I need to start by saying that I really like museums, but I understand why they can be unpopular. A love of history (which I have) gets you a long way when you walk into your city’s local chapter, but without that I find there’s a lot of reliance on things just ‘looking cool.’
But what if you could visit a museum by playing a video game? That question is given an answer with Digital Eclipse’s work and the studios Gold Master Series.
Seemingly beginning with Atari 50, the studio has been refining this notion of an interactive museum, crossing the wires between playing a video game and learning about that same game, or a bunch of games.
Atari 50 covers a wide variety of titles, though the studio’s next and more interactive-museum-solidified title The Making of Karateka focuses in on just the one game, with a breadth of knowledge jammed into one interactive package.
And then Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story was its own refinement, with a deep-dive into a single creators career works. Now, Tetris Forever is a whole new challenge, taking on the giant legacy of the Tetris franchise and all its variations.
When you consider the fact that Atari 50 arrived in November 2022, and then Karateka the following August, then Llamasoft earlier this year in March, and now Tetris Forever – oh, and don’t forget that Digital Eclipse also got Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection out in that time, and has Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind coming next month – it becomes clear that Digital Eclipse is one of the best studios in the industry today.
An unbelievable pace of high-quality games, and among them innovative releases that are redefining how we can preserve not just the games, but their cultural and historical context. It cannot be denied that Digital Eclipse is a bright spot in a games industry fraught with darkness.
That’s why I was so incredibly excited to talk to Chris Kohler, editorial director at Digital Eclipse about Tetris Forever, the studios Gold Masters series and games preservation.
Kohler is also a name some of you might recognize, because before his time at Digital Eclipse he worked as a games journalist, writing for WIRED Magazine for years before a stint at Kotaku, which was the last games media job he had before heading to DE.
He’s also written for the likes of Official PlayStation Magazine, IGN, Nintendo Official Magazine UK, and a whole lot more in his 24 years as a games journalist.
I’ve read plenty of Kohler’s work over the years, so you can imagine how all of this combined – my excitement for the work Digital Eclipse does and professional admiration for Kohler and his career – made me incredibly nervous, and at the same time excited for our chat. I was so nervous I that I told him I was nervous.
“Oh wow, now you’re making me nervous,” he says while laughing.
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Interview With Digital Eclipse’s Editorial Director Chris Kohler – “Nothing Is Preserved, Preservation Is An Ongoing Process”
The Kids Play Mario While The Adults Play Tetris
Tetris is probably the closest thing to Chess for video games. The kind of game that’s compatible with everyone and anyone; where age, background, and any other demographic defining category that’s meant to show how different we are from one another don’t matter.
Everyone likes Tetris, and everyone knows Tetris, because it is just one of ‘those things’ that everyone knows about. Perhaps that’s partly why when I asked Kohler about his first memory with Tetris, he has trouble remembering it. It feels instead like something he’s just always known – and he remembers his Mom played it.
“It would have to be on the GameBoy. You know what, it was probably when we got a CGA graphics card for our IBM PC we were building at the time in the late 80s, because we had come off of the Atari 800 and there was no Tetris on that. We had moved on to an IBM and we got a CGA graphics card, the first thing that we ran was Tetris, but the funny thing is – even that memory of seeing ‘Oh we have Tetris running on our IBM PC,’ even then I knew what it was.”
“So it’s funny, I don’t even remember how I discovered what Tetris was, but certainly, I mean, when we got the GameBoy when it launched in 1989, obviously Tetris was in there. But we also had Mario Land, so really my brother and I were playing a lot of Mario Land.
But I couldn’t help but notice that my Mom would take the GameBoy and play Tetris. So even then, you could see that something was magical about this particular video game that was hooking people who had never had a lot of interest in video games before, or zero interest in video games before. This was something that went beyond that, somehow.”
Which is the mystery of perfection, really. Everyone tries for perfection, but achieving it is a whole different story, because it’s so difficult to nail down what it is to be perfect. The closest I’ve ever come to describing why Tetris or why anything that is perfect really *is* perfect is based on vibes.
Kohler admits that they do call Tetris “the perfect game” in Tetris Forever, and even says himself, “I would call it the perfect game.” And there’s more to that then you might’ve known, because the thing behind Tetris’ perfection, is math. Really perfect, beautiful math.
