journal of visual culture

The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital

Games: From Novelty to Detritus and Back Again

Melanie Swalwell

Abstract
This article addresses the shifting, multiple and contradictory
reception of early digital games technology. It reflects on the changing
fortunes of early digital games in terms of the shifts in esteem they
undergo: from novelty to detritus, to partial recuperation as nostalgia
item, based on the author’s research into the history of such games in
New Zealand. Drawing inspiration from Tom Gunning’s analyses of the
interrelation between technological novelty and the existence of a
discourse that makes it possible to express such novelty, the author
argues that while the present collector-led valorizing of game artifacts
is significant, and the mercantile marketing of games from back-
catalogues useful, there is an urgent need for discourses reflecting on
digital games in relation to broader shifts in visual culture.

Keywords
collectors digital history
● ● discourse ● early computers ● nostalgia ●

preservation videogames
●

An irreverent, satirical television show, The Unauthorized History of New

Zealand, tells of how the Wanganui police supercomputer, after its
decommissioning, was cast into Matauri Bay. Hearing colleagues talk about
this the morning after it screened, I was intrigued to find out more. The
facility, first brought online in 1976 to house records for the Police and
Justice Departments and Land Transport Safety Authority, was highly
unpopular, being perceived as Big Brother-like in its ability to centralize and
cross-reference data. In November 1982, the 22-year-old Auckland anarchist
Neil Roberts died attempting to blow up the Computer Centre. Prior to
approaching the building, Roberts graffitied a wall across the road from the

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256 journal of visual culture 6(2)

facility with the message ‘WE HAVE MANIFESTED A SILENCE CLOSELY

RESEMBLING STUPIDITY’. Later that year Roberts’s friend, Bronwyn Dutton,
revealed that he had also talked about blowing up the ‘Beehive’, the New
Zealand Parliament: ‘If he is going to kill himself, he might as well . . . the
idea was to take something with him that was annoying everybody’ (Baker,
2003).
On the face of it, this seems a story about a public which was nervous about
law enforcement officers having access to personal information in the early
days of computerized record keeping. But it is also a story about what
happens to old computing technology when it ceases to be ‘useful’, and it is
this aspect that interests me. To date, I have not been able to find any
accounts that corroborate The Unauthorized History’s version of the
dumping of the computer, a Univac mainframe. The stated intention of EDS
(the company that purchased the centre from the Government Computing
Service), following the movement of operations to a more secure facility in
the mid-1990s, was that once the data had been transferred, the Wanganui
computers would be sold or used for other purposes (Martin, 1995), a
scenario which seems unlikely (who buys aged supercomputers?). Ten years
later, after a public outcry over taxes being wasted on bungled, never-
delivered IT systems (which kept the Wanganui facility in operation), the
Police Deputy Commissioner, Lyn Provost, acknowledged that it was finally
‘past its use-by date, increasingly hard to maintain and lacked the
functionality required’ (NZPA, 2005).
This is an article about the shifting, multiple and contradictory reception of
early digital technology, over time. Mirroring the supercomputer’s fate are
many other artifacts of the early digital period. In this article, I reflect on the
changing fortunes of early digital games, in terms of the shifts in esteem
they undergo: from novelty to detritus, to something approaching novelty
again. If during 1976 the Wanganui police computer was a focus for adult
New Zealanders’ anxieties about the coming of a computer age, younger New
Zealanders responded quite differently to the arrival of early digital games a
couple of years later. That no one seems to know or care what actually
became of the Wanganui computer brings issues of cultural memory and
value, the decisions that are made about what to keep and discard, and the
challenges of preservation to the fore, issues that this essay will treat in
relation to early digital games. I am fascinated by the abundant contra-
dictions between games’ early novelty, their subsequent rejection, and a
more recent (partial) recuperation of these artifacts – a cultural position that
is thoroughly ambivalent, incorporating excitement, nostalgia and amnesia.
Beyond simply noting this link between digital games and detritus, it seems
important to inquire into the remembering and forgetting that make it
possible to dismiss early digital technologies.
In a recent essay ‘Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second
Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-
Century’, Tom Gunning (2003) argues that ‘Modernity must partly be
understood as learning to be surprised by certain innovations, a discourse

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Swalwell The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games 257

that valorizes and directs our attention to such changes and the excitement
they can provoke’ (p. 44). Gunning outlines the importance of discourse, not
only in shaping reception – as his earlier (1989) work on the alleged reactions
of early audiences of the Lumière Brothers’ films shows – but also in novelty
actually being noticed. Citing Victor Shklovsky’s futile search for accounts of
the introduction of electric light to Moscow and Petersburg, Gunning (2003)
concludes that ‘journalists lacked a discursive context, or tradition, for the
expressing of such astonishment’ (p. 44). In applying Gunning’s arguments
to the case of early digital games, I point to the lack of a discourse, beyond
nostalgia, for their recuperation in the contemporary moment. I further ask
whether the current resistance to recuperating such games might not
indicate a larger (as yet unsuccessful) attempt to master an earlier, initial
astonishment with digital technology.
For the last two years I have been researching the history of early digital
games in New Zealand, which had a significant game industry during the
1970s and 1980s. It was a time when digital games were new and exciting,
and hadn’t quite settled into the patterns of globally marketed products that
we are now so familiar with. In weighing the remembering and forgetting
of these early digital games, this article explicates some of the challenges of
researching and writing a history of items not held in high esteem, and
discusses the institutional challenges and imperatives that accompany the
degeneration of early game artifacts.

