The market for computer games outstripped over the last year even the good old moving pictures. But the commercial success of new media is usually followed by artistic reflection, artistic derision and artistic refinement

Video killed the radio star.
In my mind and in my car, we can't rewind we've gone to far.
Pictures came and broke your heart, put the blame on VCR.
(Buggles 1979)

New media are possessed of the brassiness and arrogance to proclaim previous media to be hopelessly old-fashioned clobber. So, for example, early photography sneered at painting, then film sneered at photography, video sneered at film and now computer games sneer at video. “Video killed the radio star”, we sang with The Buggles in the 1980s, and today “Game Art killed the video star” could serve as a veritable anthem. The good old moving picture appears to have stepped into the shadow of the computer game. This is indicated not only by the thundering sales of popular video games, but also by the production costs of games like Half-Life 2 and Wing Commander IV, whose budgets exceed double-digit million euro figures, and last but not least by the interest with which artists have turned to the new medium.

The commercial success of new media is usually followed by artistic reflection, artistic derision and artistic refinement. This was already the case of photography: Henry Fox Talbot coined the poetic description “art of fixing shadows” for photographic technique. Photographic artists soon joined the photo-technicians. Film artists then followed Hollywood and next to the great movie palaces stood the cottages of art house cinema. Now, nearly forty years after the development and issuing of the first computer games, curators present the public with exhibitions of “computer games by artists” (so the title of the first Game Art exhibition at the Hartware Medienkunstverein, Dortmund, in 2003)