“The great thing is – as we kind of get into with Tetris Forever – we discuss that it has this grounding in mathematical research, it didn’t come out of nowhere. This came from Alexey Pajintov, who was a mathematician by profession or by education, and loved mathematical games. And then loved doing that research in his spare time about recreational mathematics.”
“So Tetris grew out of this movement of recreational mathematics. And what he had designed was something that was grounded in mathematics theory, so if you remove an element of Tetris, or try to add on another element to Tetris, you will never improve it. It’s not possible to improve it, because of the things that inform the way that it’s designed, not just the way that it’s designed, but because that design really came from somewhere.”
And if you think you really can improve it, then I only have to point you to Tetris Effect Connected. Arguably the best way to play Tetris today, and while I’m not downplaying the work that developers Monstars Inc., Resonair and Stage Games put into Tetris Effect, the thing that really sets it apart is its visuals.
They couldn’t improve it, but they could make it look even more beautiful than it already was, and express the natural beauty of the game through scenes depicting different parts of nature, like playing Tetris while a pack of dolphins swim through the sea around you.
I might not have been able to see the beauty in math when I was in school, but anyone can see that beauty in Tetris. It’s like how learning about different aspects of nature might not really ‘pop’ in a classroom setting, but you know nature is beautiful by just looking out your window, and seeing the sun hit the leaves on nearby trees *just right*.
Math, just like the sun, the trees and the leaves, all come from nature. Tetris comes from math, which makes Tetris an extension of nature, and just like nature, we need to preserve it in all its glory. Digital Eclipse really is doing ‘God’s work’ with Tetris Forever and its Gold Masters series.
Golden Games
It might be easy to look at the work Digital Eclipse does and just say it’s all a bunch of bundles, just collections of old games emulated on current hardware. While I’d find it hard to say that about anything Digital Eclipse does or has done in the past, to say that about its Gold Masters series isn’t even ‘reductive,’ it’s just wrong.
These games are so much more than a collection of works. Each of the now four games in the studio’s Gold Master series of games does so much to provide players not just with the experience of playing these older games, but the context around these games that players would otherwise have to seek out themselves.
For a Digital Eclipse Gold Masters Series game, you don’t need to be anywhere else besides sitting on your couch, controller in-hand to discover so much you probably didn’t know about how a few retro titles shaped their own legacy and the greater games industry and its history.
All that considered makes it fitting that Digital Eclipse’s journey to this Gold Masters series is part of how the studio is shaping its own legacy. Prior to Digital Eclipse being acquired by Atari, the studio had begun to try and flip the script on how it engaged with retro games in the industry.
Kohler describes that the studio looked to start publishing games itself, license IP itself, so that it could actually enjoy the benefits of a game they made being successful, rather than everything extra being eaten up by the publishers, and Digital Eclipse needing to make its contract spread as thin as possible.
Some aptly-timed funding helped the studio see its goals realized, but Kohler points to the studio being acquired by Atari as the “force multiplier” that is really giving the team the freedom to do what they want, and make this series of games that have an importance far beyond them being just a collection of old games re-released.
“Not only do we get to sell the games and make the money, but we get to make them exactly as we want to make them. And so we get to take all these ideas that we have had about this ‘true’ interactive documentary style, this better way of presenting classic games, and we get to implement those exactly as we want to, without somebody saying ‘Well you shouldn’t do that’ or ‘You shouldn’t do this.”
Of course, this also meant that when Digital Eclipse saw an opportunity, like the 40th anniversary of Tetris this year, they could come to the bargaining table with a stronger foundation. Though thankfully it sounded like no real convincing was needed when the studio approached The Tetris Company with the idea for Tetris Forever.
“We knew that the 40th anniversary of Tetris was coming up, we understand that the backstory behind Tetris is incredibly fascinating, the people behind it are fascinating, and importantly, it’s still run by The Tetris Company. I mean, it’s jointly owned by Hank Rogers and Alexey Pajintov, it’s still kind of in the family, in that sense. Alexey actually makes money off of Tetris, on an ongoing basis, which is not something that a lot of game designers from the 1980s can still say about their games.”
“It’s a fascinating backstory and so it’s the perfect combination for a Gold Masters series release. And we knew that, additionally, a lot of the classic Tetris games from Bullet Proof Software had never actually been released in any format before, so we understood there was this sort of beautiful [chance], all the stars were kind of aligned to make it this incredible Tetris release for the 40th anniversary.
