Outside the Videogame Nation exhibition in Urbis, Manchester

The first section of the exhibition is a haven for gamers with fond memories of the home-brew bedroom coding scene of the 80s. A grid of shelves showcases classic consoles and home computers surrounded by copies of Crash magazine and original posters for classic games. A bed featuring a Space Invaders duvet cover, a time-lapse video of Introversion lead designer Chris Delay working at home and a telephone that lets you listen to interviews with famous developers are all neat touches. The highlights of the exhibition though are the playable games that let you revisit landmark British titles and this section includes Elite, Jet Set Willy and Lunar Jetman.

An area dedicated to the bedroom coder

The gallery then explores racing games with a playable Amstrad GX4000 that lets you get hands-on with Burnin’ Rubber and a NES loaded up with Micro Machines. The next part of the story covers the UK arcade phenomenon covering the Pickford Brothers, Jeff Minter, US Gold and Ocean’s David Ward. This area also includes original arcade cabs of Ghost ‘n Goblins and Rainbow Islands that are 50p a pop.

Level design map for the Oliver Twins' Fantasy World Dizzy

Leading on from bedroom coding the exhibition then explores the formation of large British studios in the 80s and 90s using Molyneux’s Bullfrog and the Darling brother’s Codemasters as key examples. This was my favourite part of the exhibition due to the large amount of unique sketches and design work on show that gives a real sense of the creativity involved in making games. One wall is plastered with hand-drawn maps by the Oliver Twins showing the level designs for Dizzy and a long glass cabinet is filled with artwork from Ocean and Imagine Software artist Mark Jones. Original pencil drawings by Eoghan Cahill showing the foreground and background elements involved in Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars are another fantastic addition. Many more games are on offer too including Theme Park, Fantastic Dizzy, Cannon Fodder, Populous and Lemmings.

Original drawings from Revolution's Broken Sword

Sports games and the work of Dino Dini and Jon Hare are then recounted with Sensible Soccer and FIFA available to play on the SNES, compete with stadium chairs and astroturf. This area also includes a wonderful collection of original artwork by Bob Wakelin, the signature box art designer for many Ocean games. Visitors then have the chance to find out more about portable gaming with Maclean’s Mercury on the PSP and Worms on the Nintendo DS attached to authentic bus stop surroundings.

Fifa and Sensi united

The convergence of games and films is touched on with playable versions of Tomb Raider, Lego Indy and Lego Star Wars and a darkened viewing room looks at the relationship between television and games with a loop of programmes that includes Five’s Elite expose, Brits Who Made the World and Channel 4’s iconic Games Master.

Towards the end of the exhibition a room emblazoned with ‘Over 18’s Only’ uses games and YouTube clips to explore controversy surrounding titles such as Manhunt 2, GTA, Sony’s apologies to Manchester Cathedral and the infamous Jack Thompson complaining about Bully. The impact of videogames on our health are documented through a wall display of newspaper website screenshots and advertising campaigns such as the Department of Health’s recent Just Do Nothing warnings.

Stickers filled with visitors' thoughts

The exhibition concludes with a nod towards the future of gaming, specifically online distribution, an influx of massively multiplayer titles and the emergence of 3DTV gaming. The gallery also kindly includes a concluding panel promoting the NVA and a wall covered in sticky notes letting the visitor share their earliest memories of gaming.

This was my second visit to the exhibition and I still wasn’t able to spend as much time as I would have liked taking in the encyclopedic offering of detail. There’s enough to read and play to last a whole day and I had to tear myself away from several games. Understandably, not all the games were working and some had just frozen up but at least 80% were fully functional.

Videogame Nation puts into practice lots of elements the NVA has recently been thinking about regarding emulation versus the real thing. Many of the games featured in the exhibition are emulated, particularly the titles originally released for computers such as the BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum and Amiga. Loading times, the need to change cassettes and floppy discs and perhaps sometimes temperamental machines would make using original platforms difficult and costly in a public gallery environment. However, playing Jet Set Willy or Dizzy with a control pad feels inaccurate to the true nature of the original game.

The exhibition also made me think about the best way to present expansive adventure games such as Elite or Broken Sword in a gallery setting. These types of games demand hours of gameplay and a comfy chair, presenting these titles as brief experiences doesn’t do them justice.

In a similar vein to the Barbican’s Game On exhibition, Urbis’ Videogame Nation is a comprehensive, labyrinthine history of the British gaming scene that successfully charts the rise of games from the bedroom to the multi-million pound studio. The exhibition narrative takes confusing diversions at times but this is symptomatic of a story that aims to squeeze in every last detail and not leave any part of the history out. One exhibition that I regret never seeing is Pong.Mythos; a diverse collection of art pieces inspired by Pong. Just as every photography, art or film gallery isn’t focussed on covering the entire history of the medium, I’d like to see more videogame exhibitions explore specific themes such as genre or designer.

