London friends! I'm appearing on a panel about videogames and design for Disegno Journal tomorrow night with Marie Foulston and Rhiarna Dhaliwal, hosted by editor Oli Stratford. There will be games, drinks and food, and it's free! See you there???
https://disegnojournal.com/newsfeed/are-we-having-fun-yetEvent Invitation: Are We Having Fun Yet? — Disegno Journal
Disegno invites you to a gaming night and panel discussion to explore how the digital space of video game could influence other design fields
Just reading up on my home town of Bath in the BBC Domesday Project
de_dust designer Dave Johnston on Counter-Strike’s 25th birthday (!! Mind you, Minecraft is 15)
https://www.johnsto.co.uk/blog/25-years/25 Years of Counter-Strike
Happy 25th Birthday, Counter-Strike!
The PC Engine Duo is such a beautiful console, and I only just realised that I’d forgotten I met its designer, Shin Azumi, way way back, and that he, with his wife Tomoko, became, like, proper designer-designers of stools and chairs and such
https://rotational.co.uk/2024/06/the-designer-of-the-pc-engine-duo/
The designer of the PC Engine Duo
The PC Engine Duo’s casing is marked out by those delightful ridged sides and zig-zag in the line that connects the on button to the CD opening button. (Wikipedia) Way back, probably in 2003 or 2004, when I worked on the design magazine Icon, I interviewed Shin and Tomoko Azumi, leading designers of stools, chairs and homeware. I don’t remember much about it, beyond liking their elegant and minimal but expressive work and the ride along the North London Line to get to their home and studio. So when I stumbled on the article after restoring it to this website, along with a bunch of other ancient posts that had been locked away in a Wordpress backup, I noticed something that I’d entirely forgotten:
After their BA courses, Tomoko worked at architectural practices and Shin worked in the electronic giant NEC’s personal computer department where he designed the casing for the PC Engine Duo, the first CD-rom based videogame console.
Designed the PC Engine Duo?!
And these new Necromunda Genestealer lads are
😍😍😍😍😍
Oh I’m to be meeting a new Genestealer Cultist friend soon!
The end of the mechanical in modern tech is such a terrible loss, even if that’s where VCRs, floppy drives, Walkmen all tended to go wrong. Here’s a profoundly satisfying supercut of anime “retro tech”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6_DonKX4J4This by
@nathan_brown is a great summation of the current calamitous state of the gaming media. (Hint: subscribe to his excellent work! And that of other independent journalists!)
https://hitpoints.substack.com/p/235-machine-killer
#235: Machine killer
GenML's latest trick: an existential threat to online games media.
