ABSTRACT
Most popular accounts of gaming's history are situated within an industrial model of creative production focusing on platforms, their content and the companies that produced them. Scholarship often provides a rich in-depth analysis of the inner workings of a specific device, providing a sociotechnical framework for understanding the content produced for a particular platform. Using this methodology, Platform Studies technically situates the industrial development of computational and videogame technologies, but rarely addresses how platforms become culturally situated beyond their commercial lifespan. Players initially needed a copy of Utopia's boot disc, which had to be inserted before a pirated game disc could be played. Further developments would have to be made before the community could grow beyond a small number of dedicated experts. In an industrial economy, the Dreamcast is nothing more than a failed commodity, but in a cultural economy it is a thriving creative success, showcasing how fans inscribe new meanings to the post-commodity lives of gaming platforms.
