Image courtesy of Gaming History
Adam West, the 1960s Batman that many of us loved, has passed away. While his contributions to Batman-based media are known across the globe, his thoughtful considerations about video games are not as widely recognized. Earlier today, the Twitter account for GameHistory.org tweeted a part of a piece that Adam West wrote about video games for the magazine Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated back in July of 1983.West's piece, which you can read on page six of this PDF, begins with West's own relationship with computers as an actor. He lightly traces the history of science fiction becoming reality around computers, and you get the sense that West really delighted in the fact that things he did as a comic book character brought to life were, in turn, being brought to life. You can feel the excitement when West writes that "videogames are a great way to experience the thrill and challenge of being such an extraordinary figure" like Batman.What's most striking about West's ideas about games is how open he thought that their possibilities were even back in 1983. He isn't celebrating how good they look or how complicated their mechanics can be. This isn't a game fan talking about games, but instead it is someone with a lot of faith in human imagination seeing and believing that videogames do something unique with that imagination.He ends the piece on a high note: "As videogaming grows, we will grow." Despite being written more than 30 years ago, I think we're still holding out for that possibility.
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