journal of visual culture The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games: From Novelty to Detritus and Back Again

This article 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. Keywords collectors ● digital history ● discourse ● early computers ● nostalgia ● preservation ● videogames An irreverent, satirical television show, The Unauthorized History of New Zealand, tells of how the Wanganui police supercomputer, after its decommissioning, was cast into Matauri Bay. Hearing colleagues talk about this the morning after it screened, I was intrigued to find out more. The facility, first brought online in 1976 to house records for the Police and Justice Departments and Land Transport Safety Authority, was highly unpopular, being perceived as Big Brother-like in its ability to centralize and cross-reference data. In November 1982, the 22-year-old Auckland anarchist Neil Roberts died attempting to blow up the Computer Centre. Prior to approaching the building, Roberts graffitied a wall across the road from the at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 17, 2016vcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from facility with the message ‘WE HAVE MANIFESTED A SILENCE CLOSELY RESEMBLING STUPIDITY’. Later that year Roberts’s friend, Bronwyn Dutton, revealed that he had also talked about blowing up the ‘Beehive’, the New Zealand Parliament: ‘If he is going to kill himself, he might as well... the idea was to take something with him that was annoying everybody ’ (Baker