Be Excellent To Each Other

The Museum of London is currently engaged in a new, experimental collecting project which encompasses all digital media including film/video, sound, social media, and the web. We are enhancing the museum's digital collecting activities and identifying opportunities for acquiring digital material to enrich the Museum’s collections. The digital collecting area we are focusing on at the moment is around Video Games.

Interest in collecting video games as examples of art, design and social history is currently at an all-time high. MOMA recently acquired 14 video games including Pac-Man (1980), Tetris (1984), SimCity 2000 (1994) and Passage (2007). The V&A has recently acquired the mobile app game for iOS Flappy Bird as part of its Rapid Response Collecting. The Barbican hosted the Digital Revolutions exhibition in 2014 which showcased the development of video gaming with emulated games for visitors to play in the gallery.

The Museum of London is planning to acquire works that explore and articulate the unique boundaries of video games as a new media approach and as a documentation of London’s social history. The inclusion of video games furthers the mission of the museum around a new digital approach to our collections and ensures the ongoing preservation, social history study and interpretation of video games as part of the overall collections. By bringing these games into a public collection, the museum has the opportunity to research both the social history of video games and develop best practices for the digital preservation of the games themselves.

The collecting policy is based on the following criteria:
1. Historical Value
2. About London or developed by Londoners
3. Social Impact 4. Non corporate (mostly focused on UK Indie scene when possible)
5. Not online games

In this first phase we are looking into getting permissions for the following ZX Spectrum and C64 games:

- Manic Miner/ Matthew Smith
- Eureka!/Ian Livingstone
- Starglider/ Jez San
- Give my regards to Broad Street/Argus Press, Mind Games
- Streets of London/ Allan Webb & Grant Privett

I was wondering if anyone would have any contact details for the above publishers/developers. Any extra information would be of great help!
Also if anyone would have a copy of the above video games, please do get in touch!

If you need more information about our project, i am more than happy to have a chat!

All the best,

Foteini Aravani
Digital Curator
Museum of London
150 London Wall
London EC2Y 5HN
Tel: 020 7814 5719
Email: faravani@museumoflondon.org.uk <mailto:faravani@museumoflondon.org.uk>
http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk <http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk>