Blog

In 2015, while undertaking a PhD in which I examined the role of a writer in creating narrative-driven games, I was fortunate enough to speak to four expert writers, each a pioneer in video game narrative design. One of these experts was Veronika M. ... Continue Reading »

  July 12, 2015 is the release date of my first ever computer game named ‘Jam It’ – an arcade-style 2-on-2 basketball game. What’s unusual is that it’s for a computer which was very popular in the 80s – the Commodore 64. I have been asked many times why even attempt ... Continue Reading »

Czechoslovakia of the 1980s was a country behind the so-called Iron Curtain. Its economy was in a dire shape and its citizens were either oppressed or annoyed (or both) by its conservative totalitarian regime. It required considerable personal connections to be able to subscribe to a Western magazine or import ... Continue Reading »

In a second post on the relationship between British and Australian computer game scenes in the 1980s, we turn to two game developers who reminisce about playing Beam Software and/or Melbourne House games during this time. As has been discussed in previous Play it Again blogs, the relationship between ... Continue Reading »

For many British children growing up in the 1980s, the theme tune and sight of the witch in the educational game Granny’s Garden will often evoke a nostalgic response. Released in 1983, Granny’s Garden was developed by Mike Matson, a deputy head teacher at a school in Devon and an ... Continue Reading »

What got you started collecting on/around the area of games? A number of things really, I've lived my life in gaming; From the earliest time all I could think about was playing video games. First console was a 2600, and as I ... Continue Reading »

What got you started collecting on/around the area of games?  I’ve always had an interest from a young age in computers and videogames and I’m old enough to have grown up during a period when both were new and exciting. There was a period where there was a flood of different ... Continue Reading »

What got you started collecting on/around the area of games?  Back in the 80's I was also a stamp collector, so collecting came natural.  But for computer games, there was a scarcity of games for the Microbee at the time, so one collected everything you could, be it a type-in, public ... Continue Reading »

What got you started collecting on/around the area of games? I was lead into collecting by nothing more than misty-eyed nostalgia. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81. In the early 80s, at 10 or 11 years old, I taught myself to program a ZX81 which was on display in a ... Continue Reading »

What got you started collecting on/around the area of games? / What do you collect? I have managed to restrict my collecting to the Sega SC-3000 / SC-3000H. I think most collectors have their own nostalgic reasons for doing what they do, or at least that is how it starts. In my case, ... Continue Reading »

What got you started collecting on/around the area of games? I was an avid reader as a child and you could argue that my original game collection consisted of all the Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books! My transition to collecting computer games began when the electronic gaming industry ... Continue Reading »

On the 19th and 20th June, 2014, the Play It Again team welcomed a fabulously diverse group of  scholars and practitioners to Melbourne's Australian Centre for the Moving Image for the Born Digital and Cultural Heritage conference.  In attendance were Humanities and Computer Science researchers, lawyers, archivists, conservators, librarians, game ... Continue Reading »

The issues for collection managers around games cataloguing are difficult and that may well be why we find 30 years on, the institutional collection and cataloguing of this material is somewhat limited. Similar to the new challenges of ‘Time-Based Media’ cataloguing we find ourselves with the complexities of hardware, software, ... Continue Reading »

The William A. Higinbotham Game Studies Collection (WHGSC) at Stony Brook University is dedicated to documenting the material culture of screen-based game media in general and in specific, collecting and preserving the texts, ephemera, and artifacts that document the history of a 1958 computer simulation designed by Higinbotham ... Continue Reading »

The history of the collection began when the museum was founded in 1996 by purchasing video game consoles and complementary accessories at auctions and car boot sales.  Afterwards it was mainly focused on acquisitions for special exhibitions contributing to a continuously growing inventory of both software and hardware.  Since the ... Continue Reading »

The curation of videogames, their collection and preservation creates new challenges for the Museum. In 2002, Stanford curator of History of Science and Technology and Film and Media collections Henry Lowood called for new institutional and curatorial models capable of addressing videogames. Yet in a 2011 survey on the state ... Continue Reading »

The New Zealand Film Archive has been aware of the 'institutional gap' in this country for several years, with regard to the lack of representation of video games & early computer games within national cultural collections. In 2005 when the NZFA held an exhibition called C:/ DOS / RUN - ... Continue Reading »

As we have discovered, most early computer games are still protected by copyright and therefore they cannot be archived or made available online (even for not-for-profit purposes like the PlayitAgain project) without the consent of their copyright owners. However copyright protection will not necessarily protect computer games from game cloners, who ... Continue Reading »

Many copyright works – especially books – have a potentially lengthy commercial lifespan.  Of course, longevity does not necessarily equate to commercial success, but the longer a work’s ‘shelf life’, the better the prospects for the owner.  Strangely enough, a longer shelf life may also benefit the consumer – how ... Continue Reading »

Absent a legal solution for the orphan games, archivists have to balance the risks. On the one hand, to not archive them risks their physical deterioration and loss to our cultural heritage, but does comply with copyright law. On the other hand, to digitally archive the orphan games will preserve them ... Continue Reading »