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Hollow Knight, L.A. Noire and other Australian-made games to be archived by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

fieldafar

fieldafar

Member
Jan 23, 2018
1,563
Melbourne, Australia
A win for local developers and gamers.

As games become ever more tied to an online environment, the industry is struggling to find ways to properly archive and preserve the medium's incredible history. Fortunately, Australian creators are getting a little help in this regard thanks to the National Film and Sound Archive, which has announced that has begun the process of archiving all Australian games.
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Eight Australian games have been nominated for preservation to begin with, ranging from the mobile narrative Florence, Team Cherry's Hollow Knight, and stretching all the way back to cassette tape games and one of the earliest games to be banned in Australia. The archiving is tied into the NFSA's hosting of Game Masters, an exhibition celebrating the medium of video games that will run for six months from tomorrow.
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The games archived will not only be preserved long-term in a digital format, but their promotional materials, soundtracks, artwork, storyboards and pre-production art will also be saved. Preserving the games will also be a learning process for the national body, highlighting the difficulties around preserving modern games, long-term storage solutions for older mediums like cartridges, issues of copyright and expired licenses.
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The initial eight games the NFSA have chosen are:
  • The Hobbit (Beam Software, 1982)
  • Halloween Harry (Interactive Binary Illusions / Sub Zero Software, 1985/1993)
  • Shadowrun (Beam Software, 1993)
  • L.A. Noire (Team Bondi, 2011)
  • Submerged (Uppercut Games, 2015)
  • Hollow Knight (Team Cherry, 2017)
  • Florence (Mountains, 2018)
  • Espire 1: V Operative (Digital Lode, 2019)
The NFSA will continue to add more games "on an ongoing basis."

This is also great news for those interested in game archiving and preservation. Hopefully the numerous challenges that comes with doing this can be minimalised so that future generations can have the chance to view and play earlier games made before their time. Any other Aussie-made games that need to be included? I hope Golf Story and De Blob get added at some point.
 
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