Retro Gaming Australia

The Play It Again Project is a game history and preservation project that is dedicated to preserving Australian and New Zealand-authored computer games from the 1980s. It’s a collaborative effort between a number of Australian universities, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the New Zealand Film Archive and the Berlin Computerspiele Museum. Today they launched a project to document and exhibit the history of Oceanic game development – The Popular Memory Archive.

Backed by the Australian Research Council, the Popular Memory Archive aims to explore the stories behind the people and the games of the early home gaming era, interviewing the creators of many of the pivotal games from the local scene, but also gathering the memories of the people who played them.

“The game culture in the 1980s was highly participatory, hands-on and often characterised by a do-it-yourself ethic which is why we are aspiring to create a history of games as they have been used and experienced,” said Associate Professor Melanie Swalwell, one of the driving forces behind the project.

The Popular Memory Archive will also play host to monthly panels with guests from the early game development era, covering topics such as copyright and game collectors.