Advent Calendar: Day 1

By Circe -

Those of you who have been around a while -- and there are a surprising number of you here -- will recall that I run an Advent Calendar every year, or I try to. I gave up about halfway through last year because... well, you know. 

This year's theme will be the arts. Art is one of the few things I can do for free, or nearly so. I lucked into a very good arrangement with a local non-profit almost a decade ago, and it's been almost the only thing keeping me sane. The world is a giant dumpster fire right now, and I'm starting to see Nero's point about the distraction value of an impromptu stringed-instrument recital.

I am personally mainly in live performing arts, but I have a practical, historical, and archival interest in a lot of others. One of my focuses way back in college was in the history of media and technology; the field was still very new around the turn of the millennium, to the point where my best choice of advisor for this was the guy who admitted to owning an Intellivision back in 1978, but it has grown a great deal since. 

Amateurs on the internet have been attempting to archive early games ever since they realized that the passage of time had transformed their hobby from 'piracy' to 'preservation'. But that does raise the question: How far back does this go? What game was the first?

One of the better attempts I've seen at answering this comes from the YouTube channel Ahoy:


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