Video of the Pong.Mythos exhibition

In today’s world of huge, sharp LCD monitors, it’s hard to remember what a videogame image looked like on an ordinary television of the late 1970s. Emulators like Stella make it possible to play Atari games on modern computers, serving the function of archival tool, development platform, and player for these original games. But unfortunately, they also give an inaccurate impression of what Atari games looked like on a television.

Given that it was designed to live in a world of smudgy, smeary CRTs rather than pin-sharp LCDs, we could well agree that the VCS should be seen through the gauze of noise, colour-bleeding, and ghostly afterimages. Certainly, that’s how things would have looked in the 1970s and 1980s where there was little or no alternative. But, we could similarly argue that these technical limitations were not ones of the VCS game-designer’s making and that ‘their game’ – the game that they conceieved and that is capable of being displayed if the self-same code is run on a device connected to a different display – looked pinsharp and was devoid of such ‘characteristics’.

This debate puts one in mind of the thorny issue of remastering audio. Should we take advantage of contemporary studio tools and techniques to create the much-rumoured new versions of The Beatles catalogue that are ‘more respectful’ to the original recordings – or, perhaps more pertinently, that conform to our contemporary sense of audio integrity and archival standards (e.g. no over-limited ‘loudness war’ processing, mono versus stereo etc.)?

Just as with the emulation of videogames, there are technical, aesthetic, political and ethical questions to be addressed here. The NVA’s focus on the contexts of games and gameplay means that we have to consider these issues seriously as the decisions we take profoundly affect the experience of our audiences and the ability of the game to communicate.

Of course, we are fortunate that the National Media Museum already has a peerless collection of TV sets and display technologies, though if we are going to go all the way with emulating the domestic contexts of gameplay, we’re going to need to collect some brown corduroy sofas and hire the set designer for Abigail’s Party.

Retro Game Challenge is an intriguing title that, in part at least, trades in 8-bit nostalgia and retro chic as it presents a raft of 1980s-style NES mini-games. The game is actually based on a Japanese TV series of the same name and makes some references to some of the challenges faced on the silver screen in the kind of transmedial way that we’re used to a new media audiences.

As the official RGC (UK) site explains, the game’s backstory isn’t hugely inspiring…

Thrown back in time to the 1980s, you are turned into a young boy and forced to play video games by an evil self-proclaimed ‘Game Master’. Game Master Arino will test your gaming skills by throwing various challenges at you in a wide variety of retro games including shooters, racing, action and even an epic role-playing game. To escape you must defeat him in every retro game challenge he throws at you.

But, as it transpires, the actuality of RGC is far more interesting. This is no repackaged Famicom-collection or retro-chic marketing opportunity. Rather, RGC concocts a variety of pastiches of recognisable classic titles from the period and challenges the modern player to undertake a series of tasks ranging from gaining high scores to performing specific special moves. Successfully completing the tasks unlocks the next challenge and eventually the next title. So far, so traditionally sequential and linear.

However, there is more to this than a series of loosely-connected mini-games. What is really interesting about RGC is found not so much its perfect emulation of imaginary historical games but in its simulation of the broader videogame culture in which these games exist. Central to RGC‘s game world and narrative structure is GameFan, the equally imaginary but equally plausible in-game magazine that drip-feeds information about forthcoming releases and dishes out cheatcodes, hints and tips. As Parkin points out, the writing style and format of this magazine will be immediately recognisable to those of us who grew up with titles like Zzap! 64 in the 1980s*. Twenty-something years ago, these magazines were the best – and really the only source – of information for the excited and excitable gamer. This was pre-Internet, don’t forget. Far more so than today where uninterrupted, raw footage of in-development games is broadcast in glorious high-definition is commonplace, magazines built up a loyal following and set the agenda for gamers’ anticipatory excitement as well as giving them new ways to play their existing games with cheats, hints, tips and high score challenges. By simulating GameFan and building at least part of the game’s structure around the magazine’s release schedule, RGC shows us that it isn’t really a game about games at all – whether retro or otherwise. Instead, it’s a game about being a gamer.

The game perfectly captures the sense of build/release excitement felt by the young consumer. The young Arino’s anticipation for newly announced titles is infectious. He palpitates at the mere whisper of a new game, trading techniques and secrets for his current favourites with friends in the school playground (relaying them to you breathlessly each day) and following the exploits of professional gamers through GameFan’s pages. [from Eurogamer]

As you can see from our mission statement, the NVA is not only concerned with documenting and preserving videogames because videogames on their own tell only part of the story. We’re interested in the cultures of play and playfulness that support games – the things gamers do with games, the ways they play them, the materials that surround them like magazines, instructions manuals, ads…Retro Game Challenge captures our interests pretty neatly and turns them into a playable experience.

Being able to play through the narrative of being a 1980s gamer – that’s a good idea for an exhibition, right…?

