Play It Again: Preserving Australia's Game History

Join our panel at PAX as we talk all things games preservation.

The 1990s was an important era in Australian game development, with technological innovations such as Full-Motion-Video and motion capture helping to shape a new generation of games. Our panel will discuss the Play it Again ARC project, whose aims are to collect and preserve iconic titles from the era including Aussie Rules (1991), Krush Kill ‘n’ Destroy (1997) and the Team Fortress Mod of Quake (1996). We will explore some of the challenges facing the team from the technology of the era, and the ultimate goal of making these games playable once again via Emulation-as-a-Service. 

Guests

Seb Chan

Seb Chan is Chief Experience Officer at ACMI. He is responsible for the Experience & Engagement division of the museum gently guiding teams responsible for visitor experience, marketing, brand & communication design, digital products, ICT, as well as the museum’s collections, digitisation & digital preservation programs. Prior to this he led the digital renewal and transformation of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York (2011–15). At Cooper Hewitt he also led experiments in the acquisition of digital design including the first "App" to enter the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. Prior to this he drove the Powerhouse Museum’s pioneering work in open access, mass collaboration and digital experience during the 2000s. He has also worked as a museum consultant with institutions across North America, Europe and Asia. His work has won numerous awards. He also likes to make digital art, write and produce electronic music.

Candice Cranmer

Candice Cranmer is the Time-based Media Conservator at ACMI. Having worked in collections access and preservation for the past 10 years she has a keen interest in innovative conservation methodologies and is a co-convener of the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Materials (AICCM) special interest group ‘Electron’.

Dr Denise de Vries

Dr Denise de Vries is a computer science researcher at Swinburne and member of UNESCO PERSIST (Platform to Enhance the Sustainability of the Information Society Transglobally) technical taskforce. Dr de Vries has been in the ICT industry since the mid-1970s and has been developing techniques for digital preservation since the early 2000s. She has been a Chief Investigator on multiple Australian Research Council linkage projects including 'Play It Again: Creating a Playable History of Australasian Digital Games, for Industry, Community and Research Purposes' (2012–14) and “Play it again: preserving Australian videogame history” (2019–21).

Dr Cynde Moya

Dr Cynde Moya is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University. She is a digital archivist and conservator specialising in vintage software preservation. She spent 2011–19 at Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle, Washington, USA. After building the museum’s archival systems and training others in its functions, she was freed to focus on software preservation. She earned a Digital Archives Specialist (DAS) certificate from the Society of American Archivists, then spent several years as a member of the US-based Software Preservation Network (SPN). In her last two years at LCM+L Dr Moya was a recipient of a competitive grant from SPN called Fostering a Community of Practice (FCoP). The team worked together with Klaus Rechert and team at the University of Freiburg to essentially beta-test EaaS using a web-based sandbox.

Nick Richardson

Nick Richardson has worked in film archives for over 25 years. He previously worked at the Film Archives of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), the ABC and the NFSA. At ACMI, Nick manages 250,000 moving image items ranging from 16mm film prints dating back to the early 1900s, videogames, to the latest in digital and VR art pieces. He has a particular focus on enabling public access.

Dr 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).