A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

As a person who has contributed to the MAME project for the past 15 years, my own mother linked me to this article just half an hour ago, and I have some pretty strong opinions on it. You probably won't care, but I'll vent my spleen regardless, in the hopes that others will hear.

For starters: "An analysis of 'Pac-Man,' for instance, shows ... consumerism, drug use and gender politics," Are you even remotely serious? Toru Iwatani didn't give half a damn about any of those things, he was interested in designing a fun game.

Almost nobody in the industry gave a damn about such things then. You have to understand, we're talking about a time frame that is but 5 years after the first microprocessor-based arcade machines existed at all. They were to 1980 what digital computers were to 1950 at that point.

"Avoiding an enemy only delays the inevitable; players cannot move forward or back, but can only defend their space." Again, just MAYBE that's because it was 1978, CPU-based arcade games had only existed for 3 years at that point, and the industry was in its infancy.

Maybe, and bear with me, the gameplay of SI came about as a result of the enormous constraints placed on its creators by the hardware. Nothing else. It is quite insane to suggest that the designers and programmers - one and the same, back then - had some political axe to grind.

"There’s not even a reason why the invasion is occurring." No, of course not. Since when have arcade games given a reason for, uh, *anything*? What's the reason for your spaceship needing to shoot down asteroids in the eponymous Asteroids?

What's the reason for the player rotating blocks around in Tetris? What's the reason for Pac-Man consuming power pellets? What's the reason for the frog in Frogger to hop across lanes of traffic and a river? What's the reason for knocking out a bunch of bricks in Breakout?