GAMING SPECIAL
video game developers, which ranges from behemoths like Jagex to quirky indie studios like the excellently named Utopian World of Sandwiches. It’s a scene which the centre is proud to be involved with, hosting expos that offer guests a chance to see a showcase of the city’s booming gaming landscape alongside gems from its past, as well as allowing studios to playtest the latest launches with the public at gaming nights. “There’s a really thriving scene in Cambridge, and I think it’s historical and linked to the whole Cambridge Phenomenon thing: people are inspired by other people. This whole thing’s about people, and I love it; it’s so creative – all these people coming up with ideas and all this cross-fertilisation: it’s brilliant.” As well as embedding itself within the latest developments, as always CCH has an eye on the past; in this case, preserving video games for future generations – a technically complex process that has formed an important part of the centre’s work for the past 12 years. For CCH, the idea of video game preservation means exactly that: preserving these games, from which so much can be gleaned about the technological and social context in which they were made, as they were originally; from the hardware to the associated ephemera like manuals and packaging. With more than 12,000 games in the collection and more arriving every day, it’s no small task. “The video game preservation is our real push for this year; it’s really, really important to us,” says Jason. “We need a ton of help to do it though, otherwise it’s just going to take a thousand years. And we can’t do it on our own, we need companies to support us and to say: ‘Here’s our stuff, this is the history of this game, how it was developed and why it was developed.’ We want to talk to
people, we want to interview them, but they need to come forward, because we can’t go out there – we haven’t got a research team unfortunately. Companies can give us a research team if they want and sponsor us. It’s not solely Cambridge’s history that we’re preserving, but obviously there’s a lot of it coming forward – it’s bigger than that. And it would be really nice if we could get Cambridge businesses to help us do that. A lot of them doing a little bit – nobody would feel the pinch”. THE NEXT CHAPTER As well as continuing in its important preservation work, hosting events and exhibitions and continuing to educate old and young about our history and relationship with technology, Jason is clear on what he hopes the future holds for the Centre of Computing History. “To be a massive shiny building in the middle of Cambridge!” he grins. “We own this place now and we love it, but it’s not the place, it’s the place that gets us to the place… We’ve always been quite nimble as an organisation, so we can take advantage of things that happen. If, say, they develop a
ABOVE The CCH exhibits tell the story of the Information Age, from the earliest personal
computers to smart phones
museums quarter or something in Cambridge – we now have £1.5m worth of asset that says: ‘OK, we could sell this and move into this place and put that money into there.’ We’re in an amazing position for a museum that is this young… We represent Cambridge’s history of computing, and this building doesn’t. While I’m massively proud of it, you’ve got to look at it from a point of view that other countries would possibly expect Cambridge to have something that was pretty amazing. I mean, there’s a computer history museum in Silicon Valley and it’s got an incredible building, and something like that would be amazing. “At the end of the day, you’re going to die, and what have you got to show for it? I don’t know why I feel like I need to do something that will live beyond me – hopefully, anyway,” he concludes. “This is that – but it’s not quite the finished product yet, we’re not quite there yet. We still need to get that big shiny building...”
There’s a really thriving scene in Cambridge, and I think it’s historical and linked to the whole Cambridge Phenomenon thing: people are inspired by other people"
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ISSUE 06
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