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Need For Game Archiving
KrubixCube
JapanRegistered User regular
JapanRegistered User regular
When you want to read an old book, like the Odyssey – a story that has survived for something that is, to me, an amazing length of time what do you do? Obvious – you go to the book store and you buy it. How about a classic film, like the Wizard of Oz, made in 1939, or Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai from ’54? Well, there’s probably a blu-ray release for both of those, I own one, but cannot attest for the other (guess which one!). How about a classic recording of Elvis or Sinatra or some other artist that is no longer alive? Again, pop down to the CD store (if they exist in your area anymore) or go online and find it. What do you want to do if you want to play Okami? A game that came out 6 years ago…well, I hope you still have a Playstation 2, and that you can find a copy because otherwise you’re out of luck. Well, there’s the Wii edition but that’s defeating the point I’m trying to make, so I'll ignore it for the time being. That point I'm alluding to is that there’s simultaneously a huge movement to argue games as art and relatively little effort to preserve its history.
It’s a problem that has plagued almost every new medium – many of the earliest novels were lost, films were poorly preserved and many lost, I don't know a lot about music history but I imagine mankind's earliest sheet music is probably gone too.. And now games, something that one would think has been around for long enough to know better is have an archiving problem. There’s no real way to re-experience a great game or share that experience unless you have the original console or if you’re fortunate enough to see a re-release that doesn’t cock up the original game (and you own the console that re-release is out for). I’m not a huge Nintendo fanboy but I’d be a liar if I said some of its classic titles don’t make me happy but I’ll willingly dip my face in some liquid nitrogen before I buy a Wii just to access the virtual console. That would be like buying a PS3 for the PSOne classics (all 5 of them).
Obviously games present their own challenges when it comes to archiving and preserving them, and it hasn't really been addressed. Also, they need to be - and I think this is the most important point - in a state that can be played by the masses but what are your guys' thoughts on the topic?
I always thought if the industry could unite behind emulation as a valid means of preserving games then it would be a positive thing. It's like classic novels being available for free for e-readers. It seems that there's still a big stigma against emulation as being associated with the current industry boogeyman "piracy" but it could really be a force of good if the industry united behind it.
It’s a problem that has plagued almost every new medium – many of the earliest novels were lost, films were poorly preserved and many lost, I don't know a lot about music history but I imagine mankind's earliest sheet music is probably gone too.. And now games, something that one would think has been around for long enough to know better is have an archiving problem. There’s no real way to re-experience a great game or share that experience unless you have the original console or if you’re fortunate enough to see a re-release that doesn’t cock up the original game (and you own the console that re-release is out for). I’m not a huge Nintendo fanboy but I’d be a liar if I said some of its classic titles don’t make me happy but I’ll willingly dip my face in some liquid nitrogen before I buy a Wii just to access the virtual console. That would be like buying a PS3 for the PSOne classics (all 5 of them).
Obviously games present their own challenges when it comes to archiving and preserving them, and it hasn't really been addressed. Also, they need to be - and I think this is the most important point - in a state that can be played by the masses but what are your guys' thoughts on the topic?
I always thought if the industry could unite behind emulation as a valid means of preserving games then it would be a positive thing. It's like classic novels being available for free for e-readers. It seems that there's still a big stigma against emulation as being associated with the current industry boogeyman "piracy" but it could really be a force of good if the industry united behind it.
KrubixCube on
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I don't know what you can do about PC games though. Some of them just don't play nicely with modern operating systems no matter what you do. Its not even the oldest games - because those ran under DOS and DOS can be emulated easily using DOSBOX.
The games that are the hardest to get working are those from the early years of 3D, during the heyday of windows 98.
Basically, my stance is this: The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to create art, thereby enriching our society, improving our culture, and so on. It's a legal construct intended to encourage the production of art that affords the creator a temporary exclusive right to it. Even if you, your company or your family keep the copyright to a work for a hundred years, it ultimately belongs to society. That's why people who preserve video games though ROM dumping and emulation are justified in doing so.
And we all saw that King of Kong movie, right? That big Twin Galaxies arcade looks like they're good at keeping antique arcade cabinets and pinball machines in good working order.
for now your choices are to collect or... hope they keep rereleasing a lot of the memorable stuff.
that's pretty sick
It is. There's efforts being done, I just don't think any of them have hit any sort of prime spotlight or singular location to make it happen. I forget if it's that episode or another, but there's a guy who managed to do the same thing with pinball, he's out in the Bay Area as well. I think he got inspired from a Smithsonian visit that had a "pinball" exhibit but it instead had a Ms. Pac-Man machine. Which is very much not pinball. And pinball is pretty goddamn deeply rooted in 1900's America, which is super weird of the Smithsonian to drop the ball on.
Er, but that's kinda getting side tracked here.
This is because archiving film stock is ridiculously expensive in large quantities, a problem that has thankfully diminished with the rise of digitization, though film itself is also being stored better these days as companies an institutions take better care to preserve their histories.
