i want my jazz jackrabbit 2 again i have a working ripped version of it but it aint the same like the real cd . and more should play that game it has great music great levels and a good scaling challenge level. it's one of my most beloved games and i own alot of games but none can compare to it Giana sisters twisted dreams comes closes but not close enough.
The Game Overthinker has had two episodes on this problem: #27-Who Will Be Remembered? ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUOA_uhco8I ) and #65-Open The Vaults ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjaHeAIfhbg ) but no real solution. The problem is that much of this stuff will only "properly" run on the hardware it was designed for and no emulation can capture that.
As for the age of the media (< 50 years) preventing comparison with the Mona Lisa is nonsense.
Birth of a Nation (1915), Häxan (1922), Napoléon (1927), about every US film from 1939, and Citizen Kane (1941) were all within 50 years of films telling actual stories (1896).
Dramatic Radio's hayday was in the 1920s and 30s with *25 years* of radio as a popular media (1922). Because many of these shows were done live many are lost to us.
It has been argued that much of TV's best programing was in the 60s and 70s well within the 50 year range presented. Live broadcasting and limited archiving have resulted in many lost shows.
Weird. I was just thinking about both this and the Ozymandias poem. Specifically, I was remembering a particularly epic reading of that poem done by Sir Richard Attenborough - a reading done specifically for one of the most influential yet completely forgotten games of all time: Jurassic Park: Trespasser.
The game was horribly broken and glitchy on release. A number of patches fixed most the problems, but it was too little to late. The game had already received tons of 1/10 reviews and was swiftly swept into the dustbin for most people. Nevertheless it was a pioneer in the FPS genre. A lot of things that just simply didn't exist in the 90s, but which are taken for granted now, were first tried in that game. Expansive outdoor environments, the ability to physically interact with objects in the environment, an actual physics engine for those objects. Even simple gameplay mechanics like only being able to carry two guns at a time. Heaps and heaps of stuff done first in this largely forgotten game. It really is telling that the dev team for the first Half-Life game listed it as one of their chief inspirations - if you've ever played trespasser, it really does feel like a somewhat unpolished and kind of glitchy half-life with dinosaurs.
That's the kind of history people forget about though.
Look at NASA. Everyone remembers Project Mercury, just getting into space. Everyone remembers Project Apollo, getting to the moon. No one remembers Project Gemini, where the techniques needed to get to the moon were pioneered.
Everyone remembers Wolfenstein and Doom for being the first widely released FPSs. Everyone remembers Half-Life for being the ground-breaking game that revolutionized the entire industry. No one remembers a largely forgotten game about dinosaurs that pioneered the things that made Half-Life possible not long after.
Okay. So I study 15th century English literature. Most of my fellow grad students could probably name exactly one English writer during the one hundred year span. Without looking I can name seven. Seven writers in a hundred years, and I am ABD.
To be honest, I don't even see this as a problem. Even a lot of the surviving stuff is just really boring. I'm not worried that will lose games like Mario, Zelda, or even Grim Fandango any more than we will lose the Canterbury Tales. But are 90% of these games really worth saving? They're important to us, for sure, but in 500 years, they'll be half-remembered answers on multiple-choice questions.
Again, I'm all for preservation of good stuff, but I also realize that there's a reason for canon, which I basically see as acceptance of mortality. Both of players/readers who can only play/read so much in 70 years, and also of our cultural work.
Let's not forget that Ozymandias is, after all, a memento mori.
Still love and play a lot of SNES games. I run an SNES emulator on my TF300 and use a Street Fighter IV usb gamepad. I hate touch controls. Definitely need to 'feel' the buttons.
Because I am a huge nerd (and you all care, desperately) I feel compelled to point out that A) the image that appears in the video is a 3 & 1/2" floppy, not a 5 & 1/2", and the disks commonly used were 3 & 1/2" and 5 & 1/4, not 5 & 1/2". There, I feel better. Now you can shun me.
I'm kind of disappointed you guys skipped the discussion on copyright as it pertains to preserving old games, because that is arguably the most relevant issue today with preserving old video games as forms of art.
Here's the situation: Forget about piracy for a moment. Just drop it from the equation for a second. Copyright is the most oft-discussed aspect of rights management, but very rarely do we talk about Public Domain. The reason we are able to preserve these works of art, whether they be paintings, books, or poems, is because at some point, the copyright expired and they moved out of the hands of the author into Public Domain.
The reason this happened was because art used to be seen as something that would enrich human experience. Art wasn't something you owned, it was something you created and passed on to everyone else. You had ~10 years to make a profit with your piece of art, for your own financial support, and then after that you were expected to move on to another piece and let others use the work freely. It is within this framework that art preservation was possible. 10 years after its creation, people who saw it as worthwhile could preserve it in multiple forms, just to make sure it got passed on to the next generation.