Novelty

Videogames were a prime harbinger of digital technologies. Widely

accessible, they were certainly the technology which most people were able
to access in a ‘hands-on’ way. In 1970s and 1980s New Zealand, as in many
other countries, digital games created palpable excitement. From the late
1970s, before home consoles or micro-computers had entered the market,
players in arcades, bars, dairies (corner stores), and fish-and-chip shops were
given a taste of what it was like to have images on the screen respond to
input from button and joystick. The exhilaration this new possibility gener-
ated is evident in accounts from the time. Consider just one landmark title,
‘Space Invaders’: Paul Ahern (1981) wrote a strategy guide, published in
Wellington’s Evening Post, that contained the following advice:

So you want to play Space Invaders? There are certain dos and definite
don’ts.

On the way to the machine – like Buck Rogers in his first battle – think
of nothing but the task ahead.

Your mind is the screen – visualize the neat rows of the little green men,
poised to strike.

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258 journal of visual culture 6(2)

If you have a game plan, this is the time to review it. Planning is
essential for a competent player, who feels dissatisfied with only seven
replays.

[. . .]

When the invaders’ march speeds up, remain calm. Panic can be an
even greater threat.

As the tension mounts you’ll fight off a parched mouth, sweaty

forehead, and cramped fingers. Try to relax your body and mind. When
the two are in harmony your chances of prolonged survival will be
greater.

Such texts frame the new technology, providing a discourse of excitement

and astonishment to contextualize the game and those following it (cf.
Gunning, 2003: 46). These discourses are likewise evident in later, retro-
spective accounts, such as Stefan Herrick’s of the day in 1980 when ‘Space
Invaders’ came to small-town Takaka:

Off came the sheet. In went the plug. The invasion had begun. The kids
stopped licking [their ice-creams] and stared. Instinctively, they knew
this was something amazing and that the world would never be the
same again.

Writing in 2001, Herrick also reflects on the responses of that later period to
the classic: ‘No one wanted to play Space Invaders any more. Once the star
of the arcade, it sat sullen, silent and obsolete.’ The occasional visit to this
‘vid-game pensioner’ is attributed to nostalgia, with a sense of inevitability
surrounding its decline into obscurity and obsolescence. But is it really
inevitable? Perhaps, like his fellow-journalists a few generations back, Herrick
simply was not in a position to articulate any other possible fates, because he
lacked the discourse in which to do this.
In New Zealand, a relatively short period elapsed – less than 10 years after
the Wanganui supercomputer’s inauguration – between the time when
computers filled whole rooms and required operation by experts, to the time
in the early 1980s when an early ‘micro’ (personal) computer could be
purchased for a few hundred dollars, stimulating expertise in computer
programming amongst the interested general public.1 In the 1980s,
microcomputers became the new luxury item for aspiring middle-class
households, and a whole generation of children and adults learnt to code in
Basic on Spectrums, BBCs, Apple IIs and Sega SC-3000s. What did they code?
Alongside simple geometric patterns, and ascii graphics, many wrote and
played digital games, first typing these in and later, when tape and disk drives
became available, loading these from storage media. It is worth emphasizing
that games were one of the main ways in which people became familiar with
computers and digital technology.

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Swalwell The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games 259

