The city of Frisco, Texas plans to invest $1 million to bring the Videogame History Museum to town. Founded as a non-profit in 2009 by John Hardie, Sean Kelly, and Joe Santulli, the Videogame History Museum has spent years collecting vintage game software, consoles, and memorabilia to build what some call the "most comprehensive collection of video game memorabilia" ever assembled and share it with the world. The group often loans out parts of its collection to museums and traveling exhibits, but organizers have been hoping to give it a home of its own for a long time.

Ubisoft announced that its upcoming World War I adventure game, Valiant Hearts: The Great War, will feature documentary footage. The game's developer Ubisoft Montpellier reportedly worked closely with the creators of the documentary series Apocalypse, World War I in making the adventure game.

Wargaming today announced that the Dornier Do17 aircraft will be exhibited at the Royal Air Force Museum in London, England when restoration on the World War II-era plane is completed in 2015. Last year, Wargaming teamed up with the Royal Air Force Museum to retrieve and conserve the only known surviving Dornier Do17 aircraft and provide visitors with the opportunity to view the conservation process and learn more about its history and role throughout World War II.

Here's an interesting fact: the man responsible for the Atari game graveyard unearthed by a documentary film crew over the weekend (to be released at a later date as part of Microsoft's Xbox Original entertainment programming for Xbox Live) has been identified as James Heller of Nampa, Idaho.

Over the weekend copies of Atari's disastrous 1982 E.T game adaptation were excavated from a landfill in New Mexico. The long-rumored cache of trash contained copies of the game, promotional materials, and other games, according to published reports.

A documentary team accompanied by senior figures at Microsoft were on hand, as were several media outlets who spent the Saturday enjoying the fragrance and ambience that only a landfill can provide.

Games journalist Andrew Groen launched a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for his book project, "A History of the Great Empires of Eve Online." Within hours of its launch, the crowd-funding campaign for the book, which will explain in plain English the in-game history of CCP's popular space MMO universe, has already garnered well over half of its goal.

World of Tanks and World of Planes maker Wargaming today announced its plans to join with its long-term partner the Russian Kubinka Tank Museum to reconstruct and put back in running condition the only remaining Panzer VIII Maus tank.

Israel-based social and mobile game developer Plarium has launched Sparta: War of Empires today. The game, available worldwide via Facebook, is described as a 3D massively multi-player, real time strategy game for Facebook set in Greece during the 5th century BC. The game combines large scale strategic warfare with diplomacy, resource management, and city building.

On March 12th, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee put forth a proposal to make information sharing possible over computers, using nodes and links to create a "web." While the CERN physics lab where he worked could not justify the project, his bosses allowed him to do the work there in his spare time. That little side project by Tim Berners-Lee became what we know now as the Internet.

Sony Pictures has purchased the film rights to "Console Wars," a book chronicling the war between Nintendo and Sega in the 1990's. Seth Rogen (Knocked Up, Pineapple Express) has apparently signed on to write and direct a film based on the book. He will be joined by his long-time writing partner Evan Goldberg as well, according to Book Trade.

World of Tanks and World of War Planes maker Wargaming announced today the global launch of an augmented reality application that draws attention to the Dornier 17 aircraft currently being exhibited at the RAF Museum in Cosford, Shropshire, United Kingdom.

Wargaming passed along word that the Royal Air Force Museum has officially unveiled the German Dornier Do 17 and the associated Wargaming.net Interpretation Zone at its site in Cosford, Shropshire (England).

Munich, Germany-based game designer Kira Resari is working on an interactive video game that puts players in the shoes of Anne Frank, with the hopes of memorializing the Holocaust for the millennial generation. The 25-year-old designer recently told a German media outlet that "younger generations need access to history on their own wavelength."

Wargaming has teamed up with the British Royal Air Force (RAF) Museum to share its newly acquired exhibit – the Dornier Do17 bomber - with the world. Using an "Augmented Reality App" created by Wargaming called Apparition: Dornier17, visitors can see a full scale, 3D vision of the aircraft at various locations around the world. In June, the Museum successfully lifted the only known German Dornier Do17 bomber from the waters of the Goodwin Sands, three miles off the coast of England.

Russian distributor 1C-SoftClub was forced to halt sales of the WWII real-time strategy game Company of Heroes 2 after consumers complained about the portrayal of Russian forces in the game. After numerous player complaints about Russian forces being portrayed as having a ruthless leadership and taking liberties with history, the distributor decided to stop shipping the game to retailers, and reached out to publisher Sega. Sega said that it was looking into these concerns.

Game developer Wargaming America is working hard to bring some game-based virtual simulation to the USS IOWA. The battleship recently took its final voyage to dock at the port of Los Angeles, where it will serve as a museum beginning next month. Wargaming's simulation promises to bring the battleship's "history to life by creating a bridge experience and an aerial combat game that will live on the ship and showcase its firepower and aerial defenders in action."

Players will soon be able to play as the Muslim rulers in upcoming downloadable content for Crusader Kings II, Sword of Islam. Paradox Interactive said that the new DLC will be released at about the same time as an upcoming update that will add new features to the game, such as an expansion of the map into Mali-Songhay, differentiation on strong and weak claims, a new plot, expanded combat and more. With this new playable faction, Paradox says that "laws, marriage, holding, traits, titles and more will work completely differently."

A Paramus, New Jersey history teacher has developed a simple video game to help teach his students about the American Revolutionary War. History teacher David Alloco's game is called Choosing Sides: The American Revolution in Bergen County. In the game players take on the role of Hackensack resident John Van Dunk, during the beginning of the American Revolutionary War.

