The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) has announced plans to begin collecting Australian-made video games for archival preservation. The new initiative was announced for the opening of Game Masters: The Exhibition, which will be open to visit in Canberra from September 27 until March 9, 2020.

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“ It is essential that games be collected alongside other audiovisual media, to ensure their continued preservation and access.

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Eight video games, released between 1982 and 2019, have been selected as the first to be collected, including The Hobbit (Beam Software, 1982), Halloween Harry (Interactive Binary Illusions/Sub Zero Software, 1985/1993), Shadowrun (Beam Software, 1993), L.A. Noire (Team Bondi, 2011), Submerged (Uppercut Games, 2015), Hollow Knight (Team Cherry, 2017), Florence (Mountains, 2018), and Espire 1: VR Operative (Digital Lode, 2019).These Australian video games will join a collection of more than three million items already in the NFSA vault.“The collection represents the cultural diversity and breadth of experience of all Australians, and it is constantly evolving just like our creative industries,” said NFSA CEO Jan Müller alongside the announcement. “We aim to be the national leader in collecting multimedia and new media content, and it would be impossible to accurately represent modern life without games. It is essential that games be collected alongside other audiovisual media, to ensure their continued preservation and access.”“It’s very exciting to see a national collecting institution acknowledging the increasingly important role of video games in the life of all Australians,” said Interactive Games and Entertainment Association of Australia CEO Ron Curry. “Games are a major part of contemporary popular culture; an artistic, storytelling and technological achievement, as well as an industry that contributes hundreds of millions of dollars to the Australian economy. We look forward to working with the NFSA as they start adding games to their vast collection.”

Luke is Games Editor at IGN's Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter every few days