From Novelty to Detritus

However, instead of being remembered as important markers of a changed

technical standard, one that heralded a major visual cultural shift towards
more participatory media engagements (Wilson, 2004), early videogames are
– like the supercomputer – commonly regarded as disposable, of little
significance. Games (hardware and software) have always had a transitory
existence, but now early examples are being thrown away. To a large extent,
that which was never considered particularly valuable, used and consumed,
has now become detritus. Some games are literally being discarded as
rubbish, as testified to by a garbage collector friend of the journalist, Russell
Brown, who retrieved a Sportronic console – one of New Zealand’s earliest
homegrown consoles (Swalwell, 2005), built with the General Instruments
chip (Winter, 1996–2006) – from a bag before dumping the rest of its
contents. While Brown’s jokes about his friend’s ‘sixth sense’ (knowing
which bags to look in prior to dumping them) are slightly apocryphal,
the link between early games and garbage is not (Brown, 2003). Friends
have retrieved cartridges for the Tunix (a New Zealand made console,
possibly made under an early global licensing deal [CongoBongo]) from a
Salvation Army op-shop for me, and I am reliably informed that Trash Palace
is the best place to look for an old Sega SC3000 microcomputer. Although
‘recycling’ might carry less pejorative connotations, initiatives like Free
Computer Recycling Days, whilst stopping the lead, cadmium, mercury, gold
and dioxins from leaching out of landfills into surrounding ecosystems,
mean that hoarders of old computers and videogame systems are
encouraged to finally get rid of them, en masse (Dekker, 2001; Fairfax NZ,
2006).
That early videogames should be closely associated with trash is not simply a
function of their age, nor a recent phenomenon. In one of the founding
narratives of videogame history, Atari, stuck with millions of excess game
cartridges following the downturn of the company’s fortunes and its
disastrous gamble on ‘ET’, reportedly sent somewhere between 14 and 18
truckloads of cartridges to be buried in a New Mexico landfill (Crawford,
1991–2; Guins, 2006; Mikkelson and Mikkelson, 2001; Smith, 2005). An
ignominious end, to be sure, but the tawdriness or lowness of the rubbish
association should not really surprise; videogames are a ‘low’ pleasure, and
their associations with youth, mass production, and the triviality of play do
not endear them to many. As Lister et al. (2003) so nicely put it, videogames
are ‘new media’s other’ (p. 261). Interestingly, narratives about this popular
history have also been considered insignificant. Like the material artefact
itself – consigned to the basement, attic, garage, if not already disposed of –
these things are not spoken of, unless someone starts probing and asking
questions. Then almost everyone has a story, almost everyone wrote a game
at some point in their life; the arcade was a central part of many of my New
Zealand peers’ adolescent years and provided a significant social space which
was widely accessible, even to those who didn’t have money to play the
games (Van Rooyen-McLeay, 1985).

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260 journal of visual culture 6(2)

As a hit-driven pop culture industry, most digital games were only intended
for short-term use. Product cycles moved quickly, with new titles vying for
attention and ascendance over – if not altogether replacing – last year’s titles.
Indeed, a rhythmic cycling through different titles was an important part of
early arcade games’ appeal and the operator’s business logic. Typically,
operators would remove a game that was not making enough money, either
replacing it with a more popular title or updating it. In 1983, as well as
selling new machines, Christchurch-based Taito electronics was ‘also
reprogramm[ing] machines to perform new and challenging tricks for its
players. Most games have a popularity life of around 14 months . . . after
which their existing logic board can be altered’ (Skinner, 1983). The year
before, another article had set the changeover period at two years: ‘Taito
finds that operators return machines about every two years for conversion
into a new game. It is found that after two years the game becomes dated and
the return dwindles’ (Clarkson, 1982). Chris Chaston, principal of the
Christchurch-based firm Chastronics, would often change the artwork on a
game that was not performing well, in an attempt to make it more attractive.
With their ephemerality (literally, ‘of the day’) comes the impression that
games do not matter, that they are throwaways. What to do with them might
be a dilemma for a short while – sell them or give them away (to charity? to
become a small child’s plaything?) – but the decision is relatively easy when
the new ones are so much better. As a result much material, from a mere 30
years ago, has already disappeared.
Perhaps the fate of early videogames is no different than that of other
amusements, historically, which have faded from view and been forgotten.
Gunning (2003), for instance, writes of the shift from novelty to detritus of
past technological wonders, such as those displayed at World’s Fairs and
Expositions, and their journey from astonishment to second nature. It
becomes crucial, then, to consider why we are so keen to forget the novelty
of early digital technologies. While there are no doubt similarities between
the waning interest in early digital games and other early technologies, there
are also, I think, contextual factors that set the reception and forgetting of
early digital games apart. These particularly include their return, as cult
objects, and their degradation.

A Will to Forget?

If digital games coincided with the wider transition to information societies,

then this association has been a two-edged sword. While Wilson (2004) has
discussed games’ significance for the new attentive economy associated with
information technology (pp. 97–8), wider cultural attitudes to IT also seem to
have an effect on the esteem in which games are held. A cultural imaginary in
which digital technology is ‘everywhere’, shaping so many aspects of contem-
porary life, added to perceptions that they generate mountains of data, with
which one must keep up, contributes to a disdain for old devices and the data
they contain. An extreme version of the desire to rid oneself of digital

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Swalwell The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games 261

information was performed by the group monochrom in 2005. Initiating

what they called a ‘delete parade’, ‘A party for bringing about and celebrating
the loss of cultural memory’, potential collaborators were entreated to
‘Experience the experience’, by bringing data-holding devices along to a
‘Magnetism party’. This, they promised, would lead to ‘Pleasant hours of
erasure’. Using iron filings, ‘successful procedures’ were conducted upon:

13 31⁄2 inch disks

1 51⁄4 inch disk
1 audio cassette
2 VHS tapes
8 ZIP disks
1 hard drive (1 GB)
1 Los Angeles Public Library card
1 Comfort Inn room keycard
3 California drivers licenses
1 Nevada drivers license
. . . and . . .
1 iPod (40 gig)

