It may be a little Nintendo-centric, but you have to admire the guy's passion. Just about every major and many minor consoles are represented, presented much as one would imagine a really nice retro gaming museum would look if one existed outside of donkey*kong's house. This is a room I would enter and my eyes would try to move in 200 directions at once, possibly exploding in the process. I could spend hours poring over these pictures. Hell, maybe I will.

See anything or everything you like?

My Otacool Room [Figure.FM via Dannychoo.com - thanks togovero!]

The Museum's Curt Vendel says the project has a practical application beyond the living history factor. "What is the potential of this?" he said to Atari Age. "Doing the chips in smaller SMT packaging, and potentially bringing back to life some of the later CMOS designs of combo chips which could lead to a SoC - System on a Chip.

"The future just got a little brighter in terms of preserving and continuing the legacy of Atari's custom IC chips," he added.

The more technically inclined can follow a deeper discussion here. The project involves the TIA, used in the Atari 2600; the GTIA, used in the 5200 and the 8-bit line (the Atari 400 and 800) and the MARIA (used in the Atari 7800).

Atari Chips Reconstructed [GameSetWatch]

John Constantine over at MTV has written a piece today on alternative locations for WW2 games, which I am going to add to, as this is something that's been grinding my gears for some time now as well.

I mean, how many times do we need to storm the beaches of Normandy? Or scour the ruins of Berlin? It's no wonder people say they're sick of playing WW2 games when they play the same people fighting the same enemy in the same locations over and over and over.

The Second World War was fought across Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, North Atlantic, Indian sub-continent, South East Asia, the South Pacific, even Australasia, so it's time games started mixing things up and representing some of these theatres. Who knows, it may even breathe a little life into a "genre" the industry has finally decided has had its day.

John listed five (one of which, Egypt, has actually been well represented in both Call of Duty and strategy titles), so I'm going to list five more, involving theatres and nations that go a little beyond your standard Allies vs Nazis fare.

The Malayan Campaign - While Japan's attacks on Pearl Harbour have been well-covered, their initial attacks on the British Empire have not. The Malayan campaign saw the Japanese army completely overrun an ill-prepared force of British, Australian, Indian and local forces, and would end with the fall of Singapore, the single largest surrender in the history of the British armed forces.

East Africa - One of the forgotten theatres of the war, the East African campaign saw a motley collection of "British" troops - from Britain, South Africa, India, African colonies and even some Belgian and Palestinian forces - take on the Italians in what is now modern day Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and the Sudan. Hardly the most epic confrontations of the war, but the terrain, locals and forces involved are more than unique enough to make up for it.

Korea - Another forgotten theatre, Korea saw action in the closing days of the war when the Soviet Union, free to focus on the Pacific theatre with the Germans defeated, declared war on Japan and invaded Mongolia and Korea. The weary Japanese forces were completely overrun, with the speed and brutality of the Soviet offensive doing much to contribute to Japan's surrender, a fact often overlooked by Western historians.

New Guinea - In 1942, the island of New Guinea - at the time governed by Australia - was invaded by the Japanese. Throughout the next year the Japanese and Australian armies would fight bitterly along the "Kokoda Track", a campaign now famous for the fact it for the first time blunted the Japanese land advance in the South Pacific.

Finland - Finland's participation in the Second World War is both fascinating and tragic, as the Scandinavian state actually fought three separate conflicts between 1939 and 1945. The first, the Winter War, was when the Soviet Union - as part of the same deal that saw the Soviets and Nazis divide Poland between them - invaded. Against the odds, the Finns defeated the Russians. The second conflict came when the Finns sided with the Nazis and invaded the USSR, hoping to reclaim some territory lost in the Winter War. By 1944, however, the Finns had turned on the Germans, and fought a series of battles in Lapland, driving them back into German-held Norway.

Those are just five to get us started. There are plenty more worth investigating - Japan's advance on India, the Chinese Communist Party's guerilla war and Operation Pastorius (German subs landing spies on the US mainland) - and that's just a few. Hopefully in the years to come some of these unheralded (yet extraordinary) tales can be brought to life in a game, showing that it's not necessarily the war that's grown stale, it's just certain parts of it.

Computer Space was developed and published in 1971 by Nutting Associates, not Atari, although programmers Bushnell and Ted Dabney did found Atari later. It's based on Spacewar!, developed at MIT in 1961, which is itself considered one of the first video games ever.

