Blocks (WP 5.0+ / Gutenberg)

Mystery House (Apple II, 1980) was the very first release from Sierra Online. Husband-and-wife cofounders Ken and Roberta Williams mailed the game in Ziplock baggies. They eventually sold over 10,000 copies. A word of warning, though: Mystery House isn’t any fun. “By any standards it’s an incredibly abusive play experience,” game designer Erin Robinson explains. She goes on to add that “the graphics have zero sense of perspective, and background lines travel through solid objects.” Crude green-on-black line drawings accompany sparse lines of blocky text. The houseguests aren’t particularly memorable, either. (Sam, for instance, is a brunet gravedigger. He’ll be among the first to go.) Meanwhile, the game’s prose doesn’t exactly aspire to Shakespearean heights. “Because they only left themselves room at the bottom of the screen for about two lines of text,” game developer Jake Elliott says, “the textual room...

This piece inspired Rhizome to reissue Theresa Duncan’s three computer games. Thanks to Kickstarter support, the games were made available to play online. Developed in 1994 and published the following year, Chop Suey was a cunning piece of multimedia edutainment, suited just as well to grown-ups — smirking hipsters and punk rockers, probably — as it was to the prescribed “girls 7 to 12” crowd. But it wasn’t a computer game. It was something else: a loosely-strung system of vignettes; a psychedelic exercise in “let’s-pretend”; a daydream in which the mundanity of smalltown Ohio collides with the interior lives of its two young protagonists. As the game opens, the Bugg sisters are idling on a grassy knoll, counting clouds and recalling the day’s events. Lily and June Bugg, we are informed, have spent the afternoon with Aunt Vera. The narrator — a yet-unknown David Sedaris — sets the scene in nasally twee, occasionally...

Earlier this month, New York University’s Game Center presented Bad is Beautiful, a playable exhibit of some of video games’ most brilliantly aberrant atrocities. At least one game was missing. “This is the crap avant-garde,” the exhibit’s website gushes. And the Game Center’s main mission — to champion garbage, to uncover the truth and beauty burning within even the most inane — sure is noble. The exhibit was poised, it seemed, to hone in on a type of videogame art brut. But the exhibit’s curator, Owen McLean, mmmmmight have courted controversy when he included GoldenEye 007 (N64, 1997) in the gallery lineup. The Internet became predictably indignant: Whaaaat? Who would do such a thing? And to be honest, I had to side with the Internet here. The GoldenEye games are classic! What was GoldenEye 007 doing in a “bad games” gallery exhibit? Maybe the exhibit had missed its mark. Where was the Typing of the Dead, the Takeshi’s Challenge...