The Magnetism Party was pronounced a ‘significant success’ (monochrom,

n.d.).
While monochrom’s antics might be thought absurd and are clearly intended
to be provocative – one game preservationist dubbed them ‘vandalism’
(Fábián, 2005) – they are not alone in the desire to be free of the information
burden. A version of it is also noticeable amongst records management
professionals. Following unsuccessful archival searches for information on
the now defunct system of import licensing that New Zealand operated
(which was an important factor in the development of a local games manu-
facturing industry), it was suggested that the records managers of regional
offices of the Customs Department might have some information that had
not yet been lodged centrally. I had my research assistant call around several
of these offices, to ask if any such records might exist. She described to me
the lack of curiosity which our (I would have thought rather unusual) request
aroused, and the delight in the voices of these officers as they told her that
they don’t have to keep anything longer than seven years.
During the course of my research, it has become clear to me that some
people couldn’t care less whether or not early digital games survive.
Returning a journalist’s call one day who wanted to interview a colleague
who was visiting to discuss game conservation, her assistant volunteered that
if it was up to her she’d ‘throw the whole lot of them in the bin’. This distaste
for keeping early digital games, perhaps for keeping and holding on to stuff
more generally, seems to reflect an anxiety not to be swamped. It is a will to
forget, masquerading as an ideology of efficiency. While the collector’s or
hobbyist’s workshop might provide a temporary refuge, even this cannot
provide protection from this mindset. As one seller wrote on the New
Zealand online auction site TradeMe, under the heading ‘MALZAK ARCADE

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262 journal of visual culture 6(2)

GAME – GOOD PROJECT’ (2005):

my husband bought this home to work on but hasn’t touched it since

so out it goes.

unsure if it works. The back is missing off the casing but there are still
plenty of wires and boards inside. Some other parts of the outer casing
are also in poor order but it is only wood so could be replaced.

Great project for someone to work on or use for parts.2

While the wife was keen to get rid of the never-touched project (to free up
space?), others seem motivated to get rid of information, presumably to free
up material and virtual space – perhaps, to free up their lives. In response to
Gunning’s (2003) rhetorical question ‘what can be utterly forgotten in a
world where the recording of the ephemeral has become obsessive?’ (p. 56),
it seems that the obsession to record might well have a corresponding
compulsion, to purge.

Collectible

Fortunately, the picture is not one of unmitigated gloom. Not everyone

thinks games are junk and I, for one, am grateful that some people collect
the things that others throw away. One person’s detritus is another person’s
collectible. Collectors’ garages and spare bedrooms are treasure troves for
the early games researcher.3 While it is difficult to know the numbers of
people who collect early games, one of my expert informants on the New
Zealand scene, Michael Davidson, estimates that, in a nation of 4 million
people, there would be roughly 200 local collectors.

The scene in the UK is much more mature with thousands of collectors

and semi-regular shows, events, publications, and many full-time
people buying and selling retro stuff on eBay. The US scene is also
huge. Classic Gaming Expo is the biggest event of its type in the world.
They had stands at the last few years’ E3 shows as well, which is as
mainstream in the gaming world as you can get. (Davidson, private
communication)

This degree of interest and investment amongst private collectors is a

moderately encouraging indicator for those who are concerned about the
persistence of early game examples for, whilst they are being traded for
money, at least they are still in circulation and not being discarded as junk.
The trade in obsolete games and systems creates a culture of circulation, with
its own small economy. The presence of internet auction sites like eBay and
TradeMe can make the hunt easier, but you never know what might turn up
at a car boot sale (or a computer recycling drive). These trading websites are
a valuable resource for researchers, who need not scour second-hand shops

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Swalwell The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games 263

