UK Opens National Video Game Archive

BBC News reports that the UK is acknowledging video games as a "key component of modern culture" by opening the National Videogame Archive inside the National Media Museum. "'The National Videogame Archive is an important resource for preserving elements of our national cultural heritage,' said Dr Newman. 'It's not just about cartridges and consoles, it's also about video game culture, the ways in which people actually play them. Unlike film and music, it's very difficult to walk into a retail store and walk out with a bunch of games from the 1970's,' said Dr Newman. He feels that games should be archived in the same way that music, books and film are preserved, as we often use them as markers in our culture and history." There's a similar archive at the University of Texas at Austin. What games would you put on display?

What about the hardware?

So how do we archive all of the fantastic hardware that the likes of Sega and Atari produced? What about pinball games and crane sandboxes? What about the machines that would cast a souvenir for you out of plastic on the spot? There is a lot of gaming history that is sadly endangered.

Re:

So how do we archive all of the fantastic hardware that the likes of Sega and Atari produced? What about pinball games and crane sandboxes? What about the machines that would cast a souvenir for you out of plastic on the spot? There is a lot of gaming history that is sadly endangered.

Coin-op hardware-wise, there's the annual California Extreme [caextreme.org] event in San Jose. There's also a good vintage console selection (as well as computer selection) at Vintage Computer Fest [vintage.org], which has both an East Coast and a West C

Re:

Well that's just stupid. Are you saying pandas are more important than cultural ephemera? Seriously now, consider what you're saying here. You're saying that my cherished 25-year-old Mold-a-rama figure of a dolphin from Chicago's Brooklyn Zoo is LESS important than some smelly old animal in China.

Wow. Grow a set of priorities, man.

Seriously though, preserving one does not preclude preservation of the other. I think it's safe to say we all care about pandas (awww, they're cuuuute!) but that doesn't mean we s

Gaming the post.

"What games would you put on display? "

Getting First post on Slashdot. :)

Re:Gaming the post.

I prefer "Karma-Whore: The Grind to +2"

What?

No "Mega Man 2" tag yet? =P

It already is archived

Pretty much every variant of every game made in the past two decades is neatly archived on various sites. They are easy to find, you just have to look.

What games would you put on display?

Why not put all of them in storage, and have a computer to browse it displaying the most popular ones [metacritic.com] by default? Let people play them. Record their games and put up some good past recordings on a few big screens for others to see.

Re:

Some of them are corrupted though.

For example all the online copies of the 1982 Apple II game Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves that I can find are corrupted - you can play it, but not all of the original characters are present.

Re:

The best version of Pitfall II was on the Atari 5200. The programmer directly ported the original VCS/2600 version to the 5200, and discovered he had some spare time to kill, so he created a whole other game (think Pitfall III) that happens immediately after you beat the first game.

The second game can only be described as "extremely difficult". I couldn't get past the first screen due to the fact all the crabs run about four times faster! One of these days I'll get-around to beating it.

Thanks to emulatio

Fix copyright first

Well archiving ROMS and disk images for emulation would be all fine and dandy if COPYRIGHT DIDN'T STILL EXIST on most of it.

We had this discussion in regards to the Digital Dark ages not so long ago. Copyright needs a massive overhaul in order to preserve most of this gaming history, and bring it out of it's current legal grey area. ..otherwise all these obscure Commodore 64 tape games will never see the light of day.

what would I archive

Manic Miner / Jet Set Willy : Disturbingly Addictive
Elite : 3D in 32Kb
Sabre Wulf : First (I think) forced-perspective 3d
Daley Thomson's Decathlon - for single-handedly killing more Z and X keys than anything else on the market. Ever.

One game which must be included

...is M.U.L.E. [wikipedia.org] This game was a true landmark.

Hrmm

Daikatana.

Why? So future generations may know how exactly not to create a game.

Duke Nukem Forever

And Duke Nukem Forever!

Elite

Elite on the Commodore 64 .. that was f**ng awesome

Videogames don't need to be 'preserved' in museums

He feels that games should be archived in the same way that music, books and film are preserved, as we often use them as markers in our culture and history.

