Preserving the History of Games

On a yearly basis, important films are added to the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress, ensuring that landmark motion pictures are preserved in their original forms for generations to come. During last week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Stanford University History of Science and Technology Collections curator Henry Lowood spoke on his efforts to cultivate a similar effort for video games. Lowood has been archiving video games since 1998, and during GDC he along with a panel including noted designers Steve Meretzky and Warren Spector began to establish a list of games crucial to the evolution of the medium. The ten games selected by the panel as the most important games of all time--sure to be a list of great contention--are the pioneering MIT-originated 1961 space combat game Spacewar!, Doug Neubauer's 1979 space sim Star Raiders (Atari 8-bit), Infocom's 1980 text adventure Zork (PC), Alexey Pajitnov's 1985 puzzle game Tetris, Will Wright's 1989 urban sandbox SimCity (PC), Nintendo's 1990 platformer Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES), Microprose's appropriately named 1991 history simulator Sid Meier's Civilization (PC), id Software's influential 1993 shooter Doom (PC), Blizzard's WarCraft (PC) RTS franchise beginning in 1994, and Sensible Software's classic 1994 sports game Sensible World of Soccer (AMI). SimCity is "one of the most important art works of the 20th century," said researcher Matteo Bittanti. "It completely reinvented the whole notion of games. And then it transcended the game world to become a cultural phenomenon." Despite the information-based nature of video games, the history of the form has been poorly maintained, due to factors such as the plethora of formats that have come and gone over the years, the rapid obsolescence of games due to continued technological advancement, as well as the disposable, hit-driven business model that leads most publishers to largely ignore their older propertites. Many older games, particularly those requiring unique hardware, exist only in very limited numbers, and some no longer at all. On game preservation, Spector warned, "We have to be really careful here because the technology is just going to make this harder for us. The game canon is a way of saying, this is the stuff we have to protect first." "Creating this list is an assertion that digital games have a cultural significance and a historical significance," said Lowood. "Maybe we should do something about preserving them."