Released in 1983, Horace Goes Skiing is the second instalment of the Horace series created by William Tang for Beam Software. Reminiscent of the arcade game Frogger, the player must safely move Horace across a busy road to hire skis before hitting the slopes and navigating a ski course. Horace Goes Skiing was released for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Dragon 32.

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In collaboration with ACMI and the Powerhouse Museum, we collected Untitled Goose Game from developer House House in 2022, where the player controls a trouble-making goose that wreaks havoc on a small village. The game has been praised for its simplicity and sheer joy.

Click on the image to view the GIF.

Beam Software and Melbourne House developed and published many of Australia’s most iconic early video games.

Pulled from the pages of international computer game magazines, such as the UK publication ZZAP!64, these advertisements show the reach and popularity of Australian games like The Hobbit (1982) and The Way of the Exploding Fist (1985).

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Gubbins is the inaugural game by Melbourne-based indie developer, Studio Folly, developed with support from Screen Australia. The puzzle game is described as 'Solitaire meets Scrabble', and players use tiles to construct words which can be helped (or messed up) by mischievous cartoon characters known as Gubbins.

Released on iOS and Android, Gubbins is representative of the growing popularity of mobile gaming over the last two decades.

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Dros (2023) is an adventure platformer inspired by 1980s dark fantasy films, with nods to steampunk and anime aesthetics.

In the game, the player switches between a little slimy creature and her human shell to solve puzzles and explore a world corrupted by Alchemy.

Dros was created by emergeworlds, a Queensland based developer, and received funding from the Screen Australia Games: Expansion Pack program.

This clip features the promotional trailer for the game. 

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Necrobarista is a visual novel game released in 2020 by Australian development studio Route 59. 

The game is set in a Melbourne cafe called Terminal where the staff are necromancers and the customers include both the living and the recently dead, who are spending their final 24 hours in the world.

NFSA has acquired both the PC and Nintendo Switch versions of the game. This clip features the trailer for the game. 

YouTube video series featuring young Indigenous men from the Central Australian community of Ltyentye Apurte and their reviews of video games.

This episode features a review of the PlayStation VR version of Beat Saber by Beat Games.

Graphic artist Russel Comte designed some of Australia’s most recognisable games of the 1980s and 1990s. This collection of original art includes drawings of Gino’s pool hall from the Mugsy sequel, Mugsy’s Revenge (1986), concept art for the boxing game Sgt Slaughter’s Mat Wars (1989) and hand drawn maps for the monster truck racing game Bigfoot (1990). Comte’s imaginings, coded into pixels and played on the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Nintendo Entertainment System, are emblematic of the era of 8-bit gaming.

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The late Darryll Reynolds had a prolific career as an independent video game and software developer, creating illustrated text adventure games such as King Solomon’s Mines (1983), The Secret of Bastow Manor (1983) and Thermonuclearwargames (1984).

This collection of Reynolds’ material includes software and accompanying documentation such as working notes and diagrams on gameplay design, printed computer code, and organisational papers, which give insight into the first two decades of the video games industry in Australia.

These unique software 'demos' were produced for the Amiga computer by the Australian demo group Decay in 1990, and feature Steve Vizard and Derryn Hinch in an unofficial capacity, screen-captured from their TV programs at the time. 'Demos' were audiovisual demonstrations of the multimedia capabilities of a computer in the form of a computer program.

Rival groups made up of artists, coders and musicians would compete to produce the best demos that could push the limits of a computer. In the days before the web, these demos were distributed on floppy disks (either swapped in person or sent in the mail) or downloaded (very slowly) by dialling into a bulletin board.

Donated by Craig Marshall.

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White short sleeved t-shirt featuring Halloween Harry holding a flame thrower and a zombie standing behind him. 

This item is from the personal collection of John Passfield, creator of Halloween Harry and Flight of the Amazon Queen and co-creator of Ty the Tasmanian Tiger.

SIFTER’s Lightmap podcast explores what goes into making a video game as told by the creative teams making games and the journalists and academics writing about gaming culture. In 2023, the podcast featured the likes of Ben Ward and Tim Malony, the Creative Director and producer behind Dros (2023), Cult of the Lamb (2022) composer River Boy (Narayana Johnsson) on producing a soundtrack with everything from vocal sampling to bansuri; and the Fuzzy Ghost team as they develop their latest game, Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (and a witch) (2024), which explores found family and the perils of renting.

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Galf is a contemporary retro release (programmed for an original 1980s Nintendo Entertainment System but released in 2018), based on the mini game from the Brisbane-developed game Golf Story.

Tasmania Story by Nintendo is a Japanese Game Boy game based on the 1990 Japanese-language film set and filmed in Australia about a man obsessed with finding a thylacine. The game features an 8-bit chiptune version of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.