A small restoration outfit calling itself the Tapehead Archive has announced Micro Classics: Aotearoa, a curated collection of twenty-four New Zealand-made microcomputer games from the early home-computing era, planned for PC and Switch next autumn.
The project is equal parts anthology and rescue mission. Many of the titles survive only on aging cassette tapes; the team has spent two years sourcing, digitising and — in three cases — reconstructing missing code with the help of the original programmers.
Each game ships with modern conveniences (save states, rewind, CRT display filters) alongside scanned manuals, developer interviews and design retrospectives. "These games were written at kitchen tables and sold in dairies," the announcement reads. "They deserve better than to dissolve in a shoebox."
A free museum-style companion site will document titles the team could not licence. Micro Classics: Aotearoa is slated for an April 2027 release; a preservation project this thorough earns a spot on our calendar immediately.