* footnote: the Def Guide to Zzap! 64, like the High Voltage SID Collection, is an excellent example of the kind of archival resource that gamers have created over the years. The sheer amount of work and attention to detail that goes into these projects – the clear demonstration that this stuff matters – is one of the reasons we formed the NVA.

Nestled in the north-west corner of the park lies the NMoC, an entirely volunteer-led institution run solely on the passion and enthusiasm of its members. Open on Thursdays and Saturdays the Museum collects and restores computer systems developed primarily in the UK. The NMoC has many computers up and running, playing original software and it is their aim to show complete systems without any need for emulation.  Their latest gallery shows the evolution of personal computing, from the PDP-8 to the iPhone. I had a quick go on ‘Pengi the Penguin’ on the BBC Micro after being lured in by it’s hypnotic soundtrack that provided the background music for the gallery:

A museum volunteer bringing a PDP-8 back to life…

In addition to personal home computing the museum also features displays on calculators, abacuses and slide rules.

The Large Systems room features an ICL 2966, once used by Tarmac in the early 80s and is currently being restored with help from Fujitsu:

The Electronic Office room has a display of word processors and computers used in the workplace:

One of the busiest areas was the Flight Simulation room that lets visitors get hands-on with MS Flight Simulator:

The highlight of the Museum is the Collosus machine, first used to crack Nazi messages on 5th February 1944. The Colossus was the first electronic digital programmable computer, fed data by continuously spooling punch tape. Long excluded from the history of computing due to it’s secrecy, information about Colossus began to appear in the 1970s. Mark II of the Colossus at the NMoC was rebuilt over fifteen years from diagrams, old photographs and memory and is an imposing sight when running:

With plans for expansion underway including new galleries exploring the internet, super computing and a shop, it’s quite astounding just how much can be achieved with a small group of volunteers and a limited budget. One new room that sounds particularly interesting is the ‘Artist in Residence’ studio. The first Artist in Residence will be Pixelh8 aka Matthew C Applegate, a chip tune musician who creates new works from reprogrammed vintage computers. His latest commission by the NMoC, ‘Obsolete?‘, is an audio/visual study of the people, machines, and history of the museum. Here’s a taster of his superb work:

New galleries and exciting new plans mean I’ll definitely be paying the NMoC a return visit but the future of Bletchley Park is under threat. Several of the buildings at the base are in need of repair and unlike most National Museums, receives no government funding, running purely on donations and ticket sales. It’s predicted the Park only has ‘two to three more years of survival’ and this unique, historic landmark is in desperate need of external aid. To find out more about saving Bletchley Park and to sign the petition visit www.savingbletchleypark.org.

[Note: I should be clear at the outset of this position document that any discussion of 'emulation' refers to the currently available array of videogame emulation software such as MAME or the myriad freely-downloadable console emus and not to any bespoke, tailor-made emulation system such as that proposed by projects such as KEEP. It is important to make this distinction at the very outset of the project a few of the issues raised below could, perhaps, be deal with, or are perhaps a consequence of, different approaches and techniques.]

We have a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards emulation.

In one sense, our position on emulation is a very simple one. It’s truly fascinating. I’ve written a little on the subject in my most recent book on videogame fan cultures and, like any observer of the phenomenon, have been constantly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of individual and collective effort that goes into the creation and maintenance of videogame emulators. As (reverse) engineering projects, these are constant reminders of the rich, diverse and ultimately supportive nature of videogame culture. And, in one sense, this is how we see emulation – as part of the vibrant, complexly-contoured space in which videogames are celebrated and kept alive – as part of videogame culture. Without doubt, there is much to be learned from emulator programmers, alpha and beta testers and this productive work sheds much light on the richness of fandom while their use signals the voracity with which the ‘old’ games are consumed long after they have gone from retailers’ shelves and marketers’ mailouts. It goes without saying, then, that like other areas of fan production, the emulation scene is one that we consider to be important in shaping gaming culture and, therefore, is one that must come under the purview of The NVA.

So far so good. Where emulation is more problematic for us, however, is where it becomes a tool for archiving and exhibiting videogames. Why is this? Emulation seems like an ideal, almost purpose-built, mechanism for dealing with disparate formats. By turning a generic PC or Mac into a whole host of different platforms, we immediately sidestep the very real issues of original hardware breaking down (assuming we can even locate and acquire it in the first place). The reliability and longevity of these machines is a very significant issue for us. Hardly surprising – if this stuff was ubiquitous and lasted forever what would be the point of an archive? But, while the ease and convenience of emulation is appealing, there are a number of issues that make its use problematic. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to set aside questions of legality in relation to the ownership and generation of ROMs and concentrate instead on investigating how emulators might be useful and, perhaps, challenging some of the presuppositions about what emulators really are.

