NZTronix
The Early New Zealand Software Database

Publications

Towards the Preservation of Local Computer Game Software: Challenges, strategies, reflections - Melanie Swalwell.
The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.
Abstract: 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 realisation, this article considers the fidelity of the conserved digital game to its 'original'.
(forthcoming Aug 2009)

Susan Corbett (2007) Submission on the Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill, Commerce Select Committee (NZ Parliament), 15 February.

Susan Corbett (2007) Copyright Licence for NZTronix game conservation project.

Timeline of Early New Zealand computing

Early Games Production in New Zealand - Melanie Swalwell
DiGRA Conference: “Changing Views: Worlds in Play”, 17-20 June 2005
This illustrated paper reports on the early digital games industry in New Zealand, during the late 1970s and 80s. It presents an overview of this largely unknown history, drawing on in depth archival research, interviews with key industry participants and collectors. It discusses the local production of consoles, handhelds, and arcade games in this market, as well as anomalies of distribution of game systems widely available elsewhere, which was the context for this production. While relative isolation – geographical and policy driven – accounts for part of the booming manufacture during this period, the paper questions how helpful it is to treat early local games production as just a phenomenon of the local. While it is sometimes strategically useful, it is argued that this production of locality can mask more complex intersections between the local and non-local – or global – factors, the heterogenising aspects of globalization in this period of early digital games.
Full article

The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games: From novelty to detritus and back again
Journal of Visual Culture, special issue, Detritus & the Moving Image, vol. 6, no. 2
This essay 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.
(forthcoming, August 2007)

Digital Heritage: Legal Barriers to Conserving New Zealand’s Early Video Games - Susan Corbett
Corbett S Digital Heritage: Legal Barriers to Conserving New Zealand’s Early Video Games, March 2007, vol 13, No 5, New Zealand Business Law Quarterly, 48-71.
National libraries, museums, and archives have traditionally preserved non-digital cultural entities for future generations, supported by laws permitting them to override legal rights of owners of cultural works in the public interest. As much of today’s cultural material and information is created digitally, nations are being urged to develop appropriate policies and cultural property laws for the digital age so that digital entities can also be preserved and kept accessible for the future. Complex technical requirements, powerful economic interests, and significant legal barriers, however, need to be resolved. In the meantime, the earliest digital entities are in danger of being lost. This article explains why New Zealand’s early video games, created in the 1970s and early 1980s, are an important part of our digital cultural heritage and should be preserved for future generations. It examines the complex copyright environment that is an obstacle to preserving early New Zealand video games for cultural heritage purposes and explains why it might not be possible to obtain the necessary consents of the copyright owners of such video games. The article considers provisions in the National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa) Act 2003 and proposed amendments to the Copyright Act 1994 that are intended to facilitate digital archiving and warns that these may not be adequate. Finally, it suggests appropriate amendments to New Zealand’s cultural property law as well as interim measures to facilitate the preservation of early video games as digital heritage.

Melanie Swalwell and Michael Davidson, "Malzak"
Chapter forthcoming, Ludologica Retro: Vintage Games Volume 1: Vintage Arcade (1971-1984), ed. Matteo Bittanti and Ian Bogost.

During its heyday, "Malzak" would have been played alongside arcade classics such as "Asteroids" (1979), "Defender" (1980), and "Donkey Kong" (1981). Yet while these other games are now household names, with original examples highly sought after by arcade game collectors, "Malzak" remains little known, its name only meaningful to a handful of New Zealanders of a certain age. This is because "Malzak" was New Zealand’s own arcade game. To date, no serious research has been done on the early New Zealand game industry and little documentary information is available about "Malzak". The absence of more sources dating from Malzak’s own time is regrettable. The unwillingness of Malzak’s creator and the owner of Kitset Electronics, Ralph Stevenson, to tell his story further limit the available sources. Michael Davidson, a collector of New Zealand made games, is one who remembers playing this game as a youngster in the 1980s. His story, related here, contributes to an understanding of "Malzak" in its own time, while his subsequent collecting activities help to better understand its status retrospectively. Given the limited number of sources, it is fortunate that some examples of the game "Malzak" are still in existence. Though the remains Davidson has located to date (like so many other early arcade games) are not in working condition, they are far from mute, continuing to testify about the game and its manufacture. Necessarily, then, this chapter relies heavily on a return to the game as material and digital object, in an attempt to reconstruct something of its past, present and future.
Full Article