Under today's model, where the author/creator owns their work for their entire lifetime plus 75 years (which is an absolutely ludicrous length of time compared to the original concept of copyright, considering they'll be dead and can't make anymore money off of it), art preservation is stunted, especially in the medium of video games. This is because people are constantly trying to capitalize on a piece of work. They work and work and work to make money off of it for as long as possible, and when they finish, do they turn it over to the public for the enrichment of others? No. They hoard the rights to themselves and throw the work in the proverbial closet, never to be seen again under legal circumstances.
There are exceptions to this of course. Old games like Sonic and Mario get ported and remade many times over, because they were over-the-top successes, but as you said, there are literally thousands of games that are just up and disappearing. Probably gone forever, because the legality of it all has driven away the few people who might have remember to preserve them in some form.
Bringing piracy back into the equation, consider this: is piracy bad because it's illegal, or because it is morally or ethically reprehensible? Before you answer that question, let me pose another: Should the creator of a piece of art own that piece of art, effectively forever, even if it means running the very real risk that it will not be preserved beyond their lifetime?
I think before we can answer the question of how we're going to preserve old video games, we need to answer those two questions first. If art is merely a commodity, owned exclusively by its creator or whoever he passes the rights onto, then preservation is a fleeting dream. If art is a form of social and cultural enrichment, and the author has a limited window of time to make a profit before it gets passed on to the public, then preservation is a real possibility.
Given the number of classic games preserved in collections, up-res restorations, or re-released along with their own remakes, the low-key revival of the coin-op arcade, renewal of interest in classic pinball tables and faithful digital representations of same, I'm actually quite impressed with the degree to which gaming's history as a tangible, tactile experience is being preserved. Of course, some obscure titles can be extremely difficult to come by, but I'd submit that there are other mediums facing a greater crisis. It can be infuriatingly difficult to find some obscure films as recent as the '80s and '90s that never made the analog to digital transition. And even the classic Star Wars films are only available in clean, crisp HD in an unadulterated format as a result of fan edits of dubious legality.
Of course, like any medium, games will only be remembered so long as people appreciate and enjoy them. So we may only remember the very best decades from now, as with the popular music of any era. But there is no short supply of Salieris to gaming's Mozarts.*
*Far from the revered composer's nemesis, Salieri went to great pains to keep his operas in particular being played in Vienna long after his untimely death.
Zoku Gojira on
"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." - Bertolt Brecht
Here in Denmark, I know for a fact that there are games(small amount but large diversity from indie games to triple A) you can borrow at the library, so there has been some people fighting to make it work. I'm not saying the result is perfect or even that good, just that you would think EC would look these things up.
There *HAS* to be a library in the US somewhere, who's doing the same thing. It would've been good if you'd found and contacted them, to ask for a statement or an opinion on the matter. There are also a number of official arcade game museums in the world.
It's not as bleak as you make it sound, but a bit more investigation would've been nice. Who knows, you might have been more likely to inspire a few game-curators out there.
This is one of those questions, which you're better off not thinking about.
As a game designer, you are not in the worst of situation. Utility or 'normal' application programmers are in a worse situation. Consider how forgotten the work of the people who developed MS office 95 is now, merely 17 years later. Sam and Max were out 2 years before then and are still played by nostalgic people. Office 95 on the other hand is not used by anyone, anymore.
Now consider how useless the job of a janitor, manager, accountant or CEO is in the grand scheme of things. They have no product to show for their work, and yet they are absolutely necessary for anything to get done.
So as I said, not worth thinking about, as all the jobs are important. Even if they will have nothing direct to show for.
Now to address another point. Grim Fandango, Sam and Max, Pong or any game made so far cannot be compared to the greatest work of any artist, composer or craftsman. They are art, which will live in our generation and get forgotten, as our generation dies off. This is it's place in the scheme of things. All the games developed so far are to game development, what cave paintings are to the art of painting. We are in an age of development, not in an age of refinement. There have been no masterworks yet, compared to what is ahead of us. 300 years down the line, the period we are in right now is definitely not destined to be remembered as anything more than a bullet point saying "The first interactive experience ever produced was around the year 2000" on that history slide, which is never on the quiz.
So my opinion is that, while the games we are currently producing are important for the development of the medium, they are not yet ready to be called 'masterwork'. The field of game development needs to plateau before masterworks will begin to appear. And for that to happen, both computing and algorithmic technology need to plateau first.
I'm sorry for making this post so depressing, but it's very hard to do otherwise, considering the video was just as depressing. The last thing I wanted to say is that I know this post will only be read by very few people, most of who will just skim through it. Also everyone who does read it will (combined) likely spend less time reading it than I did writing it, not to mention the post becoming completely forgotten just a few days after it's posted. And despite knowing all this, I still decided to write it and post it. Because I think my ideas should be heard, even if they will not stand the test of time, and people in 300 years will not remember me or credit me for posting this. Our role as game designers is an important one, and while none of our work will be credited as masterpieces, we will be credited as contributors to the development of games as an art form. A vague bullet point in a slide show in some liberal arts college is a million percent more creditation than anyone will get in 100 years, who makes anything less than a masterwork.