or purchase an item themselves to know it exists and obtain a photograph of

it. A small economy exists around the trading of early games by collectors and
the exchange has its own rhythm, which brings items onto the market in
periodic fashion. While I have not conducted detailed research, the
impression I have formed from browsing TradeMe is that at least some games
collectors are liable to resell a purchase, perhaps after a change of heart (or
a spouse’s encouragement), perhaps for a profit, or in order to refine their
collection.
Himself an avid collector, Walter Benjamin (1992a[1931]) wrote that the
book collector must possess a ‘tactical instinct’, which the collector of early
digital games would seem to share. But while for Benjamin ‘the thrill of
acquisition’ was paramount, the game collector’s purchase is more likely to
be followed by subsequent trades (perhaps collectors have multiples, or
perhaps continued ownership is not as strong a need) (pp. 64, 62). Some
collectors clearly feel a sense of responsibility or custodianship towards the
objects they acquire, and here it is significant that collectors – recognizing
the fragility of early digital games – have been at the forefront of efforts to
preserve early examples, as seen in the case of the Multiple Arcade Machine
Emulator (MAME) project (1997–2005; see also Swalwell and Davidson,
forthcoming 2007). I count myself fortunate to have had the assistance of two
collectors in the conduct of my research, Aaron Wheeler and Michael
Davidson. Together, they have compiled a list of locally written software titles
for the Sega SC3000 computer (Wheeler and Davidson, 2005). In an effort to
stabilize the deteriorating magnetic tape software, Wheeler has digitized
these tracks, running them through noise filters to clean them up, then
checking that the .wav files will reload on the original hardware. The large-
scale preservation work of the MAME team – who receive help from
collectors worldwide – and the local unofficial migration of these titles
resonates with Benjamin’s (1992a[1931]) belief that, while ‘public
collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically
than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter’ (p. 68).
This is a point to which I will return.
There is irony, of course, in such mass-produced products as digital games
acquiring a cult value and becoming collectible.4 Even more interesting is
that games’ generally low cultural esteem (which leads to their being thrown
out) indirectly enhances the value of remaining ‘original’ examples, as these
become scarce. In a way, surviving examples of early games are acquiring an
aura (Benjamin, 1992b[1936]), albeit a different kind to that of a unique,
handmade item: though they were once mass produced, they are no longer
in mass production, with a particular item being one of only a finite number
remaining. Games are not the only factory-produced objects to become
collectible, of course. Fine china, such as Wedgwood, is a good example and
mass-produced designer products can also hover uneasily between
uniqueness and sameness.5 At the time of writing, a nascent market in replica
arcade machines is emerging for the top-end of the collector market, as well
as for installation in commercial premises. Elsewhere I have extended
another of Benjamin’s insights – that ‘the work of art reproduced becomes

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264 journal of visual culture 6(2)

the work of art designed for reproducibility’ – to recognize that it was

required that early games be copied (ported), and that, as a consequence, it
makes little sense to seek to canonize one as ‘the’ original (Benjamin,
1992b[1936]: 218; Swalwell and Davidson, forthcoming); in the context of
replica cabinets, it remains to be seen what emphasis will be placed on
‘originality’ by the collector market.

Technical Reproducibility – Theory versus Practice

Despite the importance of Benjamin’s 70-year-old analysis (1992b[1936]) of

the effects of mechanical reproducibility on the artwork, this is not the end
of the matter. While, during the 1990s, digitality was often taken to be
synonymous with perfect, indistinguishable copies and limitless repro-
duction (e.g. Mitchell, 1992: 49–51), we are now in a position to refine our
understanding further regarding what happens to digital objects with time.
In the case of digital games, not only is hardware usually mass produced, but
also, in many cases, software. Their situation is not comparable to a unique
work of art, such as a painting, of which only one exists, and yet neither are
they all the same. Each item of hardware does not enjoy the same level of
care or abuse, and so each will not suffer the same fate. Some units will stop
working long before others. As for software, while many titles will be mass
produced, a work can be written by an individual not affiliated with a
publisher so that distribution of the work remains limited or underground.
It was, for instance, not uncommon in the 1980s for school students to write
game titles and distribute these to friends at school. While such work is
theoretically infinitely copy-able, in practice, distribution was very local with
few copies made, rendering the work scarce. The storage conditions for
these copies will differ, meaning that the rate of degradation will also vary.
And while media migration, hardware emulation and the ease of distribution
over the internet offer important benefits to early digital artifacts, success is
far from guaranteed, as the example of the already mentioned New Zealand
made arcade game ‘Malzak’ (1981) demonstrates.6 Dumped to MAME and
now with an individual driver written for it, this game still cannot be played
as it was intended: no one has seen it working for 20 years, no one knows
the correct colours, collisions are not working, and there is no sound.
Anyone can download a copy of this (sort of) mass-produced digital work,
but in this case redundancy does not ensure the survival of the game
(Swalwell and Davidson, forthcoming).
Having made the journey from novelty to detritus, are early digital games
now progressing back towards novelty? That is certainly the hope of those
game companies with extensive back catalogues. They may not move quickly
from ‘low’ to ‘acceptable’ status, but retro gaming has, over the last decade
or so, certainly attained a degree of cool. The collector market is serviced by
a number of niche magazine titles, such as the UK’s Retro Gamer and
sections in Edge and GamesTM catering to those interested in retro games.

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Swalwell The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games 265

