Stella at 20 - An Atari 2600 Retrospective

On the 20th birthday of the Atari 2600 VCS, AtariAge member Glenn Saunders gathered a group of Atari legends to celebrate the occasion. He filmed the event, thereby creating the "Stella at 20" documentary.

Previously only available on VHS, the original footage comprises nearly 14 hours worth of material, including interviews with Nolan Bushnell (Atari founder), Al Acorn (Atari co-founder), Joe Decuir, Steve Mayer, Ron Milner (2600 designers), David Crane (Pitfall, Freeway), Carol Shaw (River Raid), Al Miller, Larry Kaplan (Activision co-founders), and many more.

Curtesey of Glenn Saunders, the entire 14 hours of this fantastic piece of computing history are now available on Archive.org.

"Forum on the Future of Personal Computers" Video Recordings To Be Released

The Computer History Museum has started to release historic video recordings from the "Forum on the Future of Personal Computer". This was a monthly panel held by the Boston Computer Society, which brought together some of the biggest players in the computer world of the 80s.

First up is this remarkable gathering from October 1981, which brought together Don Estridge of IBM, Bill Gates of you-know-who, Mike Markkula of Apple, James Finke of Commodore, Jon Shirley of Radio Shack, Peter Rosenthal of Atari, and Nigel Searle of Sinclair.

The video recordings will released in format of a youtube playlist. Read up on background background information on the serie's blog.

[demo] Is That a Demo in Your Pocket? by Snorpung

Woohoo, a new Gameboy demo by Snorpung has appeared. And appearantly it didn't even run in any competition :o

download/discuss

Beep: Game Music Documentary Kickstarter

A kickstarter is currently underway to create the world's first documentary on the sound and music of video games. The main initiator behind this is Karen Collins, a well known researcher on chip and game music. So chances are that this will be a quality product, and I therefore recommend backing the project.

Read details on the Kickstarter page.

"Computer Chess" Mocumentary Out Now

Computer Chess, a much hyped independent comedy/mocumentary revolving around a computer chess tournament in the 1980s, has been released for home audiences recently, after doing well at this year's Sundance Festival.

I have yet to see the full movie, so I won't comment on it in detail for the time being. However from the bits that I have seen so far, I'd say the humor is a bit too much in the "awkward/WTF" fashion that is so en vogue lately. And while critics almost universally praised the movie, audience response has been rather ambiguous so far.

Well, if AI and computer history are your thing, then I guess you'll be checking this out anyway. (I surely will, in case you're wondering.)

For everybody else, my recommendation is to wait a bit before buying the film. Instead, check out this subject related article on BBC News first.

If you have seen the movie already, please comment to share your thoughts on it.