I hope you survived that. My writing style tends to result in overcomplicated sentences. I'm working on that, but it'll have to do for now.
You completely lost me at 5.5" floppy. There were 5.25" floppies (bigger and floppier ones) and there were 3.5" floppies (smaller and not actually all that floppy), but to my knowledge there were never any 5.5" floppies. I got so distracted that I went and did web searches to see if I had somehow missed something. That took me to wikipedia and I spent the next hour reading about the history of magnetic media.
Here's some forgotten gems you may never have heard of:
Invasion From Beyond -- Apes 50's B sci-fi movies in the context of arcade flight shooter, and one of the fastest / most difficult / most fun I've ever played. Ships zip through the air making hair-pin turns at speeds that make other arcade flight shooters look lazy.
Robot Alchemic Drive -- PS2 game in which you take on the role of, not a giant robot, but a guy CONTROLLING a giant robot. Battles play out in sandbox city environments, where the player is forced to run around looking for good vantage points from which to then switch, and control their giant robot. The giant robots are slow, clunky, difficult to control (as in, one button for each limb) and it takes 5-10 seconds to throw a single punch -- so when you do, it's obscenely satisfying. This one really needs to be played to be understood, but it's an absolute blast. Gigantor The Space-Age Robot if it were a videogame. Also features quite literally the worst voice acting you will ever hear, bar none.
Jade Cocoon -- PS1. Pokemon meets Final Fantasy. A dark, mysterious monster-battle RPG with a very addictive and deep monster-breeding system.
Chrono Cross -- PS1. Getting a touch more mainstream here, but a lot of people haven't played this game, and that's a mistake. A massive, rich turn-based RPG with so many characters, party members, and interweaving story threads it puts modern RPG's to shame. Also has a haunting overall atmosphere and a soundtrack that is one of the best you will ever hear in any game, ever.
Suikoden (1 through 3) -- Another PS1/PS2-era RPG series with a buttload of party members. Blisteringly quick turn-based battles, and even some RTS-lite. Not as narratively rich as Chrono Cross, but a great deal more fun, the Suikoden games task the player with rebuilding a dilapidated castle and putting together an army to take on an evil empire. Some of the best old-school RPG's ever made. They even did the Bioware "one save carries across multiple games" thing, as far back as 1998!
Treasure Adventure Game -- A side-scrolling adventure game that plays like a cross between Metroid and Legend of Zelda: Windwaker.
Half-Minute Hero: A PSP / XBLA game that's like nothing you've ever played. So fun it has to be played to be believed. Download the demo and see for yourself.
"Obedience and patriotism are men's worst ills. Obedient is the one who doesn't want to think, patriot is the one who doesn't want to question."
- Anonymous Russian Philosopher
You are expecting quite a bit from such a young medium and one that is so imperfectly cloned from one period of technology to the next. Film due to its two layer format can be more simply updated from one generation to the next, in the same way art is a one layered idea. Code and software are electronic signals encoded into things and do things that film and visual art cannot dream of. So expecting them to be used so conversationally as something as simple as a picture is expecting games to exist in a different level of format and doesn't really work.
It's a nice idea but humans literally destroy artworks and memories on purpose as they do not operate on a "Vulcan" level, Pharaohs used to have there forebears chiselled out of existence until the time of Ramsay. And who's not to say that games will be simply forgotten for purpose of functionality, does the everyday man working on in a Mustang factory know how to construct a carriage wheel?
The Digital Game Museum in Sunnyvale, CA, was created expressly for this reason. Check out the web site. You may have seen our exhibits at PAX Prime 2011 and 2012 (see the PA Report article, too - http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/the-evolution-of-game-controllers). And note that this all costs a great deal of money, so add yourself to our mailing list to keep up with our activities, and if it sounds like what you think should be happening, send us a couple of $.
In 1998, Denmark passed a law which states that all video games published in Denmark must be added to the Royal Library for preservation. However, it doesn't actually happen: between 1998 to 2010, only 1.5% (157) of all games released on the Danish market were actually added to the collection. Of those 157 games, 10 were developed in Denmark (15% of all games developed in Denmark during that time period).
Local libraries may be doing pretty well at providing newer games, but we're terrible at the older stuff, and as time passes, it's only going to become harder to preserve those titles.
There's a private museum in Ikast which is doing a much better job, covering vastly more systems and even arcade games, but they were (are?) at risk of closing earlier this year, and they have been unable to obtain government funding to continue.
In other words - we could do a lot better than we are right now.
You should check out the PC Gaming Wiki that folks at Reddit created. http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Home
Its goal is to consolidate all the goofy steps you have to do to get old pc games running.
Even on different medium, not all works survive through the test of time.
