Late last year, after several months of legal to-ing and fro-ing, the National Videogame Archive was launched at the GameCity 3 show. To coincide with the launch, myself and Jimmy conceived of a campaign during a late-night skype, the intention of which was to heighten the emotional and cultural intent of the whole project.
The NVA is really only very partially about the preservation of code, more central to its conception is the question of how games can be explained and translated – the answer to this is seldom contained within the games themselves.
Save the Videogame then, was conceived initially as a way to capsulate the humanity in the archive, whilst also providing a useful push-off to get the Archive collection launched. It proved to be more successful than we were prepared for – Keita was generous enough to design a launch t-shirt, Big Tone came through with some really nice branding – and a series of pledges were recorded by a number of devs and GameCity attendees.
Jonathan Smith : Save the Videogame from gamecity on Vimeo.
So, right now – we’re just into the planning of a series of live events in support of the campaign, which will be gathering some pace again when the GameCity online efforts are wholly retooled in the Spring.
The first of these is happening later on this month in Manchester, and we’d love it if everyone came along.
Thursday January 22, 2009 at 6:45pm
Kilburn Building
Oxford Road
Manchester, England M13 9PL
Category: Social
Save the VideogameVideogames are disappearing.
No, really. They are.Consoles, cartridges, discs, and tapes gather dust in lofts. Crucial prototypes get thrown away when studios go bust, rare versions of classic games are lost forever. Every day, we lose bit of our history.
We need a National Videogame Archive.
Luckily, we’ve just started one.Tonight, Iain Simons and James Newman will be explaining the origins of this new project, and addressing the issues surrounding digital heritage, inviting you to have your say in the preservation of this most important of cultural forms.
Issues addressed will include:
- Cultural Elitism
- How to preserve Fan-Culture
- The challenges of translation and access
- Horace goes SkiingAs well as being an incisive look at the cultural and technical challenges of digital preservation, Save the Videogame will also feature plentiful opportunities for the audience to win prizes.
We’ve enjoyed games for years.
They need our help now.
*The Archive was actually first publically talked about a good year earlier in a New Statesman supplement we did for GameCity II.