Finding the invisible

An experience-based methodology for selecting retrogame archaeology “sites”

Abstract

Part of understanding and preserving game history is the study of games’ implementation, a technical approach that I refer to as “retrogame archaeology.” The first problem in retrogame archaeology is simply choosing a game to study, because interesting implementation aspects are not necessarily known or visible even to a trained eye. This paper distills years of experience conducting retrogame archaeology and addressing this exact problem, categorizing the different methods I have used, their strengths and weaknesses, and begins to examine how these efforts might scale