Technostalgia

Game companies are seeking to cash in on this rediscovered interest in early

titles with re-releases of ‘classic’ game titles. A number of well-known
companies have repackaged samplers of their early 1970s and 1980s games
(Konami, Intellivision, Atari) for a range of platforms (arcade, PC, console,
mobile phone). STAR Roms was providing a way to acquire and play early
Atari ROMs legally, by offering them for download for a nominal fee, but the
service has been suspended. High-profile re-releases are appearing for
current generation consoles – such as a 25th-anniversary re-release of ‘Pac-
Man’ for the Xbox 360 (Poplak, 2006) – while Namco is again making arcade
machines with ‘Pac-Man’, ‘Ms. Pac-Man’ and ‘Galaga’ in a ‘cabinet that
screams ‘retroville’ Pac-Man with a little ‘edge’ added for the current
millennia! [sic]’ (Greater Southern, n.d.). Then there are the custom
consoles and controllers. Intellivision markets the Intellivision 10 and
Intellivision 25 (Intellivision, n.d., which provide games built into a
controller that plugs into a television, while Atari is covering both markets:
its Flashback Game Console is a reproduction console, but ‘Atari Anthologies’
is also available for PS2 and XBox owners (Atari, 2004a, 2004b).
Reaching more people are the exhibitions that have brought early digital
game artifacts into mainstream cultural institutions and other venues, cele-
brating and raising the profile of historic videogames. Unlike the game
companies, who only peddle nostalgia, exhibitions – such as ‘Game On’
(2002) from the UK, and ‘Pong Mythos’ (2006) in Germany – explicitly make
a case for videogames’ historic significance. Locally, the New Zealand Film
Archive’s 2005 exhibition ‘C:/DOS/RUN: Remembering the 80s Computer’
reflected on the decade when most people got their first taste of computers,
whether at home, school, or through popular culture’s incorporation of
iconic games imagery, such as in the video clip for the Mi-Sex hit ‘Computer
Games’ (1979). The exhibition seemed to touch a nerve, making it ‘the Film
Archive’s most successful exhibition since opening in its new premises in
2003, prompting unprecedented audience numbers, media attention, online
debate and the show traveling to our Auckland office’, according to curator
Mark Williams (private communication).
While game companies are seeking to revive the novelty of 1970s and 1980s
games through appeals to nostalgia, the interest in retro digital artifacts
should not just be dismissed as such. Some of the excitement generated by
‘C:/DOS/RUN’ may be put down to that, but one of the strengths of this
exhibition was that it also contained contemporary games and artworks that
were heavily influenced by 1980s game aesthetics, showing how the early
digital game era has had a lasting legacy on visual culture. Works such as
Lexaloffle Game’s ‘Jasper’s Journeys’ (2005) and Campbell Kneale’s
‘McCahonoid’ (2004), a digital image of a Colin McCahon painting being
blasted, Space Invader-fashion, make this point eloquently. The exhibition
was also successful in generating a buzz about the accessibility and simplicity
of 8 Bit computing. It makes me wonder whether or not one of the reasons
why some people are so keen to forget this period is because it now seems

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266 journal of visual culture 6(2)

somehow quaint and naive, compared to our current presumed technical

sophistication. Works such as Stephen McGregor’s ‘re-humanizing’ of the
mighty Sinclair Spectrum, getting it to read poetry and perform ‘Incorrect
Sums’ (1992), recall a time when computers were more approachable and
you didn’t need a computer science degree to write code.
It is significant that this re-discovery of the early digital age should occur now,
when early computers and game systems are beginning to be at risk, as they
become fragile and start to break down. In his analysis, Gunning (2003)
invokes the work of Martin Heidegger, for whom the moment of equipment
breakdown allows us to experience a piece of equipment afresh. When we
are missing a certain tool, and only that tool will do, we come to understand
what that tool does (p. 45). Such recognition is arguably occurring now, as
mobile users and content providers discover the suitability of low-fi graphics
for the small screen, and commentators argue whether contemporary video-
games’ impact is comparable to the success of some early hits, such as ‘Pac-
Man’ (Poplak, 2006).

Amnesia

It is, however, puzzling that, just as curators are offering audiences a chance
to reflect on the moment when computers began to directly impact on
people’s lives, there is still a reluctance in some quarters to look back, to
recognize the early days of the digital era as an historically valid subject of
enquiry. How can it be that the 1970s and 1980s – the beginning of the digital
age for most people – are considered singularly uninteresting and
insignificant by expert panels, funding providers, and (some) cultural
institutions? I have been by turns surprised, disappointed and intrigued at
the lack of interest shown by a range of institutional and research
gatekeepers. The question arises as to whether, or not, this is part of a need
to believe that we have always been digital (modern). For instance, I have
found myself in the farcical situation of explaining to a New Zealand
Government Fund ‘Business Manager’ why research into emulating early
computer technology is a worthy investment, likely to generate economic
and social benefits, when her predecessors in government departments such
as Trade and Industry in the 1970s were falling over themselves to support
the development of electronics and associated fields, because they were seen
as industries with valuable economic potential (Department of Trade and
Industry, 1976: 8, 21). Perhaps this lack of interest is due to a reluctance to
remember the 1980s, because the decade is still relatively close; specifically,
the Lange Labour Government’s years of restructuring the country were a
watershed, economically and socially. Only recently are ‘defining moments’
from this decade – such as David Lange’s Oxford Union debate (against Jerry
Falwell) on the moral indefensibility of nuclear weapons, the sinking of ‘The
Rainbow Warrior’ in Auckland harbour, and the protests the Springbok
rugby tour occasioned – being (selectively) recuperated as their anniversaries
come up.

