![]() ![]() Let’s take a look at 8 brain-training games that have earned positive reviews:įree in the iOS Store and Android Play Store, Lumosity offers an ever-expanding set of cognitive and scientific games designed to improve your working memory and stimulate your brain on a daily basis. But, if you’re interested in preventing Alzheimer’s by keeping the neural connections in your brain strong, then games that challenge your working memory and mental agility can be an important part of your plan (along with eating a nutrients-rich diet, getting plenty of sleep, and exercising multiple times per week). If you’re looking to transform yourself into the next Einstein, playing brain-training games may be a fool’s errand. Why not? Because there’s actually some good evidence to suggest that they can do exactly that. Seems to me this is a backwards way of going about things I think they had the right idea to promote the fact (when they were Eidetic) that they were the only game company in Bend, and now as a Sony company it seems that could be a much more powerful message to market.However, these same objective scientists have not widely doubted the effectiveness of brain-training games in preventing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. So, now I know Sony Bend does exist, and I have an address and phone number for them, and nothing else. The story of what happened to Mike Berlyn will be the “part two” I alluded to at the beginning of this story. Not very helpful, other than to prove they did exist, plus you can also trace an interesting history of the company through its web presence… such as the fact that Mike Berlyn left the company in 1997. Just to prove to myself I wasn’t crazy, I went to the Internet Archive and used the Wayback Machine to pull the cached pages for Sure enough, there they are, from 1996 to mid-2000. I did unearth a few other gems to indicate Sony Bend’s existence: a short page about them on IGN.com an online resume that now only exists in Google’s cache from a person in Bend (or at least used to be in Bend) that lists a stint at the company from December 2000 to “present” (though it comes to mind that if he was posting a resume online, maybe he’s not there anymore?) as a Character Artist an archived Yahoo Groups message from 2002 from an employee at the company to a user who was seeking advice on C++ code. There’s no other contact info save an address and phone number no web presence or email address except for Sony’s main office. I finally found out where the office is located on Sony Computer Entertainment’s location page, and so far that is the only official record I can find of its existence, other than indirect references to Sony Bend on various pages about Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn. It’s like the company doesn’t exist, yet it does. There’s almost no mention of Sony Bend anywhere that I could find. I decided I wanted to find out more about Sony Bend, née Eidetic, and maybe get in touch with them, so I set out on a net search for them they’re not listed locally in the phone book, so off to Google! What I found was quite amazing. I learned that Eidetic had been bought by Sony and incorporated as “Sony Bend.” The Eidetic identity had disappeared from the map, and for all intents and purposes, so did the company. ![]() So it was very cool to me that two former members of Infocom had set up shop here in Bend and were producing successful games.Ģ001. Blank and Berlyn were prominent members of Infocom members of the echelon of legendary game developers. (They created Zork, which should be a household name.) What was amazing about these games was the amount of detail that went into them, the high quality of writing, and the nearly-natural language parser that was unmatchable-and that they managed to make all this work on the tiny machines of the era-Commodores, Apples, etc. What made Eidetic all the more interesting was that it was founded by two people whose names any self-respecting gamer growing up in the ’80s should immediately recognize: Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn.įor the non-initiated, the short version is that during the ’80s there was this software company called Infocom which produced a computer games known as text adventures. The first game they produced was Syphon Filter, which turned out to be a moderately successful hit for them. At the time, they billed themselves as the “one and only video game company” here-which may be true still-and they produced games for the Sony PlayStation. I found out there was a video game company here in Bend called Eidetic (no link, because there’s no such site any more… read on). ![]() If you’re interested in any of the following: Infocom, the Sony PlayStation, or video game companies in Bend, Oregon-then you’ll probably enjoy this story. Herewith the first part of an online detective story, with interesting results. ![]()
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