Outside of Game Developers Conference 2019, people have never heard the phrase “Google Stadia,” Sits on a small screen outlining the game’s history. Dates and bullet points mark some major events, and on three pedestals are some of the industry’s most notorious failures: Atari’s ETMattel’s NES Power Glove, and Sega’s Dreamcast. The fourth pedestal is empty except for a tag that says “coming soon”. Just over three years later, Stadia, Google’s cloud-based streaming console, has finally earned its spot on that fourth pedestal, and the curator that made the original exhibit is now ready. to auction it.
“Remember when Google Stadia had that GDC screen, where they put it next to the three most famous failures in game history?” Founder and Co-Director of the Video Game History Foundation, Frank Cifaldi, tweeted yesterdayafter that Google announces the end of Stadia. “Now you can recreate this screen 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 left until the end of the auction. All proceeds will go to Organized video game history.
“Honestly, I put these items aside in their own bin for storage right after the GDC just for this purpose,” says Cifaldi. Kotaku by email. “I had the idea for this auction during the show, and waited patiently. Okay, I’m a vulture, but at least that’s for a good reason? “
Does it come complete with a Stadia controller? No, and Cifaldi is tired of people asking. “I don’t have Stadia, nobody has Stadia, if they did we wouldn’t be here to make money for their misfortune,” he tweeted.
It was never clear what message Google intended to send with the odd display. Atari helped collapse the game industry in the early 1980s and ET so bad that it became something of a legend for buried in the desert by trucks. Power Glove is a classic (and literal) case of accessibility beyond grasping: an idea neatly ahead of its time with no practical application other than an interesting moment in the movie 1989 Witch. And then there’s the Sega Dreamcast, a design overkill but great system with some great games that only sold 10 million units and unfortunately ended Sonic manufacturer’s console manufacturing enterprise.
“[The exhibit] went through what felt like several committees and decision makers were all on the same page, they changed course completely with only a week before the show, and in the end it was a mix. of two completely different concepts,’ a Cifaldi timeline explains in the description of the eBay auction. “The details don’t really matter, what really matters here at the end of the day is that it’s not my fault.”
Read more: The game developers and staff of Stadia Alike were blindsided by the sudden shutdown
While that process was one of many bad omens, the exhibit certainly caught everyone’s attention. “There are no clues as to how this will happen but I am intrigued # GoogleGDC19“Nibel Game Insider tweeted when the exhibition was revealed at the time. In the years since, the image of the screen sometimes reappears as an evergreen gaming memeespecially when it becomes clearer that the only thing that matches Google’s ambitions is its arrogance.
“Finally when they announced [Stadia] at GDC (I was not briefed on helping with this exhibition) to me, it was like a solution to a problem,” said Cifaldi. “Like, their customer is a heavy gamer who will buy a $60 AAA game that requires a significant time investment to complete and they pay for high speed Internet, but they will don’t buy Switch or Series S? Who is that?”
But the game historian was quick to point out that while Stadia is still a joker, his heart for all game developers is now reeling with platform closes suddenly. Cifaldi said: “I have a friend who is in jeopardy because his whole business has been financially planning around the earnings that Stadia promised him when his game was projected. launch. “He invested time and money into the game with that in mind, and now it’s not going to happen.”
He continued, “I hope that they will care about the partners they are burning, but if not, I hope the industry will remember how this went down when Google made sure… will try to get back into the game business in three or four years.”
