Local Practices in Digital Gaming Heritage: An Interview with Maurizio Banavage and Andrea Dresseno Journal of Games Criticism Volume 5, Issue 1 Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone & Stefano Caselli Abstract This article engages with the experiences of two small-scale computer/game heri- tage curators, in Malta and Italy. The interviews delve into their aspirations and concerns, as well as practices and values. We situate their voices in relation to other examples and to recent and current debates in the area of digital heritage, memory studies, and nostalgia, with particular regard to the specifc issues facing such small- er initiatives. 1 © 2021 by the Journal of Games Criticism, http://www.gamescriticism.org If Pac-Man and the games that followed in its wake mean anything to us, if they are central switching stations through which thousands of our most important memories are routed, it is our duty to dig deeper. (Weiss, 2003, p. 7) Considering the pace of ongoing changes in computing and transmission technolo- gies, considering how recent the development of computer games, and considering the generational demographic of the heaviest computer game users, the future of things past has never been more promising. (Uricchio, 2005, p. 336) William Uricchio is here referring to the ability of digital games to handle and transform historical and historiographical practices and materials. However, with growing interest in the “retro”, which casts its attention “on the recent past” (Garda, 2013a, p. 1), his claim could also be applied to the history of digital games and computers themselves. 1 Moreover, digital games cannot but join the so-called fetishization and consumption of the past (see De Groot, 2009) brought to the foreground also by the recent “retro” trend, remediating memories and commodifying nostalgia (Sloan, 2014). At the same time, they can (and do) take part, as memory artefacts themselves, in the increasing “musealisation” 2 of the past everyday life (Macdonald, 2002; Cappai, 2020) once they reach their afterlife (Guins, 2014 ). As the Weiss