Re-Program, Re-Play, Rewind:R an alternative history of computer game creation in 1980s Britain.

Despite the increasing amount of games hardware and software being preserved in dedicated archives both nationally and internationally, it has been noted that histories of computer games have largely been ignored in current discussions of both game analysis and design (Guins 2014). Conferences and conference strands have started to emerge in order to facilitate discussions surrounding methods, game histories and the preservation of games yet these events only offer a small percentage of a vast area of study. Recent documentaries, such as From Bedrooms to Billions (Caulfield and Caulfield 2014), alongside books written by game journalists, including Replay (Donovan 2010), and Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (Anderson and Levene 2012), all expose British histories of game development in the 1980s. However, there is a tendency to focus on well-known game titles and developers thus masking other prominent developments during this time.

The 1980s in particular marks a significant starting point for the development of the British computer game industry. A significant legacy of 1980s UK computing and gaming cultures is the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos created through microcomputing magazines and books that printed listings of software code for users to type in and run in order to create and play their own games. These printed program listings now exist in memory institutions such as The British Library and The National Museum of Computing. Here the software code is preserved as a written text and not as an immediately playable artefact. This raises questions about the role of the program listing as software, source code, game object and process as modes of analysis for historical game research.

The aim of this study is to analyse the different facets of game production and cultures from the 1980s by further examining the role of typing in program listings from magazines to emulate what these games once were. The research will be extended by tracing writers of these program listings in order to undertake oral histories as a way of recognising those involved in this industry and to provide a legacy of cultural memories for future researchers. Finally, interviews with those who worked in the games industry in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as those that continue to work in the industry today, will be undertaken as a way of tracing the legacies of 1980s DIY cultures and the drive for national computer literacy. These interviews will include developers and artists who worked for companies such as Automata, Martech, Virgin Interactive, Rabbit Software and BITS studios.

This early career fellowship will facilitate career development through an international collaboration with the project partner, The University of Montreal. This collaboration will result in the co-chairing of the 2016 Annual Game History Symposium that will run alongside a co-curated exhibition of creative uses of computer game hardware and software from the 1980s and 1990s around the globe. The research will also be disseminated in a series of workshops in London and Nottingham and at an exhibition of magazine program listings from The National Museum of Computing archives. An experienced project mentor and an interdisciplinary, international advisory panel consisting of academics from various disciplines, curators, archivists and the games industry, will support the research. This will allow for these emerging networks to be consolidated during and beyond the life of the project. The panel will be able to further advise and support the dissemination of the research to their respective disciplines in order to ensure impact beyond the academy.

Whilst archives of born digital content are emerging in the UK, the need to explore the potential of the archive beyond the digital artifact is often missing as preservation efforts surrounding hardware and software take the forefront of current debate. This project aims to show how current archives can be used to engage audiences in texts by exposing their multiple forms, as well as develop new methodologies for a range of disciplines to engage with them. The outcomes proposed by this project will also expose the need to extend current archives of computer games beyond the material artifact as oral histories are recorded and stored for future researchers, archivists and curators. As such, the research methods undertaken during the project will generate multiple sites of potential impact. These include academics and researchers, networks of game industry professionals, library and museum archivists and curators, and the general public.

One of the key impact pathways is the value of designing and developing a methodology for exposing alternative avenues of historical research that have been highlighted through an initial pilot project. This is in itself is an important area of investigation for both current and future researchers of games, media, cultural and software studies when analyzing not only born digital content but also their related texts. Whereas archival research is already recognized as a fundamental component of historical research practices, by re-working components of the archive back to some of their alternative forms, this project will also engage a wider audience beyond academic researchers and curators. Using freely available emulation software rather than the original computing platforms exposes the potential for the wider public to have access to and engage in past programming techniques. Visitors of cultural and memory institutions will be able to experience content in new ways, thus allowing for different types of engagement with the material held in these places.

The outcomes of this research will be able to reflect on the publication of the Nesta NextGen report in 2011, outlining the importance of computer programming for the creative industries including computer game design and production. The research is also timely as these changes are currently highlighted in the new National Curriculum from September 2014 that now includes a compulsory computer science curriculum. Given the focus on understanding how software applications work by exposing the source code and outputs of computer games as recognized cultural artefacts, this project aims to generate a similar enthusiasm for computer programming and computer literacy that occurred during the 1980s. This will be communicated through a public-facing project website which will not only show how source code links to game design through the examples developed, but also expose the people who wrote game program listings for magazines through a series of audio interviews placed online.

A public exhibition of the recreated archive will be curated near the end of the project at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, UK. A public workshop and talks will also be held at the recently established National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham to include sessions about the histories of computer programming in relation to computer game production and design. The partnership with colleagues at the University of Montreal, alongside the National Archives in Quebec, who are partnered with the Annual Game History Symposium series, allows for further knowledge exchange activities and networking to take place across cultural institutions internationally during and beyond the life of the project.