Do you remember “Dragon” magazine and “White Dwarf”? Maybe you were hardcore enough to have read Avalon Hill’s “The General”! Do you remember SSG’s magazine “Run5” In the 1980s when gamers wanted to get more out their games, to learn strategies to take their gaming to the next level or play new ... 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 »

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 »

It was Friday the 16th, August 1985, and our first interview on television. Unfortunately the computer was not hooked up and as a programmer I was the closest thing they had to a hardware expert. At the moment it was working I had time to get to the couch, sit ... 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 »

During April this blog will focus on the legal environment for computer games of the 1980s. This post explains why many early computer games are “orphan works”. (An orphan work is a work which is protected by copyright, but whose rights-owner, or owners, cannot be identified and/or located.) Orphan works ... Continue Reading »

I purchased my first computer back in the Christmas of 1980. A Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1. This computer came with 16K of RAM, which I upgraded internally to 32K. It used an 8 bit Z-80 processor running at 1.78Mhz and had a monochrome graphics capability of 128 x 48 ... Continue Reading »

How does game development back in the early 80’s compare to game development today? For starters, the computers of that era were far less powerful  and didn’t have anywhere near the graphics and audio capabilities of today’s power houses. My TRS-80 was monochrome and offered a graphic resolution of only 128 ... Continue Reading »

The Poly could well have been the first microcomputer specifically designed for educational use in the world, and it came from New Zealand. The Poly was designed by Neil Scott and Paul Bryant at Wellington Polytechnic (hence its name) in 1980 as ... 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 »

Were you a user group sort of person?  What did your user group do?  How did you find out about it?

Collector of New Zealand digital games, Michael Davidson, has been busy packing up his collection for the exhibition he is helping to mount at Digital Nationz this weekend in Auckland. Alongside the chance to play the next generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft, ... Continue Reading »

Welcome to our blog.  A part of the Play It Again project, this is a space where we'll be hosting monthly blog discussions on themes related to 1980s games, game history in Australia and New Zealand, preservation, cultural heritage, intellectual property, and more besides.  Guests bloggers will be drawn from ... Continue Reading »

How does one identify local themes and scenes in digital games history?  Figuring out what is local will usually require knowledge of the non-local, won't it?  Well, in 1980s New Zealand there were some unique conditions which meant that games production developed at least partly along its own trajectory.  New ... 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 »