Monday August 8, 2022; 10:46 AM EDT
- Some scheduled, fixed-topic podcasts start way slow, first mentioning every sponsor, talking about where the idea for the episode came from ("I was walking along Main Street when I saw a sign in the window of a shop . . ."), mentioning how cool the episode is going to be, how much respect we all must have for the person about to be interviewed, how we first became acquainted with their work, etc.#
- But Museum Archipelago takes another approach. Here's the opening script for a recent episode:#
- 0:00 "Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner.#
- 0:06 "Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than fifteen minutes."#
- 0:13 "So let's get started."#
- (End of standard episode introduction. Episode's new content commences here.)#
- 0:15 "The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play . . . games. The central interpretive through line, called Milestones, presents a timeline of the rapid development of the video game industry, through fifty individual games, from Space War, developed in 1962 at MIT, to the latest console and PC games. But nearby, tucked into corners and side rooms, visitors are invited to play many of these games on their original hardware with their original controllers. The museum even goes so far as to emulate the spaces in which people would have been playing these games the year of their release. Games like Asteroids and Space Invaders are presented in a full arcade-like environment. Early home computer games live inside your parents' home office, while the home console classics like Super Mario Brothers are in a space made to look like a basement in an early-90s suburban home in the U.S. So you can play a Japanese video game in an American home inside a German museum . . . ."#
- Thirteen minutes remain in the (shorter than promised) 14 minute, 20 second episode.#
- PS. Check out the fifteen-page online gallery of old game machines owned by the museum, each machine shown in a photo with a healthy blurb about its significance. In German, but web browsers won't mind translating, if you like.#