Some gaming experiences stay with you forever. I’ve played more videogames than I care to remember, on many different platforms, but I distinctly remember ambling into a very small arcade in Clearwater and, among the beaten-up and half-dead machines, spotting S.T.U.N. Runner.

Akin to smashing a futuristic bobsled game into a rollercoaster experience with a hammer, S.T.U.N. Runner got over the feeling of speed in a way no games had done before and few have done since. The pace was breathtaking to my younger self, and the game over incredibly quickly. But on getting to grips with the game’s mechanics, S.T.U.N. Runner became a fantastic means to while away an hour, escaping from the hot Florida midday sun.

Snapping back to more recent times, Ed Rotberg was kind enough to chat with me last year about his classic tank game Battlezone, and we then talked about S.T.U.N. Runner. Preparing for the interview a day earlier, I fired up the game in MAME and had forgotten how pretty it is. Sleek vector-based designs shoot past at breakneck speed, and even when using a PC, control of the craft is just perfect.

Perhaps this is nostalgia putting the boot in, but I think it’s a massive shame that the game has never been done justice on home formats (with the exception of an astonishing and surprisingly faithful Atari Lynx effort), because even in today’s rush for increasingly extreme gaming experiences, S.T.U.N. Runner still impresses.

My interview with Ed (and co-conspirator Andrew Burgess) is in the current Retro Gamer.

The standard online retailer guide to updating an online store:

1. Upload products quietly, in the background, without fuss. Maybe if the product is particularly exciting, add it to the front page.

The Apple method of updating its online store:

1. Accidentally leak a minor product shot by accidentally uploading it a few weeks before release. Accidentally. Really.
2. Wait for hundreds of Apple rumour websites to get terribly excited about a tiny incremental update to a nothing product.
3. Watch as frenzied Apple fans argue about what other updates are on the way, such as a $5 solar-powered iPhone that also makes perfect toast and tea via WiFi.
4. Abruptly take down your entire international online store, making it impossible for anyone to buy anything. Add an obnoxious post-it note for good measure.
5. Wait as Apple fans drive themselves into an apoplectic frenzy, trying to figure out what exciting new things are going to be added imminently.
6. Watch as Apple news sites report that you took your store down, which means exciting things.
7. Sit back and laugh heartily, safe in the knowledge that even though the updates are tiny, you’ve just got more marketing than most companies get for a new product launch.
8. Put the site back online, with as many ‘new’ badges as possible.
9. Wait for the internet to recover from millions of Apple users refreshing the Apple store fifteen times per second.
10. Wait for orders to flood in from Apple users starved of the store for a full 90 minutes.
11. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Imagine’s answer to EuroGamer, NowGamer, went live recently. With the publisher having a dedicated retro magazine—the rather spiffy Retro Gamer—it should come as no surprise that NowGamer offers a dedicated retro section.

Most of the section appears to be reprint, but there’s some great stuff in there, including a slew of making-of articles, a smattering of company profiles and a couple of ‘def guides’ to videogame series. A fairly random selection of my own articles has been reprinted on the site, including The Making Of: Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, where I interviewed Steve Meretzky about his collaboration with Douglas Adams.

The game itself remains one of the meanest, toughest and funniest pieces of interactive fiction to date, and with the original article buried away in an old issue of Retro Gamer (and not making the cover nor even the contents pages), it’s great to see it get another airing, not least because Steve Meretzky was a wonderful interviewee. I hope that we can one day talk about the controversial Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which would make for a fun making-of in the mag.

Elsewhere, you can also read my making-ofs on seminal soccer title Sensible Soccer, ubiquitous action puzzler Tetris, US platformer Miner 2049er, fantasy/chess mash-up Archon, and overhead bouncing ball action game Bounder.

As for the magazine itself, Retro Gamer’s on the stands, priced £4.99, and can be bought from retrogamer.net. The current issue includes a making-of Space Invaders, Amiga and Mega Drive retrospectives, and my interview with Ed Rotberg and Andrew Burgess on their classic S.T.U.N. Runner.

Google Street View has been a controversial development. Most people seem initially excited by it, right up until the point where they use it and find on display their car, their garden, their house, and, sometimes, their front rooms.

In the UK, the response has been largely negative, perhaps due to Labour increasingly turning the country into a surveillance society. However, in today’s BBC article, Villagers challenge Google camera, Google makes a particularly weaselly statement:

“Imagery is taken on public property and is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”

Technically, this is true—Google’s car drives along public roads, and takes photos that anyone could take. But this ignores the all-inclusive nature of the photography—I doubt ‘anyone’ could take the sheer number of photos the Google car does, even in a single town, without massive investment.

Also, I bet if ‘anyone’ tried to emulate Google, either driving or walking around a major town, taking dozens of photos every few metres, and subsequently published them online, they’d be arrested, not defended, by local police forces.

A couple of days ago, Josh Marshall’s article about his Kindle on Talking Points Memo got me thinking. He relates how on experiencing the device, he surprisingly got sucked into using it, which was subsequently followed by a dark epiphany:

“In our living room we have two big inset shelves where I keep all the books I feel like I need or want ready at hand. And last night, sitting in front of them, I had this dark epiphany. How much longer are these things going to be around? Not my books, though maybe them too. But just books. Physical, paper books. The few hundred or so I was looking at suddenly seemed like they were taking up an awful lot of space, like the whole business could dealt with a lot more cleanly and efficiently, if at some moral loss.”

This is the kind of statement I’d have scoffed at a few years ago, but we do seem to be rampaging ever onwards into a digital-only future regarding media. Newspapers are struggling, being replaced by online equivalents. The CD is clearly on its last legs, about to be obliterated by digital formats for all but those in the niche space. And although video has resisted this transition, things are on the move, and it’s clear that a combination of bandwidth and storage issues is the only thing holding this particular shift back.

And so, wither books? Almost certainly, and largely for convenience. As living spaces get smaller and the amount of crap we own grows, space is at a premium. Although I’m a staunch buyer of CDs, I almost never play them, instead ripping them to a Mac and playing the music back via iPods and amps. I keep threatening to put our CDs in the loft, but at that point, why bother even buying new CDs in the first place? (And, yes, I’m fully aware that online music purchases are generally in compressed format, but for the most part the formats are now in a decent enough quality that I can’t tell the difference, and most music is mixed so poorly and compressed so heavily that it makes no odds anyway.)

The danger, of course, is in terms of longevity. In moving from physical product to digital-only, we’re in danger of creating very temporary history. Already, people are finding that digitally printed photos often fade frighteningly quickly, massively at odds with faded but still perfectly visible black and white photos from the early portion of the last century. And digital file formats rapidly change and evolve. JPEG and MP3 may be dominant today, but what about in ten years? What about in 100? Are we rapidly moving towards a time where everything we create will be potentially lost within a few generations, all in the name of convenience?