Welcome to Videogame Pavilion

Howdy! My name is Chris and I’d like to welcome you to the launch Videogame Pavilion. This site is to be a resource of primary and secondary sources for the hobby and industry of videogaming.

This is an alpha version of the site taking nine videogame magazines as sources. Seven of these magazines are available in two digital archive forms: 300dpi images of every page of the magazine in both PDF and CBR formats; and web recreations of the articles and graphical elements. Two additional magazines were sourced from other sites thus only the web recreations are provided at this time.

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Coin-op Frogger

Atari 2600 Frogger

ColecoVision Frogger While many sites start with the games, Videogame Pavilion is committed to being a home for primary and secondary sources. All games mentioned in magazines will receive coverage regardless of release. Because the focus of this launch is on the magazines the game pages are solely sourced from material found within with a two exceptions: Frogger and Lock ‘N’ Chase. While these pages are far from complete they are representative of the type of material that will bolster the magazine information about a title. Each game page features sections for screenshots, artwork, photos, advertising and articles from the magazines as a start. From there games can have releases, where physical representations of the games themselves are also archived. Taking the sample of Frogger you will see three items above, with the graphical objects linking to the “master” Frogger page, while the text links below take you to specific release pages. Following modern web design trends the master pages attempt to combine as much information into one location as a starting point for research. The release pages focus on primary sources such as game release packaging, manuals, catalogs and more. Despite the focus on primary and secondary sources there is added value to be had by linking to additional digital information in the form of articles and videos. The over 800 games that are part of this launch all have links to MobyGames, Wikipedia and The Arcade Museum where available, while Frogger and Lock ‘N’ Chase add links to articles on other sites and videos available on YouTube. As the collection of magazines grows so will third-party links about the referenced titles, as well as more primary resources around game releases.

Adventure Astrosmash Kaboom! Centipede Frogger TRON Screenshots are a great way to represent a videogame as a single frame of art. Thanks to video we can now preserve a game in a better way, but screenshots will always have a place. As a record of the state of a game changing from pre-release to release or simply an artist’s interpretation of a game before it comes to life images provoke memories in gamers. Given the era of these magazines, the early 1980s, “screenshot” is a looser term than it is today. Many of these “screens” are artist rendering provided by the publishers. Others are photographs of television sets or arcade monitors.



December 1982 Electronic Fun

December 1982 Electronic Games

December 1982 Video Games A primary focus of the site will be advertising, preserving the way most gamers were introduced to titles outside of first seeing them on store shelves. Given the challenges of marketing in the digital age the ads found in these magazines, as well as television commercials to be covered in the future, serve as part of the history of the selling of videogames. Mutli-page ads are merged at each fold point to recreate the experience of paging through the magazine. Links to all products are included in summary pages allowing multiple ways to navigate through them. Each is assigned a “campaign-permalink”, a way to organize the use of the same ad in multiple publications. There is much more to do in regard to using advertising as a starting point for both research and nostalgia. A later launch article about the next steps in building the site will discuss some of these ideas.



Fall 1982 Video Games Player

Spetember/October 1982 Vidiot

December 1982 Videogaming Illustrated Original artwork solicited by the magazines or provided by videogame publishers is separated and indexed. Where possible this artwork has been edited to remove overlay text to retain the original artist’s intent as well as remaining as is in the full page scans.



Spetember/October 1982 Vidiot

December 1982 Electronic Games

December 1982 Video Games Like artwork photos are extracted and indexed and edited where appropriate. Many photos show regular videogame life and serve to document the hobby since its inception.



December 1982 Electronic Games

December 1982 Video Games

December 1982 Videogaming Illustrated All of the above starts with the article. Videogame Pavilion allows you to browse through these magazines as if they were modern web sites. Another article deals with the process and technical details of the site and delves into the choices that were made in transitioning very different magazine layouts and style choices into a hopefully somewhat coherent standard for the site.