This web portal forms part of Play it Again 2, a game history and preservation project focused on collecting and preserving Australian videogames of the 1990s.
Play it Again 2 is a research project that aims to document, preserve, and exhibit the history of the Australian videogame industry during the 1990s. Australian made videogames of the 1990s are at risk digital artefacts. This project aims to preserve these complex digital artefacts and recover their history for future generations by conducting participatory historical research with the public. It will also investigate challenges to the emulation of 1990s videogames created during a decade of rapid development of computing power and graphics. It will address questions of access within collecting organisations for complex born-digital objects by evaluating game emulation as a cloud-based service.
The project builds on the original Play it Again which focused on curating a collection of Australian and New Zealand games of the 1980s. The 1980s collection addressed the emergence of videogames as central to the cultures of home computing. Collecting games for microcomputers, it critically addressed both the emergence of Australia’s early videogame design industry and the importance of hobbyist game design in this era. It recognised that, for many Antipodeans,tinkering with the code of videogames on your microcomputer and writing your own videogames was as central as playing games
This new iteration of Play it Again, focused on the 1990s, addresses a time when the videogames industry became more formalised and games and other software became more complex. 1990 games software for home computers can require specialised software such as dlls (data link libraries), graphic and sound card drivers. How people played games was also changing, with an increased focus on online and multiplayer experiences.
Working with partners the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and AARnet (Australia’s Academic and Research Network) and in collaboration with global digital heritage leaders UNESCO Persist and emulation cloud services designers Open SLX.
The project aims are:
- To research the production and reception histories of selected Australian digital games of the 1990s, in conjunction with fan communities;
- To develop a collection of significant Australian digital games from the 1990s, stabilising these so they can be accessed in the future within the museum context;
- To develop tools to extract software requirements (e.g. driver names and versions) to enable execution of legacy game software;
- To pilot and evaluate cloud services and platforms, including Emulation as a Service (EaaS), and conduct a comparison of cloud technologies, in terms of their efficacy for accessing born digital artefacts.
The Play it Again 1990s collection is a curated collection of videogames that are representative of the era. It includes games that feature unique Australian content and others that are significant in understanding how global forces have shaped the local production industry. The era saw the rise of a local studio culture and bold experimentation in the crossover space between cinema and videogames. While focused firmly on digital games, the project also attends to the cultural and historical milieu in which game-makers negotiated a changing technology and business scene, collaborating with industries such as film as well as the player practices around games. This included experiments in networked community, and with what players made and did with these products.
The second two aims of the project are more explicitly addressing the challenges of emulation to collecting organisations. Firstly, is the recognition that, with complex softwares such as 1990s videogames for home computing, the need to develop a suitable emulation environment requires knowledge of associated interdependencies. Access to the game’s files may not provide insight into information of the other necessary utilities, cards and drivers required to create a compatible computer environment in which the program could best be executed. In many cases this information may not be easily discoverable. The project is working to develop tools to discover and document all the requirements for an optimum emulated system that takes into account a multitude of factors (operating system, interface, code, metadata, driver files, etc) needed to emulate a preserved game artefact. Secondly is the exploration of the use of Emulation as Service (EaaS). In Emulation as a Service, emulation environments are hosted by a server providing a stable operational environment for emulation and enabling ease of access to emulated works to users with heritage organisations.