The Sheffield-based National Videogame Museum is gearing up to establish the UK's first archive of video game design, reports the BBC.
Dubbed 'Behind the Screens', the venture is supported by the British Film Institute's Screen Heritage Fund and has dual goals: to preserve games as cultural assets and record the experiences of players for posterity.
Those involved with the project will undertake a study of the game design materials held by UK development studios and seek to preserve them for future generations via a networked archive.
Players will also be consulted to record their experience and memories of playing video games, and how these titles have influenced UK culture.
The National Videogame Museum's John O'Shea explains:
"What we do is really carefully check every component and make sure that the games are going out and working in the best possible way. If you think about a game like Space Invaders, it includes electronics, computer coding, but the materials break down over time so we have our engineers caring for that.
Now video games are social spaces themselves. If you think about Fortnite, you're spending a lot of time within this space, not just passively, but actually creating things. We want to celebrate that as a really rich cultural experience."
Nick Poole, from the gaming industry body Ukie, feels that video games are often seen as an afterthought when it comes to preserving culturally significant media, with books, films and music seen as more worthy topics:
"This is a cultural medium that's defining culture for billions of players around the world daily. A lot of that culture is intangible. It's the games people play online, it's what they're doing behind the screens. It's so important to be able to capture those moments and tell that story.
It is literally everywhere and it's changing lives, but unlike some previous media it's not always going to be kept physically."
While this is the first effort on UK soil to properly archive video game history, other organisations around the world have a head start.
The Video Game History Foundation was established in North America in 2017 with the primary goal of archiving, preserving, and disseminating historical media related to video games. Meanwhile, Japan's Game Preservation Society is undertaking similar work on the other side of the globe.
Video game giant Embracer has also constructed its own archive.