Interesting Article on Game Industry Preservation

Gamasutra recently published this article about the sad state of preservation in the gaming industry. For a medium that so many people like to consider "art," we sure do everything we can to let it all fall away with time, leaving its preservation to hackers and indie coders.

This is one of the main reasons I started Sega-16. The history behind games is vital and worth preserving, and the games themselves should be made available for generations to come. Movies, art and music do it, so WTF is wrong with the gaming industry?

Good points in the article. The industry needs to do a better job in both preserving access to playing classic games in the future and also in informing younger generations about more than just the mainstream stuff.

At least the emulation scene is doing a great job for most systems. I really hope the government/corporate internet anti-piracy crusade doesn't end up ruining that scene. It does a ton of good with games that aren't being re-released commercially anyway.

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Originally Posted by Melf

This is one of the main reasons I started Sega-16. The history behind games is vital and worth preserving, and the games themselves should be made available for generations to come.

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And you have my thanks for that. The reason why I've discovered Sega-16, was when I was doing the nearly useless task of searching for behind the scenes info about an almost unkown game for the Mega Drive, Jurassic Park. It was then when I found this very informative article. Now, where else would I find this kind of information? Look at the sources of the article. 10 year old magazines and books (which are very rare at this point) and web pages that no longer exist.

It's not just the games that need to be preserved, but the behind the scenes information about the process of making those games aswell.

In the way of archiving and game preservation, why does Sega-16 not have a user-submission database of label scans, liner scans, manual scans, etc? The bigger part of preserving the games involves archival copies of the printed materials as well as the game code.

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There's an even larger problem with games whose multiplayer resides on private servers.
Most games have some content that is only accessible through multiplayer, and when those private servers shut down, that functionality is forever lost.

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This. I remember a mobile game called Bookworm Heroes that only has multiplayer mode, there is no single player mode.
Now that the server has been shut down, no one could play it anymore.
I miss the game, really want to play it again, but there's no way to play it anymore.

Star Wars: Galaxies servers were shut down a long time ago, as were the servers for PSO. There are fan run servers keeping those games alive.

The thing is, games aren't considered 'art' by the people in charge of making sure to preserve games.

They are considered as just products that do their job until the next one is ready for launch.

Someone also already managed to save ME3mp for when the time comes for EA to shut it down.

When it comes to preservation nobody wants to ever tackle the actual issues.

A piece of music is just that, it can be preserved and saved onto any kind of magnetic tape, digital file, whatever. It then exists, same for a movie. Stick it on a disc, an underground bunker filled with hard drives, a film reel. Whatever. Preservation of most major pictures has been a complete non-issue for the better part of 50 years with only rare cases of films going partially or completely missing (although seriously can we please find that first Cleopatra it has to exist right)

Games, well games aren't like that. We can preserve old pieces of software, but we can't easily access them since they are more than just a piece of code on a disc, if we discovered the source code for some 80s games we could read it? Or look at it? But without any assets, emulation of said hardware or anything we have what is essentially unreadable lines of text that once resembled an actual product.

Although the current state blows, Killzone HD nearly got cancelled but by chance someone made backups of the old assets for the game, and that is a PS2 era game released in 2004 and was an AAA title at the time. If games like that can't even get preserved properly what chance do old arcade games have? Slim to none.

Isn't emulating the hardware the cure?

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Originally Posted by needler420

Isn't emulating the hardware the cure?

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Yes, poison was the cure.

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Originally Posted by needler420

Isn't emulating the hardware the cure?

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It's a start, but it's not always entirely accurate.

The information is out there for anyone who wants to find it. There's nothing stopping any 12 year old from checking out AtariAge or watching LGR or Generation 16 or visiting any other website. That's what I started doing when I first got the internet as a kid. If people today are only interested in reading/watching what they're already familiar with ("NES was teh first game system evar made!!") then that's not really a problem with the games industry per se.

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Originally Posted by Melf

This is one of the main reasons I started Sega-16. The history behind games is vital and worth preserving, and the games themselves should be made available for generations to come. Movies, art and music do it, so WTF is wrong with the gaming industry?

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Actually it took decades for people in other media to actually give a fuck. Pretty much nearly all of the early movies are gone because the reels were destroyed, for instance.

Probably the bigger issue with games (and really software in general) is that they actually go obsolete and literally unplayable. So far emulators helped us with older games, but that's not gonna help us anymore with those that rely on publisher servers (not just multiplayer stuff but also good luck dealing with DLC!), and then we have phones and their walled gardens (Apple has even started to remove apps that haven't been updated in a while, even those that still work just fine on newer phones). And even then emulators are only maintained for as long as anybody cares about those old games anymore, otherwise ironically the emulators themselves become obsolete and start suffering from software rot (i.e. they start having problems and eventually stop working as newer operating systems change over time).