Your mission, should you choose to accept it: locate and share the original soundtrack to the Commodore 64 Smurfen computer game. Apparently all the video clips online are like the one below, with tunes like Michael Jackson’s ‘Billy Jean’ replacing the original track.
Much kudos will be awarded to anyone who tweets a link including the original Smurfen soundtrack with the hashtag #ieconf13 before the conference is over. Please also tweet at Dark Matter. I’d also appreciate a comment below but getting the link to the researchers would be awesome.
Why this Smurfen mission?
Academics have united for an international collaborative project incorporating universities and museums in order to preserve early Australian- and New Zealand-made computer games and computer game culture. Play it again features their archaeological finds so far.
Play it again!
Play it again says:
Digital games make up a significant but little known chapter in the history of the moving image in Australia and New Zealand. The Popular Memory Archive aims to exhibit some of the significant local games of the 1980s era, and collect documentation from the public in order to remember early games through popular memory.
Play it again is one of the many projects I’ve been hearing about at the Matters of Life and Death conference. More soon. First, sleep.
Then more conferencing.
Then comes the writing.
UPDATE
Progress has been made and yet we’re still not sure if the original has been found. The Play It Again peeps are also hoping to track down a full copy – including packaging and instruction booklet, the works – so please keep circulating this post
Chris Garcia, aka Johnny Eponymous on twitter, said he has the game but he’s not sure if it’s the original or a copy. This means that he may not have the packaging either – the search continues.
Is it this game? http://t.co/wPjt7YqPag Does your version have Michael Jackson soundtrack – if you recall? @johnnyeponymous @DarkMatterzine
— Prof Melanie Swalwell (@melswal) October 2, 2013
