We’re seeing the topic of game preservation pop up more and more, but what about the preservation of Australian-made games?
The Australian Research Centre has funded three years worth of research into different techniques for saving games and digital art for future generations. Coming to the end of their second year working on this project, Swinburne University of Technology Professor of Digital Media Heritage, Melanie Swalwell, and her team at the Digital Heritage Lab are now ready to show some of the fruits of their labour.
From the 16th to the 19th of February, the Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI) will be hosting Play It Again: Preserving Australia’s videogames from the 1990s, a series of events, experiences and exhibition artefacts looking at game preservation. These events will showcase how Swalwell’s team has been recovering, restoring, and preserving Australian made video games since the 1990s.
Some of the games that will be showcased as part of the exhibition include Choplifter II, Cricket 97, and KKND: Krush Kill ‘N Destroy Xtreme, all of which were developed by Melbourne-based developer Beam Software across the 90s. The Team Fortress Quake Mod will also be on display, which was made in Australia and later influenced Valve’s Team Fortress Classic. The games on display will be presented running on both their original hardware as well as on modern emulators for experts and the public to compare the versions and try the emulations out.
Other events include talks with researchers about the work that they’ve done to keep the games from the past alive, as well as veteran developers about their past creations, such as John Passfield and his work on Flight of the Amazon Queen and the TY the Tasmanian Tiger series.
The exhibition is on now, so I highly recommend checking it out. ACMI is filled with all sorts of amazing Australian video game history, so this new project showcasing game preservation is an incredibly cool addition.
You can check out more info here.
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