Phosphor Dot Fossils: About Our Video Feature
Welcome to the media archive for Phosphor Dot Fossils. This is meant to serve as a collection of movies and other media supporting the soon-to-be-redesigned Phosphor Dot Fossils video and computer game archive, and isn’t really designed to be browsed on its own, but hey, you’re welcome to poke around and let us know what you think.
For many years, as many great books as I’ve read on the subject of the video game industry, I’ve always felt that a book intrinsically misses huge swaths of the video game experience. There’s sight and sound and suspense and much more that you just don’t get to see unless you’re playing - or watching someone else play. You’d think that the many TV documentaries on the same subject would remedy this, but they often don’t. (They often don’t even get the facts right - when I see a documentary reducing Ralph Baer to a footnote to the grand story of how Nolan Bushnell created the video game industry, I cringe…and then change the channel.)
So I decided to apply a little bit of my TV and technical know-how to this problem, and the result is a compromise which straddles the audiovisual experience of video games and the thousands of words I’ve already written on the subject. The new version of Phosphor Dot Fossils will gradually replace static snapshots or simple animated GIFs with a Shockwave Flash movie of the game in question actually being played. What you’re seeing is the actual game’s output, recorded to digital videotape, converted into a humongous AVI file, and then converted into a more compact (usually ~5 megs) Flash video file (thanks to the Kimili Flash Embed plug-in for WordPress). Some resolution is lost, but the experience of seeing the game in motion and seeing how it works is gained.
Wherever possible, you’re seeing the output of the original hardware. When you see an Intellivision or Odyssey 2 or ColecoVision game in action, you’re seeing it coming from the original machine, running through my custom-built A/V rig allowing me to record even RF-based systems to digital video - you’re not seeing it run on an emulator.
Also, in the true spirit of classic adventure games, there are a few hidden treasures to be found by clicking on the movie while it’s running. Sometimes it might be a chance to see an unusually interesting attract mode. Sometimes it might be something even cooler than that. These “Easter Eggs” aren’t everywhere, but they will crop up from time to time if you’re paying attention.
Go give it a try, and I think you’ll agree that this is the neatest thing to hit this site since screenshots were invented. More mini-movies of games in action are being added as fast as I can record and process them (and play them, which certainly makes things fun!), so check back often for new videos.
