Topic: Digital Eclipse and the Interactive Documentary

Hi all, I made a post on this topic over on the NintendoLife forums, not realizing that the forums and comments of Hookshot sites aren't unified, so I hope it's okay if I make one over here as well. I don't want to delete the other thread, as it got a thoughtful response from someone, but I also feel that it might generate more discussion over here. I also may be hoping for too much from a niche topic on a niche site, haha. Oh well. I just like talking games.

Here's the original post. I'll paste the contents below:

"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."

@Dogorilla responded:

That led me to this picture:

...and now I'd also be interested in knowing more about these guys, haha. Both to hear their stories and to fill in my (very lacking) knowledge of the UK home computer gaming scene.

Any thoughts?

I like talking about video games too

The Atari 50 collection is stunning. It's exactly how retro compilations should be done, providing all of that value added content, history, and context. It really shows up the lazy shovel-ware rom-dump collections for what they are.

I have the Jeff Minter story too, but have yet to explore it. I'm expecting good things.

As for other companies I'd like to see a similar treatment of, Taito immediately springs to mind. iD would be a good shout, but also some SEGA studios like AM2 who have been very influential over the years.

I'd also like to see companies like Sierra, LucasArts, SSI, Origin and others given a similar treatment. I say similar because the Atari collection (and I expect the Minter one) has games you can just dip in and out of spending as much time as you like, whereas adventure games, rpgs, strategic battle games require a bit more investment.

Fully agree.

I started The Making of Karateka shortly after writing the original post, and so far it's been at the level of Atari 50, so I too expect good things from The Jeff Minter Story! I've been a Prince of Persia fan for years, so I have some surface-level familiarity with Karateka and Jordan Mechner's older games. Getting all these details filled in about how he grew up (many of which are recounted by his lovely father in video clips) has been very interesting, and increases my respect for both the original Prince of Persia and The Sands of Time. On the other hand, I have very little experience with Llamasoft games, so I'll be getting the full-course Minter education (pre-Tempest 4000, of course). I'm excited!

Taito and id are excellent choices and I'd be thrilled to see either of them. AM2, however, gets an S+ ranking from me, a big Yu Suzuki fan who was literally JUST reminiscing about importing Shenmue II in a retro thread over on NL, haha.

That's a good point; the structure of the collection would need to be tweaked to accommodate that. I'd be really interested to see what they do in that regard, given that they're so good at framing short-form games. One thing they did in The Making of Karateka that I feel really lends itself to that is giving you a choice between playing the game or watching a playthrough. I was very surprised to see the second option, and even more surprised when I was informed that I could press a button to take control at any moment! And... yeah, they weren't kidding. You can fast forward, rewind, and pause, just like a video (complete with runtime and progress bar), but at any frame you can just seamlessly take over. After messing around with it, I believe it's essentially a series of save states of a tool-assisted run, just presented as a video, which is why it doesn't need to boot into the emulator to let you take control; you're already there. I used it to check out the differences in the later stages of a game, based on Mechner's own notes(!), without having to play through each iteration from the beginning. I mean, little things like that floor me about these collections. When have we ever been able to do this before with our hobby? So very, very cool.