As part of an overarching feature about saving video games for posterity, Gamasutra managed to corner Junction Point front man Warren Spector on the topic, who has a strong message for gamers, game developers and publishers: It's up to us the preserve game software for the sake of history.

The International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) announced that it has received a grant of $500,000 from Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, which is headquartered in Rochester, New York.

The former director of the Grand Theft Auto series, Navid Khonsari, is working on a new game that will explore Iran's Islamic Revolution. The game is called 1979 and will be set in an open world where protagonists can make moral choices that affect what is going on around him. Khonsari, who worked on Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas, spoke to CNN about his plans for the game recently and why it is important to him.

According to a Gamasutra report, GameFly Media has acquired video game information and documentation site, MobyGames. Gamasutra points to new information on the footer, which now features a GameFly Media logo. GameFly stepped out of its comfort zone - game rentals via mail - to purchase ShackNews from site founder Steve Gibson in 2009. To its credit, the site has remained largely independent of its new owner.

MobyGames is an exhaustive collection of data about games; it contains 33,000 entries complete with trivia, developer credits, release dates, platforms, reviews, and more. For the researcher looking for obscure game information, MobyGames is often an invaluable resource. On a personal note, it is one of the few web sites in the world that gives me a personal credit in a game, even if it is not deserved.

Today the Computer Game Museum (Computerspielemuseum) opened Berlin, Germany, offering 50 handheld games, video consoles, and home computers organized and exhibited in chronological order from 1971 up to 2001. The museum was open for a few years in the late 1990's but was shut down in 2000. The new museum is located where "Cafe Warsaw" used to be in an East Berlin-era building.

The exhibition called "Computer Games: Evolution of a Medium" chronicles the development of computer and video games since 1951, and includes the first ever arcade game called "Computer Space," released in 1971.

The museum is supported by German-born American Ralph Baer, who invented the Magnavox Odyssey console. Baer says that the exhibition is an important way of chronicling the history of games:

Sonderkommando Revolt, the Wolfenstein mod that reimagined an 1944 Jewish uprising against the camp guards at Auschwitz, has been shelved. One of the key developers on the homebrew project, Maxim Genis, said that online criticism about the subject matter, and an abusive response from the internet community have made working on the project too difficult.

"I did a lot of research for the game," said Genis. "I wanted to show the Jews really did fight back against the Nazis. I wanted to honour them. My intentions were pure and pro-Jewish in every way."

In a response to a Kotaku inquiry about the game last week, the Anti-Defamation League had urged Genis to cancel the launch in January, calling it "a crude effort to depict Jewish resistance during this painful period." As we pointed out last week the ADL praised the film Inglorious Basterds for doing basically the same thing.

An Israeli modder is recreating a real-world uprising at Auschwitz that took place in October 1944 via a mod called Sonderkommando Revolt. The mod, built on top of the Wolfenstein 3D game port, Wolf4SDL, Sonderkommando Revolt sends players on a killing spree against Nazi officers in the infamous concentration camp.

Sonderkommando were groups of workers (prisoners) who helped dispose of those killed in the camp. They were never directly involved in the killing of other prisoners. The uprising referred to in the mod happened after the camp's resistance group successfully blew up one of the crematoriums. From Wikipedia:

1378 (km), the game based on the “death strip” separating East and West Berlin during the Cold War has seen its release delayed until December.

The game’s developer, a student at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design named Jens Stober, took to his blog to announce the postponement, which he said was partly due to criticism of the game. Comments about the title, such as the Director of the Berlin War Memorial stating “The seriousness of what once went on at the border can’t be portrayed in this way,” led Stober to claim that “an objective discussion of the game is presently impossible.”

Stober also offered a rather impassioned defense of games, specifically computer games, writing:

A large part of the criticism is a consequence of my chosen medium, the computer game. Computer games as a medium are often quick to be judged without being more closely examined, as was also the case with my art project. It was designed to enable a younger generation to access information on recent German history using a medium familiar to them.

The Russian government has drafted a commercially successful local game developer in order to create videogames that would promote patriotism and serve up the “historic truth” of the country’s past endeavors.

Russia’s Communications ministry and 1C, developer of games such as IL-2 Sturmovik and Red Orchestra, are already working on six flight simulator games, according to Russian website RiaNovosti. The main goal of the games would be to “to create low-cost educational and professional simulators for pilots, promote Russian information technology abroad, and increase Russia's hi-tech exports.”

A budget of 720.0 million rubles (approximately $24.0 million U.S.) would be required to back the full project, of which the government would contribute 500.0 million rubles (approximately $16.6 million U.S.) and 1C 200.0 million rubles (approximately $6.7 million U.S.). The remaining 20.0 million rubles would come from “the government of Russia's Khanty-Mansiysk region.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a $100,000 grant to a Norfolk University history professor to develop a video game which tells the tale of the Underground Railroad.

Prof. Cassandra Newby-Alexander said that the history of the Underground Railroad, a network which helped slaves escape from the South in pre-Civil War days, is not well understood:

The underground Railroad was a much more complex issue than it's been made out. When you push a person to a point where they have nothing to lose, that's when you create a formidable enemy. Ultimately, human beings are going to be free.

When you ask people to describe the Underground Railroad, they think of Harriet Tubman on foot, with a gun. Most slaves didn't escape that way. I don't want to dumb-down the game.

Newby-Alexander is working with a local playwright to create a script for the game, which is expected for PC in 2011.

Via: Kotaku