Video game museum hopes to preserve pixels

Love it or hate it, but you can't argue with gaming's amazing cultural impact over the past thirty years. And according to academics at Nottingham Trent University, it's time to start saving games. Literally.

Located at the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, the newly announced National Videogame Archive will host an unmatched assortment of historically significant video game goodies, ranging from classic 70's Pong machines to 21st century hits.

"The National Videogame Archive is an important resource for preserving elements of our national cultural heritage," said Nottingham Trent's Dr. James Newman in a press release. "We don't just want to create a virtual museum full of code or screenshots that you could see online. The archive will really get to grips with what is a very creative, social and productive culture."

So why bother preserving games now? According to the caretakers, part of the reason they created the game archive so early in gaming's evolution is to "avoid mistakes of their counterparts in the film industry." Despite the efforts of the National Film Preservation Foundation, for example, countless cinematic artifacts have unfortunately been lost to the ravages of time.

Paul Goodman, Head of Collections & Knowledge at the National Media Museum, doesn't want that to happen to games, too.

"The archiving of these important artifacts presents us with some real challenges, not least in the area of preservation. We must balance the necessary conservation requirements of these materials, with the need to allow the public to understand and interact with them both now and in the future, which is really the cornerstone of what we are trying to do," he said.

The archive's official launch will take place during the three-day GameCity 3 festival in Nottingham on October 30.

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