#UTOPIA GAMES FOR MAC#
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Thus emerged Utopia, the video game, an early 1982 release for Mattel's Intellivision home video game console. They play with systems, and they create models and simulations with them - so that we may play with them too. They look at the interaction of these systems, and examine how the world works.

Utopia, a word meaning 'nowhere', or 'no place', thus now also means 'the perfect place'.Īnd it has occupied the minds of game designers just as completely over the five decades we've had this digital medium as it had architects, writers, philosophers, painters, and poets for millennia before that.īut not necessarily for the same reasons - for you see game designers, in the same vein, it seems, as Sir Thomas More, tend to think in systems - not ideals. It was hardly the first time that somebody had imagined - or even satirised - an ideal society, but it captured the imagination in such a way that we named the concept after this fictional place. A place called Utopia, a place that, of course, was flawed in myriad ways, doomed to failure, and frankly much less perfect than our enthusiastic traveller would have you believe, all for reasons left to the reader to identify. He was a statesman, lawyer, and philosopher, but today we know him best for a literary work of his called Utopia, a satirical account, told by a fictional character to More himself, of visiting a perfect island society. We call this utopia, a term plucked from the writings of Sir Thomas More, an Englishman who lived in the late-15th and early-16th-century. And yet we cannot resist the temptation to imagine a perfect world, if only one could exist, and to ponder how we might attain it. I'm Richard Moss, and this is episode 29, Utopia, and the teacher who made a game of its impossibility.

#UTOPIA GAMES SERIES#

Welcome to the Life and Times of Video Games, a documentary audio series about video games and the video game industry, as they were in the past and how they've come to be the way they are today. (I also accept commissions and the like over email, if you're after something specific.) To support my work, so that I can uncover more untold stories from video game history, you can make a donation via /mossrc or subscribe to my Patreon. Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon - especially my $10+ backers Carey Clanton, Rob Eberhardt, Simon Moss, Vivek Mohan, Wade Tregaskis, and Seth Robinson.

#UTOPIA GAMES FOR MAC#

You can find out more about his Retro Games for Mac collection at his website or by listening to my Indie Spotlight interview with him.

Thanks to my sponsor for this episode, Richard Bannister.

All music in this episode was my own, except selected clips from Santa Paravia, Astrosmash, Fascinating Fruit, and Utopia, and the IBM mainframe playing a song.In the meantime, you can grab a fan-made remake on Itch.io (Mac or Windows), track down a copy of the Intellivision Lives! collection from some years back, boot it up in an emulator, or just watch some videos of it on YouTube. Utopia is one of several Intellivision games slated for re-release on the upcoming Intellivision Amico console.

Utopia games