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Swalwell The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games 267

C. Nadia Seremetakis (1996) tells us that in Greek, ‘Nostalghía speaks to the

sensory reception of history.’ Yet

Nostalgia, in the American sense, freezes the past in such a manner as

to preclude it from any capacity for social transformation in the present,
preventing the present from establishing a dynamic perceptual
relationship to its history. (p. 4)

Nostalgia is currently the dominant motif of remembrance, as companies

market nostalgia-led purchasing and consumption. However, while
important, this is not sufficient to conjure Seremetakis’s fuller sense of
nostalghía, despite the centrality of aesthetics to gameplay. If early digital
games are to be remembered in a fuller sense, as having ‘a dynamic
perceptual relationship to . . . history’, then they also need critical discourses
in which their significance can be articulated. There is an urgent need for
compelling explanations of the significance of early digital games for moving-
image culture and its history. Particularly given the challenges of preserving
digital artifacts, arguments need to be made that situate the early digital
period and its products (such as videogames) in terms of broader shifts in the
relation to technology (for instance, games’ role in acclimatizing users to
digital computing) and shifts in visual culture.
Locally and internationally, cultural institutions charged with the preservation
of cultural heritage (including digital cultural heritage) have been slow to
realize their responsibilities towards preserving hardware and software –
though this is starting to change (Library of Congress, 2006) – items that
future historians will need to study. As Henry Lowood (2001) has argued,

The broader social and cultural impact of computing will revolutionize

(if it has not already) all cultural and scholarly production. It follows
that historians (not just of software and computing) will need to
consider the implications of this change, and they will not be able to do
it without access to our software technology and what we did with it . . .

Historians of software clearly will have to venture into every niche,

nook, and cranny of society in ways that will separate their work from
the work of other historians of science and technology. (pp. 148–9)

In New Zealand, the collecting of early digital artifacts has largely fallen into
cracks between institutions. After discovering so many systems that were
indigenous to New Zealand,7 I was perturbed to find (through a 2004 inquiry
to the Museums Aotearoa listserv) that no New Zealand institutions were
collecting these digital games and game systems. Whilst a will to archive
might be thought to characterize contemporary societies, digital artifacts
from this period are still not on the agenda. Archiving is a politically charged
endeavour, involving decisions about what to include and what to exclude,
or, as Jacques Derrida (1996[1995]) puts it: ‘archivization produces as much
as it records the event’ (p. 17); preserving something to be remembered

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268 journal of visual culture 6(2)

involves leaving out something to be forgotten. With regard to early games,

clearly the low cultural esteem in which games are often held has not made
them a priority for inclusion. Locally, confusion as to what digital games are
– are they material culture, publications, or moving image works? – has been
the cause of some delay in finding an ‘appropriate’ institutional home. The
Film Archive was sympathetic to initial approaches and was interested in the
likeness to film, but its policy is to collect linear works for the screen (that is,
not interactive works). The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa felt
that games should be held by the National Library, while the National Library
felt that they were items of material culture that would be best held by the
museum. This struggle with meeting the requirements of institutions vividly
illustrates Lowood’s (2001) observation that software does not fit current
institutional divisions.
I have been speaking of collecting; the preservation and conservation of early
digital content such as games is another matter. The future of early games
material is uncertain. Processes of ‘digital decay’ are at work, which mean
that those systems that are currently still working will not work for much
longer. This is a threat that is unique to digital artifacts. A submission made
by the Digital Game Archive (DiGA, 2004) explains this succinctly:

Digital media have a limited life. For example, a magnetic disk usually
becomes unreadable after about 10 years. A work not copied to a
different medium within that time is lost.

Ageing of the original hardware is an additional factor. General opinion

has it that the life-span of hardware is limited, mainly because of
physical and chemical processes within the microchips. (Established
scientists like Ed Rothenberg estimate 30 years.) To access the works
afterwards, they have to be preserved by software-based archiving
solutions. To achieve this, the works have to be copied from the original
media to modern ones as well, e.g. to run them on emulators.

Digital preservation is a hot topic at present, and this is a ‘problem’ that

makes digital archivists – who know the awkwardness of managing different
formats, their incompatibilities and idiosyncrasies – shudder. The perception
that it is all ‘too hard’ is a major impediment, requiring institutional will to
move beyond, as Kenney et al. (2005), the authors of a Digital Presentation
Management tutorial, note:

Although technology is a key element in digital preservation, we believe

it isn’t the greatest inhibitor – the lack of organizational will and way is.
Despite the increasing evidence documenting the fragility and ubiquity
of digital content, cultural repositories have been slow to respond to
the need to safeguard digital heritage materials.

