TGAM went outside.

And we went to the V&A (AKA Victoria and Albert Museum). After shyly looking away when we thought some girl looked at us whilst we were trading Pokemon with ourselves on the train, we paid our &13.50 to see the British design exhibition. The exhibit is littered with some really kitschy examples of British design, from simple things like the font used on Road Signs, to Ziggy Stardust outfit.

But the exceptional part was the brief Computer games section... Exceptional may be a tad over-selling it. The fact there was a Computer games section which was pretty much mind blowing in itself. There were no descriptions is was just a darkened room with the following:

Elite: This was being projected on a wall showing some of the battle scenes. Elite is an important game as, even though it's nearly 20 years old, it set a standard for CCP's space trading MMO: EVE Online. In fact if you strip away the overzealous graphics and the recently tacked-on interior stuff, it's the same game. Elite was designed by Acornsoft, a Cambridge based company.

Lemmings: This display was quite cool, it was a selection of square LED lights re-creating and animating the different lemmings. Lemmings was created way back in those heady days of the early 90's where everyone was taking Ecstasy and dancing to Haddaway. It was actually created by DMA Designs, which later turned into Rockstar north. You can also play it here.

Speaking of Rockstar:

GTA: San Andreas: The display consisted of some CRT TVs with rolling footage of GTA San Andreas. Why San Andreas? Why Rolling footage? Why CRT?
Who knows. San Andreas was blatantly there as Rockstar North are British...

wipEout: This display again consisted of about six CRTs with rolling footage of some of the races. wipEout was created by Psygnosis now Sony Computer Entertainment based in Liverpool. The display was odd Some TVs on one wall and some kind of opposite.

Tomb Raider: This was again an odd display, it consisted of 3x3 CRTs the Left 3 vertical ones showed normal running footage of '96 version, the middle 3 showed the '06 Legend version, and the right 3 TVs showed some trailer footage of the new one. I guess it shows how much she has changed but why on vertical stacked displays? Meh. The original concept for Tomb raider was created by Core Design, in Derby. 

LBP: Well lastly there was Little Big Planet, and well, it was the most obnoxious as it has some crappy repetitive music, which didn't really fit in with the other displays. The display itself was a 3D Cabinet which had several glass panels with different parts of background foreground being displayed on them. Essentially it seemed to be a very expensive homage to Parallax Scrolling. This display had an interactive bit!!! There was a little touch screen where you could choose different sackboys and then for 30 seconds showed footage of that sackboy (albeit in a fancy 3D cabinet) in a level. Fucking disappointing to have that level of "interactivity". LPB was created by Media Molecule in Surrey.

In all, it was exciting to see a games section in an exhibition of design. I think it was the correct titles to choose for a British design Exhibition, however I feel it was a little poorly executed with no descriptions of the "displays", no interactivity and fucking annoying music.

The best one was the Lemmings displays.

Love and now you can save yourself £13.50,

Richie X