/ New Zealand's digital game history includes a significant quantity of locally
written software titles from the 1980s. Currently, few people are aware of this, no
institutional collections exist, and institutional preservation efforts are directed
elsewhere. This context prompted the assembly of a multidisciplinary team of
researchers to bring legal, technical, and media-historical expertise to bear on
these titles' preservation. This article briefly introduces the game preservation
landscape, before outlining the case for the preservation of local game software. It
reports on the challenges faced in a pilot study to preserve locally written game
software for the Sega SC3000 computer. The initial plan — to secure licence
agreements that would, in turn, enable technical preservation — gave way as a more
complex intertwining of the legal and technical emerged. Navigating these challenges
required a change of strategy: from emulation to translation. Translation — from
BASIC to Java — is an elegant solution, in the circumstances. As well as recounting
the project's practical realization, this article considers the fidelity of the
conserved digital game to its `original'.
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