ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories is a hybrid audience, open-access journal for the advancement of critical historical studies of games
Works published in ROMchip are open access in accordance with the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. Authors retain copyright to works published in the journal. This license allows others to copy and redistribute work published in ROMchip, according to the following license terms: Provide Attribution — Redistributed work must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . Redistributors may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. Non-Commercial — Redistributed material may not be used for commercial purposes . No Derivatives — If an individual remixes, transforms, or builds upon the material, they may not distribute the modified material. Author/s retain all other rights to the publication, including rights to republish, audio/visual, film and television, podcast, and all other rights not named herein, and may do so without ROMchip’s permission. Author/s grant ROMchip a nonexclusive, perpetual license to publish their work. Author/s understand they must provide a citation to the original ROMchip publication if/when they publish the Work elsewhere.
Copyright (c) 2026 Laine Nooney http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2026 Skot Thayer http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Yves Greppin and the Swiss-centered Networks of European Atari Distribution (1981-1984)
Copyright (c) 2026 Guillaume Guenat, Pierre-Yves Hurel http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Yves Greppin et les réseaux helvétiques de la distribution européenne d’Atari (1981-1984)
This article traces women’s participation in Chinese gaming between the early 1980s and the post-2010 era, not as a simple move from absence to presence, but through shifting access, visibility, and value. Building on Western feminist media history that asks, per Laine Nooney, not only “Where are women in game history?” but “Why are they there in the way that they are?,” it reconstructs women’s place in Chinese game history while arguing that frameworks centered on liberal inclusion do not fully capture how gender operates in a postsocialist, state-led media system entangled with patriarchy and consumerism. To fill this gap, the article draws on materials such as game magazines, policy documents, online forums, and feminist scholarship, situating game history within Chinese state policy, gender politics, and media infrastructures, to reconstruct four overlapping moments: the arcade–home divide of the early reform era; negotiations over liberal aspiration and “Chineseness” in the late 1990s and first decades of the 2000s; the 2000 to 2010 rise of online games, esports, and beauty marketing; and the 2010 to 2015 platform and mobile boom that drew more women into mobile games, otome/boy love titles, esports, and livestreaming under tightening moral and commercial control. Across these periods, women surface as players, industry practitioners, community leaders, esports champions, and market icons, as well as bearers of national morality and targets of monetization. The post-2010 period sees NGO crackdowns, the so-called masculinity crisis, online misogyny, and stricter game censorship unfold alongside mobile and otome blockbusters, mobile esports, and feminist player communities, which expand but also fragment women’s presence. Under these conditions, industry and the state increasingly depoliticize women as consumer-citizens. Women players and creators, however, keep testing how far games can push back against these limits. Taken together, these histories show the value of a feminist reconstruction of Chinese gaming: It makes women visible in an understudied context and reveals how gender operates within a postsocialist, state-led media system.
Copyright (c) 2026 Mayshu (Meixu) Zhan http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Logan Brown; Pierre-Yves Hurel, Adrian Demleitner http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Laine Nooney http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Interwoven Threads of Experimental Games
Copyright (c) 2026 Gurn Group http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Pierre-Yves Hurel, Adrian Demleitner http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Niklas Nylund http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Des loisirs électroniques à la création de jeux
Copyright (c) 2025 Pierre-Yves Hurel, Sophie Bemelmans http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Between Mass Culture and Technological Improvisation
Copyright (c) 2025 Henrique Sampaio http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Heidi Kemps, Brian Clark; Hiromasa Iwasaki http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
From Leisure Electronics to Game Creation
Swelling inventories of obsolete arcade equipment prompted businesses to offload items into Japan’s secondhand electronics market during the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, surplus arcade game PCBs (printed circuit boards) found their way into the hands of home tinkerers, who built compact devices to play these games on televisions and computer monitors. This development marked the emergence of what is now recognized as the supergun hobby. Magazines fostered the early success of the hobby by facilitating the exchange of information and nurturing a sense of community among enthusiasts. The supergun hobby garnered considerable media attention during the height of its popularity; nevertheless, it has remained overlooked in academic discourse. Examining the supergun phenomenon from its do-it-yourself (DIY) origins offers a fresh perspective on Japan’s video game culture. Employing a heterodox approach, this article establishes a chronology of the supergun hobby by examining period print materials and, for the sake of comparison, the internal components of commercial hardware. Additionally, to recreate the DIY hobbyist experience, multiple supergun devices were built using only published build guides for instruction. The combination of textual and hands-on research illuminates a neglected yet noteworthy episode in the annals of electronic entertainment.