There's a green and a yellow version for sale. In addition to its cultural impact, the Computer Space cabinet is itself a funky piece of furniture, and a sure conversation starter for anyone visiting your rec room.

Rare Computer Space Arcade Machines Turn up on eBay [Technabob via Gizmodo]

Skira Island has long been a place of turmoil. Luckily its real-life inspiration, Kiska Island, which was the scene of much strife during World War II. In 1942 the Japanese captured the island, one of the Rat Islands group of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, owned by the United States. After staging several bombing runs, the Allies brought in a force of 34,426 troops in 1943, only to discover that the Japanese had evacuated the island under cover of fog without the Allies noticing. Despite encountering no human opposition, booby traps and friendly fire caused close to 200 casualties.

Now the site is a U.S. Historic Landmark. Unfortunately its fictional counterpart hasn't fared nearly as well.

Within a year, Bungie would be bought out by Microsoft and Halo would become a launch title that, more than any other game, made the Xbox viable in its infancy. Although Jobs had sworn that Apple had "put an initiative in place to get games back to the Mac," the new console project and Microsoft's commitment to it seemed a much more stable environment than remaining the lone standard bearer of gaming on the Mac.

People argue the Halo franchise's innovation and significance, or lack thereof, all the time. What isn't disputable is its place in history to these two companies, as the catalyst for the fortunes of one and the persistent listlessness of another, at least in gaming. I often wonder if Macintosh really could have evolved into a serious gaming platform, using OpenGL, with Halo as a leadership title. And I wonder what would have happened with the Xbox - if anything could have matched the impact of Halo on that console, or if Microsoft would have simply developed another multiplayer FPS with which to stake its claim in the market.

Above is Steve Jobs' keynote introduction of Halo on July 21, 1999 at Macworld Expo in New York. The game had been given a closed-door screening at E3 earlier that year. This is its public debut.

Eventually, Halo would make it to the Mac. In 2003.

Halo ... On the Mac? [YouTube]

The Toronto Star waxes nostalgic about moon games in a writeup that spans some of the major games set on the moon, in whole or in part. Naturally, Williams' Moon Patrol stands as one of the granddaddies; Atari's Lunar Lander of 1979 - an arcade port of a game common to PCs before then - was something of an oddity, a science-fiction game that was non-violent. Well, unless you crashed your lander, of course.

In addition to those two, Military Madness, Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge, Duke Nukem 3D, the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and I Wish I Were the Moon are all mentioned for featuring the moon, in whole or in part. I'm certain there are more than just those games. For example, DuckTales' moon level - cited by many as having the greatest level music of the chiptone era.

So what else did the Star miss in the Moon? Think it over, while you play this lunar lander flash game. Or listen to President Kennedy's address of Sept. 13, 1963, one of the best in his campaign to make landing on the moon by the end of the 1960s a national priority. Why, indeed, does Rice play Texas? Maybe InsidiousTuna, as the private-school doormat representative from that state, can tell us.

Glows in Many a Title [The Toronto Star]

The thing is so super-huge you should probably just go directly to it or download it to magnify it for yourself. But it covers all 130 games featuring Mario or any permutation of the Italian pipefitter/construction worker, beginning with Donkey Kong, including Wrecking Crew and Mario Teaches Typing (1 and 2) right on down through Super Mario Galaxy.. The groupings seem to be by platform type and/or genre.

Mario Family Line [Limit Break]

"The underground Railroad was a much more complex issue that it's been made out. When you push a person to a point where they have nothing to lose, that's when you create a formidable enemy. Ultimately, human beings are going to be free."

The story of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad that was responsible for liberating so many slaves during a darker time in our country's history is often over-simplified, in order to present a more appealing version of the story. Such simplified tales provide both children and adults with a clear hero and a clear goal, making it easier to understand without going into some of the more disturbing details on the length that slaves would go to take back their lives. As Newby-Alexander puts it, "When you ask people to describe the Underground Railroad, they think of Harriet Tubman on foot, with a gun. Most slaves didn't escape that way."

In fact, many slaves never escape at all, losing their lives in the cramped holes of smoked-out ships, or simply captured, punished, and returned to their "owners". This is the sort of realism that the professor seeks to elicit in her video game. The player will be forced to make decisions - which path to take; who to trust - and not every decision will be the right one. The player, in the role on an escaped slave, can potentially be captured or even killed, but Newby-Alexander assures, "Even wrong choices in the game will lead to learning." In fact, while the game is aimed at middle and high school students, the plan is to make it challenging enough that success isn't always a foregone conclusion. "I don't want to dumb-down the game." If only more developers felt this way, right?