And so from our side of it, it was talking to Tetris. From their side, it was trying to figure out how they would make it work. But we were all very enthusiastic about working with each other, and it’s been really great to work with Tetris on this, and I’m just very excited. I can’t wait for people to see what we’ve come up with together.”
Thinking of just how perfectly Tetris fits into the formula Digital Eclipse has found with its Gold Masters series makes me dream of other games and topics that could slot in well with this series.
Which is why I’m perhaps a bit disappointed when he tells me there’s no wish list of all the topics Digital Eclipse would want to do a Gold Masters series entry with. But at least later on Kohler did tell me that he doesn’t have a “set number” in mind for how many Gold Masters games the studio will do, and I can keep my hope alive that they’ll just keep coming for years.
“It’s not as if there’s a big list of things that we want to go into the Gold Master series, it’s more we’re talking to everybody, and as we start talking about certain things, it’s like, ‘Hey, could this be a Gold Master series release? Does this have the depth of content, the great combination of amazing story and incredible, important game that would allow us to do a Gold Master series out of it? Is that something that the fans would want, [etc.].
…It’s more of a, ‘We want to work on projects that make sense for us,’ and then whether or not something gets that branding or that treatment is in that discussion.”
My disappointment definitely comes more from my own selfishness, and wanting so many games and topics to be given the same care and treatment Digital Eclipse has given to its Gold Masters games so far. But it’s easy to swallow that selfishness when I know two things. That the team at Digital Eclipse is extremely talented, and they’re going to be making something amazing whatever it is they’re working on.
And that they really want to entertain and educate the people who play their games, because these aren’t just recreations of old games, these Gold Masters titles are new games in their own right.
“I really want to get this across, with a Gold Masters series, it’s like, even if you’ve never heard of Karateka, even if you’ve never heard of Jeff Minter – we are going to give you something that I hope is entertaining to you, and in fact these are written with the idea that you’ve never heard of these. We literally start with a video that explains to you ‘Why are we here?,’ ‘Who is this person?,’ ‘What makes this a Gold Masters series entry?’
We have a problem because I think the vast majority of people, they don’t understand that yet, because it’s so counter to everything that we know about quote-unquote retro collections at this point. Because I get a lot of feedback that’s like, ‘Yeah, I never played Karateka so I didn’t pick that one up,’ or ‘I played some of Tempest 2000 but I never played any other Jeff Minter’s games so I didn’t get that one.’
And that’s the whole point. We have to get people thinking about it how you would be thinking about a new release. It’s like when a brand new video game comes out and saying like, ‘Oh I never played The Last Of Us, so I’m not going to buy The Last Of Us.’ No! Now is your time to jump in and do it, and we’ve done as best we can.
This gets into the title of Tetris Forever, I mean we call it ‘the perfect game,’ and we don’t want this game to evoke like, ‘This is a look back at old products.’ My feeling is we’re looking at timeless games, we’re keeping timeless games in print, that are still wonderfully playable, that are still just as addictive and playable and fun. So with the title Tetris Forever, I mean the whole idea is this is not Tetris Then, it’s Tetris now and into the future.”
An Ongoing Process
If you’ve existed on the social platform – that realistically never resembled a town square – called Twitter, before it was given a worse name, then you’ll be accustomed to repeating discourse. That is, arguments and conversations around the same topics that come up every six months.
Things like the conversation around ‘yellow paint’ in games or whether or not a game like Dark Souls should have an ‘Easy’ difficulty mode. The preservation of games is one of these repeating topics.
It’s less so whether or not we should have it, because no one is really out there advocating for the destruction of history (at least I’d like to believe that’s the case), the conversation is more about how to do it.
There are a lot of layers to the question of how we should preserve old games, but humanity never figured out its big problems by staying stunned at the complexity of the issue. When it comes to games preservation and the question of how, Kohler and Digital Eclipse are doing their part.
Is a complete interactive documentary that both re-creates and re-releases old versions of classic games while including interviews, writing, images, and all kinds of research documenting the original creator of these games and their cultural importance the whole solution?
