The challenge of preserving video games isn’t just technical: it’s also about convincing the public that game history *is* history, and that it’s well worth saving.
Michelle Flitman, a recent art-school graduate who lives in a suburb of Chicago, grew up in a home full of video games. To her dad, Mark, they were the odds and ends of corporate life: he was a game producer and designer who worked on NFL Blitz 2003, Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage, and WWF Raw. But to Michelle, they were part of the fabric of childhood, and she thought her father deserved some recognition.
Two days later, she was on a Zoom call with Frank Cifaldi, a Bay Area preservationist who incorporated the foundation in 2016 and opened it to the public in 2017. He directs it alongside Kelsey Lewin, the co-owner of Pink Gorilla Games, a retailer that sells retro video games in Seattle. Cifaldi and Lewin agreed to fly out to Chicago to sift through Mark’s hundreds of games and dozens of dusty boxes. They have been working to archive his collection ever since..
“This is the longest-running and most-subscribed-to video-game magazine in the U.S.,” Lewin observed. Listening to them, I felt like a kid on an unchaperoned field trip. These days, Mark is semi-retired, doing a bit of screenwriting and working on a memoir that is tentatively titled “It’s Not All Fun and Games.” Mark left the video-game industry, he told me, because even the success of major publishers didn’t last very long. “Midway is gone now,” he said. “Mindscape is gone. Atari is gone.”
Still, Cifaldi often found those online communities unsatisfying, he told me, because games tended to be uploaded without context. “I would discover these whole-ass games—like, entire video games that were completed and done, sold to people—and we didn’t know anything about them,” he said. He didn’t like that the story seemed to end as soon as playable code was posted online.
This argument is starting to take hold in game-preservation circles, according to David Gibson, a digital-project coördinator at the Library of Congress. “It’s really just another way of repurposing the content so that people can have access to it,” he told me. The Library of Congress preserves physical materials such as video-game periodicals and strategy guides, but it “didn’t really start collecting games until around the mid-nineties,” he said.
In the fall of 2009, a group of archivists and researchers published a paper called “Before It’s Too Late” in the, an academic publication from the Strong Museum of Play, in Rochester, New York. “Electronic games have profoundly changed the way people play, learn, and connect with each other,” the authors wrote. “If we fail to address the problems of game preservation, the digital games of today will disappear, perhaps within a few decades.
Then there’s the challenge that games are more than cultural artifacts—they’re also business ventures and social experiences, and to contextualize them you need things like marketing-strategy documents and media booklets and dinosaur-themed magazine issues. That’s difficult when everything that goes into a video game may be confidential.
Upstairs, over the comforting noise of a scanner, Lewin told me that even people in the video-game industry sometimes wonder why historians would be interested in their work. “I think a lot of people tend to just not realize they are a part of something important,” she told me. “These were just jobs to them.”
Malaysia Latest News, Malaysia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Country music singer Luke Bell found dead at age 32Country music star Luke Bell has died, Arizona authorities confirmed to Fox News Digital. He was 32.
Read more »
Soft Foods, Hard Liquor: A Dining Dispatch from Jon Taffer’s Just-Opened DC TavernThe Bar Rescue star dishes out a meal we'd be happy to receive at an airport.
Read more »
Yoga Sect Allegedly Exploited Women to Lure Men Like Opera Star DomingoFormer members of a sect-like Argentine group say women in the group were called “geishas” and “slaves.”
Read more »
Telluride Film Festival 2022 Lineup Includes None Other Than Cate BlanchettTelluride Film Festival will be awarding Cate Blanchett as one one of this year’s honorees, which recognize “an artist’s significant contribution to the world of cinema,” according to the festival
Read more »
Hollywood Walk of Fame Star for Avril Lavigne UnveiledGrammy-nominated singer and songwriter Avril Lavigne will be getting her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame celebrating her the 20th anniversary of her first album.
Read more »