SUDDEN DESU is a blog dedicated to digital archaeology and related topics, such as data preservation, hardware emulation and the culture/history of the video game industry and the players who enjoy the games.

What is Digital Archaeology?

Digital archaeology is part of a wider field of study called archaeogaming. Archaeogaming considers video games as constructs to which archaeological study can be applied, both internally as part of the game experience and externally as data and physical media. Our corner of this field deals with examining the data itself as an “archaeological site” from which we can excavate artifacts to tell us more about the software itself. We can learn how a program is structured, how it uses or doesn’t use hardware, about features that may have been planned but cancelled part way, even about the personality of the devs themselves by way of easter eggs.

archaeology

The study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains

digital archaeology

The analysis of software data to understand the program logic and techniques used during development; to discover and recover hidden, disabled or otherwise normally inaccessible content; and to improve our understanding of the evolution and history of the software and of the human element behind its creation

By deconstructing the data, we may find program code that has been disabled, such as graphics viewers, stage selects and other debugging tools. We may find half-finished stages or unused music. We may even find easter eggs that would have been impossible to trigger otherwise. Just as a classical archaeologist carefully digs into the dirt to not only discover artifacts but to also examine the context in which they were found in order to better understand the story of the past, we want to uncover lost content and use it to help us determine what happened with the game’s development.

We don’t know what’s hiding on the disks and cartridges and ROM chips until we take the time to examine them, and that process of discovery is what we enjoy doing.