/sociological event, but the way we are being told that this event came about is wrong.

I had the idea to produce a museum exhibit and I launched into that. We got a warehouse and increased the collection to about 400 games and began work on this museum exhibit, which I eventually toured all over the place – it is now a collection in the Strong National Museum of Play.

In the process of doing this exhibition – which was really the first serious and in depth look at the history of video games, we started to figure out what was the first game with a microprossor/3d graphics etc. at that point nobody really knew what they were.

One video game magazine marked Pong as the first video game, which was not true. We spent a whole bunch of money finding and restoring key arcade games. Nobody knew what the full story was.

I collected a lot of tapes and information which I’ll eventually donate to one of these museums. A lot of the seminal figures in the industry contradict themselves now.

Its been interesting and I’ve gone on from there to produce other museum exhibits using video game technology.

What elements of games do you think are most important to preserve? Is there a particular kind of game that is in more danger than other types of games?

The focus on arcade games is because that’s where video games first came to the front of cultures attention. They were the rarest, the ones who had disappeared the quickest. There was an entire culture that existed at the time – there were arcades, there was a different social dynamic there.

The most important thing to remember is to show the game in its original context. You have to give people something – whether it’s a printed plinth or something else – to put it in the context of when it was released, when it was designed, to show it in its original form. Its enormously important that these games are played using the original hardware, especially when youre looking at these games as a resource for designers. Imagine if you had film schools only showing people classic early black and white films on a tiny television set cropped and colorized – its not the same film. Not as much fun to play on a computer – because its not the same game.

You have people saying that they’re preserving the game because they’re preserving the original code, and it's not the same game. Video games are an art form, it’s the very small little things, instances of timing that are completely missing or altered when you remove the game from its original hardware. A lot of the early games produce their own sounds in analog format with analog circuitry – you cannot get that from an emulation. That also alters the timing of how the program runs. I think its very important that the games be preserved and played in their original form as long as that is possible. A lot of the components are no longer available, the differences at least should be documented so when those days do come you can explain how its changed.

Are there any current preservation efforts that you think are particularly strong? What kind of changes need to be made to current gaming culture to improve game preservation?

I can’t tell you that I have any honest comment on what the Library of Congress is doing because I haven’t seen what they’ve done. Again, anything that has to do with the Library of Congress or Smithsonian, it's going to run ten to fifteen years behind what other people are doing anyway. When I was doing the video game exhibit I was in touch with Al Alcourn, he was atari’s first engineer, the guy who built Pong. He had the prototype Pong machine that went into the bar, he still had that in his basement. He goes “I offered it to the Smithsonian a couple of months ago and they turned it down,” the worst part about it was that they turned it down because a few years agot they paid a lot of money to have a replica built. That’s indicative about how I feel about that kind of thing.

I would look at the preservation efforts of non-governmental not for profits. I have a checkered opinion of collectors, but they will grab things and hid them in some guys basement until he loses interest in it, you can’t get good access to things. There were situations where I was fighting with collectors about “why are you bidding on this.” I want to put it on display so everybody can come and look at it. Certain things really do have value, and they need to be preserved in ways that people have access o thtem. That goes for all kind sof video games – early console games, even before cartidges came into being. Very few people have seen a ‘video brain’ that was a machine that came out in the late 70s with cartridges and a key board.

It needs to be preserved for the art form as well. Film students can go and watch projected and restored versions of birth of a nation to see all of the language of modern film. For video games students don’t, what they end up doing is download something and play it on different architecture in a different context and it loses a lot of the message and a lot of the importance. You see people making design mistakes that could be avoided if they had a proper education in the history of their chosen field. It just doen’st exist, there’s no place that they can go check out a copy of dungeons of dagarath when they’re creating a first person perspective game.

Are you planning to continue work within the field of video game preservation? If so, what is the next project you’re focusing on?

I maintain a relationship with both of the museums that I mentioned – I just could not do it anymore because it cost an incredible amount of money to amass these things and to store them – a few hundred arcade games take up a lot of space. I am going to stay involved in it as much as I can, but I personally have moved on. I wanted to try and do somethings on my own.

I formed a company with Eugene Jarvis, designed defender and robotron and stargate, all this kind of stuff – intended to look at educational games and see what could be done with them.