Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
No "Mega Man 2" tag yet? =P
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
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.
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.
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
...is M.U.L.E. This game was a true landmark.
Daikatana.
Why? So future generations may know how exactly not to create a game.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Elite on the Commodore 64 ..
that was f**ng awesome
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.
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.
I prefer "Karma-Whore: The Grind to +2"
In Soviet Russia meme tires of you!
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.
Which gibbering simpleton tagged this UK-based story yourtaxDOLLARSatwork?
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
A true product of cold war era.
Especially as a Finn I find it significant, for reasons highlighted in the wiki article. 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.
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.
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?
Can I bum a sig?
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 emulation, everyone can now play these games. It's no longer limited to just those who have ~$100 to spend buying the necessary hardware.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
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!
(At least part of this I think came from parents delusion that if they bought a home computer it'd get used for a lot more than games, which was untrue for maybe 90%+ of the kids that got the).
The C64 (and VIC 20 before the launch of C64), Amigas and Atari ST's dominated in Scandinavia (pretty much in that order in terms of volume), with Spectrum and Amstrad as lesser players. Elsewhere in Europe Spectrum, Amstrad and BBC did comparatively better. Acorn Archimedes also didn't do too badly in the late 80's.
In fact, I've never seen most of the consoles you list before 1991 apart from in pictures despite being in and out of the local tech stores as often as I could (probably almost daily from '85-'90 or so) and reading all related magazines I could get my hand on - none of my friends ever had them.
I remember seeing a wide variety of home computers in the computer stores near where I lived (in Norway) in the early 80's, including Commodore PET's, Dragon 32's, Spectravideo, Oric, the odd MSX and other rarities - some larger stores or specialist stores would have other models, but I can't recall ever seeing any of them sell any consoles until the late 80's (I'm sure I ignored some, by virtue of our complete lack of interest in them).
By 1985 most shops around me had stopped stocking any other 8 bit home computers than C64 and Spectrum, with some selling Amstrad CPC's. Then the Amiga's and Atari ST's and the occasional console slowly started showing up.
At least Commodore's massive popularity here was a uniquely European thing - Commodore's European sales far outpaced it's US sales, and the sheer volume probably was part of "stunting" the importance of consoles in Europe in the 80's significantly.
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.