All the known pieces of artists like Vincent van Gogh or Picasso were under critical limelight that allowed those works to be accessible through centuries. Equivalent works on game medium would be like Pong or Wolfenstein 3d. Inasmuch as there are games that are completely lost from our touch, there are countless number of paintings, films, and stories that did not survive through ages.
Not 3 days ago I was standing in a Half Priced Books carrying my weight in old games I hoped to somehow force my OS to play one way or another. My inability to get Dungeon Siege running on Windows 7 doesn't give me a lot of hope for the older games like Warcraft 2 & Thief: The Dark Project.
I also want an emulator that will play iPhone games on a PC.
I've already lost at least 3 MMOs I'll never be able to play again, & I'm dead set against mandatory host servers for single player games.
Working in social games made the issue of preservation even more important to me. I know there's a debate about whether these are games or not, but they're still a part of our history. However, whenever I brought up the idea of preservation, it was always scoffed at by the designers. They didn't want any of their game design being preserved and used by competitors after the death of their game. So many of the games that my company created are just gone. No way to play them, no record of their existence, not even a boxed copy gathering dust on a shelf.
This is a problem that faces art music and movies just as much as video games. Everything that is created has a good chance to be utterly forgotten within a hundred years. It has to be a fortunate piece of art to survive for hundreds of years. How many paintings have been painted that were simply burned down in a fire? How many old musical acts from thousands of years ago have been forgotten because it took a while to come up with a way to write music. And even then how many were lost before recordings of music were possible?
How many early movies/tv shows were thrown out just because they didn't think anyone cared?
How many stories are lost to time? Either because they were just oral traditions or because they were recorded but the library they were stored in.
Gaming is not unique in this respect and if anything more games are likely to exist in the future compared to anything else. Thereby completely negating your argument.
Sure interfaces may change and it might be a pale shadow as you called it. But by the same token the way we view a modern painting is completely different from how someone a century would see it. How many people fail to understand that Greek sculptures were not just white marble but had elaborate paint covering them?
You say we're losing our past, but really, we aren't. Not compared to the huge amount of content that has been lost in the others.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
This is another of those instances where current copyright law really hurts the industry.
If more of these games became public domain earlier, then we might stand more of a chance of creating these "library of video game congress" archives of old games.
I'm not against developers getting money, and many of these games are still masterpieces in their own right, so I'm glad that the companies can still make money off of them. But at some point I would really love to (legally) be able to get every NES game made, every Sega Genesis game. Piracy is sadly one of the only things that keeps many of these games alive, and that is a real shame. I know many DOS games are considered "abandonware," but that is still a murky area both legally and morally.
I would disagree that there is a lack of preservation. Plenty of video games disappear from the public eye to later disappear completely all the time, but this happens with every other medium. For every Hamlet, there are a hundred thousand stories lost forever. For every Starry Night, there are a hundred thousand paintings that will never be seen again. It's just that those works became such big hits that they've been remembered for centuries. I'd say that the likes of Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pokémon, Halo, and Call of Duty will be long remembered past their cultural relevance, in much the same way people remember Gone with the Wind even among those who have never watched it.
That we have emulators with vast libraries of long forgotten games is a lot better than the times when playwrights like Aristophanes would throw away their plays after the actors had performed them, when political enemies burned down the Library of Alexandria specifically to destroy information, or when the Sistine Chapel--one such case of a great work known to everybody--fell into disrepair until a recent effort to restore it.
The proportion of games being remembered to games forgotten, I'd say, is higher than other media that have been around for a long time.
Besides, hardly anyone reads Shakespeare or studies Van Gogh unless they're in a class.
To be fair, people rarely read Shakespeare or look at Van Goghs outside of school, so it's not like it's specific to video games. Still, preservation exists for those media. I'd imagine the easiest and most effective means of preservation would be for game design students (or even those going into theory).
And as far as the fine arts goes, I'm sure that for every Hamlet everyone remembers, there are a hundred thousand stories that have been lost forever, and for every Starry Night, there are a hundred thousand paintings that no longer exist. It's just that Hamlet and Starry Night were masterpieces that received widespread exposure. You can say the same for video games: Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pokémon, Halo, Call of Duty, and so forth made such deep cultural impacts that they are going to be remembered for decades into the future, if not centuries.
That emulators with vast collections of games from forgotten consoles even exists is tremendous progress compared to, say, the Library of Alexandria getting burned down by political enemies, or the Sistine Chapel falling into disrepair until a recent restoration project.
To be fair, people rarely read Shakespeare or look at Van Goghs outside of school, so it's not like it's specific to video games. Still, preservation exists for those media. I'd imagine the easiest and most effective means of preservation would be for game design students (or even those going into theory).
