Explore the history of worldbuilding in iconic Australian videogames.
Australia has a legacy of creating internationally successful videogames that stretches back to the medium’s earliest days.
As part of the Play It Again projects, ACMI and our partners have collected and preserved iconic and important games from the 80s and 90s. This workshop showcases five games preserved in the Play It Again projects that highlight the evolution of worldbuilding as a craft.
Hear from a panel of key talent from the studios behind these games discussing the worldbuilding process, led by noted academics in the field. Then, enjoy some time playing these classic Australian videogames.
Major Research Partner
Featured Games
Panel (2–3.30pm talk)
Pauli Kidd
Pauli Kidd has been a full time games designer, SF and fantasy author for 40 years. Her work runs through film, literature, computer games design, role playing games design, comic books, boardgames design and tabletop miniatures games. She has worked on classic computer games titles such as The Lord of the Rings, Discworld 1 & 2, Nightshade and Shadowrun SNES, plus countless others. Pauli has 40+ novels in print, and wrote key novels for Dungeons and Dragons. Her books are a part of the U.S. Library of Congress' permanent collection, representing Australian literature. She runs the Youtube channel 'Lace and Steel', and works as a transgender activist.
Helen Stuckey
Dr Helen Stuckey is a Senior Lecturer in the Bachelor of Design (Games) RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She was the inaugural Games Curator at ACMI (2004–09). Her research addresses game history and the curation and collection of videogames. She is the co-editor of Fans and Videogames: Histories, fandom, archives (2017, Routledge).
Mark Morrison
Mark Morrison is a writer and game designer. He currently works for Chaosium on the Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon tabletop roleplaying games, which is where he got his start four decades ago. Along the way he has worked on videogames for Melbourne House, Atari, THQ and Robot Circus. He lectures on Writing for Interactive Narratives at Swinburne University.
Justin Halliday
Justin Halliday is a veteran of the Australian games industry, working for 20 years in videogames (from Beam Software to Transmission Games), managing the Screen Australia Games Fund, and now focusing on indie role-playing game design (Hero Kids and Onyx Shards).
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