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- Title
The Intertextual Arcade: Tracing Histories of Arcade Clones in 1980s Britain.
- Authors
Gazzard, Alison
- Abstract
The videogame arcade has created franchises of iconic, recognizable characters and game mechanics from their inception during the 1970s and beyond. Whereas some videogame arcades were deliberately ported by companies to home gaming consoles, in Britain a microcomputing culture emerged in the 1980s focused on national computer literacy as well as users being actively engaged with programming and creating their own games. This culture spawned various clones and remakes of popular arcade games as a way of experimenting with well-known graphics and game mechanics often under the radar of the larger corporations releasing the initial <6> titles. This article explores the various remakes and clones of the popular games Pac-Man and Frogger made for both the ZX Spectrum and BBC Microcomputer platforms. In doing so it draws upon magazine articles, reviews and interview commentary from a ZX Spectrum developer as a way of piecing together an alternative history of the arcade game and the role these games played in wider computing cultures in Britain during this time.
- Subjects
AMUSEMENT arcades; VIDEO games; VIDEO game characters; VIDEO game consoles; PAC-Man (Game)
- Publication
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 2014, Vol 14, Issue 1, p3
- ISSN
1547-4348
- Publication type
Article