Inspired by a forgotten 1980s console, one creator is using VHS tapes to build wonderfully strange, interactive versions of Doom and Super Mario Bros.

"Historical computer backup systems (like ArVid) or audio formats (like Alesis ADAT) used standard VHS cassettes to store around 2 GB of digital computer data" (quote is not from the article)

I had no idea! Cool project

I had the Gargoyles Movie in on VHS a version my mom bought came with a whole table top type game or something, and the movie allowed you to play a tabletop game with a VCR game it came with, I dont rememver if I even had a VCR so I don't remember if I played it or not. I just know she got it at a garage sale, and I watched Gargoyles religiously.

In 2026, everything is a stream of numbers. It's obvious everything is a stream of numbers. We can save them to disk and stream them over the internet and archive them and it it were't for DRM and hostile practices we could stick them all in the same place right next to each other in the same directory.

In let's say 1996, we weren't remotely there yet. A radio program was distinct from a television program was distinct from a book was distinct from a CD was distinct from a CD-ROM was distinct from a video game... and so on and so forth. You had a tool for recording from the TV, the VCR, but that didn't do the radio. You had a tool for that, which was a cassette tape, but that didn't do anything else. Except for certain early computers who took advantage of the fact that a cassette tape is really just a recording of varying voltages which can be fed into a computer to be interpreted as numbers, but this is one of the rare exceptions where there was some crossover, and by the 1990s this was gone anyhow. Now you had floppy disks, which were for computers, and they didn't store movies or books or radio shows, they just stored computer programs.

Everything was compartmentalized so the idea of "storing a computer backup on a VHS tape" sounded like some sort of forbidden union.

What sort of fascinates me about this history is how so much of it is written into the law now. We have all these different laws where music is treated this way, but movies are treated that way, and books are treated some other way, and so on and so forth. Copyright law isn't quite entirely broken up into unrelated fiefdoms but neither is it anywhere near as unified as it would be if it was a brand new idea someone was coming up with today. And it still has trouble dealing with the concept of things like "databases" sometimes.

Now it's not such a weird idea that a VCR tape is really just a stream of numbers to be sliced and diced as needed for a project like this. But back then, so much of the processing involved fundementally analog processes that anything that crossed the streams seemed like magic. I don't feel like I've conveyed the idea properly that this wasn't just a technical thing, I'm talking about how people thought about these things. It was a revelation at the time that CDs could contain "video". It was a revelation that you could have "an MP3 player" that had "computer files", but, but, it played music. You could store backups on a CD. You could put a book... on a computer. I remember the first time I realized that if I took these cables from the VCR and fed them in to the input of my cassette player I could record the audio off a VCR on to a tape, the point being not that this was impossible but that it was something I had to realize. We had all these categories in our minds with strict boundaries between them that don't exist anymore, because those categories are just accidents of history.

What we have today is much closer to reality... it's all just numbers. Any numbers can go on to number storage devices. Any numbers can be streamed across the number delivery service. The tech industry is in fact busily trying to re-establish the boundaries they themselves erased so they can artificially segment the various markets again.

It's fun to see an old-school boundary breaker project again.

The element of limited choice between multiple tracks makes me think of the Viewmaster Interactive Vision which implemented a much more limited version of the concept.