Preserving video game history has become more than just archival work over the last decade –– it’s a necessity.
The industry’s biggest players have pivoted to always-online, subscription-based games, which means a game only exists as long as a company is willing to invest in keeping its servers up. Owning a disc or a cartridge no longer guarantees you’ll always have access to a game, and that poses a problem for the future, as well as the history of the industry.
Now, a professor at Northeastern University is looking to help protect the history of one specific area of the industry: mobile gaming.
With the Retro Mobile Gaming Database, Adriana de Souza e Silva, a professor of communication studies at Northeastern and director of Center for Transformative Media, aims to chart the history of mobile games before smartphones opened the floodgates of mobile games.
The database currently contains information about more than 200 games stretching from the 1970s to 2007, including classics like “Tetris” and “Game & Watch.” The database includes games that were played on cellphones, including early location-based games in the mold of “Pokemon Go,” as well as handheld games like Nintendo’s Game & Watch and Mattel Football.
Currently, each entry in the database includes basic information about each game, along with pictures, links to research and press articles about them and a map of where they were created. For de Souza e Silva, it’s opening the doors to understanding an area of the games industry that doesn’t often get as much attention.
“There are some game databases out there that people built, but none of them are focused specifically on mobile platforms,” de Souza e Silva says. “We are really trying to build a resource obviously for the public that likes games but people who are interested in learning about the history of these games and to create new knowledge.”
In researching and finding games to add to the ever-expanding database, de Souza e Silva says she found that many mobile games weren’t created for commercial purposes. There are many games that began as educational games or interactive art projects.
These games helped push the art form forward, she says, and could be a useful lesson for a still young industry that doesn’t have a long memory.
“For artists, they weren’t concerned with selling the game,” de Souza e Silva says. “They weren’t concerned with making a profit, so they could really push the limits of some of the technology. … Learning [about] that would actually be really helpful to develop new games.”
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De Souza e Silva and her team are working to expand the database and create a new suite of options for people interested in using it. The database itself is always growing, with new entries being added by researchers, and soon the public will be able to have a hand in it as well.
“Anyone can suggest a game,” de Souza e Silva says. “Obviously, we’re going to screen it first before we let it go in. But [the goal is] to create a crowdsourced repository that people can suggest games and add content to as well.”
She is also adding resources for educators who want to create courses and lessons on the history of mobile games, as well as a timeline of mobile gaming history and interviews with game developers and players. Eventually, de Souza e Silva hopes to even add emulators to the digital archive that will let people play these games.
Outside of the digital database, de Souza e Silva is bringing the Retro Mobile Gaming Database into the physical world, too. She has a collection of about 100 mobile consoles, games and even older model cellphones that will soon be partially on display at Northeastern’s Snell Library.
“The goal is preservation,” she says, preservation of a medium that, unlike games played on consoles or computers, has an intimate place in the lives of players worldwide.
“A mobile game is not something you have to sit at home and just be interacting with,” de Souza e Silva says. “It’s embedded in everyday life. … These games are pervasive. They don’t have a beginning and end.”
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