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?

Comments

What about the hardware?

[Majik Sheff]

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:What about the hardware?

[penginkun]

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 should knock down the museums to build panda habitats.

Re:What about the hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 event in San Jose. There's also a good vintage console selection (as well as computer selection) at Vintage Computer Fest, which has both an East Coast and a West Coast show every year.

Pinball-wise, we have the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, and the Lucky JuJu in the SF Bay Area. (And these are museums, not shows.)

Pinball show-wise, a bunch of Bay Area pinheads also put together the Pacific Pinball Expo, which features a lot of fully-restored electromechanical machines from the 50s-70s, and even a small selection of flipperless / woodrail / bumper games from the late 20s-30s. (If you ever go to the expo, play these games. They're surprisingly fun!)

There's a preponderance of "shows" over "museums" here, but that's because games are interactive (and old electronic/mechanical hardware, even if engineered to take the abuse of an arcade environment, can be fragile), and the risk to the artifacts over the long term is enough to discourage most museum curators from having lots of hands-on exhibits. Building a sufficiently large collection to warrant a museum, leasing a permanent space, and then opening that collection up to the general public on an ongoing basis is a prohibitive amount of time and money for all but a handful of people.

Crowdsourcing the collection process (by having a few hundred people haul in a couple of their own personal games for a weekend), by contrast, works very well. The downside is that you can only attend the event one weekend a year, but the upside is that it's a very well-populated event. And because you've also crowdsourced the repair/maintenance (each exhibitor is responsible for the upkeep of only one or two games on the show floor, and no individual collector's entire collection is at risk), you can let the general public show up and play the games.

So that's how it's done in the coin-op amusement community (and the crane sandboxes and plastic mold-making machines would probably be welcome at either CAX or Pacific Pinball Expo). Anyone got any links for other museums or shows featuring other forms of cultural ephemera?

Fix copyright first

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[ozbon]

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.

Hrmm

[acehole]

Daikatana.

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

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

[radimvice]

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:Gaming the post.

[NoisySplatter]

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

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

[stranger_to_himself]

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.

Tag?

[SpooForBrains]

Which gibbering simpleton tagged this UK-based story yourtaxDOLLARSatwork?

Do both

[pjt33]

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.

"it's also about video game culture"

[aplusjimages]

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?

A "Timeline of Adventure Games" is mandatory!

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

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.