In order to facilitate the project, the professor was recently awarded a grant of $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create the interactive video game. She will pull on her own knowledge gained through extensive research of the Underground Railroad in the Norfolk, Virginia area in order to help assure the game's authenticity. She's working with a local playwright Terrence Afer-Anderson to write the script and develop characters, and next year will work on programming with the aid of various other professors and historians. The plan is to launch the PC game locally by the year 2011.

I'd expect the subject of an Underground Railroad to drum up the usual criticisms and arguments. Video games are not the medium to respectfully depict tragic or profound events. A video game version of the slaves' struggles to be free would trivialize sad struggles. Still, I believe that if handled with the respect it deserves, the video game could shed new light on the truth behind one of America's darker eras.

Source: The Virginian-Pilot July 5th 2009 Edition

Reader Knoxximus passed along this interview, from February, with Jerry Lawson, who was the director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild Semiconductor's video game division. He was a contemporary of men named Jobs, Wozniak and Bushnell. In his garage he created one of the first coin-operated games after Pong. Its success led Fairchild to tap him for a super secret project to bring a game from an Intel 8080 processor over to the Fairchild's F8 - the CPU of the Channel F.

He was also, and this has to be said, an African-American man in a field that was overwhelmingly white in the 1970s. It's not to say Lawson faced overt barriers to his work because of his ethnicity. Mostly, people who met him expressed surprise that he was black, because none of his contemporaries ever referred to his race, just what he did. But Lawson's work on console gaming is another contribution to our culture that is not commonly credited to the black community.

On Father's Day 2009, the era of ROM-based console gaming seems on the cusp of its long denouement, with downloadable content on the rise and the cloud on the horizon. But let's take a moment to consider one of the true fathers of video gaming: Jerry Lawson.

Photo by Peter Fuller

VC&G Interview: Jerry Lawson, Black Video Game Pioneer [Vintage Computing and Gaming, thanks Knoxximus]

Some of you might be too young to remember this, but PC gaming wasn't always a choice between GeForce and Radeon. There was Open GL and Direct3D settings to consider before that, and before that, well. Let's just say when Tie Fighter was re-released on CD-ROM with Super VGA graphics, it blew my mind.

From Voodoo to GeForce: The Awesome History of 3D Graphics [Maximum PC]

That disagreement, which reportedly infuriated Sony president Norio Ohga, let to a transition in power. Edge explores the birth of the console that would ultimately change the landscape of the industry, with Sony chinking away at the armor of then-dominant consoles from Sega and Nintendo with its PlayStation. As a companion piece to the magazine's historical piece on the "Fall of Nintendo," it's a fascinating follow-up.

Not only do readers get a peek at preliminary PlayStation logos—which some have probably seen before—and the evolution of the console's controllers, we get a chance to see the old Sony guard in their prime, when Phil Harrison had hair and Ken Kutaragi had a real job.

There's real drama here, when consoles had surprise launches, executives undercut the prices set by their Japanese bosses and games like the original Tekken were complete unknowns. Fascinating stuff.

The Making Of: PlayStation [Edge-Online] [Image Credit]

All kinds of things.

See, games do history a little differently. Other mediums, such as film, books and even comics, are re-telling a story. They add drama and embellish the facts to varying degree (see: Braveheart), yes, but in essence, they're historical, as they're re-counting actual events.

Games, though, are interactive. You're not being told a story. You're the one telling it, acting it out. Every man you kill, every city you conquer and every nation you destroy isn't a case of retreading history. It's rewriting it.

Which, in many ways, is exciting! It's a blast seeing Babylon become an atomic power in Civilization, or to see Sweden become a global superpower in a game of Total War. But in many ways, it's also a challenge for developers. How do they balance the need for some degree of historical accuracy with the need to create an entertaining video game?

Some don't. There are developers – and these can often be found creating games in which action is the primary focus – who use historical events as a bullet point on the back of the box. The glut of Second World War games over the past decade are probably the best example, using the 20th century's most brutal conflict as nothing more than window dressing for a fast-twitch action experience.

Which is disappointing. Like any other medium telling a historical tale, there is always a danger that the audience, presented with a product that is claiming to be "historical", takes the action at face value, which can colour and distort their impressions of a particular period or sequence of events.