Let’s start by asking the simplest question. What does an emulator emulate? The most facetious answer is that it depends. Not least, it depends on the ambition and coverage of the specific emulation project. Some emulators target a particular piece of hardware (the MegaDrive/Genesis, the Atari VCS etc.) while others aim to be more all-encompassing with projects such as MAME covering multiple chipsets and hardware configurations. PC/Mac videogame emulators such as Generator and Genesis Plus do a wonderful job of bringing 1990s classics like the Sonic the Hedgehog to desktop PCs. Indeed, from a European PAL-MegaDrive owner’s perspective, we might even say that the emulator offers some significant advantages over the original as the readily- (if not wholly legally-) available NTSC ROM of Sonic the Hedgehog allows European gamers to enjoy full-speed gameplay, music at the correct pitch and tempo, and no ugly black letterboxed borders (unless, of course, you download Sonic the Hedgehog from Nintendo’s Virtual Console where the unoptimised 50Hz conversion remains the version on offer). We might argue that the NTSC version is that which was intended by the game’s designers and as such should be considered the canonical version although given that countless millions of European gamers’ experience was of the demonstrably hobbled conversion, surely this, imperfect as it may be, is the version that has cultural and historical resonance and meaning in this context. This variation in the localised versions of a single title and the comparative ease with which contemporary gamers can gain access to and knowledge of them, highlights another, related issue of course. When I talk about ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ or ‘the ROM’, I am in fact referring to a range of artefacts. 60Hz Sonic is not the same as 50Hz Sonic just as the first release is different from the ’2.0′ revision that addressed an inconsistency in the bevahviour of the spikes in the Green Hill Zone that put paid to Sonic even if he was temporarily invincible following an earlier hit (in the original release, when struck in mid-air, invincibility was not gained immediately but only after Sonic’s feet hit the ground).

But, even though the game itself might change throughout it’s life in different pressing or releases or may even be quite clearly changed for release in different markets as it is tailored for different preferences or cultural norms, the game system remains constant, surely? Unfortunately, things are not quite so simple. Hardware revisions that occur throughout the life of the given platform often have noticeable, usually wholly unintended and sometimes wholly undesirable, impact upon performance. The variations in the tonal quality of the SID-chip filters across various revisions of the Commodore 64 home computer are well-documented and make a particularly good example given the legion of fans of C64 game music for whom the work of Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish et al. is their classical music (see the High Voltage SID Collection for some extremely tuneful examples). As you can hear, the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis sound mixing systems went through similar revisions that subjectively degraded the audio quality on later models. Where there are variations in the target hardware that have qualitative and experiential impacts on the output of the system, which version does the emulator address? Is the version declared or even offered as a choice to the user? Let me be clear, these are not criticisms of any particular emulator. Rather, my questions here demonstrate my sensitivity to the difficulty of the broad project of emulation when that which is to be emulated is not stable and static in itself.

From our point of view as videogames archivists and curators, the issue over what is emulated is almost of secondary importance when we begin to consider what isn’t. Let us be clear. Regardless of one’s opinions on the merits of any given project, a MegaDrive emulator is not a MegaDrive. I make this point as a simple matter of fact and I am well aware that few, if any, would wish to claim otherwise – emulator creators included. However, let me explain precisely what I mean and why the distinction is important in our work. The most immediately obvious distinction between the MegaDrive and the MegaDrive emulator is the controller. The physical hardware interface and, in particular, the joypad. Emulators are great at turning the 64-Bit Dual Core chips in a current Mac or PC into something that behaves like a Motorola 68000, but they can’t turn the keyboard into a MegaDrive pad. Clearly, players can buy additional or alternative pads to replicate the functionality of the original controller. The availability of such peripherals and adaptors may offer one way to sidestep one issue, but the questions remains as important when we consider the huge variety of other, non-generic joypad interfaces that grace consoles and coin-ops. What about the integrated buttons and D-pads of handheld gaming devices like the GameBoy or the bespoke hardware of coin-op cabinets with wheels, pedals, light guns, skis…? These pieces of hardware are integral parts of the gaming experience. PropCycle demands its preposterous, audacious bicycle as Wii Fit requires it Balance Board and Rock Band it’s guitars, drums and mics. Sega’s R360 fairly ably demonstrates the centrality of the interface and the impossibility of recreating its viscerality through emulating code or audiovisuals alone.

If we’re going to ‘emulate’, we need to emulate the whole game and recognise that the meaning of the experience flows through these interfaces. Anybody familiar with Nintendo’s Virtual Console will be aware of the generic ‘Classic Controller‘ peripheral and its attempt to provide the functionality of a range of different controllers from NES, through MegaDrive to N64 and Neo Geo. As a single piece of equipment, it is a neat, convenient solution but it is not a substitute for the original controllers an games feel substantially different as the buttons on the Classic Controller are a different shape, have different resistance and travel, and fall slightly differently under the hand.

