The Keepers Of All Games

Defender

Simons and Newman do not share this point of view. "The idea of a National Video Game Archive came about after a frustration that there was no single resource to direct students or parents to if they wanted to find out about games," explains Newman. "Iain and I wrote a book called 100 Videogames for the British Film Institute in 2007 and one of the frustrations was that we had was that a lot of the games we were writing about simply couldn't be played. Even seminal titles like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - titles that frequently top 100 Best Games lists – weren't easily available unless you wanted to rummage through bargain bins or download ROMs and emulators.

"We thought that bargain bins and consoles that eventually end up falling apart (because, we should remember that everything falls apart eventually), illegal ROMs and emulators that get 80% of the experience of the original are clearly not the way to preserve the history of gaming. Games are an important part of popular culture and any attempt in years to come to understand what the popular culture of the late 20th/early 21st century would be pretty impoverished with no access to videogames." So the pair partnered with Nottingham Trent University and the National Media Museum to begin working out what a video game archive might look like. But while it's easy to argue for the relevance of preserving gaming's past, working out how to go about preserving that past is another question entirely. 

"The technical issues faced are substantial," says Simons. "Some games are extinct; some are missing; the ones you can find have to be migrated to new systems and emulated, whereupon they sometimes become almost unrecognisable from the originals; and then there's the army of Intellectual Property lawyers to stop you doing any of it anyway." As such, the Archive's approach to preservation has, thus far, been somewhat scattershot.

"Our aim is to collect, preserve and exhibit a whole host of materials from game cartridges and disks, through to design documents, marketing and advertising, fan-made maps and artworks, and videos of players playing," explains Newman. "So, we try to cover the full extent of videogames, from the initial design through to the objects themselves, to records of how they were played once they were released."

Gotta Catch 'Em All?

The collection of these artifacts is currently held in vaults at Bradford's National Media Museum, with parts of the collection available to the public. Despite having premises to house the collection, the question of storage is, of course, pertinent and leads to another question: how much to endeavor to collect? Surely the plan isn't to make a library of all games?

"No museum can attempt to save everything so we have to be selective," says Newman. "We have a collections policy that identifies specific collecting themes and we have an exhibition strategy that guides our collecting as we acquire objects for display. Similarly, although it's the National Videogame Archive, it's not a British collection per se. Rather, it's intended to reflect the games that impacted on this country and helped to create our gaming culture. So without doubt that means collecting from the UK's rich heritage but it also means looking to Europe the US and Japan."

If the plan isn't to attempt to preserve all games, then someone must have the job of choosing what games are to be included in the archive. As such, what constitutes notability? "That's a really tricky issue and is at least part of the reason we have collecting policies and themes," Newman explains. "We try to tell stories as much as preserve individually important games.

"By picking particular narratives to tell, whether they are something like 'user-generated content' or particular genres of games, for example, we can select titles whose features will contribute to enhancing understanding. This also allows us to move away from simply dealing in the 'best' games to being interested in the most illustrative. Things like the IGDA Game Canon is absolutely great but we probably already all agreed that we needed to look out for Tetris and Doom. What about Horace Goes Skiing? Game & Watch Parachute? N64 Superman?"

Indeed, Newman believes that 'bad' games can be just as important as 'good' games to capturing gaming's history and that there's a danger that our history becomes exclusively defined by titles that enjoy universal acclaim. "We need to be careful that we don't just end up with a list of the usual suspects - all those lauded games that everybody agrees are great. They're not the only things we want to preserve. The history of games is full of terrible games just as it is full of AAA successes. Look at the Smithsonian's Art of Games crowdsourcing project - there's not too many surprises in there. We must be careful not to preserve only that which is universally lauded in its time."