Realistically speaking, probably not – but it’s definitely a part of the solution. The Making of Karateka is a huge example of how, especially when, as Kohler says, “That’s a story [Karateka] that really hadn’t been written down or explored in anywhere near that level of depth, in any media, films, books, whatever. I mean Jordan [Mechner] had his journals, but the journals were just Jordan’s perspective on everything. The sort of day-to-day, beat-by-beat of what’s going on.”
“I mean, to be able to take such an impactful game like that and really, for the first time, tell the complete story [and] to do it in the form of a video game, it was a dream come true.”
To some degree, sure, you could’ve maybe emulated the game(s) made available in The Making of Karateka, the Llamasoft Collection and Tetris Forever. But you couldn’t easily emulate the unreleased versions of Tetris included here. You couldn’t emulate the numerous versions of Karateka and creator Jordan Mechner’s notes and design documents, and you wouldn’t be able to emulate the historical context that goes along with every Jeff Minter title included in the Llamasoft collection, and what a single developers body of work did to impact an entire medium.
We need to continue putting in the work to preserve this art form that we all love so much, and part of that comes from recognizing the important parts of the past. Relative to other major forms of art, games are still very young – but not so young that we should feel like these 20, 30, 40 year-old games aren’t so far removed that they won’t go anywhere, or be truly lost.
If not for Digital Eclipse, there would’ve been so much lost just regarding its three Gold Masters series releases alone. It’s probably impossible for Digital Eclipse to go through every major game or game developer that influenced the industry, but its work so far has shown that there are those who deserve it.
Maybe I’ve read Arcadia one too many times, spend way too much time thinking about what’s been lost, and what we could lose when it comes to chronicling of history and art, but I find myself constantly worrying about games preservation. I think it’s insane that foundations like the Video Game History Foundation are being denied access to games for academic and archival purposes by the U.S. Copyright Office.
A legal library of video games accessible to those doing academic research means more people studying games and writing about them in ways that contextualize their impact on humanity and culture. It means the work of preserving games so that they are accessible to the public through the proper channels can be given its own force multiplier, and maybe myself and the millions of people who don’t want to see all their games disappear over time could breathe easier.
It’s a future that Digital Eclipse is already supporting, by having provided copies of its own games like Making Of Karateka to universities for academic use. They’re participating in the process, but that can’t entirely get rid of the fear of a future where the history of the games industry is deleted every few decades.
“Certainly I would hope that Making Of Karateka is something that could be used, 20 or 30 years from now. But when you look at how inaccessible 20 or 30 year old video games are today though, it does make me fearful for the future,” Kohler said. “That 30 years from Making Of Karateka – it’s still a complete story, it’s still an important story, it’s not going to diminish in importance, in terms of that games’ impact on the development of the medium of video games – but that the Making Of Karateka, that particular product might be something that people might not be able to access 20 or 30 years from now.”
“Preservation is not a state, it’s not a past tense, sort of thing. Nothing is ever preserved, and I think that’s really important to remember. Nothing is preserved, preservation is an ongoing process all the time. If you take a physical artifact and you put it in the best museum in the world, if you put it in the Strong Museum in Rochester which has state-of-the-art facilities, they still need to maintain that physical object.
And what it boils down to is money. They still need the money and the expertise to keep those facilities open to maintain that stuff. ‘Oh well then digitize it,’ well that’s even worse, because now you’ve got hard drives full of stuff. You know, film companies, movie studios are finding that they digitized everything, they backed up everything on a hard drive.
But now, digital preservation is also physical preservation, because you’ve got to preserve that hard drive. Then 20 years later, how are you going to access those files? It’s an old file system, there’s stuff on ZIP disks and thins like that, people can’t even access old files in the first place. And even if you can access the files, the program that can interpret them is long obsolete and out of date. Then you look next to the hard drive, and sitting on the shelf are a stack of film canisters, and that’s actually far easier to access than the quote unquote preserved, digitized futuristic stuff on this hard drive, because we know how to get the footage of it.
So it’s just this ongoing constant battle. And again, I would love to look at the Making Of Karateka and say ‘We did it, we preserved the history,’ but it’s still an ongoing thing.”
A huge thank you to Chris Kohler for taking the time to speak to me for this interview, and another huge thank you to Tabitha Beidleman for their help in making this interview possible.
Tetris Forever is out now for PS5 and PS4.