Now imagine the ball is the size of a cue ball, and has heaps of momentum. It's hard to describe what this is like if you've never used one: imagine turning an old mouse on its back and the pushing the ball around. Why? Missile Command uses a fairly uncommon input device, a trackball.

Lead programmer Dave Theurer said the game ' embodied the Cold War nightmare the world lived in'.Ĭhosen by: Ed Orman, co-founder and director of Uppercut Games What is it? In the classic 2D arcade shooter, players command a fortified anti-missile base and are tasked with defending six cities from a barrage of ballistic missiles from an unknown enemy. Playing as the wind carrying flower petals, the story of the world is told through visual cues in the environment and is a gentle meditative experience. It was designed to evoke an emotional response from players.

Why? Flower is a beautiful, meditative experience. ( Supplied: Thatgamecompany)Ĭhosen by: Kamina Vincent, producer at Mountains (Florence) Since 2013 Flower has been part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's permanent collection. Veronika Megler, co-developer of The Hobbit, said of the eight games in the NFSA's first intake: 'These games show the state of game technology and thinking at the time.' (The Hobbit has also previously been archived in the Internet Archive of Classic Games).Īlthough many of the games at the time were also text-based, Kaeding said the interaction and commands within The Hobbit's gameplay were 'revolutionary'. The first intake spans almost four decades, starting with the 1982 text-based adventure The Hobbit, which is considered one of the first major games produced in Australia, and was internationally recognised as the Best Strategy Game at the inaugural Golden Joystick Awards in 1983. This year, eight Australian games from 'a cross-section of age and formats, from cassette to cartridge and optical disc, to full on digital' will be preserved for future play and archived alongside the NFSA's 3 million strong collection of cultural artefacts. 'In 100 years' time, when someone comes and looks at our collection, we want to be able to accurately reflect the culture of the time - the culture of now - and games are absolutely fundamental to that,' Kaeding said. In September last year the NFSA acknowledged the significant role of video games in contemporary culture by announcing that going forward, 'games collecting will be part of our normal collecting operations'.

'It certainly tells us that people are absolutely engaged with it as an art form.' 'In Australia, the games industry has a turnover as much as the film and recorded sound industries combined,' National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) games curator Thorsten Kaeding told ABC Arts. According to the Digital Australia 2020 report, two-thirds of Australians play video games, and in 2018 retail video game sales reached $4.03 billion.

Australian themed games