Copyright (c) 2025 Hanae Kramer http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Aurélie Petit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Translation of Étienne de Flacourt’s Fifangha Rules (1661)
Copyright (c) 2024 Alex de Voogt, Lisa Rougetet http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Screenshots are one of the most ubiquitous visual forms of the twenty-first century. Each day billions of screenshots are created on smart phones and personal computers to document the mundane and spectacular interactions of users with their computational machines. Perhaps the most publicly visible use for screenshots today is as proof of action with or through a computer—that is, as evidence of interaction. We use screenshots to document the microworld of the computer as a space of personal identification and individual expression. In this article I argue that this practice has its origins in the video game cultures of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this period, game publishers and magazines used screenshots to document the visual appearance of games for advertisements and publications. However, quite quickly users began to document and photograph their own experiences of play through photographs of personal achievements such as high scores and end screens. Game companies like Activision and magazines like Nintendo Power encouraged this practice, offering rewards and publishing scores to foster participation. These vernacular practices marked a shift in how users related to computational systems—not merely as tools but as expressive environments where actions were documented and identified with. Over time, these practices evolved into a broader visual culture of play, encompassing screen selfies, player portraits, and early cultures of competitive play such as speedrunning. Far from trivial ephemera, these images indexed the rise of a new computational personhood, where users saw themselves reflected in their screen interactions. In situating this history within this broader discourse, I suggest that unprofessional, everyday practices of gaming and its visual documentation reveal the social and personal dimensions of digital life. Screenshots become not only technical artifacts but also records of self, community, and computational experience.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jacob Gaboury http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Video games are an art form that saw early experiments in the mainframe computing era, emerged fully in the personal computing era, and has proliferated amid the ubiquitous computing era. This new media form introduced an expanded sensorium through aesthetics that include mechanics, kinesthetics, proprioception, networked interrelations among players, and haptics. An exemplary element of video game aesthetics is proceduralism, a concept first theorized by media scholars such as Janet Murray, Ian Bogost, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. In this essay, we approach the expanded field of media aesthetics via video game proceduralism and its computational foundations, but with particular attention to traces and absences that gesture toward the unconscious. Instead of the individual unconscious, we are most interested in something more akin to Fredric Jameson’s “political unconscious,” which is historical and collective, though still nonrepresentational. Our inquiry focuses on how game aesthetics feel out connections among terms that might otherwise seem distinct, including computational abstractions, speculative finance, and racial capitalism. To explore this point, we turn to American designer Lucas Pope’s 2018 Return of the Obra Dinn, an independent puzzle game that asks the player to explore a merchant ship that disappears and returns several years later in 1807. This game is unusual, even singular, but it also stages more generalizable ways that proceduralism accesses history. In place of the game's own logic-driven murder mystery, we substitute a media aesthetic mystery: why would a late 2010s video game use a contemporary perspective and a 1980s graphical style to explore a narrative about early 1800s marine insurance? By making sense of Obra Dinn’s medium-specific operations within the context of political hermeneutics, we seek to theorize what we call the procedural unconscious. Though human beings lack direct access to the opacity of contemporary computation, algorithms, and networks, video games use procedural and affective interactions to extend our sensation and perception into the contemporary media ecology and allow us to play and experiment with it. The procedural unconscious complicates a rationalist approach to video games through careful attention to their sensory dimensions and opens up a more layered approach to historical thought, especially the trajectory that leads from the transatlantic slave trade to racial capitalism.