And as far as the fine arts goes, I'm sure that for every Hamlet everyone remembers, there are a hundred thousand stories that have been lost forever, and for every Starry Night, there are a hundred thousand paintings that no longer exist. It's just that Hamlet and Starry Night were masterpieces that received widespread exposure. You can say the same for video games: Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pokémon, Halo, Call of Duty, and so forth made such deep cultural impacts that they are going to be remembered for decades into the future, if not centuries.
That emulators with vast collections of games from forgotten consoles even exists is tremendous progress compared to, say, the Library of Alexandria getting burned down by political enemies, or the Sistine Chapel falling into disrepair until a recent restoration project.
I don't think they're saying that video games are unique in that they need to preserved, or that other types of art haven't had preservation issues in the past, or even currently. The point of the video was to point out that video games have unique obstacles to preservation not present in other media. With books, only the text itself has to survive in order to be preserved. With music and movies, playback is needed, but those are often based on worldwide standards that often don't change for decades. For a video game, not only do you need the original media, but you need the correct "playback" device, which can vary between dozens of types in any given year, and change often.
To reference Shakespeare or Van Gogh, there are still lost plays of Shakespeare that probably will never be recovered, as popular as he was. There's stories of film preservation and restoration efforts on some fairly high-profile films that may have been lost to time. And Van Gogh was not popular in his lifetime. It was only after his death that his work became appreciated. Something similar happened to Moby Dick, which was a disappointment bother commercially and critically when first released, or Citizen Kane. So to assume both that only the most popular works of their time are worthy of preservation, and that those works will be automatically preserved without any focused effort, is folly.
Relying on emulators instead of the original hardware means running into problems when the emulators themselves are out of date and need to be ported or re-written on new hardware. How do you know the game is being accurately rendered if you only have the old emulator to reference (which may have been inaccurately rendering the game itself)?
Film preservation took a while after the creation of film to take hold. Same with TV. Considering how young the video game industry is, I don't think it's foolish to take a look at the current state of video game preservation and point out the flaws and roadblocks that currently exist, and try and look for solutions.
I've been wrestling with preservation lately myself. King's Field IV The Ancient City is one of my favorite games of all time. What happens when the day comes that my PS2 doesn't spin up anymore? It can't be emulated, even via the PS3, because there's a specific point where the game world fails to load and is unpassable during emulation.
This is one reason why I'm happy that some companies are taking the time to revive their older titles. When they do, they should include the original version too for reference's sake AND to offer choice to the player. Having bought Final Fantasy on NES and PSP, I could justify buying it a 3rd time for my iPad if I could actually have access to the NES version on my iPad as well.
I think one thing we need to do to address this is to adjust the now antiquated laws. New lines need to be drawn. For example, if somebody were to "illegally" acquire an original Playstation BIOS and "illegally" acquire a copy of a PS game, would Sony's sales really be impacted now that the system hasn't been relevant for nearly two decades? Similarly, technology moves so quickly that I think it needs its own, shorter duration ruling in regards to public domain.
Posts
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
As for the age of the media (< 50 years) preventing comparison with the Mona Lisa is nonsense.
Birth of a Nation (1915), Häxan (1922), Napoléon (1927), about every US film from 1939, and Citizen Kane (1941) were all within 50 years of films telling actual stories (1896).
Dramatic Radio's hayday was in the 1920s and 30s with *25 years* of radio as a popular media (1922). Because many of these shows were done live many are lost to us.
It has been argued that much of TV's best programing was in the 60s and 70s well within the 50 year range presented. Live broadcasting and limited archiving have resulted in many lost shows.
http://news.lib.uchicago.edu/blog/2012/05/25/videogame-collection-supports-scholarly-study/
The game was horribly broken and glitchy on release. A number of patches fixed most the problems, but it was too little to late. The game had already received tons of 1/10 reviews and was swiftly swept into the dustbin for most people. Nevertheless it was a pioneer in the FPS genre. A lot of things that just simply didn't exist in the 90s, but which are taken for granted now, were first tried in that game. Expansive outdoor environments, the ability to physically interact with objects in the environment, an actual physics engine for those objects. Even simple gameplay mechanics like only being able to carry two guns at a time. Heaps and heaps of stuff done first in this largely forgotten game. It really is telling that the dev team for the first Half-Life game listed it as one of their chief inspirations - if you've ever played trespasser, it really does feel like a somewhat unpolished and kind of glitchy half-life with dinosaurs.
That's the kind of history people forget about though.
Look at NASA. Everyone remembers Project Mercury, just getting into space. Everyone remembers Project Apollo, getting to the moon. No one remembers Project Gemini, where the techniques needed to get to the moon were pioneered.
Everyone remembers Wolfenstein and Doom for being the first widely released FPSs. Everyone remembers Half-Life for being the ground-breaking game that revolutionized the entire industry. No one remembers a largely forgotten game about dinosaurs that pioneered the things that made Half-Life possible not long after.
