Once in a while I still play Tetris or (near) equivalent on Windows XP via VMware. Tetris Classic from Spectrum Holobyte even has a level 11, which pops up after having gained enough points at level 10. Funny enough, level 11 is so slow it's possible to increase the score to the maximum that can be displayed.
The electrical engineering building of the Delft university is a high-rise building. In 1996, they put triac-controlled lamps behind each window on the back side of the building and controlled them by a computer on the parking lot, so they could play tetris with the entire building as display. It was a stunt for the 90th anniversary of the Electrotechnische Vereeniging, an organization for electrical engineering students.
A lot of these games were not designed to be playable so much as to take your money. An arcade machine is intended to be a coin eater. Any nostalgia I have for that period of gaming is tempered by the memory of shovelling a week's pocket money into a slot.
Home gaming was better, of course, for those that had it (my parents didn't approve, so that wasn't really an option); but 8-bit gaming, perhaps influenced by the arcade machines, was frustratingly difficult for a casual gamer like myself. My experience, once I did get a console after going out into the world (Famicom), was generally clearing several screens before losing all my lives. Then playing again with similar results. And again. And so on. Replaying these on emulators in subsequent years has only confirmed what I remember.
I think gaming vastly improved when it evolved towards true immersion and playability instead of constantly resetting the player to zero. Probably a combination of new possibilities in graphics, and the popularity of gaming on PCs, as well as the arrival of more sophisticated consoles.
Home gaming was better, of course, for those that had it (my parents didn't approve, so that wasn't really an option); but 8-bit gaming, perhaps influenced by the arcade machines, was frustratingly difficult for a casual gamer like myself. My experience, once I did get a console after going out into the world (Famicom), was generally clearing several screens before losing all my lives. Then playing again with similar results. And again. And so on. Replaying these on emulators in subsequent years has only confirmed what I remember.
I think gaming vastly improved when it evolved towards true immersion and playability instead of constantly resetting the player to zero. Probably a combination of new possibilities in graphics, and the popularity of gaming on PCs, as well as the arrival of more sophisticated consoles.
Tetris reminds me of Conway's Life. I wrote quite a few versions of Life. Life was popular because it could run on very small computers.
Ed
Ed