"There is potentially great hazard in attempting to reduce the nature of conflict to a simple matter of button-bashing" says Dr Cliff Williamson. Cliff is the senior lecturer in Modern British and American history at Bath Spa University, nestled in (and named after the key attraction of) the ancient Roman city.

Cliff is also, handily, a keen gamer.

"The most serious issue for me is the separation of the protagonists from the nature of the regime they represent", he says. In reducing history's protagonists to characters and factions, Nazis are reduced to targets, crusaders to a selectable faction. You don't, for example, perform missions in Company of Heroes rounding up a town's Jewish population. You just do the "fun" stuff.

But while some games do a poor job, there are many others that do not. And the ones that get it "right", in Dr. Williamson's opinion, may surprise you. Because while open-ended games like Civilization – which let you completely rewrite the history books – may seem the least historically responsible, in many ways, they can be not only incredibly historical, but educational as well.

How? It's all in their structure. Their building blocks. Civilization, for example, may sound ridiculous by allowing you to convert Britain to Islam and build a fleet of Zulu fighter bombers, but scratch the surface and the game design that got you to that stage in the first place has been teaching you some very important lessons about history.

"I think that the games like Civilisation and Total War series are less of a problem to historians", Dr. Williamson believes, "as they do offer an insight into the forces that shape history via technology trees and an appreciation of the subtleties of diplomacy".

So while you may not be learning the true history of Britain's religions over the millennia, you're learning something potentially even more valuable: an understanding of the dynamics of history; of the forces that have shaped, and will continue to shape, human society.

While Dr. Williamson mentions Civilization and Total War, other similar games that instruct you in the "dynamics of change" are Pirates!, Colonization (yes, there's a Sid Meier theme here), Paradox Interactive's strategy titles (Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis & Victoria) the Age of Empires series and Railroad Tycoon.

That's a historian's take on matters, then, but how do the developers of probably the year's biggest "historical" game feel about portraying history in their games? And how do they reconcile the need for accuracy with the need to make a game fun?

"Whilst we pride ourselves on historical accuracy in our games, we only take it as far as it's entertaining." Says Kieran Brigden, from Total War developers The Creative Assembly. "We could, for instance, represent the coffee or spice trade more fully in Empire, but we chose to keep it included but not as a full market system. "

Why? "Because although it would have been more accurate, it wouldn't have been as fun for the majority of players."

This challenge of balancing history with fun when developing a historical game is hard enough. But then, developers making history games are often faced with an even tougher challenge: balancing their own take on history.

The field isn't science. Outside of simple facts – there's no disputing the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, for example – much of history is subjective. How it's told depends on who is telling it.

"History is always contentious, one man's hero is another's villain", Brigden says. "Everything down to national flags can be disputed." So include one nation in a game and you could insult another. Make one nation stronger than a rival and you'll upset customers.

The Creative Assembly face this challenge the same way they do the accuracy vs fun debate: fun has to come first. "We try and treat these issues with respect, but always with an eye to entertainment as our ultimate goal", says Brigden.

Which explains why, for example, Empire: Total War only depicts a handful of the 18th century states that made up what we now know as Germany, while Dr. Williamson says that, if it were accurate, there should have been around 300. Including all of them may have been more accurate, sure, but Empire: Total War just couldn't handle that many "postage stamp principalities" clogging up the map.

So The Creative Assembly struck a balance. And that balance goes back to what Dr. Williamson says about the "dynamics of change". Yes, the final game shipped about 296 Germanic states short of 300, but in playing the game you still get a sense that Germany as we now know it was, in the time period, fragmented and surrounded by hostile states.

So as far as this "balance" goes, in the end, we're split. For every shoddy shooter set in the Second World War or Vietnam, which outside of uniforms and gun effects has done little to really deal with the people or events underpinning the game, there has been a game like Civilization, Colonization, Total War or Railroad Tycoon (a personal favourite of Dr. Williamson's) able to show us how history actually works.

But as we move forward, and games grow not only more realistic-looking but are pitched at larger and more "accessible audiences", the challenges facing developers in treating history with respect will only grow sterner. Something that, in a surprise for an industry that in many other ways is often labelled as juvenile, Dr. Williamson reckons it might just be able to handle.

"There is the potential for games to mess it up as badly as the film industry has at times, because for every Das Boot made there is a U-571 just around the corner", he says. "The tension is always there".