Thankfully, digital archiving professionals are getting beyond the shuddering

response. In my own work in New Zealand, I have found that professionals

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Swalwell The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games 269

in cultural institutions are starting to respond to arguments that the period of

early computerization needs to be remembered. That the early digital games
I have uncovered are unique internationally, and serve as markers of New
Zealand’s entry into a digital age, have proved to be powerful arguments.
As noted earlier, in the absence of much institutional involvement to date,
collectors have become unofficial archivists. Digital preservation specialists
acknowledge that ‘The digital domain is changing the nature of institutions’
missions and their relationships with other organizations’ (Beagrie, 2003)
with his survey of National Digital Preservation Initiatives recognizing the
importance of private collectors historically in supplementing collections. He
writes:

Private individuals have frequently been vital in preserving collections

of material, particularly ephemera that have not been in areas of
contemporary collection by curators. In the digital environment,
examples of private initiatives include Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive
or the sharing of early computer games and emulators by private
enthusiasts. Digital preservation challenges and copyright protection
mechanisms may make such efforts harder in the future. This could
result in greater reliance on institutional selection decisions and the
development of new tools to support personal archiving.

While a part of me is beginning to agree with Benjamin – that objects get

their due in private collections – Beagrie’s suggestion, that private collectors’
efforts may in future be hampered, makes the need for institutions to start
collecting and working on the challenges of documentation, migration and
emulation more urgent.

Concluding Thoughts
If institutions do not collect early game titles, how will we remember them?
Should we just rely on the market? That might be alright in the case of
famous (and valuable) properties like ‘Mario’ and ‘Donkey Kong’, which
Nintendo routinely brings back for newer systems (and even, as was recently
announced, ‘The New Zealand Story’, RawmeatCowboy, 2006). But we will
have to accept that less commercially valuable properties, and regionally
specific titles and systems, will not be available. These will disappear and be
unavailable for future researchers and interested parties. While some within
cultural institutions might question whether it is their role to collect and
conserve consumer commodity culture – mass-produced objects of pleasure,
which digital games surely are – the simple fact is that these will be lost if
nothing is done. In the New Zealand context, this means that the Fountains,
the Malzaks, the Sportronics, the titles written locally for the Sega SC3000 –
all unique creations internationally – will be lost if institutions do not begin
to collect and conserve them. Local cultural institutions need to do this
themselves: if they don’t, it simply will not happen.

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270 journal of visual culture 6(2)

Though early digital games mark an important shift in recent visual culture,
the boom in games studies internationally has not (yet) encouraged
assessments of digital games’ wider relations to, and significance for, the field
of visual culture. While there are reasons for why this has been slow to
develop, situating digital games in relation to other visual media and their
histories is critical for the emergence of wider discourses regarding games’
significance.

Notes
1. My research indicates that there was often a lag in early microcomputers being
released in New Zealand. For example, the Sinclair ZX81, released in the UK in
1981, seems to have had its heyday around late 1983 (retailing for NZ$199), as
did the Commodore Vic20 (NZ$495), released in North America in 1981.
2. See Swalwell and Davidson (forthcoming) for more on ‘Malzak’.
3. ‘Cast-offs from the Golden Age’ contains many collectors’ insights (Swalwell and
Loyer, 2006).
4. Benjamin (1999[1927–39]) also recognized this, calling it ‘Fundamentally a
very odd fact – that collector’s items and such were produced industrially’
(p. 206).
5. The Clarice Cliff range of china provides an illuminating example here. This was
produced by a team, who hand-painted her distinctive designs – usually under
Cliff ’s direction – on factory-produced items. Cliff ’s name and mark continued to
be used after she had ceased creating, and in the early 1990s, Wedgwood came
to hold the copyright and produced a range of reproductions of the 1930s
designs, for collectors.
6. Together with a team of colleagues, I am conducting research into the
preservation and conservation of the New Zealand games turned up in the
course of this research. Our team blog, containing news, drafts, and progress is
at www.nztronix.org.nz
7. ‘Cast-offs from the Golden Age’ contains images of, and information on, these
(Swalwell and Loyer, 2006).

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Swalwell The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games 273

Exhibitions
‘Game On’ (2002) curated by Lucien King, 16 May–15 September, Barbican Gallery,
London.
‘C:/DOS/RUN: Remembering the 80s Computer’ (2005) curated by Mark Williams, 26
August–9 October, New Zealand Film Archive, Pelorus Trust Mediagallery,
Wellington.
‘Pong-Mythos’ (2006) curated by Andreas Lange, 11 February–30 April,
Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart.

Melanie Swalwell’s research centres on the intersections between

aesthetics, new media arts and digital games. Her work has been published
in Convergence, Reconstruction, with a recent interactive multimedia piece
of scholarly multimedia in the web journal Vectors. With Jason Wilson,
Melanie is editing a collection of essays that seek to re-place digital games
and gaming into wider arcs of cultural history and theory (McFarland & Co).
She leads the NZTronix project, which is researching the history and
preservation needs of early digital games in New Zealand (www.nztronix.
org.nz). Together with Andreas Lange (Berlin Computerspiele Museum,
Digital Game Archive), she will curate a project of area-specific histories of
digital games. Other work addresses the development of LAN gaming.
Melanie lectures in the Media Studies Program at Victoria University of
Wellington.

Address: Media Studies Program,Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box

600, Wellington, New Zealand. [email: melanie.swalwell@vuw.ac.nz]

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