ENJOYING A DIGITAL SPACE or; please do not touch the items with your hands
by dean
note: this is a script for a video essay I plan to make, but I really don't feel like it is strong enough for a video. however, it is strong enough for a blog post! this is a pilot script for "Lightman's Son," a series of video essays I'd like to write about games and media. But here it is as, you know, just a regular essay.
Hello, friends!
NAMCO Museum for the Sony PlayStation is a series of games that spanned 5 volumes from 1995 to 1997. They are compilation ports of classic NAMCO arcade titles. They feature games such as PAC-MAN, BOSCONIAN, MAPPY, RALLY-X, POLE POSITION, and more.
I personally grew up only playing Volume 3 in the NAMCO Museum series. The one with the M on it. I’m forming a lot of my descriptions and using my memories of this specific volume, but they largely apply to the whole series. Volume 3 included ports of MS. PAC-MAN, POLE POSITION 2, DIG-DUG, GALAXIAN, THE TOWER OF DRUAGA, and PHOZON.
In NAMCO Museum, you play as PAC-MAN himself, a fun detail represented by the little animated icon in the bottom right corner. You walk through a luxurious “museum” featuring themed exhibits around each game in the collection.
You’re greeted by a pink robot concierge who asks you to refrain from smoking inside the museum and “please, do not touch the items with your hands.”
Pick a game you’d like to explore from the main lobby and enter its exhibition room. In the hallway leading towards the Game Room, you can interact with various items on display. It is typically game manuals or promotional material, as well as a few pictures of the game’s circuit board. Once you’ve reached the final item (a How-to-Play sheet), you can enter the Game Room.
Inside the Game Room, you’re treated to a really cool re-orchestration of the game’s main theme music, along with animated characters, special effects, and aesthetics. I love the looping launch sequence from the GALAXIAN room, the scientists observing you in the PHOZON room, the orbaceous monsters from Dig-Dug bouncing around in the archeological zone, the Ms Pac-Man & Pac-Dog dance from the MS. PAC-MAN room, and the huge Druaga in the TOWER OF DRUAGA room. That one was my favorite as a kid. You can also unlock secret game rooms, like an alternate Druaga room called “Another Tower.”
Other highlights in the collection are the recreation of the SKY-INN from ORDYNE, and the little woodland clearing from the LEGEND OF VALKYRIE. The entire museum’s design in Volume 5 is unique and interesting. The BOSCONIAN room in Volume 1 makes me ill.
Also, playing PAC-LAND makes me ill. Sorry, PAC-LAND.
Once you’re satisfied with the game exhibits, you can walk to the Library (or, Lounge, in the first 2 volumes). This is a wing of the museum dedicated to Namco Community Magazine NG covers, concept artwork for the games, and photographs of some arcade cabinets. I’d like to hang out in this Library! It's usually quiet, peaceful, and empty, but in Volume 4 you get to browse the library area with a bunch of LIBBLE-RABBLE dudes.
There is the Theater wing, where you can view sprites and animations from each game. You can also listen to each game’s music and sound effects! The Theater itself is populated with tons of colorful characters, the most active room in the museum.
Everywhere else is lonely and meditative, save for the few Information robots waiting around. The Volume 3’s Lobby Theme is what my dreams sound like on a good night’s sleep.
This is all wonderful. This is especially wonderful to an only child in 1998.
As an adult, I can readily admit it’s pretty clunky! Load-times are abysmal when you are trying to look at the game pamphlets or concept art for the games. Gotta load into the little view screen and then if you want to zoom in and inspect the items closer it's another few seconds of loading. Then you gotta exit out TWICE to get to the hallway again. Movement speed through the museum is languid and stiff. The limitations of the era are extremely apparent.
When I was a kid, my dream was that one day, graphics and presentation would get so much better that they’d release NAMCO DEAD REDEMPTION II. (Here's where I'd show a silly little image of Pac-Man wearing a cowboy hat inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, if I wasn't extremely lazy.)
Call it something like… NAMCO MUSEUM: FOREVER. Every classic Namco game in a multi-story museum filled with high quality exhibits that you can just zoom in on and inspect and maybe even have some interactive quests with NPCs as they guide you through calm, liminal space-like hallways. A perfect digital environment that actually serves as a realistic museum to explore the history of gaming and NAMCO. I still dream about a game like this. A digital space to hang out in, and have digital experiences.
In the newest release of this series, 2020’s NAMCO MUSEUM ARCHIVES, you’re just picking the game you want to play and pressing start. There are some nice modern touches like a rewind and a save feature. But they don’t have any CRT filters to make the games look good. Regular emulators have that! They still separate the games into multiple volumes! It's not even a complete collection! They don’t have any game manuals or magazine covers or pleasant spaces to explore. It’s completely laser-focused on the games themselves and charging you twice to get them all. And there’s still no LIBBLE-RABBLE. We have analog sticks now!!
This is all a result of the devaluing of prestige presentation in digital entertainment. The quiet space between the games is just as important as the games themselves. The exploration around the media, engaging with it as a piece of art is completely lost. We lost the cultural ability, patience, and free time to simply enjoy a digital space.
Even menus themselves have gotten less interesting. Take the Wii Shop. It was an interface designed with a fashionable Frutiger Aero aesthetic and lounge music with a bossa-nova beat that you still hear today in every video essay you’ve ever watched. It was a place that you looked forward to browsing. You might have even put on the music while you cleaned your room. The Nintendo Switch eShop has no music. It features flattened squares of the game logos and that is it. It also barely works.
DVD menus used to be filled with fun games and Easter Eggs and some life to accompany the downtime before and after watching a movie and its bonus features. It was a big deal! You could spend (what felt like) hours on the menus alone. Now, we have endless, bland scrolling menus on streaming services with the express function of stumbling upon the next bit of content to consume.
We don’t get to explore anymore. Menus are bland. Curated museums are gone. Websites are endless commercials. We’re not making things designed to simply kill time and appreciate things. Everything is disposable. All of this detail, this personality, is removed to get into and out of the content faster.
The thing is, in the NAMCO Museum games… you could also select the games from the main menu! The museum portion was ALL an optional experience. But the museum context made getting to play the games better. Greater. Prestigious. Like a Criterion Collection of video game history. It made me appreciate PHOZON.
PHOZON is wack!
We’ve grown with technology and the kinds of experiences we can build with it. What used to be a slower process of discovery became something we take for granted. We don’t have time for wandering around a digital museum. We were shown the promise of what could be when we were kids, but our relationship to it changed. We came to see all of the extra texture and details as superfluous padding. Things got faster and could hold more information. We pivoted from marveling at the whimsical and fantastic to emulating realism. We culturally lost a sense of wonder as our lives got busier and as technology got more commonplace. Then, the Money caught on to our need for instant gratification.
Companies and corporate investors don’t want us to spend a lot of time in the fancy, expensive museum anymore. They don't want to give us paychecks that give us the means to have free time. They want us to pay for a quick, cheap, bare-bones pop-up exhibit and be on our way to the next one. Why have a museum when you can have a menu?
Thank you.
THE END.