To be honest, I don't even see this as a problem. Even a lot of the surviving stuff is just really boring. I'm not worried that will lose games like Mario, Zelda, or even Grim Fandango any more than we will lose the Canterbury Tales. But are 90% of these games really worth saving? They're important to us, for sure, but in 500 years, they'll be half-remembered answers on multiple-choice questions.
Again, I'm all for preservation of good stuff, but I also realize that there's a reason for canon, which I basically see as acceptance of mortality. Both of players/readers who can only play/read so much in 70 years, and also of our cultural work.
Let's not forget that Ozymandias is, after all, a memento mori.
Here's the situation: Forget about piracy for a moment. Just drop it from the equation for a second. Copyright is the most oft-discussed aspect of rights management, but very rarely do we talk about Public Domain. The reason we are able to preserve these works of art, whether they be paintings, books, or poems, is because at some point, the copyright expired and they moved out of the hands of the author into Public Domain.
The reason this happened was because art used to be seen as something that would enrich human experience. Art wasn't something you owned, it was something you created and passed on to everyone else. You had ~10 years to make a profit with your piece of art, for your own financial support, and then after that you were expected to move on to another piece and let others use the work freely. It is within this framework that art preservation was possible. 10 years after its creation, people who saw it as worthwhile could preserve it in multiple forms, just to make sure it got passed on to the next generation.
Under today's model, where the author/creator owns their work for their entire lifetime plus 75 years (which is an absolutely ludicrous length of time compared to the original concept of copyright, considering they'll be dead and can't make anymore money off of it), art preservation is stunted, especially in the medium of video games. This is because people are constantly trying to capitalize on a piece of work. They work and work and work to make money off of it for as long as possible, and when they finish, do they turn it over to the public for the enrichment of others? No. They hoard the rights to themselves and throw the work in the proverbial closet, never to be seen again under legal circumstances.
There are exceptions to this of course. Old games like Sonic and Mario get ported and remade many times over, because they were over-the-top successes, but as you said, there are literally thousands of games that are just up and disappearing. Probably gone forever, because the legality of it all has driven away the few people who might have remember to preserve them in some form.
Bringing piracy back into the equation, consider this: is piracy bad because it's illegal, or because it is morally or ethically reprehensible? Before you answer that question, let me pose another: Should the creator of a piece of art own that piece of art, effectively forever, even if it means running the very real risk that it will not be preserved beyond their lifetime?
I think before we can answer the question of how we're going to preserve old video games, we need to answer those two questions first. If art is merely a commodity, owned exclusively by its creator or whoever he passes the rights onto, then preservation is a fleeting dream. If art is a form of social and cultural enrichment, and the author has a limited window of time to make a profit before it gets passed on to the public, then preservation is a real possibility.
Of course, like any medium, games will only be remembered so long as people appreciate and enjoy them. So we may only remember the very best decades from now, as with the popular music of any era. But there is no short supply of Salieris to gaming's Mozarts.*
*Far from the revered composer's nemesis, Salieri went to great pains to keep his operas in particular being played in Vienna long after his untimely death.
There *HAS* to be a library in the US somewhere, who's doing the same thing. It would've been good if you'd found and contacted them, to ask for a statement or an opinion on the matter. There are also a number of official arcade game museums in the world.
It's not as bleak as you make it sound, but a bit more investigation would've been nice. Who knows, you might have been more likely to inspire a few game-curators out there.
As a game designer, you are not in the worst of situation. Utility or 'normal' application programmers are in a worse situation. Consider how forgotten the work of the people who developed MS office 95 is now, merely 17 years later. Sam and Max were out 2 years before then and are still played by nostalgic people. Office 95 on the other hand is not used by anyone, anymore.
Now consider how useless the job of a janitor, manager, accountant or CEO is in the grand scheme of things. They have no product to show for their work, and yet they are absolutely necessary for anything to get done.
So as I said, not worth thinking about, as all the jobs are important. Even if they will have nothing direct to show for.
Now to address another point. Grim Fandango, Sam and Max, Pong or any game made so far cannot be compared to the greatest work of any artist, composer or craftsman. They are art, which will live in our generation and get forgotten, as our generation dies off. This is it's place in the scheme of things. All the games developed so far are to game development, what cave paintings are to the art of painting. We are in an age of development, not in an age of refinement. There have been no masterworks yet, compared to what is ahead of us. 300 years down the line, the period we are in right now is definitely not destined to be remembered as anything more than a bullet point saying "The first interactive experience ever produced was around the year 2000" on that history slide, which is never on the quiz.
So my opinion is that, while the games we are currently producing are important for the development of the medium, they are not yet ready to be called 'masterwork'. The field of game development needs to plateau before masterworks will begin to appear. And for that to happen, both computing and algorithmic technology need to plateau first.