While we firmly believe in the importance of the integrity of the ‘original’ controller, we are aware that there is (at least one) serious flaw in this argument. Just as the ‘authentic’ Sonic is difficult to pin down, few consoles have ever specified a particular joypad. Certainly, they usually ship with one (or more), but there is little to prohibit and often much to encourage one to purchase a different, perhaps more specialised (fighting stick, steering wheel), more feature-packed (remember ‘autofire’ and ‘slo-mo’ pads?) or just plain bigger and more impressive (X-Arcade anybody?). So, we have a problem. Which Sonic? Which pad? Clearly, the sheer number of third-party peripherals makes it impossible to talk about the definitive hardware interface for any console so we have to make compromises and arrive at best-fit solutions. It is worth reiterating here that the NVA is not a completeist collection and so it is not our intention to acquire examples of every peripheral for their own sake and so our choices of hardware interface will be governed by judgements about the integrity of the experience and the representativeness of the setup in the context of the story we are seeking to tell.

We should remember also that videogame emulators often make use of tricks and hacks to improve performance and/or compatibility that necessarily impact upon the integrity of the playable experience. Perhaps the most obvious example is the skipping of frames to improve the performance of playback of complex games (or even of particularly processor-intensive sequences of games where the emulation struggles and demands more horsepower from the host system than it can readily provide). As such, games that may have played at a smooth 50/60 Hz in their original incarnations may have their refresh reduced thus impacting on the visual and visceral complexion. In some cases, depending on the emulator or the configuration, the frame rate may be dynamically adjusted bringing the game to a judder in certain places. Now of course, ‘slowdown’ is not a feature unique to emulation and the original hardware may well have experienced similar problems. Indeed, throughout the 8- and 16-bit eras, slowdown was rife as CPUs strained to near-breaking point to fill the screen with sprites. However, even though slowdown may (still) be an endemic part of gaming and indicative of the compromises and tradeoffs between creative ambition and technological capability that are inherent in any design work, the issue for us is about the replicating the original slowdown (along with all the other imperfections, quirks and vagaries of the original game running on its (evidently sometimes inadequate) platform.

[Image credit: http://www.gameandwatch.com]

It is important to remain constantly mindful of the huge impact minute variations can have on the experience of a videogame and how attentive and unforgiving we as players can (and perhaps should) be to such inconsistencies. Some years ago, I purchased a Game & Watch Gallery cartridge for the GameBoy. Now, technically, these games aren’t emulations per se and are perhaps better described as remakes or even simulations of the original LCD games that I grew up with in the 1980s but, nonetheless, they illustrate the point quite well. Among the titles on this collection was Donkey Kong. I had, in fact still have, an original DK-52 Donkey Kong Game & Watch handheld, so I know the game pretty well. Indeed, and perhaps indicative of my destiny as a games archivist, my DK-52 remains in its box complete with polystyrene insert and instruction manual. I was excited to relive Donkey Kong in a more convenient form on my shiny new GameBoy but was almost immediately disappointed. This was Donkey Kong alright. It looked like Donkey Kong (as far as the GameBoy display could given the fundamental differences in display technologies between the two systems), and it sounded like the game (though it looked more like it than it sounded like it to my eyes and ears). But still this wasn’t the game.

The cause of the problem was as small as it was massive: the rhythm was wrong. Let me explain. Every time Mario and the barrels move in Donkey Kong, they each make an audible blip. The barrels move on their own (or rather, they move in accordance with the rudimentary physics model which dictates that everything moves down the slopes). Mario, under the player’s control, moves with the D-Pad. Holding down one direction of the D-Pad makes Mario run. That is, he moves position in accordance with the rhythm of the game (which gradually increases in tempo as progress is made). Seasoned players of Donkey Kong will know the distinctive, Steve Reich-like phasing polyrhythm of the barrels and Mario blipping their collision-course paths across the screen. Indeed, true connoisseurs of the game will soon learn judge their jumps according to the audio cues of this minimalist composition more than they will rely on reading the visual especially once the pace picks up. The poorly-quantized, dissonant truth of the GameBoy version of the game was that the rhythmic beating of Mario against the barrels is not offset in the same way as the original. The result is not only a qualitatively and aesthetically different one, but one that robs the player of part of the fundamental tools of interaction and feedback. The result is a different game. Minutely different. Utterly different. Wholly enjoyable as a game of Donkey Kong. Wholly unacceptable as a version of DK-52.

I was reminded of this story recently when I came across a fascinating comparison of the 360 and PS3 versions of Street Fighter IV (see also Eurogamer’s comparison screenshots gallery).

