Nathan Daniel Altice, No Generation. Since the late 1970s, when the first era of dedicated ball-and-paddle games gave way to cartridge-based consoles, the consumer electronics press has grouped videogames’ historical timeline into discrete generations. While these generations help us define and categorize by hardware similarities, those platforms that don’t fit tidily within the accepted trajectory—market failures, computer/console hybrids, clones, regional variations, and so on—end up as footnotes in our game histories. So how might we chart failed or forgotten media constellations and renew the history of platforms that belong to no generation?

Nathan Altice is a Teaching Professor, Computational Media at the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, UCSC. His research interests include history of computing, hardware humanities, platform studies, games and play, computing cultures, sound and synthesis.