Long Island University Amassing Historic Games For Science

If you're a college graduate, you know one of the greatest privileges is the joy of getting that little slip in the mail asking for donations from faithful alumni such as yourself. If, hypothetically, you graduated from Stony Brook University in Long Island, NY, you might soon be getting letters begging you to donate some of your classic, historical, and teachable games.

This state university has been collecting the games, most of which have been bought from a single private owner, in order to fashion a Game Lab in the library's central reading room, starting with the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, NES, SNES, and N64 systems. The focus, according to cultural studies professor Raiford Guins, is to preserve the physical interface of games, right down to the classic CRTs for the older systems, whose graphics would look out of sorts on modern plasmas. Other areas of the library's video game section will include a Special Collections room, with a database of at least 15,000 scans of marketing, strategy guides, box art, and magazine editorials from the 80s onward.

Professor Guins is hopeful for the project, but notes that it has a small budget to start: "it's only through donations that this will grow." Luckily, the generosity of gamers is quickly kindled by the idea of adding some scholarly cachet to our hobby, so game-gifts should be easy to come by when the university eventually expands into more modern gaming.

The head of Special Collections, Kristen Nyitray, notes that they're not looking to create an exhaustive catalog of games: "We don't want to amass everything. We want to be very selective."

So, while Stony Brook works on its exhibit for use next spring, what are some classic games that you think deserve a place in any university library? Whether they're significant to gaming's history or to the evolution of the genre designs we know today - games like Legend of Zelda, Space Invaders, and even Pitfall come to mind, but surely there are many more just as important to compiling a concise and accurate history of gaming.

Stony Brook Gets Serious About Games [Stony Brook Independent]

[via: GamePolitics]