Our modern culture is increasingly expressed in the form of digital
artifacts, yet archaeology is in its infancy when it comes to
researching and understanding them. The study and reverse engineering of
digital artifacts is no longer the exclusive domain of computer
scientists. Presented by way of analogy to the process of archaeological
fieldwork familiar to readers, the 1986 Electronic Arts game Amnesia is
used as a vehicle to explain the procedure and thought process required
to reverse engineer a digital artifact. As a go-to reference to learn
how to begin studying the digital, Amnesia is shown to be a
multi-layered artifact with a complex backstory; through it, topics in
data compression, copy protection, memory management, and programming
languages are covered.