This article addresses the shifting, multiple and contradictory reception of early digital games technology. It reflects on the changing fortunes of early digital games in terms of the shifts in esteem they undergo: from novelty to detritus, to partial recuperation as nostalgia item, based on the author's research into the history of such games in New Zealand. Drawing inspiration from Tom Gunning's analyses of the interrelation between technological novelty and the existence of a discourse that makes it possible to express such novelty, the author argues that while the present collector-led valorizing of game artifacts is significant, and the mercantile marketing of games from back-catalogues useful, there is an urgent need for discourses reflecting on digital games in relation to broader shifts in visual culture.

The overlooked history of an early appropriation of digital technology: the creation of games though coding and hardware hacking by microcomputer users.From the

/ New Zealand's digital game history includes a significant quantity of locally written software titles from the 1980s. Currently, few people are aware of this, no institutional collections exist, and institutional preservation efforts are directed elsewhere. This context prompted the assembly of a multidisciplinary team of researchers to bring legal, technical, and media-historical expertise to bear on these titles' preservation. This article briefly introduces the game preservation landscape, before outlining the case for the preservation of local game software. It reports on the challenges faced in a pilot study to preserve locally written game software for the Sega SC3000 computer. The initial plan — to secure licence agreements that would, in turn, enable technical preservation — gave way as a more complex intertwining of the legal and technical emerged. Navigating these challenges required a change of strategy: from emulation to translation. Translation — from BASIC to Java — is an elegant solution, in the circumstances. As well as recounting the project's practical realization, this article considers the fidelity of the conserved digital game to its `original'.

Relatively cheap, low-end 8-bit machines were embraced by hobbyists interested in computing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But what were these early computers good for? Opinion was split as to whether these early computers were useful, and what for. As early adopters, hobbyists were in the vanguard of inventing new uses for computers. To date, their pursuits have tended to be overlooked or dismissed as insignificant. This article focuses on consumption in the early microcomputing period and considers the Australian history of computing in terms of several interrelated questions about utility. Based on extensive archival research, it discusses doubts about the usefulness of these computers, the actual uses to which these micros were put, the invention of new uses by hobbyists and factors behind the change in perceptions of computers' usefulness in the latter part of the decade.

The Popular Memory Archive is an online collaborative research portal for collecting and exhibiting the production and reception histories of Australian and New Zealand micro-computer games of the 1980s. Proposed as a resource for both historians of technology and media, and the public, the site provides the means to collect and share the memories of those who lived and played their way through this period. This article surveys activity on the site and offers some preliminary evaluation of the significance of the online contributions. From this we consider the discursive, inclusive and questioning practices of the portal as a means of exhibiting historic games.

Locality has largely been left out of game history. That many histories have been written by journalists and ‘insiders’, largely accepting the game industry’s ‘global’ rhetoric, has no doubt contributed to this situation. An appreciation of socio-cultural and geographic specificity is important to develop if other histories are to be told. But the local also needs to be critically situated if it is not to simply become a new orthodoxy, celebrated for its own sake. This chapter critiques game history’s silence with respect to locality, poses questions about the critical potential of locality for game history, and surveys the different figures of locality that are brought together in the anthology.