Such debates about consoles and the ‘best’ platform are as old as games themselves and platform loyalty is one of the bedrocks of videogame fandom and culture. This was no partisan, ‘fanboy’ ranting, however. This was a carefully and skilfully constructed video showing – in split-screen – identical sequences from the two (con)versions of the game allowing detailed analysis of the impact of the PS3′s lack of full-frame anti-aliasing and its dynamically-shifting 720p-630p resolution. The sheer level of commitment and effort that is entailed in producing a video analysis of this kind will be immediately evident to anybody who has attempted to lift, let alone read, the manuals for Final Cut Studio. This hugely compelling and insightful piece of work is invaluable in its own right but, perhaps more importantly for our purposes here, it speaks volumes about the meticulousness, passion, care, affection and knowledge of gamers. Ultimately, what is essential to remember is that, analysis such as this are not motivated by a desire to reveal only the technical but rather to understand and explain the impact of the technical on the experiential. The point of the Street Fighter IV video comparison, as I read it, is to evaluate the consequences of anti-aliasing on gameplay experience. It’s all about the game and the game is all about the gameplay.

Given the enormity of the impact of even minor inconsistencies in conversion and emulation on the playable experience of the game and the more general issues surrounding the scope, literal, theoretical and practical potentialities of emulation, our position at The NVA remains one that, where possible, offers primacy to the integrity and purity of experiencing ‘the original’. Let us not forget also that, beyond our discussion of the uses and limitations of emulation, the original object, the original work of art has its own aura and that there is something special, distinctive, moving and powerful about being in its presence. Even in an age of digital reproduction.

A few years ago, I wrote a piece for Imagine Publishing’s 360 Magazine called Ear Candy. It started like this…

It’s difficult writing about videogame music because you have this terrible feeling that nobody is really listening.

Not because we’re not interested, but because we’re all too busy looking.

This is the next-generation, after all. And we know that Next-Gen equals High Definition equals Photorealism equals better. In the Next Generation, graphics are King.

Mark Rein of Epic Games has ‘the vision thing’,

I mean, give me a break; close your eyes and play a game and tell me how much fun that is. The thing that makes the game more believable for you, that makes you more interested in the game, the reason why Burnout is a better racing game than Pole Position is because of the graphics

OK, he’s got a point. Playing Burnout with your eyes closed is pretty shit (although altogether more challenging). Videogames without video would be, er, radio. No argument there.

But just try something…

Fire up Burnout. Open your eyes. Mute the sound. And then play…

Hey, that’s not fun either. No engine noises, no tyres screeching and the crashes just don’t look real anymore. There’s no weight behind them when you can’t hear the sounds of twisting metal. They’re the same graphics, but the experience is utterly different. Mr Rein, Hearing is believing.

And it’s not just sound effects. Where did the tunes go? The music that was pumping on your car stereo, that was making your heart race, getting your adrenaline flowing, it’s gone. Driving around in total silence. It’s like being in a really fast, inappropriately reckless funeral procession. Everything’s oh so quiet. But worse than that, it’s less exciting.

And it is not only Burnout. Try it with any game. Halo, Perfect Dark Zero, wipEout, Doom, Resident Evil, and it’s always the same. Games are less fun with the music off. Because, games aren’t just graphics. They are multi-sensory. We watch them and we hear them and we interact with them – all at the same time. You can’t take anything away without ruining the experience. The music makes the graphics work makes the music work makes the game work…

So, just like in film, just like on television, music helps create the emotional effect of the game. It sets the scene, it excites us, it calms us, it makes us happy, it makes us nervous, it creates suspense and horror. Music moves us, it takes us on a journey, it’s part of the rollercoaster ride of playing. Even if we don’t notice the music when it’s there, we sure as hell notice when it’s taken away.

The most obvious way that ‘audio’ impacts upon our gaming experience is music. It can perfectly complement, adding depth and atmosphere as with the audacious and not-a-little-bit pompous Metal Gear Solid soundtrack, for example. Similarly, music can also jar. Recently-released footage of A Boy and His Blob is, without doubt, visually arresting and aesthetically intriguing, but the often rather grandiose orchestral score, despite echoing the soundtrack from the original ABAHB game, seems to strike a different note that is not wholly in keeping with the wistful aesthetic in musically referring to Japanese RPGs like Chrono Trigger.

However, whether good, bad, technically impressive or creatively inspirational, the sounds of videogaming are important and incredibly evocative. Here at The NVA, we’re very aware of the important role that music and sound effects play in creating the videogame and are dedicated to celebrating, preserving and providing exposure for game sounds. And we are not alone.

One of the most high profile projects (especially for a lifelong Rob Hubbard fan like me) is the ‘High Voltage SID Collection’ (HVSC). The HVSC FAQ describes the aims:

The HVSC Project is an attempt to accurately archive the most popular C64 SIDs into one complete collection. The project was started in May 1996 when a few ambitious people decided to merge the many SIDs collections available on the Internet into one masterpiece. The previous SID collections contained many bugged SIDs, repeats, and inaccurate credits not to mention being highly disorganised. Thus this task was not a simple “copy & paste” unfortunately. An additional challenge for us dealt with being compatible with other platforms. The only way one true collection can exist is if we remain compatible with the major operating systems currently in use.

