Topic: Digital Eclipse and the Interactive Documentary

I recently completed Atari 50 and its DLC and I gotta say, I'm so impressed with the whole "interactive documentary" idea. What an awesome concept!

If you don't know, Digital Eclipse has been in the emulation and game compilation business for years and they're rightfully acclaimed for their accuracy and attention to detail. With the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection and SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, they set the games on a timeline and provided bits of context like concept art and info blurbs to give the player a fuller, chronological picture.

Then in Atari 50, they incorporated video interviews, even more archival media, and a museum-like presentation. As you follow the timeline, you're given the option to jump in and play a multitude of games, unreleased prototypes, and even some reimagined entries and community-made homebrew titles! They give you piles of context and you decide how much or how little to take with you into the games. Personally, knowing the drama and genius behind some of this stuff made the games far more interesting, and thus the collection far more fun.

Now they have their Gold Master Series, which is currently comprised of The Making of Karateka, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, and Tetris Forever. Each title wants to add to this idea of comprehensive, engaging, completely rad game history education and I'm so down for it; I can't wait to check them out.

So I wanted to ask, for my first forum post (please let me know if I messed something up 🙏), who else has thoughts about Digital Eclipse, the Gold Master Series, and/or the preservation and curation of games this way? Are they going in a direction you like or do you have reservations? What series or companies would you like to see get this treatment?

Off the top of my head, I can think of two I'd love to see: HAL Labs and LucasArts (the adventure games, specifically). And I know what you're thinking: "How are they ever gonna get Sakurai on camera to talk about Kirby?" Tricky, yes, but if they can find a way, it'd be an utterly fascinating experience 😉. And the more ways I can learn about Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, and SCUMM, the better, as far I'm concerned.

I haven't yet played any of these compilations but I definitely want to, I love the concept and it seems like the historical context would make things like early Atari games much more enjoyable. Lucas Arts would be a great addition! Bitmap Brothers would be good too, I've never actually played any of their games but they seem to have a good reputation.

Exactly! Some of the earliest ones just aren't really fun anymore on their own, but when you learn just how crazy hard it was to make games for the Atari 2600, for example (the first ones could be 2 kilobytes in size MAX), they become so cool to check out, even if only for a minute.

I'd never heard of this developer before, but I just looked into them and that's a GREAT choice! Their games were well-received and super varied, so if we got a compilation, it would have platforming, RTS, action-adventure, run and gun, and more.

Plus, look at these guys:

You know they have some stories, haha.

Haha yeah, they seem like fascinating people! They've got the right kind of number of (self-developed) games that it would probably be feasible to get most or all of them in one compilation as well.