I'm sorry for making this post so depressing, but it's very hard to do otherwise, considering the video was just as depressing. The last thing I wanted to say is that I know this post will only be read by very few people, most of who will just skim through it. Also everyone who does read it will (combined) likely spend less time reading it than I did writing it, not to mention the post becoming completely forgotten just a few days after it's posted. And despite knowing all this, I still decided to write it and post it. Because I think my ideas should be heard, even if they will not stand the test of time, and people in 300 years will not remember me or credit me for posting this.
I hope you survived that. My writing style tends to result in overcomplicated sentences. I'm working on that, but it'll have to do for now.
Invasion From Beyond -- Apes 50's B sci-fi movies in the context of arcade flight shooter, and one of the fastest / most difficult / most fun I've ever played. Ships zip through the air making hair-pin turns at speeds that make other arcade flight shooters look lazy.
Robot Alchemic Drive -- PS2 game in which you take on the role of, not a giant robot, but a guy CONTROLLING a giant robot. Battles play out in sandbox city environments, where the player is forced to run around looking for good vantage points from which to then switch, and control their giant robot. The giant robots are slow, clunky, difficult to control (as in, one button for each limb) and it takes 5-10 seconds to throw a single punch -- so when you do, it's obscenely satisfying. This one really needs to be played to be understood, but it's an absolute blast. Gigantor The Space-Age Robot if it were a videogame. Also features quite literally the worst voice acting you will ever hear, bar none.
Jade Cocoon -- PS1. Pokemon meets Final Fantasy. A dark, mysterious monster-battle RPG with a very addictive and deep monster-breeding system.
Chrono Cross -- PS1. Getting a touch more mainstream here, but a lot of people haven't played this game, and that's a mistake. A massive, rich turn-based RPG with so many characters, party members, and interweaving story threads it puts modern RPG's to shame. Also has a haunting overall atmosphere and a soundtrack that is one of the best you will ever hear in any game, ever.
Suikoden (1 through 3) -- Another PS1/PS2-era RPG series with a buttload of party members. Blisteringly quick turn-based battles, and even some RTS-lite. Not as narratively rich as Chrono Cross, but a great deal more fun, the Suikoden games task the player with rebuilding a dilapidated castle and putting together an army to take on an evil empire. Some of the best old-school RPG's ever made. They even did the Bioware "one save carries across multiple games" thing, as far back as 1998!
Treasure Adventure Game -- A side-scrolling adventure game that plays like a cross between Metroid and Legend of Zelda: Windwaker.
Half-Minute Hero: A PSP / XBLA game that's like nothing you've ever played. So fun it has to be played to be believed. Download the demo and see for yourself.
- Anonymous Russian Philosopher
It's a nice idea but humans literally destroy artworks and memories on purpose as they do not operate on a "Vulcan" level, Pharaohs used to have there forebears chiselled out of existence until the time of Ramsay. And who's not to say that games will be simply forgotten for purpose of functionality, does the everyday man working on in a Mustang factory know how to construct a carriage wheel?
Just wanted to say great post, and that I certainly read it all. It definitely gives a more positive perspective on the whole issue
Is there a way to quote or reply directly to a person on this board?
In 1998, Denmark passed a law which states that all video games published in Denmark must be added to the Royal Library for preservation. However, it doesn't actually happen: between 1998 to 2010, only 1.5% (157) of all games released on the Danish market were actually added to the collection. Of those 157 games, 10 were developed in Denmark (15% of all games developed in Denmark during that time period).
Local libraries may be doing pretty well at providing newer games, but we're terrible at the older stuff, and as time passes, it's only going to become harder to preserve those titles.
There's a private museum in Ikast which is doing a much better job, covering vastly more systems and even arcade games, but they were (are?) at risk of closing earlier this year, and they have been unable to obtain government funding to continue.
In other words - we could do a lot better than we are right now.
Its goal is to consolidate all the goofy steps you have to do to get old pc games running.
"My name is...um...hmm...Adahn...king of kings..."
Earthbound's legal issues are known. Emulation is the only way now.
All the known pieces of artists like Vincent van Gogh or Picasso were under critical limelight that allowed those works to be accessible through centuries. Equivalent works on game medium would be like Pong or Wolfenstein 3d. Inasmuch as there are games that are completely lost from our touch, there are countless number of paintings, films, and stories that did not survive through ages.
Memories... Im so old.
I also want an emulator that will play iPhone games on a PC.
I've already lost at least 3 MMOs I'll never be able to play again, & I'm dead set against mandatory host servers for single player games.
How many early movies/tv shows were thrown out just because they didn't think anyone cared?
How many stories are lost to time? Either because they were just oral traditions or because they were recorded but the library they were stored in.
Gaming is not unique in this respect and if anything more games are likely to exist in the future compared to anything else. Thereby completely negating your argument.
Sure interfaces may change and it might be a pale shadow as you called it. But by the same token the way we view a modern painting is completely different from how someone a century would see it. How many people fail to understand that Greek sculptures were not just white marble but had elaborate paint covering them?