Copyright (c) 2024 Patrick Jagoda, Ashlyn Sparrow http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Mikko Heinonen, Niklas Nylund http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Henry Lowood http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Accessible Sport and “Wheelchair Romance”
Copyright (c) 2024 Matt Knutson http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Multimodal Adaptation of Game Center Arashi
Copyright (c) 2024 Nathan Altice http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Computer Theatre is an unreleased game prototype commissioned by Activision in the mid-1980s. Through interviews and a large collection of physical and digital artifacts, we present and contextualize this never-before-seen prototype from disparate disciplinary points of view: game history, computer science, anthropology, and archaeology. Specifically, we argue that Computer Theatre is an early entry in what we would now call the visual novel genre. This multifaceted genre focuses on both social interactions and on the playful exploration of branching paths; it also exhibits first steps toward hypertext and multiform games. Due to the people involved and the time period, we are additionally able to enhance the knowledge of contributions from women in the early game industry and document some of the human ramifications of the 1983 (predominantly North American) video game crash.
Copyright (c) 2024 Dona Bailey, Paul Allen Newell, Katie Biittner, Carl Therrien, John Aycock http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Deep Past, Imaginary Future, and the Interactive Novel
Copyright (c) 2023 Soraya Murray http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Using a mixture of media archaeology and discourse analysis, I argue that the two most popular board games in ancient Greece, Five Lines (Pente Grammai) and City-State (Polis), had direct precursors in dynastic Egypt. I note that Plato's two speculative city-building dialogues—the Republic and the Laws—both engage in a "serious game" (in Plato's words) of imagining an ideal city, and each one mentions a different game as their referent (City-State is referenced in the Republic, and Pente Grammai is mentioned in the Laws). Through this comparison and references to other Greek literature modeled on games, I describe the central importance of games as models in early Greece. I argue that this understanding of games as models necessitates a reappraisal of game origins and patterns of transformation and that it reaffirms the necessity of game studies across disciplines.
Copyright (c) 2023 Samuel Pizelo http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Selling the First Programmable Game Console
Copyright (c) 2023 Kevin Bunch http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article makes an intervention into the growing body of literature concerned with historical video game paratexts, with a focus on Obsidian Entertainment’s Pentiment (2022). The game is remarkable for its ludonarrative and paratextual engagement with the complexities of history, particularly mediating the role of power and memory, and the consequences of the limited evidence of the past left behind. Focussing namely on various paratextual materials that accompanied and preceded Pentiment’s release, this article explores the “layered” approach to deploying historical discourses in the game’s promotion and critical reception. It does so by categorising different elements of this discourse into three conceptual categories – history of, history around, and history in – noting where and why they intersect, and to what effect. It also explores Pentiment’s comparative novelty as a mainstream game which takes a more critical approach to remediating historical knowledge, yet attempts were still made to construct a sense of the game’s “authenticity”. Ultimately, this article sustains the argument that we should take video game paratexts seriously, incorporating them as a vital part of our consideration of historical video games to arrive at more nuanced understandings of the way they represent and negotiate memory and knowledge of the past.
Copyright (c) 2024 Esther Wright http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article is a contextual historical study focused on the restoration process of a Finnish educational PC game, Promille (Tietotoimisto, 1990). In 2017, a floppy disk containing the previously unknown (to historians and hobbyists) game was found by chance in the city woods of Tampere, Finland. These unusual circumstances and the following repair efforts, undertaken as a collaboration between the local retrogaming circles and the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere, attracted national media attention. This paper aims at reconstructing and contextualizing these events while at the same time reflecting on the cultural practices of maintenance and repair at public and private memory institutions in Finland, and how the case of Promille has affected the local heritage community. The study contributes to the theoretical discussions around the heritagization of games and revisits Alois Riegl’s concept of unintentional monuments in relation to game cultures.
Copyright (c) 2023 Maria B. Garda, Niklas Nylund, Jaakko Suominen http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2023 Scott Stilphen http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0