Know Your Roots.

The Brits have opened a video game historical archive at the National Media Museum in Bradford.  This is a Good Thing.

The nature of our industry has made it far too easy for us to “fire and forget” products in the past with the result being the loss of awareness of the history of great games that have been released over the years. Furtive and legally difficult efforts have been made to preserve the availability of so-called “abandonware” and the success of handheld devices has given added life to older games that get ported to things like the DS, but even then all that’s being saved is the data.

What makes efforts like this archive helpful is the addition of context.

Without understanding where something came from or why it looks, feels and behaves the way it does makes it hard to appreciate the significance of many older games. How can you explain the significance of text-based MUDs to a kid whose first online gaming experience was a graphically intensive shooter on XBox Live? You need a narrative. What was the world like when these games came out? What sort of impact did it have on players? On developers? On future game makers?

People tend to try and compare what we do to movies, which I don’t think is correct. We’re a lot more like music. I was talking with Barnett a few days ago and he mentioned something that struck me as very true. Anyone who loves games – as with people who love music – almost certainly has a “season” in their past where that love was first established and fortified. What you experienced during that “season” is lodged forever in a priveleged part of your mind and psyche and – while you’ll continue to seek out and enjoy new games (or music) for the rest of your life – you’ll always have a disproportionate affection for the things you LOVED during that specific time in your life.

For most of us, that happens when we’re young. I distinctly remember rushing over to my best friend’s house in the Winter of 1993 to try and grab DOOM off of the U. Madison FTP server the day it was officially released. And then, of course, failing to do so and desperately trying to get onto a local BBS that had it available. I have fond memories of weekends spent playing through old Sierra adventure games with my friends – taking turns at the keyboard while the rest of the group shouted suggestions and demands. I remember playing the original Civilization for the first time, then losing the next six months of my life to it. I’ve enjoyed hundreds – maybe even thousands – of games since then, but the games I played in those formative years mean the most to me on a core, emotional level.

It’s hard to communicate what old games meant to people simply by porting them to a phone. You need to offer the human side of it as well to capture the full narrative and history of where we as an industry came from. I hope we see more of this sort of thing in the years to come because the work of the early generations of game developers deserves to be preserved and remembered not simply in screenshots and emulation, but also in stories and in the collective consciousness of new generations of gamers.

Comments

3 Responses to “Know Your Roots.”

  1. arbitrary on November 1st, 2008 1:32 am

    Am keeping an eye on this, as I have a ton of really old games I want to find a good home for.

  2. Barnett calls it “gaming archaeology”. :Rev. Dr. Joshua S. Drescher on November 13th, 2008 6:29 pm

    […] to them to detail the whole event.This sort of thing is important to our industry (as I’ve mentioned before).  The folks who built those old games have all moved on to other things (some of them have […]

  3. Lagwar on November 19th, 2008 4:09 pm

    Wow, the comparison of games to music was just amazing and really hit home. You’re right, you don’t look back at movies and remember them like a “season” so to speak like you do with music or a game you were really into. Can remember what games my friends and i were playing all those weekends when we were in grammar school and which songs I played on repeat when a girlfriend broke up with me. Couldn’t tell ya what movie I had been watching lol. Good stuff.

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