You say we're losing our past, but really, we aren't. Not compared to the huge amount of content that has been lost in the others.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
If more of these games became public domain earlier, then we might stand more of a chance of creating these "library of video game congress" archives of old games.
I'm not against developers getting money, and many of these games are still masterpieces in their own right, so I'm glad that the companies can still make money off of them. But at some point I would really love to (legally) be able to get every NES game made, every Sega Genesis game. Piracy is sadly one of the only things that keeps many of these games alive, and that is a real shame. I know many DOS games are considered "abandonware," but that is still a murky area both legally and morally.
That we have emulators with vast libraries of long forgotten games is a lot better than the times when playwrights like Aristophanes would throw away their plays after the actors had performed them, when political enemies burned down the Library of Alexandria specifically to destroy information, or when the Sistine Chapel--one such case of a great work known to everybody--fell into disrepair until a recent effort to restore it.
The proportion of games being remembered to games forgotten, I'd say, is higher than other media that have been around for a long time.
Besides, hardly anyone reads Shakespeare or studies Van Gogh unless they're in a class.
And as far as the fine arts goes, I'm sure that for every Hamlet everyone remembers, there are a hundred thousand stories that have been lost forever, and for every Starry Night, there are a hundred thousand paintings that no longer exist. It's just that Hamlet and Starry Night were masterpieces that received widespread exposure. You can say the same for video games: Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pokémon, Halo, Call of Duty, and so forth made such deep cultural impacts that they are going to be remembered for decades into the future, if not centuries.
That emulators with vast collections of games from forgotten consoles even exists is tremendous progress compared to, say, the Library of Alexandria getting burned down by political enemies, or the Sistine Chapel falling into disrepair until a recent restoration project.
And as far as the fine arts goes, I'm sure that for every Hamlet everyone remembers, there are a hundred thousand stories that have been lost forever, and for every Starry Night, there are a hundred thousand paintings that no longer exist. It's just that Hamlet and Starry Night were masterpieces that received widespread exposure. You can say the same for video games: Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pokémon, Halo, Call of Duty, and so forth made such deep cultural impacts that they are going to be remembered for decades into the future, if not centuries.
That emulators with vast collections of games from forgotten consoles even exists is tremendous progress compared to, say, the Library of Alexandria getting burned down by political enemies, or the Sistine Chapel falling into disrepair until a recent restoration project.
I don't think they're saying that video games are unique in that they need to preserved, or that other types of art haven't had preservation issues in the past, or even currently. The point of the video was to point out that video games have unique obstacles to preservation not present in other media. With books, only the text itself has to survive in order to be preserved. With music and movies, playback is needed, but those are often based on worldwide standards that often don't change for decades. For a video game, not only do you need the original media, but you need the correct "playback" device, which can vary between dozens of types in any given year, and change often.
To reference Shakespeare or Van Gogh, there are still lost plays of Shakespeare that probably will never be recovered, as popular as he was. There's stories of film preservation and restoration efforts on some fairly high-profile films that may have been lost to time. And Van Gogh was not popular in his lifetime. It was only after his death that his work became appreciated. Something similar happened to Moby Dick, which was a disappointment bother commercially and critically when first released, or Citizen Kane. So to assume both that only the most popular works of their time are worthy of preservation, and that those works will be automatically preserved without any focused effort, is folly.
Emulators are nice, but they're not a complete solution. To be frank, the majority of them are incomplete, and resort to quick "hacks" to get the more popular titles to work. To completely accurately emulate an older system is still very hard to do, as this article goes into:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/
Relying on emulators instead of the original hardware means running into problems when the emulators themselves are out of date and need to be ported or re-written on new hardware. How do you know the game is being accurately rendered if you only have the old emulator to reference (which may have been inaccurately rendering the game itself)?
Besides that, there's still copyright and patent laws to consider when offering emulation. Here's a story about a German Museum that'd like to use emulation, but is having trouble with the copyright laws in place to prevent piracy:
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/04/22/saving-the-game-why-preserving-video-games-is-illegal/
Film preservation took a while after the creation of film to take hold. Same with TV. Considering how young the video game industry is, I don't think it's foolish to take a look at the current state of video game preservation and point out the flaws and roadblocks that currently exist, and try and look for solutions.
This is one reason why I'm happy that some companies are taking the time to revive their older titles. When they do, they should include the original version too for reference's sake AND to offer choice to the player. Having bought Final Fantasy on NES and PSP, I could justify buying it a 3rd time for my iPad if I could actually have access to the NES version on my iPad as well.
I think one thing we need to do to address this is to adjust the now antiquated laws. New lines need to be drawn. For example, if somebody were to "illegally" acquire an original Playstation BIOS and "illegally" acquire a copy of a PS game, would Sony's sales really be impacted now that the system hasn't been relevant for nearly two decades? Similarly, technology moves so quickly that I think it needs its own, shorter duration ruling in regards to public domain.