Game Preservation SIG/Digital Game Canon

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Contents

Welcome to the IGDA Game Preservation SIG's Digital Game Canon project page. Here you will be able to find information on the games from around the world recognised to be the most important in digital game culture.

Creation of the Digital Game Canon

The creation of the Digital Game Canon recognizes the importance of digital game culture. The Canon provides a starting-point for the difficult task of preserving this history inspired by the role of that the U.S. National Film Registry has played for film culture and history. (Our scope is international.) Our argument: We could do worse than to start by making sure these games and archival material related to them are available to future developers, players, and scholars.

At the 2007 Games Developers Conference, five panellists (Matteo Bittanti, Christopher Grant, Henry Lowood, Steve Meretzky, and Warren Spector) revealed and discussed our choices for the first ten games on this list. These were the ten game titles put on the Canon at this event, linking to each games information:

Full audio and slides from the event can be downloaded from the Preservation SIG website.

Future Digital Game Canons

Each year, 10 new entries will be decided upon and added to the Digial Game Canon library. These will be announced by the Preservation SIG and put up on the website. Hopefully some years will have suitable GDC panels to explain and discuss the reasons behind each game's addition to the list, although GDC2008 will hold no such panel.

Helping the project

Urgent help is needed to document and preserve these games! If you can help do a history article with Gamasutra, an interview, a review or a timeline of these games, then please contact the Preservation SIG!

These are entries currently without a base history article:

  • Tetris
  • Sim City
  • Super Mario Brothers 3
  • Doom
  • Sensible World of Soccer
  • Warcraft I, II and III

If you are a member of a preservation group and have preserved any of the Digital Game Canon entries, information about the preservation you've completed would be highly useful.

Also see future work on a Digital Game Canon website, which will host the multitude of documents and information on each game.

Links

Retrieved from "http://wiki.igda.org/Game_Preservation_SIG/Digital_Game_Canon"
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