If you’ve been gaming for a long time, there’s a lot to take joy in when it comes to the games and devices of yesteryear. For those of a certain age, then, it’s great news to find that Kingston University will play host to a new retro and gaming showcase from the 5th to the 11th of August, before taking up a permanent residence in the Sopwith Building (SB3033) at the University’s Penrhyn Road campus in London.
Visitors will be able to play various classic titles, from Sonic the Hedgehog through to Pac-man and Tomb Raider, though the fact the original Tomb Raider is a retro game continues to make me shudder. Or is that the onset of some age-related condition? Either way, this is a celebration of gaming’s past, and there’s undoubtedly lots to revel in and discover anew for visitors of any age.
You’ll also be able to take various old platforms for a spin, including the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64 and the more obscure Fairchild Channel F. I wonder if you have to make a cup of tea while the tape deck loads?
From the pioneering Atari consoles of the late 1970s and early 1980s, through the great Nintendo and Sega rivalries of the NES and Mega Drive eras, to the rise of PlayStation and Xbox around the turn of the millennium, visitors can relive more than four decades of gaming history.
The free exhibition, which is open to the public, will take place at the University’s award-winning Town House building and feature more than 60 playable machines from each decade from the 1970s through to the present day, including the Fairchild Channel F (the first to be based on a microprocessor and use ROM cartridges), Sega Megadrive, Nintendo 64, Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Atari 2600+.
The Archive of Retro Computing exhibition follows on from last year’s successful event and has been organised by the Archive of Retro Computing at Kingston University (ARC@KU), which has been established to preserve and showcase early microcomputers and game consoles of the past.
The exhibition and launch of the institution’s Archive of Retro Computing (ARC) permanent showcase is being, Kingston University Computer Science BSc (Hons) course leader Paul Neve.
He said “The computers and consoles on display at the exhibition had made computing and gaming accessible to the home market for the first time. “Before these machines, computers were only seen in laboratories and businesses. These machines arrived in homes and kids’ bedrooms, launching the careers of a generation of programmers and game developers – that history is so important and the users that championed them are the pioneers that led us to digital world we live in today.”