As we merged the collections we began to realize that many famous SIDs were missing. This led to the HVSC Crew and many others to begin searching various C64 software archives for more SIDs to rip. Due to this effort the collection began to grow at an enormous rate. As we progressed, we then noticed that many inconsistencies and questions started to surface. For example, we would find a music credited to a famous composer yet the style of the music was completely different than his normal style. One sure way of solving these mysteries was to contact the original composers. Over time we gradually tracked several of them down and received a tremendous amount of information. As you may have figured out, we are SID archeologists patiently piecing together SID history with only fragments of information.

The SID chip, for those who don’t know, is the ‘Sound Interface Device’ that made the Commodore 64 computer sing. Actually, that’s probably not true. It was the sound chip. Composers like Rob Hubbard made the Commodore sing. The surprisingly versatile 3-voice synth that lurked inside the C64 and the raft of composers like Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish et al that created the most imaginative music gave rise to a fan subculture that enjoyed the music as much as the game. Many are the times I and friends purchased games just for the soundtracks. We made mixtapes of favourite sidtunes and even tried to create our own masterwerks.

[picture credit http://retro-treasures.blogspot.com/2007/11/commodore-64-music-maker.html]

Of course, the true master had very different techniques:

Most importantly, the HVSC is not simply a technical undertaking or one that is motivated only by a sense of fan completeism, though that is important. This is as much about the emotional responses to videogames. As they note,

You may be asking yourself, “Why go through so much effort for SID music?” Only a person who never owned a C64 would ask such a question. Many people long to hear these old, classic tunes that they enjoyed in their youth. You don’t believe us? Look at the amount of Television sites that recall many a program that as a child you treasured and how much memories you get from that. With SID music, this is true equally if not more so. Thankfully with the abundance of SID emulators this is now possible. What was thought to be lost is now found. Let the tears of joy proceed as you listen to perhaps the most accurate and comprehensive computer music collection in existence

On a similar note, a new resource has just come to light. Classic Arcade Sounds is a videogame audio archive. With a difference. This is a collection of audio recordings made between 1982-1988 in videogame arcades across east coast of the USA. Nothing particularly unusual about that, perhaps. The difference is that these are location recordings that reveal not only the music and sound effects of classic coin-op games such as Donkey Kong, Joust and Defender, but also the ambience of the arcade and the players’ talk as they encounter these games. Listening to these recordings, one is transported back to the arcades of childhood and reminded of the importance of these places as palaces of gameplay. Arcades were places where you could play exciting games and also, watch other people playing. Why would you want to watch other people playing if games are, as we are similarly used to hearing, all about the feel of play and performance? As I have noted in my most recent book, arcades are/were places where players learned technique, tactics and strategy from experts by observing their play. Arcades are places where skills are honed and where masters pass on their knowledge and expertise to a new breed of players peering over their shoulders.

Videogame sound then, is important in its own right just as it is important as part of the totality of the multimediality of the videogame. It is also a hugely useful and effective means of evoking memory and recall. Projects like the HVSC and Classic Arcade Sounds – and The NVA – help us remember the significance of our ears as well as our eyes.

On a personal and professional level, one section really resonated with me:

The game room meant more to me than I knew at the time, and so I didn’t protest when my parents cleaned it out. I couldn’t articulate why I wanted to hang onto the boxes for all my old videogames, including ones I hated.

As a gamer, my house (and loft) is full of games (all in pristine condition, being something of an obsessive) and while a good number of those games are things I truly love, some of them I cannot – and never could – bear. Bringing me nothing but frustration, annoyance and a sense of wasted time and money, they are nonetheless as treasured a part of my collection as the films I don’t like and the clothes I never wore. On a professional level, it does raise an important point about the ‘canon’ of videogames. Iain and I thought long and hard about including ‘bad’ games as well as ‘good’ in the 100 Videogames book (where good and bad are hugely subjective terms once you remove issues like crashing and buggy code). We want to find ways to carry forward the idea of a balanced canon into The NVA. This is not a collection of ‘the usual suspects’ and you can often learn an awful lot from flawed design (and lot of awful). Our imperative is to tell the stories that represent the past, not to sugar-coat it or write a revisionist history where only Super Mario Bros., SFII and The Legend of Zelda speak for our cultural heritage.

What you see here is the wonderful Mark Parry and Sandy Spangler from Sony London Studios pledging their support to The National Videogame Archive by donating the original, working prototype EyeToy camera for PS2. Complete with its handwritten ‘#1′ prototype sticker, this little black box revolutionised gameplay by blurring the boundary between the virtuality of the gameworld and the actuality and domesticity of the living room – and all for 30 quid!

Here’s Dr Richard Marks, the man who devised the EyeToy, talking about his creation and showing some tech demos.

We are hugely thankful to the lovely people at London Studios for this donation and are incredibly excited to see where they take EyeToy next…just look at this video for a glimpse of some is-it-real-or-is-it-sci-fi goodness…PlayStation Eye and the EyePet…

of course, for people old enough to remember Tomorrow’s World, this might look just a little like MIT’s interactive physics interactive whiteboard demo…

You can find out more about EyeToy at the official site and read about the history its development at Gamasutra where friend-of-GameCity Tom Kim has written a nice ‘In-Depth’ article.

