In order to complement the classes it offers on video game culture and history, Stony Brook University is in the throes of amassing an archive of videogames.
The student newspaper of the Long Island, New York-based school documents the efforts, which began with the acquisition of six historic consoles—the Atari 2600, a ColecoVision, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), a Super Nintendo, a Sega Genesis and a Nintendo 64. These systems will eventually be able to be played in a the Central Reading Room of the university’s library, while a permanent display of additional videogame material, from box art to magazines, will take up residence in the library’s Special Collection’s room.
The collection will be named the William A. Higinbotham Video and Computer Game Archive, to honor the man who created one of the world’s first electronic games, a title called Tennis for Two (pictured) which ran on an oscilloscope. As an aside, a video of the game in action at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where Higinbotham invented it, can be seen on YouTube here.
Raiford Guins, a Stony Brook Cultural Studies Professor who teaches the videogame-related courses at Stony Brook, said that the collection would be selective and that the group hopes to “preserve the material history of video games.” While there is a budget attached to the project, it is small and Guins indicated that the group could use help, saying, “it’s only through donations that this will grow.”
The school is also planning a punk rock collection and already features an odd homage to data collection technologies as part of its Automatic Identification and Data Capture Archive.
Additionally, it’s hoped that the collection can eventually be used as a basis for coursework, as the article states, “A women’s studies lesson, for example, can explore how women are depicted in video games.”
The collection is expected to be open for all students to check out by 2011’s spring semester.
According to Guins’ bio, he is currently working on a book entitled Arcadeology: Excavations in Video Game History, Memory, and Preservation.
Comments
Re: NY School Assembling Video Game Archive
That's pretty cool. They never taught me that in DeVry Univ. Cheapscapes! This is very interesting.
"It's better to be hated for who you are, then be loved for who you are not." - Montgomery Gentry
Re: NY School Assembling Video Game Archive
This is definitely a good thing. Yeah, there are a few other similar efforts- Stanford's, as mentioned in the article, and the University of Texas's Video Game Archive at the Center for American History- but there's certainly room for more preservation, and potentially more research and collaboration before users of these collections.
Re: NY School Assembling Video Game Archive
U of M has an extensive archive already that students can use whenever they want. Every console and tons of games.
-Optimum est pati quod emendare non possis-It is best to endure what you cannot change-
Re: NY School Assembling Video Game Archive
I think they still have Tennis for Two on display at the BNL. Maybe instead they could try and restore it to working order and have people try it out during their summer tours.