With video games it's not just software but hardware, which takes up comical amounts of space and cant just be tucked into a storage shed in Arizona and ignored if you want it to stay functional. Emulation alleviates this, but actual complete emulation is enormously intensive, and unless you have a crew of people going through and testing every game, you'll likely miss something. This is supposing you could get the rights holders to allow a project like this in the first place, not a sure thing in the least when they're just learning to monetize particular parts of their old catalogs.
Part of the problem with archiving an MMO is that part of the experience is the other people around you, whether they're standing around, spamming shit, or trying to recruit you for tasks, etc. Archiving the software is easy enough, but you can't aritifically populate it. You can do the quests and all, to a point, but the world is going to be empty. But engaging the game first hand is still important.
So really, extensive videos like the ones you mention above are good, but not on their own enough - putting hands-on experiences along with those videos at any display is what's needed.
so wait, is the problem that archiving doesn't exist or that you'd rather not pay for it?
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Twenty years from now computing may be radically different, but odds are we'll still be watching movies the same way, sitting down looking at a screen.
I am envisioning a time a hundred or more years from now when C++ and DirectX are considered "dead languages" and digital archaeologists will do their best to decode and understand our modern age software that they have found on ancient hard drives or forgotten CD spindles in people's basements or buried beneath the earth, entombed in the future dig sites that are our modern age landfills.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I think my issue is more with the fact that I'd be buying a console for the sole purpose of playing games that weren't made for it. Which seems silly. Like a lot of you mentioned it seems most of the dedication in terms of preserving games seems to be upheld by the fans here and there, not necessarily any sort of bigger organizations. I think a lot of the problems in game archiving are, also like you guys have mentioned, problems in archiving digital stuff in general. We haven't quite figured out ways of keeping all of our file types and languages up to date as time goes on.
there were just a few years there were we hadn't figured it out quite yet, and so the environments in which to play games from that era have to be emulated in software
but there aren't that many of those games really, and most of the ones anybody is interested in have had the legwork done already
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Society has decided it's worth publicly funding libraries because we want a publicly accessible archive of books and etc, but I don't really see the need for a similar thing to exist for videogames when 1) most of it already exists publicly anyway and 2) the barrier to entry is really low.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
It'd be nice to see a consolidated effort to preserve everything though. If one dude saves the code for these old games somewhere, it starts becoming the same as the Metropolis example above. Except replace some Brazilian guy's attic with some dude's old hard drive.
I mean, pretty much any game produced in the last 15 or so years can be popped into a modern windows box, installed and played (might have some driver issues with stuff from the win95 era, but for the most part windows can figure those games out.) Earlier than that we have to emulate using third party solutions, but for the most part those exist.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
The cloud is not a magical entity where data lives, the cloud is made up of actual computers, sitting in actual buildings, that require actual money to keep online.
Some people seem to think that the cloud is data heaven, and everything in it will be available anywhere forever, but it's not.
There was an entire modern, commercially active MMORPG that was completely lost to the ether after a hardware failure. This was modern day software that was making people money. A server full of 100 year old digital copies of videogames isn't going to be anywhere near safe.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
This is assuming you could even find hardware capable of running either language.
Best to err on the side of caution I'd say.
So no, game archiving for the average person is a hamstrung task - where it should be easy with emulation it's difficult because it's almost entirely tied to crumbling physical media.
Every game-player for themself.
I think you're really, really, really wrong here. First, many game companies have just vanished.
Also, even big companies like Square and EA often lose all their source code and files for their games. So that means no one can do a perfect port, and will have to either recreate the entire game from the ground up, with a bit of help from the compiled game. But what if there is no way to reverse engineer a very old game? Or to even RUN it in the first place?
If it has, would you know about it?
philosoraptor.jpg
Certainly there are games that have disappeared of the face of the Earth. Probably not anything important or noteworthy.
Reminds me of SEGA's Outrun Online Arcade, which disappeared from both XBLA and PSN (probably due to stupid Ferrari licensing issues)...
That's why we have to check the fossil records, you silly goose, to find the remains of extinct videogames.
Dark Castle for the Mac is available on the app store.
Panzer Dragoon Saga is still floating around on ebay.
The original Prince of Persia is on gametap.com
The reason I say every commercially released game still exists today is because as soon as it's released, it becomes a part of a collection. And I'm betting collectors will hang onto titles no matter how obscure or terrible they are to play simply because they want a complete collection. Thanks to the culture, a videogame will never disappear like the Dodo - there are just too many nerds who love videogames to let that happen. :P
3DS FC: 4699-5714-8940 Playing Pokemon, add me! Ho, SATAN!
You're just saying things. Doesn't mean they're actually valid.
Also, being part of a private collection is no solution if no one else has access to playing it. Maybe we still didn't lose any half decent game forever, but this art form is barely 30 years old. We already lost uncountable important books, and we don't even know anymore that many of them existed. And books in general are a hell lot more accessible than videogames. I can read any English, Portuguese and Spanish books I find, no matter how old, but I have access to very few original old videogames, because I don't have the consoles.
Maybe today it's still kinda ok, but who knows how's it gonna be in 30 more years? The point is that we need to worry about preserving now, while we still can use them things.