The idea of ‘supersession’ is always a persuasive one and immediately helps people get some sense of our perspective on games as important cultural artefacts as opposed to suites of technologies or abstract code. Perhaps the most important aspect of our talk, however, was the focus on the ‘cultures of videogames’. The idea that the game is not the only – or perhaps even most important – unit of currency may be a somewhat counterintuitive one but it is absolutely at the heart of our approach and it became clear that this contextualisation and recognition of the wider place of games in the everyday lives of players is a key differentiator of The NVA. Not treating games as extraordinary things but rather utterly embedded in the normal lives of ordinary people is something central to our thinking and I am glad that we got this point across and that it seemed to resonate so well with the folk at the Archives.

We concluded our talk with a discussion of some of the challenges of exhibition and display focusing on issues such as the non-linearity of games and the impact of deliberate and competence-based choices on narrative branches and therefore the extent of the game seen through any single playing. As a means of demonstrating this challenge, we showed some video examples of ‘superplay’. Two in particular we showcased were:

a single-player playthrough of both sides of a two-player game of cult curtain-shooter Ikaruga. Watch for the hands!

and an approx 5-minute Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS) of Super Mario Bros. We didn’t explain TAS straight away and let people try to work out what was happening. Surely nobody can be this good? Mario seems to be jumping through the piranha plants…Indeed, nobody can be this good. And that’s the point – playing beyond human ability. Find out more about Tool Assisted Speedruns at the excellent TASVideos.

Examples such as these are really useful for a variety of reasons.

First, they’re enjoyable things to watch. Watching virtuoso performances of videogames is clearly entertaining and the masterclasses we showed off today continue to impress us. However, there is an important, less trivial and obviously populist, crowd-pleasing point to this. We tend to think of videogames as experiences that have to be played to be understood. Certainly, I am sympathetic to this position and have, in my time, been one of those game studies scholars imploring students and researchers alike to play the damn games. Would we feel it acceptable to show up to a Shakespeare studies conference introducing our talk on Romeo and Juliet with the opening line, “Well, obviously I haven’t read the play, but I had a glance at the York Notes on the train…” Why then is/was it acceptable/necessary to declare oneself ‘a gamer’ at a particularly high-profile games conference not so long ago. So, aside from the crowd-pleasing function, showing superplay/gameplay videos really helps hit home the idea that games are often enjoyable spectacles in their own right. Rather than being robbed of their integrity by removing direct player input, they are reinvented and seen afresh as audio-visual media. In fact, as a viewer, one is able to concentrate on things that simply go unnoticed during play. This shouldn’t surprise us too much, though. We’ve long written on the uses of games in social groups and among teams of players who adopt different roles during play (map-reader, puzzle-solver etc.). From an exhibition perspective, the idea that you don’t have to play the games and that there are other ways of making sense of them is an important one and presents an opportunity and challenge for us.

Second, superplay really powerfully demonstrates the difficulty of locating ‘the game’. If videogames are as plastic and mutable as this – as capable of supporting such radically different (and sometime radical is precisely the right word as performances can take the form of reworkings and interventions that disrupt the logic and meaning of the game – particularly when we consider the use of glitch exploits and sequence breaking…), if they can support this range of gameplay performances, then where is the game? The variety and opportunity of these ‘playings’ is at least one of the things that makes videogames exciting and vibrant for gamers. For archivists, it makes them a complete nightmare! This isn’t just a variety of readings or interpretations as we might be used to dealing with in relation to film, television or literature. These games play out, quite literally, in different ways depending on who is playing, what their motivations are, how good they are, how much they know, sometimes how random events manifest, not to mention the influence of plain-old luck. A challenge indeed, but one that we were keen to highlight – along with the fact that we don’t have all of the answers yet.

What was reassuring, though, was that in talking to some of the country’s leading experts in digital curating and conservation, we are at least asking the right questions.

It seems that the preservation and conservation of digital media is fast becoming a hot topic with more and more attention centring on the ephemeral nature of much electronic communication. Coupled with the realisation that so much of our communication, as well as the media we consume, are electronic, it’s hardly surprising. In addition to the issues of capture (and even discovery as the good people at The National Archives pointed out – does the rapid emergence of Twitter as a channel of communication demand a reappraisal of the capture strategies as new platforms come (and go) with alarming speed?), we have a particular additional challenge at The NVA in relation to exhibition. From a game studies research and development perspective, this is one of the areas that The NVA is most likely to prove influential. It comes back to locating the game again. So, even if we get to the stage where we can reverse – or at least arrest – the deterioration of plastics and save the code, what of the performances of play? How do we begin to codify them, let alone demonstrate and display them?

Obviously, make sure you read the whole magazine, but you might want to start on p74…