bingewatches

History is told by the winners, the saying goes, and that’s certainly been true with English-language coverage of the video game industry. Want coverage of the NES and PlayStation? That’s easy to find. Want coverage of the Zemmix and Dendy? Were you even aware they existed?

Lewis Packwood’s book Curious Video Game Machines was written to fill in some of those gaps. Structured around game consoles and hardware that never got much attention in the West the first time around, the book is an exhaustively researched look at a world that has largely been unexplored — either in English, or at all.

In an effort to spotlight many game-related books and documentaries, Polygon is running an email interview series with the people behind them. We previously connected with Julian Rignall about his not-quite-an-autobiography The Games of a Lifetime and Paul Vogel about his Housemarque documentary The Name of the Game, and below we have Packwood discussing how and why he went digging into the most curious of game machines.

Polygon: I love this book because I think when most people think of obscure game consoles, they go to something like Pippin, but you show there was a whole different world out there. Where did that idea come from?

Lewis Packwood: It all began back in 2014, when I discovered the Avatar Machine, created by the artist Marc Owens. It was such a wild idea: he’d created a polygon-style suit with VR goggles, which were attached to a camera on a pole sticking out of the back of the suit, so this contraption let you view yourself from a third-person perspective, as if you were in a video game. I wrote an article about it, and shortly after that I came across a forum discussion about a unique, open-source Yugoslavian computer called the Galaksija. I wrote about that, too, and over the years I’ve kept an eager eye out for stories about unusual consoles and computers, like the Casio Loopy, a Japanese exclusive console that prints stickers. It regularly astounds me just how many weird and wonderful game machines are out there, machines that hardly anyone has heard of.

The catalyst for writing the book was an interview with Chris Crawford a few years back in 2021. I was talking to him for a feature about Balance of Power, the brilliant Cold War tactics game he made in 1985, a few years before he founded GDC. Apropos of nothing, he showed me some pictures of a custom machine he’d made back in the 1970s out of a KIM-1 kit computer, and I was fascinated. He called it Kimtanktics, and it was one of the first ever computer wargames: a real-time, two-player tank battle that you controlled with a calculator-style controller in conjunction with a big paper map. The machine itself was housed in a huge wooden cabinet, and Chris had only ever shown it off at early game conventions, meaning just a few hundred people have ever played it (with a blanket hung between the players so they couldn’t peek at each other’s maps). It felt like such an important piece of gaming history, but I also knew it was such a niche thing that it would be difficult to persuade any editor to commission an article on it. But I was fascinated, and I was certain other people would be, too. That’s when I decided to write the book, with the idea of revisiting several of the unusual machines I’d discovered over the years and really digging into the stories behind them.

If you had to choose one, what would you say is the most curious game machine featured in the book, and why? (Side note: Any chance you have a photo of this?)

It’s so difficult to choose, but one of the most surprising machines was the Daewoo Zemmix. I found out about it through a console collector, but it’s a machine that very few people know about, since it was never sold outside South Korea. Daewoo was a huge Korean conglomerate that was probably most famous for manufacturing cars, but back in the 1980s it developed a line of computers based on the MSX standard, which was popular for a while in places like Japan, the Netherlands and South America. Daewoo then expanded into MSX-based consoles, beginning with the Zemmix in 1985, followed by the Zemmix V, the Zemmix Super V and the Zemmix Turbo. And they are gorgeous machines. The Zemmix V in particular looks phenomenal, like a triangular rocket ship. It came in a range of colours, too, and the asymmetrically coloured version is particularly beautiful.

These machines were so popular in Korea that there was even a mini console version of the Zemmix V released a few years back in the same vein as the NES Mini, but almost no one outside the country has heard of them. It just goes to show that the history of video games is much more complicated and interesting than the narratives we’re often told, and it varied enormously according to which country you lived in. This is something that I’ve tried to get across in the book, exploring, for example, how the video games crash of 1983 wasn’t felt in the UK, where everyone was excited about microcomputers like the ZX Spectrum and the ill-fated Enterprise 64, while Brazil was dedicated to the Sega Master System (which was released in a number of unique forms in the country, like the Master System Girl) and Russia was devoted to the Dendy, a bootleg version of the Nintendo Famicom that even had its own TV show and magazine.

When researching the book, what were some of the biggest hurdles you had to jump through to track down details on these machines?

The trouble with writing a book about rare and unusual video game machines is that it’s often very hard to find information on them: even basic things like when they were released. I spent a long time picking through dusty texts and forums and trying to track down the people involved with these machines, and I got lucky on a few occasions: like interviewing Laury Scott, who ran the plant that produced the Radofin 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System. Many early consoles and computers were based around either the Zilog Z80 or MOS 6502 chips (the Atari VCS used a variant of the latter, for example), but Radofin’s console used the now long-forgotten Signetics 2650 chip — and this chip was also used in a host of other rarely talked about consoles, like the Interton VC 4000, which was made by a German hearing aid company. It was wonderful to explore the history of those strange old Signetics 2650 consoles, but so little has been written about them that the research was particularly difficult. Even the German Computerspielemuseum had only a couple of magazine articles relating to the VC 4000, although they ended up proving very useful.

One person who I spent ages trying to track down was Rick Dyer, the creator of Dragon’s Lair. He was also behind a couple of machines featured in the book: the hologram arcade cabinet Time Traveler and the now extremely rare RDI Halcyon, a 1985 LaserDisc-based console with voice recognition, of which only a handful of prototypes remain. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get hold of him (if you’re reading this Rick, I’d love to chat), but I was still able to tell the story of these machines through other sources. That wasn’t the case for a couple of other machines, and there were two chapters I had to drop because I just couldn’t dig up enough trustworthy information. But I’m hoping to revisit these in a follow-up book somewhere down the line if more information comes to light — and there are so many more curious video game machines out there to discover. I have a huge spreadsheet of rare and unusual machines that I’d love to feature in the next book, so this is just the tip of the iceberg!