The Evolution of Video Game Media
June 1st, 2010 by Benj Edwards
A few days ago, PC World published my latest slideshow, The Evolution of Video Game Media. Many people probably missed it due to Memorial Day weekend, but I’m here to remind you that it exists. It’s the third in my “Evolution” series of slideshows after “Evolution of the Cell Phone” and “The Evolution of Removable Storage.”
For this slideshow, I scanned every type of video game storage media I have — about 66 different cartridges, optical discs, and magnetic disks in all. I visually presented all of these formats to scale with each other between slides so you can get a sense of the size of each. While I included media from a majority of the video game systems ever released, I didn’t include every single one.
A large portion of the text was cut in edits for this slideshow (it’s hard to squeeze a lot of info into a small caption space), so I plan to publish the full text along with the images at a higher quality on VC&G at some point in the future. I hope you enjoy it.
June 1st, 2010 at 7:03 pm
That’s a fantastic collection of video game cartridges and other media types. You’re right that it is fascinating to be able to see them side by side for a comparison of shapes, sizes, etc. Well done!
June 2nd, 2010 at 1:23 am
About to go check it out, looking forward to it based on your past slideshow posts… Thanks for mentioning it here when one of your pieces appears elsewhere, since some of us wouldn’t know otherwise!
PS. For anyone else that’d prefer the slideshow have all/more of the relevant text visible, I shared a ‘fix’ on Userstyles a while back — my name/website link on this post should point to its page.
June 2nd, 2010 at 6:34 am
That’s cool, Xyzzy. I wish you didn’t have to click the “Show More” button every time, because I suspect few people read my text as a result, which I typically put a lot of work into. (The text of my slideshows is usually longer than most feature articles on tech news sites when I submit it to the editor — i.e. there’s a whole article in there as well as the pictures.)
There used to be a way to show a “print” view of any slideshow with all the slides and text on one page. I don’t know if you can do that anymore.