Game Masters: five decades of video game history
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The National Film and Sound Archive’s summer exhibition promises visitors a heavy dose of nostalgia from Game Masters: The Exhibition.
Do you remember your first video game experience? Perhaps you counted out coins for an arcade game? Maybe you were of the Nintendo 64 generation, blowing on cartridges before inserting them or perhaps Halo on Xbox was more your thing.
It’s likely you’re still a keen gamer, wandering the streets in search of the perfect Pokémon, tapping your phone screen while playing Plants vs Zombies or dropping into Fortnite.
My seminal gaming experience was actually a very passive one–watching my next-door neighbour play Sonic the Hedgehog for hours on end. From there I graduated to stealing away my sister’s aqua Game Boy Colour to play Donkey Kong and in my teen years, The Sims was king on our chunky home PC.
It’s gaming’s unique history and culture that will be explored when Game Masters opens at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) next week.
Installation imagery of Game Masters at ACMI. Courtesy and copyright ACMI. Photographer Mark Ashkanasy.
A colourful dive into five decades of gaming from the perspective of both developers and users, Game Masters will allow visitors to explore a plethora of memorabilia, concept artwork, vintage consoles and collectable items—not to mention 80 playable games.
Anna Tito remembers her formative gaming experiences fondly. Atari, DragonAge, Dark Forces and Zork: Nemesis all warrant a mention, except—for Anna—these weren’t just pastimes. They would form the foundation for what would eventually become a highly coveted career as a game developer.
“My interest in gaming actually came later in life,” says Anna. “It had always been there, but the passion to make games came later when I was looking at what was being made and thinking, ‘it needs people who are different’. I wanted to make things that were different—that explored a different way of telling stories.”
Anna Tito.
For Anna “different” meant deviating from what she saw as the gaming status quo—“your standard first person shooter [game] or puzzle game” and “insert-white-male-here heroic narratives” and digging deeper.
“There wasn’t much depth of character,” she explains. “You weren’t exploring [the] stories of people of colour, you weren’t exploring women’s stories, or people with a disability or mental health … there wasn’t depth around those other parts of what it means to be human.”
Installation imagery of Game Masters at ACMI. Courtesy and copyright ACMI. Photographer Mark Ashkanasy.
Leaving her job in the not-for-profit sector in Canberra, Anna studied a Bachelor of Design (Games) majoring in programming and digital art at RMIT Melbourne.
After cutting her teeth in the Australian gaming industry, Anna was headhunted for a job with Gameloft in New Orleans and eventually landed a role with heavyweight developers Electronic Arts aka EA Games at one of their major gaming studios in Austin, Texas before circling back to Melbourne once more for a job at Hipster Whale Studios.
Installation imagery of Game Masters at ACMI. Courtesy and copyright ACMI. Photographer Mark Ashkanasy.
Across these roles, Anna was able to explore the multi-faceted world of game design, from prototyping to engineering to development, coding, bug fixing and more. But despite her impressive resume (which being named as one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 for Games in 2015), Anna insists that breaking into the gaming industry isn’t as daunting as it may seem.
“Tech looks intimidating up front … and the one thing I want to say is that anyone can program. If you can reason down a problem to a yes or no answer, if you can see cause and effect, you can program. Programming is merely a language of reasoning—you’re really just writing out a thought process in code. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it.”
Installation imagery of Game Masters at ACMI. Courtesy and copyright ACMI. Photographer Mark Ashkanasy.
But for now, Anna is back in Canberra, keen to share her knowledge with her hometown. This includes speaking at the Game Masters Local Heroes of Gaming panel on Friday 22 November, where she’ll join fellow Canberra-based game developer Ben Roach (whose credits include Final Fantasy XV and Elden Ring) and games music composer Mick Gordon (Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, Doom) in a discussion about their careers in the NFSA’s Arc Cinema.
“We have some great people [in Canberra] doing some really interesting things,” says Anna. “We have a whole host of really creative and interesting people willing to try different things and push themselves.”
Installation imagery of Game Masters at ACMI. Courtesy and copyright ACMI. Photographer Mark Ashkanasy.
The Game Masters exhibition is a retrospective, but it’s also a roadmap to show how modern gaming has evolved—a world that Anna says is changing for the better, adding that diversity is key to the future of gaming.
“My passion is that we need different people telling different stories in technology and games. We need people with disabilities telling their stories in games, people of colour telling their stories, Indigenous groups telling their stories and getting involved in these mediums—because otherwise the stories will be very monochromatic.”
“If you want to see your stories in these mediums, go ahead and tell them. People are wanting to hear them.”
the essentials
What: Game Masters: The Exhibition
When: 27 September 2019 – 9 March 2020 from 10 am – 4 pm daily
Where: The National Film and Sound Archive, McCoy Circuit, Acton
Cost: $19 adults, $15 concession, $12 kids 5-17. Kids up to four years of age: free. Special family and group prices. See the website for more information.
Website: nfsa.gov.au/events/game-masters-exhibition
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