National Film and Sound Archive of Australia to Preserve Aussie Video Games for the First Time

From the The Sydney Morning Herald:

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) maintains over three million items that it documents, preserves and shares, but at Thursday’s opening of ACMI’s Game Masters exhibition in Canberra, the NFSA unveiled its plans to expand the collection to include games.

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The initial lineup of eight games to be archived covers almost 40 years of Australian development, and represents a variety of formats from cassettes to plastic cartridges to digital downloads, and even a game for virtual reality headsets. Müller says the diversity here is intentional, because the first step towards establishing games in the archive is to work out how best to preserve the various media.

For older games stored on tape, as with film and audio recordings, preservation is important as the data will likely be completely degraded within the next ten years. There’s also the issue of preserving machines that can play the games, and knowledge from experts who were there. With newer titles, issues include extricating games from the digital platforms they’re distributed on, or recreating an appropriate network environment for online play.

Read the Complete Article, View List of First Eight Games to be Preserved

Filed under: Data Files, News, Preservation