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150 Years of Games Development -
and We’re Still Asking “What’s Next?”
Inside a Panivox development session that began with a journey through gaming history - and became a reminder of why decades of experience still matter when you are building something new.
A Panivox development session on 12 August 2026: looking back only long enough to ask better questions about what comes next.
There is something compelling about walking into a development meeting and finding yourself surrounded by the history of an industry.
The shelves around the Panivox team hold games and formats from different generations of interactive entertainment. Before the conversation turned to what we are building now, it travelled backwards.
I worked on that.
Do you remember this?
What did we have to solve then?
Around the table was approximately 150 years of combined games-development experience. Yet the most interesting part of the meeting was not what the people in the room had already made.
It was what they wanted to make next.
A working history, not a museum piece
The collection is not set dressing. It records changing tools, platforms, audiences and creative possibilities.
A collection like this could easily invite nostalgia: familiar boxes, old platforms and the sudden return of problems that once felt enormous.
But the value of experience is not that it lets us remain in the past. It gives us a longer view of change.
Games development has always meant working at the meeting point of imagination and constraint. In the early home-computer years, the limits were visible in every byte of memory, every clock cycle and every screen.
New platforms changed the possibilities, but not the underlying discipline: understand the medium, solve the problem and turn an idea into an experience that works for the person using it.
That thread is visible in the Oliver Twins' account of learning to make games in the early 1980s. In Let’s Go Dizzy!, they recall a period shaped by imagination, basic-computer constraints and the determination to complete and release games rather than leave ideas as experiments.
It is a useful principle for any era of technology: possibility matters, but follow-through turns possibility into something real.
Experience is not the opposite of innovation
Formats change. The design questions behind a successful interactive experience endure.
It is tempting to talk about innovation as if it requires a clean break with everything that came before.
In practice, the strongest new work often comes from people who have seen technologies, formats and assumptions change repeatedly - and have learned which questions remain important.
What is the experience for?
Where does the audience have agency?
What makes an interaction intuitive, surprising or worth returning to?
Which technical choice serves the story, and which is merely novel?
How do you move from a promising demonstration to something robust enough to put into people’s hands?
Those questions travel well. They mattered when software had to fit within severe technical limits. They matter now, as AI and new forms of digital content expand what can be made and how quickly ideas can be explored.
They also matter beyond games. Museums, heritage organisations and visitor attractions increasingly use digital experiences to open archives, interpret places, reach families and create new forms of participation. In those settings, technology still has to serve a person, a purpose and a story.
A technically impressive experience that distracts from the collection or place is not automatically innovative. Neither is a rapid prototype that cannot survive contact with real visitors. Experience helps teams recognise that distinction.
The meeting moved forward
A development-session detail from the Panivox games collection.
The collection prompted stories, but it also did something more useful: it gave the present conversation depth.
The team could compare old constraints with new ones, recognise familiar patterns and challenge easy assumptions. That is where accumulated experience earns its place - not as authority for its own sake, but as material for better judgement.
Panivox is focused on interactive storytelling, AI and new forms of digital content and experience. We are interested in what these technologies make possible for audiences, organisations and places - and in the craft required to turn that possibility into something meaningful.
That focus is future-facing, but it is not starting from zero. The people doing the work bring experience of different platforms, production challenges and creative eras. They also bring the curiosity to keep asking whether the next tool changes the answer - or changes the question.
For museums and visitor attractions, this depth of experience matters because interactive projects live at the intersection of many disciplines.
Story must work with interface. Creative ambition must work with operational reality. Technology must work for audiences with different ages, expectations and access needs. The finished experience must belong to the collection or place rather than feeling like a detachable novelty.
Those are design questions, editorial questions and production questions at the same time.
What comes next?
The phrase can become an empty slogan if it is only about chasing the newest technology. For us, it is a practical question.
What can we now make that could not have existed before?
Which ideas deserve to move beyond the prototype?
How can new technology create richer stories, clearer participation and more memorable experiences?
What have decades of making interactive work taught us about the care required to answer those questions well?
The development session on 12 August did not produce a neat dividing line between past and future. It showed the two in conversation.
The shelves held evidence of what had already changed. Around the table, the team was considering what might change next.
That is the real story of 150 years of games development in one room.
Not a retrospective.
A starting point.
“Experience is not the opposite of innovation. The interesting things happen when experience is applied to possibilities that did not exist when that experience began.”
Creating a new interactive experience for a collection, story or place?