CLASSICAL MUSIC
[REPORTER] This is where Australia’s most culturally significant audio/visual works
are preserved for future generations.
Our most treasured movies...
news reports...
music...
video games…
...wait, what?
Video games?
[ROBOTIC VOICE] GO!
THUD
F1 ENGINE ROARING
[RETRO TV AD] Woah!
DUBSTEP MUSIC
[RETRO TV AD] He's got a Game Boy!
VIDEO GAME SOUND EFFECTS
[THORSTEN KAEDING] The average age of people playing games is 34,
46 per cent of people playing games in Australia are female.
Games is part of mainstream culture and places like the National Film & Sound Archive
have a responsibility to take the preservation of these important cultural artefacts seriously.
[REPORTER] It’s almost a year since the National Film & Sound Archive announced
it had started archiving Australian-made video games,
with ‘The Hobbit’,
‘L.A. Noire’,
and mobile game, ‘Florence',
among the first eight to be archived.
The anniversary got us wondering...
will this be an annual thing like NFSA’s ‘Sounds of Australia'?
And, what Aussie games will be archived next?
[THORSTEN KAEDING] There’s the aspect about selecting the games and looking at the
cultural importance of them, but for us, it’s also about making sure that they survive into the future.
We’ve got games that came out on the MicroBee computer,
so we had to find a MicroBee from the early 1980s.
Where we are at the moment is working through a lot of those technical issues
and probably towards the beginning of next year,
we'll be in a position to be really looking at the next lot of games.
We haven’t quite decided how we’re going to do that,
we may even be asking people what they think should be in the next batch.
[REPORTER] Well Australia, whaddaya reckon?
VIDEO GAME SOUND EFFECTS
8-BIT DUBSTEP MUSIC
[BEC PETRAITIS] When you archive something, you’re not just archiving, like, a physical thing,
you’re archiving, like, a moment in time.
[ALEX WALKER] It’s really about time that Australia started archiving games.
If you take merchandising out of the equation,
video games is the largest entertainment franchise on the planet.
Look at something like Mario, Pokémon,
Hello Kitty for instance, that’s a bigger franchise than Star Wars.
[BEC PETRAITIS] It’s a film that you can play,
I don’t want to watch a film, how passive, boring!
[REPORTER] So, when it comes to the Australian video games we know and love...
BALL HITS WICKETS
[CRICKETERS] Howzat?
[REPORTER] ...and the ones we maybe didn’t know were Australian...
[BEC PETRAITIS] ‘Austin Powers Pinball’…
[ALEX WALKER] ‘MechWarrior’, Super Nintendo version.
[BEC PETRAITIS] ...yeah baby yeah.
VIDEO GAME SOUND EFFECTS
[REPORTER] What games should we save next in the hallowed halls of the National Film & Sound Archive?
DRAMATIC THUD
Alex, ‘Ty The Tasmanian Tiger’.
[TY] G’day mate!
[ALEX WALKER] You’ve got this ocker, funny,
kind of a piss-take platforming game about throwing a boomerang.
To have something that sold millions of copies, that had the Dreamtime as a core element.
[NANDU GILI] I am Nandu Gili the Bunyip Elder.
[ALEX WALKER] I would have ‘Ty The Tasmanian Tiger’ as the immediate next choice.
[REPORTER] Bec, ‘Untitled Goose Game’.
AGGRESSIVE HONKING AND PIANO
[BEC PETRAITIS] It had such a big cultural impact around the world,
everyone was playing this game about an annoying goose.
It is that Australian developer ingenuity and innovation
where they go, well this is a silly little idea but let’s give it a bloomin’ go!
That goose is a national treasure.
I love you, goose.
[REPORTER] Alex, ‘Krush Kill ‘N’ Destroy’.
[GAME NARRATOR] The War of 2079 had no winners...
[ALEX WALKER] It had a ocker sense of humour,
one of the factions was a series of farming robots that had risen up because they were sick of being exploited,
a very Aussie take on a post-apocalyptic sci-fi strategy game.
It was one of the few games from that 90s 'golden age'
to actually have elements that were identifiable as Australian.
[REPORTER] Bec, ‘Void Bastards’.
[ALIEN] Surprise buttface!
[BEC PETRAITIS] It’s a rougelike game and I think ‘Void Bastards’ captures that Australian jokey,
black comedy, not only in the story,
but in the gameplay itself, feels very silly and fun.
[GAME NARRATOR] Do try not to die while action items remain unticked.
[BEC PETRAITIS] It did make a big impact because it was released by Humble Bundle, that's a big deal.
[REPORTER] Alex, ‘Mad Max: Asylum’, a game that never made it out of development,
and was kept under wraps, until Kotaku Australia showed the world what it looked like in 2016.
[ALEX WALKER] Back in 1990, there was a Mad Max game for the NES that did so poorly,
that George Miller never wanted to work with video games again.
Despite this, Infogrames were completely convinced
that they could get him and his team to pick up the phone and accept their project.
GUNSHOT
[CANNIBAL] Time to eat.
[ALEX WALKER] Unfortunately, what happened is the meeting went really well
and then Melbourne House never heard back.
So, if you were actually trying to archive the history of video games,
you need to tell the other side of the story too,
and that’s the things that don’t get made and why they don’t get made.
[REPORTER] Bec, ‘Aussie Rules Footy’.
[BEC PETRAITIS & AFL UMPIRE] “Out of bounds on the full.”
[BEC PETRAITIS] You could finally play AFL on a console
and not only on a console, a Nintendo console,
and it was only released in Australia.
'AUSSIE RULES FOOTY' MUSIC
I would love to be back there when they were coding it
and talk through their decision-making of having, I think, a Canberra team and a Darwin team?
I think it captures a moment in time,
I can play this game and feel like I’m back at my friend Adrian’s house playing his NES.
'AUSSIE RULES FOOTY' MUSIC FADES
STATIC
EMOTIVE 8-BIT MUSIC
[ALEX WALKER] Video games in themselves are social spaces, they are the modern framework
for kids to connect to each other after a day at school,
so we need to save that element of the story too.
Australia has a very large development community
and have been making a lot of incredibly good games for a very long time.
It's important that we remember and honour the work that they’ve done.
ENERGETIC 8-BIT MUSIC
[REPORTER] Well, what would you pick?
Mine are 'ARL 96' and 'Super International Cricket'.
Howzat? A quick shout now to our sponsor, FSW Shoes.
They’re a family-run business in the ACT and New South Wales. They’ve got a great website
and they ship right around Australia. Just check out FSWshoes.com.au
and we’ll see you next #GoodShoutFriday.