My first video game (Zaxxon) was on a cassette tape, before VHS (early 80s). Each time we wanted to start a gaming session, we had to download the game from cassette deck to the CoCo 2 computer, and it took 2 or 3 minutes.

So the VHS version of DOOM is something like Dragon’s Lair, but way more seamless. That’s amazing.

It’s almost nothing like using a cassette drive to store your BASIC game code.

This was already a thing. There was a Captain Power set of VHS tapes that had VFX patterns that works with a toy with IR sensors and interacts with the toy.

Bang! Yeehaw!

I had a TI-99/4A and backed up games that in input manually from a magazine, on to a cassette tape. My tape recorder had a counter so that you could put multiple programs on a single tape. The fun part was if you forgot to reset the counter or the tape wasn’t rewound to zero you could get half of one program plus half of another.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5258/star-trek-the-next-generation-interactive-vcr-boar

The only question here is how many bytes per minute the VHS can hold. I’ve played several games in music cassette tapes. They played in normal speed and sounded like a modem after the handshake. IIRC, It took more than 20 minutes to load Hero and, sometimes, it didn’t work.

In the Sinclair era we used cassettes instead of discs. It was shitty but cheap solution.

Most of the actual news about this project has already been covered elsewhere, so this is really just me indulging my love of strange physical gaming media and the wonderfully impractical things people come up with.

I’ve always been fascinated by oddities from gaming history, and the idea of someone getting Doom and Super Mario Bros. working with VHS tapes was far too interesting for me to ignore.

So here’s a little/casual dive into GCVHS, the bizarre Action Max console from 1987, and why I think there’s something super curious about people finding new uses for old technology. Sometimes I just like writing about things because they’re weird :)