Heather Alexandra at Kotaku did a great write-up about the basic ins-and-outs of game preservation and the challenges faced, both technical and legal. She includes interviews with some of the leaders in the field, including the Internet Archive’s Jason Scott and the Video Game History Foundation’s Frank Cifaldi.
One of the reasons I wanted to share this post is the curation problem discussed at the bottom. Even preserved, games will effectively disappear if they aren’t discussed and brought into new light.
Additionally, fans can attempt to keep games alive in the public conscience. Streaming games, writing blog posts, having forum discussions, and working on fan creations all help keep the spirit of old games alive.
“Players and fans should capture gameplay videos and record their thoughts on playing games,” Scott suggested when asked what simple things could be done to help preserve games
“There’s only so much that individuals can do,” Cifaldi commented. “I think we need to use our power to publish and share things can help create an oral history around games.”
Callis sums it up more succinctly. “If you care at all, make an effort.”
I’m grateful for everyone who does this, and I’m trying to do it to. Talk about and share your thoughts about odd, forgotten games in the open to keep them alive.
There’s many games that were never got ported home, so emulation is the only way these game can even exist anymore. It’s hard enough acquiring a rare PCB, let alone dumping it, so there’s an untold number of games out there that are already gone forever.
Relying on a game’s original physical cartridge, disc, or cabinet is definitely not a long-term preservation strategy. Things degrade or fall apart, and there will always be less original hardware. Emulation keeps things accessible, and it’s so frustrating that the collector market puts scarcity and dollar value above that. Keeping unique items locked away for absurd prices effectively destroys a piece of culture. We should be in this together.
The cases that really fascinate me, though, are the ones we don’t know we’re missing, the unknown unknowns. The latest batch of Apple II software uploaded to the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am?sort=-date&and[]=subject%3A%221tp%22) has never been preserved before because of copy protection measures. In some cases, we might never have known they were even missing.
How strange is that to think about? Games that were developed, manufactured, and sold, then just vanished. How many games like that are people sitting on, not maliciously but because they just don’t know they’re some of the last ones out there?
The horrible situations are the ones where people actively try to prevent preservation, simply because it makes things “lose value.” Did you know there’s a SEGA Mega Drive called the LaserActive? It’s like a SEGA Mega-CD, except it uses LaserDiscs. Which are notorious for literally rotting away from age. Only a small selection of games got released, as well as 4 unreleased games. One of these is a port of Myst, which got to a near-finished state before it was cancelled. Collectors have copies of the betas, and charge thousands of dollars if put up for sale. And they will deny sale of these things if people don’t sign a contract saying that the game will never be dumped into a digital backup file.
Another case is what happened to @shoutime, who found an unreleased Sonic game for arcades. All the other collectors decided to gang up and force him to not release any dumps; if he did, they would blackball him and prevent him from getting and preserving any more rare, unreleased arcade games.
All because “MAH RARITIES”
It reminds me of the NintendoAge thread about dumping prototype roms (as if there’s any question about whether they should be dumped or not) and how there are collectors who have these super juvenile “I love being able to play games nobody else ever will!” attitudes and act as if dumping protos is “like letting someone else drive around in your expensive cars” as if they don’t understand the concept of preservation.
The people who bitch about rom dumps affecting price don’t really care about any of this shit, they’re only in it as an investment.
speaking as a librarian with training and experience in archives and digitization: thank goodness for people who secretly and/or illegally make copies of media in alternative formats. There is so much that has been partially or totally lost because the only copies were in an impermanent or fragile format.
Why Some Video Games Are In Danger of Disappearing Forever
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