Microsoft's Game Room for Xbox Live Arcade is a leap into the legal age of emulation -- for years, people have been illegally playing ROM files of old Arcade games over the internet with little thought on where they come from, or who owned the rights to them.
Although there have been PC services like GameTap offering legal play of classic titles, Game Room changed this for consoles at the end of March 2010, with over 30 titles with the promise of new games getting released each week thereafter. While there has been a delay, the next batch of Game Room titles will hit this Wednesday.
We got in contact with Lead Designer Dan Hooley and Lead Arcade Board Technician Barry Jones from Krome Studios, the Australian developer behind the Game Room, to see what their background in Arcade machines were, and what we can expect from the service in the future.
Tell us a bit about yourself – when did you start playing games, and when did you get into the industry?
Dan Hooley: I think I started playing games at around 5-6 years old; I have fragmented memories of my cousin owning an Atari 2600 - and then my first machine, an Acorn Electron personal computer. Spectrum +2’s and C64’s ensued and I think my first console was aged at around 7-8, when my mum came home with a giant Nintendo box. ROB the robot and hex code loading screens were pretty much the hook for me to get into games.
After an education that was very IT and computers focused, I eventually entered the industry 7 years ago at Bits Studios as a Junior Designer - Game Room being my 8th release and 10th project so far (but nothing to the 20 years + programming vets who are pulling the code from the arcade boards)
Barry Jones: I started playing space invaders in about 1980, and loved it. That got me keen to get into the business, so I managed to get a job handing out change, sweeping the floors etc, at a video arcade in Brisbane. That was great because I got to play the games for free. Later they moved me to the workshop, where I began wiring up cabinets and doing general repair work. After that I went on to learn the tech side of things, and had my own business repairing game boards, which led to an interest in programming the games, so began learning to do that. As time went by I found myself designing custom game boards for various companies, and writing games.
Eventually, many years later, I came to Krome as a programmer. When this Game Room project came along, I got very excited by it because it made good use of both areas I’d had experience in, hardware and software.
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