Game Preservation

SomethingAwful Game Articles

Some humour from SomethingAwful with PC Game Covers 2, looking at various poorly made old game covers, and for Nintendo fans comes some humourous Counselor's Corner! tips in Nintendo Power: The Lost Pages.

GOG from CD-Projekt to Offer Classic Games

Good news, from some perspectives, is that CD-Projekt are offering classic PC games for download from their new site come August or so at GOG.com, with prices either being $5.99 or $9.99. They say modern compatibility (perhaps the obvious objective for it really!) is there, and possibilities of extra downloads. It is good to see some great games get some life, and there is no DRM according to the interview - a big plus for us preservationists who hate it! Without a physical copy being offered, the fact is, if the system goes offline we'll still be able to play the games. I am glad they understand this!

Stanford Workshop: “Preserving Knowledge in Virtual Worlds”

Our own Henry Lowood at How They Got Game has advertised a new August 2008 workshop titled "Preserving Knowledge in Virtual Worlds". This will among other things hopefully answer: "How will businesses, government organizations, and academic institutions preserve and manage knowledge emerging from work in these spaces?" - read the post for much, much more detail, and I hope to hear news from the event when it is finished!

The Importance Of History In The Excellence Of Video Games

Via. Matteo at How They Got Game, a The Escapist piece which passed me by until now, titled "Excellence Never Goes Out Of Date" penned by Rob Zancy - detailing the basic fact that, of course, if no one plays old games then they couldn't very well make good new ones, and the history of games is very important.

Henry Lowood on Machinima and the History of Digital Games

As the titles says, Henry has good piece on Machinima, it's importance for digital game history. Nice to see more evangelicalism for this sector of game preservation!

The First Video Game Sequel with modding?

Jay Barnson at Rament Cyote muses on what the possible first video game sequel and moddable game - Hunt the Wumpus. A interesting note to look at.

Discworld Game Remakes

Very interesting, from Chris Bateman comes the news that all 3 Discworld games are being remade by fans, officially allowed and to make the games free to play on modern platforms! This is awesome news, and I've never had the pleasure of playing Discworld Noir - which faired poorly on most systems due to the bugs.

Interview with Benoît Sokal

Adventure Classic Gaming interviewed Benoît Sokal, designer of celebrated adventure games such as Syberia and Amerzone, and asked his opinion on projects both old and new.Syberia won several awards when it was released in 2003, making Sokal a well known figure in the genre.

10 things everyone should know about Space Invaders

Benj Edwards from Vintage Computing and Gaming has just published an article in 1up about the 10 Things Everyone Should Know About Space Invaders. It covers everything from development to impact in our culture. A must read for anyone interested in games!

THE MAKING OF… Carmageddon

Edge (via. Next-Gen.biz) has the Making Of...Carmageddon online, a not too new game from the haydays of PC, and a controversial game in the UK and German markets. Should have possibly got more love, it and it's sequel were really just fun.

Ralph Baer On The Industry’s Birth, Preserving History

Ralph Baer had a talk about many things, as detailed in this Gamasutra news article, especially interesting is on the first videogames and the need for preservation. I wonder if any form of transcript would become available, it'd be certainly an interesting read to hear it in full.

@Play on Roguelikes and History

Interesting overview of the history of roguelikes by John Harris on his @Play GameSetWatch column, and the efforts made to preserve them. I missed posting this earlier this week, so go read it now if you haven't ;)

Video Games and Libraries

An interesting overview of Video Games and Libraries by Heather of Adventures in Library School, which includes a note about the Library of Congress work with them, and several other endeavours in American Libraries.

The History of 8bit Gaming in the UK

The History of 8bit Gaming in the UK, a website by Tony Barnett, I recently found and seemingly details a good amount of press releases from 1982 onwards for the UK's gaming scene. Makes for some interesting reading, especially for companies which still exist in one form or another. Certainly, the UK 1980's gaming scene was very different to the USA one, so that too is a nice contrast.

Tony also seems to run the parent site ZXSoftware.co.uk, which contains information on Sinclair systems.

The Horrors of Retro PC Game Covers

SomethingAwful has a look at some of the worst PC Game Covers from the 1980s and 1990s.