"But I feel that the gaming industry - with young, involved and devoted developers - is still very respectful to the need to be faithful to the past."

The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, has finally given video games their due, establishing a separate section of the museum for our favorite pastime. The National Center for the History of Electronic Games houses a console collection that puts even the most stalwart fan's collection to shame, with every gaming console from the Magnavox Odyssey to the Nintendo Wii represented, along with more than 100 examples of handheld gaming systems, more than 10,000 individual game titles, and an extensive collection of electronic toys, such as Simon and Tamagotchi.

The center will encompass all areas of gaming, from packaging and marketing to news publications and private documents on the subject.

http://kotaku.com/320756/atari-2600-gets-in-toy-hall-of-fame

"Electronic games are not only changing the way we play; they are having a profound effect on the way we learn and the way we interact with each other. Because Strong National Museum of Play is dedicated to exploring the role of play in American life, we are especially interested in the growing impact that electronic games have on it," said G. Rollie Adams, president and CEO of Strong National Museum of Play.

The collection is completely open to researches on the site, with several exhibits open for visitors to fool about with. They're also working on an exhibit called "The Revolutionary World of Electronic Games", which looks at the growing impact gaming has on the way people play.

The Strong Museum is currently working on cataloging their entire gaming collection of more than 15,000 items in order to make it accessible online.

While most gamers (myself included) are too busy gaming to go on a pilgrimage, it certainly sounds like Rochester would be a lovely place to make one, were we so inclined.

Strong Museum adds video games [Playthings]

From his birth as a desperate attempt to steal some of Nintendo's thunder by artist Naoto Ōshima and programmer Yuji Naka, to his latest rash of sub-par console titles, GameTap's Sonic the Hedgehog Retrospective covers it all. Thankfully, however, the first three episodes of the 24-minute special are dedicated to the 2D Sonic classics, only delving into the 3D games during the last segment. This basically means you get a lovely chunk of Sonic at his best, with only a brief mention of the dark days that were to come. Someone give GameTap's editor a cookie!

This flash game asks you to name as many as you can in 12 minutes. I only got 31 and thought I was doing well. You don't have to guess in order, and correctly spelled answers (or in some cases, their abbreviations) will automatically appear in the list. I'm putting this to you guys not only as a throw-down-the-gauntlet challenge, but also if the quiz creator missed any, or improperly listed one or more, you'll pick it all apart. Because after getting fewer than 50 percent, I need to feel better about myself, and the only way to do that is to question this quiz's credibility. (Kidding.) So you have at least one hint, let's see what you can do with the rest.

Can You Name the Video Game Systems (Released in the U.S.)? [Sporcle]

Tennis for Two was created by Drs. William A. Higinbotham and Robert Dvorak at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. on Oct. 18, 1958. The lab, also the scene of six Nobel-winning discoveries, is currently honoring the achievement. It can be played with a replica controller on a simulation of its original oscilloscope screen, all of five inches. Future versions of the game allowed it to be played in alternate gravities, such as the Moon's or Jupiter's.

The New York Times went there and spoke to one of the developers' son, Robert Dvorak, Jr., putting together another chapter on the very early days of video gaming.

Higinbotham got the idea reading the instructions for one of the computers at the lab. It could simulate the trajectories of bullets, missiles, or bouncing balls — why not create a tennis game? It was conceived as an attraction for a laboratory open house to be held later. Of course, when word spread of the new game, a long line snaked out the door waiting to play it. Next time you're outside a game store waiting in line for a new AAA-release, remember you're a part of a phenomenon now half-a-century old.

Dvorak's son, who is now 57, fondly recalls playing the game. He's an electrical engineer now. And he's still a gamer.

“Games are great,” Robert Dvorak Jr. said. “You a learn a lot about strategy, you interact with people, you use tools and creativity. I’m a gamer, period.”

Brookhaven Honors a Pioneer Video Game [New York Times, and NYT photo]

IBM and Palace Museum Announce Opening of The Forbidden City Virtual World Celebrating 600 Years of Chinese Culture

"The Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time" Recreates Historical Treasure as a Fully Immersive 3D-Internet Experience

BEIJING, Oct 10, 2008 — Today, some 600 years after construction began on the 178-acre site that would become the center of unrivalled imperial power known as China's Forbidden City, the Palace Museum and IBM will open the walled fortress — and hundreds of years of history and culture — to the world.

