Eaten by a Grue

Here's the poster for our upcoming Racing Tournament. The poster is by Stephanie Grimm, one of our grad students.

We are getting ready to run our first gaming tournament in the archive! This will be a silent tournament, meaning that instead of several hours of head-to-head competition, the competitors will have to prove their mettle on five different racing games by scoring the best times. The races can be done during any of the designated times over the course of a week.

Fall semester begins on Tuesday, and so do the fall hours in the CVGA. Yes, by popular demand, we are adding hours on Saturday.We are also planning our first tournament in the CVGA, for sometime late September or early October. Stay tuned for details soon...

Bad news and good news: The bad news is that the archive will be closed all next week, due to the intersession. Regular summer hours will resume the week of August 31, though we'll of course be closed on Labor Day.The good news is that starting September 8 not only will we expand our daily hours to 10am - 9pm, we'll also be adding Saturday hours of 3pm to 9pm.

Over the course of the summer, various camp groups from here at U-M have made use of the video game archive for their campers, including Camp CAEN and GISE (Girls in Science and Engineering) Summer Day Camp.

From the July 2009 issue of Scientific American: “A pernicious excitement to learn and play [this game] has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages. Why should we regret this? It may be asked. We answer, [this game] is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body..."

The Computer & Video Game Archive will be closed Thursday & Friday July 2-3.

Robin Burkinshaw created a homeless family in Sims 3 and has been blogging their story at Alice and Kev: The story of being homeless in The Sims 3. Start at the beginning; you'll find their story fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking.

Local gaming store Get Your Game On is now a University of Michigan vendor, so I went down there this afternoon and picked out some old games for the archive: Atari, Intellivision, Genesis, NES, SNES, PS1, etc. A big thanks to Manager John for all his help!

After a long absence, the HP Blackbird 002 is back up and running, so you all can play your PC games again!