Hi everyone,
Thanks to everyone for their help in advance by the way! I'll be posting this message or something like it on other retro gaming forums so sorry to those who are seeing it multiple times! I also hope it's in the right section of the forums.
So, I'm a student at the University of Brighton doing my masters dissertation on the materiality of 80s UK home microcomputer gaming. I'm focusing on the BBC, Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad because I believe they were the most widely owned but please correct me if I'm wrong, preferably with a source for your info if you've seen it printed somewhere.
The subject of my dissertation is materiality so that means anything physical or material to do with gameplay. Since this is an historical project I'm also only interested in stuff that was created in the 80s/early 90s when the games were current. I'm not really covering the retro scene. I'm also only interested in those items from the UK. I'm Irish myself but covering Irish or other European places would be a bit much I think.
Here's a list of stuff I'm interested in:
(Of course you don't need to reply to all of these questions - there are a lot of them, I know! You can just reply to whatever is relevant to you. Thanks.)
Player-made stuff:
People's homemade maps, notes from games or custom keyboard overlays.
Did you make any replacement inlays if you lost yours?
Did you make any objects to help you to play the game or inspired by the game?
Did you make your own games and make the packaging to go with them?
Bedroom coding:
If you know of/have any games that have obviously handmade packaging and were available for sale I'd love to hear about them.
Games that mix the real and the virtual:
Games that mixed real objects with gameplay (like the Mystery of Silver Mountain type-in text adventure book or a board game that also needed the computer for you to be able to play it) - do you know of any?
The gaming space:
What was your gaming space like: was it in your bedroom or the living room, did you have lots of magazines or other objects lying around, did your computer have its own table?
Game media:
Did you have any games on odd media like vinyl records or recorded from a television broadcast?
So, if you have any material bits and bobs to do with gaming if you'd share them with me I would be extremely grateful. You can scan stuff/take pictures and post them here, email me at retrogamestuff@gmail.com or, if you like, you can post small items like maps and notes to me in Brighton. If you're interested in posting something to me send me an email and we can see about postage and the like.
If you can give details of which game the item relates to that'd be brilliant.
Many many thanks, hope you'll find this an interesting thread since I'm hoping it'll drum up discussion as well as material for me. I'll be going to the "In da 80s" convention in Manchester on the 16th and 17th of July too so if anyone else from here is going see you there!
All the best,
Maria
Maria Costello
MA student in Design History and Material Culture,
University of Brighton
http://speccyandarnoldandjoysticksohmy.tumblr.com/
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