This only applies to the destructive elements of games (packaging, artwork, instruction manuals, etc), and the actual computer or console hardware the games are run on. However, the whole 'stick videogames in museums' mentality this projects reeks of reflects a much greater ignorance of the preservation of software in general. What we really need in order to 'preserve' video game culture is not some expensive museum space full of trite screenshots of software still under copyright that nobody is legally allowed to play themselves, but we need a relaxation of copyright and a strengthening of fair use so that old cultural artifacts that are no longer profitable and would otherwise be forgotten are defaulted to the public domain. Then the 'preservation' and archiving would happen on their own for free by people who still love the old games and enjoy taking part in the preservation of a culture they were a part of. Just look at projects like MAME and the massive ROM archives collections that are passed around the Internet underground and continue to exist despite all of the legal obstacles.

Re:Videogames don't need to be 'preserved' in muse

What we really need in order to 'preserve' video game culture is not some expensive museum space full of trite screenshots of software still under copyright that nobody is legally allowed to play themselves, but we need a relaxation of copyright and a strengthening of fair use so that old cultural artifacts that are no longer profitable and would otherwise be forgotten are defaulted to the public domain.

You're right about copyright etc but there's more to a museum than just displaying old stuff. The curators have an important job of putting everything in context, finding the really interesting stuff and giving it prominence, and providing the historical and cultural background behind each gaming milestone. And make it interesting for old gamers and people who aren't old gamers.

So I would expect the museum to show me stuff I'd never think of looking for on my own, to talk about who made the games, who was playing them, where they were played etc, and to help my kids to understand more about how I grew up.

Do both

Allowing use of abandonware would certainly keep the good games alive, but I think you're missing the point of an archive: to make as complete a collection as possible, so that the non-popular stuff is preserved, and to make it available to researchers. The two complement each other, and shouldn't be treated as alternatives.

Political Science of Archivism

He feels that games should be archived in the same way that music, books and film are preserved

Let's hope he changes his mind. Today's music, books and film are archived in proprietary formats, often requiring proprietary for-profit DRM services and software to access, legal (copyright) restrictions on making backup copies; and in the case of movies and TV shows the original films are often changed to suit the fad of the current day while the original copies sit literally rotting in storage. Books are often stolen or vandalized in libraries (including more restrictive academic libraries), and many are just banned and even burned because of PTA (think-of-the-children) activism.

Once knowledge becomes commercialized and given moral value then archivism will deal more with political science rather than library science.

Tag?

Which gibbering simpleton tagged this UK-based story yourtaxDOLLARSatwork?

Raid over Moscow

A true product of cold war era.

Especially as a Finn I find it significant, for reasons highlighted in the wiki article [wikipedia.org]. It was pretty funny to follow from sidelines...Talking heads on TV and all that about how computer games might affect our kids, relation to the USSR and so on. Of course we have since heard that same stuff again over GTA and similar games, but at least back then it was related to foreign politics instead of scoring random points for next election.

"it's also about video game culture"

I'd like to see how they capture all the bigotry and name calling on Xbox Live. Hopefully they have some recordings of actually taunts while playing Halo 3 online with some 12 year old kid.

Will they also have a wax model of a 12 year old kid with cheetohs all over his fingers and lips?

SCUMM Archives

The Lucasarts point and click adventure games have a special place in my heart. Maniac Mansion, Zack McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders, Indiana Johnes and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max Hit the Road... all classics near and dear to my early gamer career!

A "Timeline of Adventure Games" is mandatory!

I want to see one hallway that starts with "Adventure," leads on to an Infocom retrospective, then "Mystery House," the Sierra library, and so forth. Adventure gaming is a very distinct subset of the gaming canon that relies on narrative and immersion rather than action and graphics. Leaving it out would be like going to a museum that didn't bother exhibiting paintings because they were just 2D.

Re:

In fact, in many (most?) countries in western Europe at least, home computers massively dominated for most of the 80's and consoles were a niche. Most kids I knew considered consoles as something for people that couldn't afford a full fledged computer until at least the Super Nintendo, which was the first one I remember people talking about without being embarrassed for not getting something better.

(At least part of this I think came from parents delusion that if they bought a home computer it'd get used