Stadia’s exhibit on historical game chess is now on eBay

Outside of Game Developers Conference 2019, before anyone had ever heard the phrase “Google Stadia“, sat a small screen depicting the game’s history. Dates and bullet points marked some of the major events, and on three pedestals were some of the industry’s most notorious flops: Atari HEY, Nintendo’s Power Glove and Sega’s Dreamcast. A fourth pedestal was empty except for a card that said “coming soon”. Just over three years later, Stadia, Google’s cloud-based streaming console, has finally earned its place on that fourth pedestal, and the curator who made the original exhibit is now set to sell it to audiences. auction.

“Remember when Google Stadia had this GDC screen where they sat it next to three of the most famous failures in gaming history?” Frank Cifaldi, founder and co-director of the Video Game History Foundation, tweeted yesterdayA little after Google announced the end of Stadia. “Now you can recreate this display in your own home! I provided the originals for display, and now I’m selling them for charity.” The current bid on eBay is $1,525, with just six days before the auction ends.All proceeds go to the Video Game History Foundation.

“Honestly, I put these items aside in their own bin in storage right after GDC just for that purpose,” Cifaldi said. Kotaku by email. “I had the idea for this auction during the show and I waited patiently. Okay, I’m a vulture, but at least it’s for a good cause?

Does it come with a Stadia controller? No, and Cifaldi is fed up with people asking. “I don’t have a Stadia, no one has a Stadia, if they did we wouldn’t be here to profit from their misfortune,” he tweeted.

It was never entirely clear what message Google intended to send with the odd display. Atari helped crash the video game industry in the early 1980s and HEY was so bad that he became a legend for get buried in the desert by the truck. The Power Glove was a classic (and literal) case of reach beyond reach: a neat idea ahead of its time with no real application other than as a cool moment in the 1989 movie The wizard. And then there was the Sega Dreamcast, an over-engineered but wonderful system with amazing games that only sold 10 million units and sadly ended the Sonic manufacturer console manufacturing company.

“[The exhibit] went through what looked like multiple committees and decision makers disagreeing with each other, they completely changed direction with like a week before the show, and in the end it was a mish-mash of two entirely different concepts, “a timeline of video game console innovation” and “collectibles folks will take a selfie next door,” Cifaldi explains in the eBay auction description. don’t really matter, what really matters here at the end of the day is that it wasn’t my fault.”

Read more: Game developers and Stadia employees were blindsided by the sudden shutdown

Although this process was one of many bad omens, the exhibition certainly caught people’s attention. “No idea where this is going but I’m intrigued #GoogleGDC19“, game insider Nibel tweeted when the exhibit was revealed at the time. In the years that followed, images of the display occasionally resurfaced as an evergreen gaming memeespecially as it became clearer that the only thing matching Google’s ambition was its hubris.

“When they finally unveiled [Stadia] at GDC (I was not informed as part of the aid to this exhibition), it seemed to me like a solution in search of a problem,” said Cifaldi. “For example, their customer is a hardcore gamer who will buy a $60 AAA game that requires a significant time investment, and they pay for high-speed internet, but they won’t buy a Switch or a Series S? Who is this person?”

But the gaming historian was quick to point out that while Stadia remains the butt of many jokes, his heart goes out to all of the game developers who are now reeling from the shock of the brutal formwork of the platform. “I have a friend whose whole business is in jeopardy because he made financial plans around the income Stadia promised him when his game was supposed to launch,” Cifaldi said. “He invested time and money into the game with that in mind, and now that’s just not going to happen.”

He continued: “I hope they take care of the partners they burn, but if not, I hope the industry remembers how it happened when Google inevitably tries to re-enter the business. games in three or four years.”