“I wanted sensory overload and information overload”.
If you live outside of North America and Japan, you might not have heard of the BattleTech Centers – but they were amazing places, years ahead of their time.
There were around 26 of them at one point, dotted across the United States, Canada and Japan. They were like Disney theme parks for gamers, offering simulated 3D mech battles at a time when 16-bit consoles were only just emerging. Players sat inside a realistic mech cockpit – with multiple monitors, joysticks, pedals and a myriad of switches and flashing lights – going head-to-head with other players in the same room, or even fighting mech pilots on the other side of the world – despite the fact that many people hadn’t even heard of “the World Wide Web” at this point, let alone had internet access at home.
Read the full article on timeextension.com
“I wanted sensory overload and information overload”.
If you live outside of North America and Japan, you might not have heard of the BattleTech Centers – but they were amazing places, years ahead of their time.
There were around 26 of them at one point, dotted across the United States, Canada and Japan. They were like Disney theme parks for gamers, offering simulated 3D mech battles at a time when 16-bit consoles were only just emerging. Players sat inside a realistic mech cockpit – with multiple monitors, joysticks, pedals and a myriad of switches and flashing lights – going head-to-head with other players in the same room, or even fighting mech pilots on the other side of the world – despite the fact that many people hadn’t even heard of “the World Wide Web” at this point, let alone had internet access at home.
Read the full article on timeextension.com