Three years in the making, IBM has meticulously built a virtual recreation of the architecture and artifacts of the former palace grounds, enabling online visitors to get a first-hand view into imperial China as embodied in the intricate design, history and storied culture of this newly accessible Forbidden City.

"The Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time" ( www.beyondspaceandtime.org) is a first-of-a-kind, fully immersive, three-dimensional virtual world that recreates a visceral sense of space and time of this Chinese cultural treasure — as it was centuries ago during the height of the Ming and Qing dynasties — for most anyone with access to the Internet.

"The rich cultural heritage of China's imperial past, embodied in the Forbidden City for over five centuries, is now brought to life and accessible to all through a virtual world created by IBM and the Palace Museum," said Henry Chow, Chairman, Greater China Group, IBM. "This initiative takes the online experience to a new level of innovation with rich content, educational storytelling, community and social networking features that represent the next generation of 3D-Internet applications.

"What makes me proud is that IBM now has opened the door to a cultural treasure and rich heritage to everyone, everywhere which in the past was only available to relatively few."

Originally, the Forbidden City was constructed to embody the idea of the emperor as the center of the universe with a series of dramatic courtyards and gates, buildings and landings underscoring a design built to reinforce security and power. This huge palace complex was completed in 1420, about twelve years after construction began, and contains hundreds of exquisite buildings and historic artifacts, and on October 10th, celebrates its 83rd anniversary as a museum and one of China's major cultural attractions.

Now, using virtual world technology, visitors can experience the awe inspired by this vast and amazing space. Rather than experiencing its wonders in isolation, the virtual Forbidden City allows you to see and interact with other users and a range of helpful automated characters. As you explore the virtual Forbidden City, you can choose to simply observe the buzz of activity, or you can take tours and participate in activities that provide insights into important aspects of Qing culture.

Visitors to the virtual Forbidden City will be able to take tours that correspond to major historical topics and stories from the Forbidden City, such as Dragons of the Forbidden City, the Supreme Golden Halls of the Forbidden City, the Imperial Garden, and the Symbolic Animals in the Forbidden City.

"'The Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time' is a program that combines China's world-class cultural heritage with state-of-the-art information technology. Three years in the making, the Palace Museum worked closely with IBM in jointly engineering the program. Both parties have been deeply touched by the profound and dazzling ancient Chinese culture," said Zheng Xinmiao, the Director-General of The Palace Museum. "Meanwhile, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to IBM for its full investment and devotion and its strategy of applying innovative technology to social and cultural promotion. This program is only a start, which, as we believe, will have an unlimited future to explore China's traditional culture."

Visitors to the virtual Forbidden City may also engage in activities in which their avatars take an active role in the culture of the period. For example, avatars can take part in activities such as archery, cricket fighting, and playing the ancient game of Weiqi, the "board game of surrounding" now popularized as GO. Visitors may also view and inspect artifacts and scenes such as "The Emperor Having Dinner" and "Court Painting."

The recreation of the Forbidden City represents how 3D technology can be used to educate and provide cultural experiences on a large scale. At the Forbidden City in Beijing, local visitors can also use a kiosk to interact with the virtual world. It is the first virtual world to be built using SOA architecture and includes open source components such as Linux.

IBM's BladeCenters with Linux Blade Servers are at the heart of this virtual world — supporting robustness with the capability to enable thousands of concurrent users and the scalability comparable to that of massive multiplayer online games. IBM built the application using WebSphere Application Server, Tivoli, ESB (Message Broker), DB2 Viper, and IBM BladeCenters. The virtual world runs on Linux, Windows and Mac operating environments.

IBM has dedicated more than a decade to creating successful cultural heritage projects, including the Vatican Library, the Pieta, Hermitage Museum, Eternal Egypt, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

There’s always been a minor niggle at the back of my mind when I played the Nintendo DS. “They’ve got it backwards,” I thought, “The A button should be on the left and B on the right. That’s how it’s always been… I think.” A speedy investigation showed that my memory was a little foggy, and that the answer was significantly more interesting than that. Therefore, I present to you a brief history of gamepad button mapping.

It's a short and sweet look at how our controllers have evolved (or not) over the years — including issues of localization. Some questions are still unanswered (like where the 'A' and 'B' designations originated from, though it would appear that the NES was the first), but an interesting little wrap-up nonetheless.

A Brief History of A & B [The Quixotic Engineer via GameSetWatch]