Ruggill says a ilmmaker from China once
visited the archive and presented them with the
scufed-up, yellow game cartridge he and his
friends used to pass back and forth when they
were kids. It contains knockof versions of 21
popular Japanese games, all still playable.
Not to be outdone, McAllister reaches into a
nearby ile drawer and pulls out several clones
of Nintendo handheld electronic games from
the 1980s with Cyrillic writing on them. He says
the games were reverse-engineered, then mass-
produced by the former Soviet Union, which
had no intellectual property agreements with
Japan at the time.
Though physical items make up most of the
collection, the archive also maintains a server
illed with thousands of pieces of software and
other digital-only relics.
McAllister and Ruggill could never hope to
sample it all, but they still try to carve out some
time for games when they’re not tending to
their administrative duties.
In addition to managing the archive, McAllister
is the associate dean of research and program
innovation in the College of Humanities,
while Ruggill is the founding head of the UA’s
Department of Public and Applied Humanities.
Play is part of the job as far as Ruggill
is concerned.
“I do try to game on a regular basis, just not at
the level that I could before,” he says. “It’s really
hard to talk about the medium if you don’t
participate in it.”