Leisure Electronics as a Cultural Context for the Emergence of the Swiss Video Game

This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2023, outlines an early-stage research project examining how video game creation emerged in French-speaking Switzerland between the 1960s and 1980s. Its central thesis is that programming games in Switzerland grew out of a broader culture of leisure electronics, including robotics, ham radio, and model railway hobbies, and therefore shared communities and practices with those earlier pursuits. The authors draw a parallel with the origins of Spacewar! at MIT, whose creators came from a railway modelling club, to support this hypothesis.

The project, part of a four-year initiative called Confederatio Ludens, focuses on three local entities: the Microprocessors Systems Lab at EPFL led by Jean-Daniel Nicoud, the Microclub hobbyist association founded in 1976, and the company Epsitec, which sold locally produced Smaky computers under Cathi Nicoud's leadership. Three case studies anchor the inquiry: an electromechanical Nim adaptation built in 1968 by a 17-year-old student, a 1979 Swiss television documentary showing a Blockade port played on a Smaky, and a floppy disk of student-ported classic and arcade games written in the machine's assembly language. Sources include specialised and local magazines, general newspapers, and interviews.

The authors emphasise that reproducing, modifying, and creating games was a common route into computing during this period, and that Swiss games from the era remain largely unstudied. The methodology is grounded theory, combining in-depth interviews with analysis of industrial archives, press, and websites, and is informed by game history, media archaeology, and platform studies. The paper is explicitly preliminary, and the authors note the urgency of recording this history given the recent passing of a key figure.