Keeping Old Games Intact

[RockyRan]

This week's Extra Punctuation is probably the best Yahtzee has done in terms of a worthy discussion argued with some very good points made:

 

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/9053-Extra-Punctuation-Keeping-Old-Games-Intact

 

I agree with it all, thought I would like to point out that there have been quite a few efforts to start archiving games. I know that Stanford University has a video game library that lets you check out any game you want on any platform, and if they don't have said game you request it like you would request a book. They've got a pretty sizable collection too, from current-gen libraries of games to really old Atari stuff.

[Yantelope]

I've already hit this wall I think. I'm fairly certain TVs don't have analog tuners in them and my Genesis only has an RF modulator so there's no way to get the signal from a RF mod to a new ATSC television directly. I think you can go buy an RF to composite converter if you're so inclined but part of me is seriously considering going out and buying a cheap CRT for my old games.

[MasterDex]

Game conservation is something I think a lot about and care deeply about. The thought that one day certain games won't be available because the industry and community left it too late to start archiving scares and saddens me. Game conservation, I believe, is the strongest argument for the development of emulators and digital backups. Take old cassette games for example. I've got a bunch of them still but should I ever decide to hunt down a system to play them on, I'll probably find that time has degraded the tape and left the games unplayable. Thankfully, most of the games I have are already archived...I think...they might all be....I should give them a second look.

 

But yeah, I'm as much a collector as I am a player and I wholeheartedly support any drive to archive and conserve games. 200 years from now, I want my progeny be able to fire up Pssst or Dizzy.

[CorgiShinobi]

While we can preserve older games, there will still be problems due to the dependent nature of gaming electronics. Storing/archiving only solves half the problem.

 

I use to have a television circa 1988 that I would use for older consoles. Around 2001, it finally died standing on its last leg. I memorized the channels because the numbers burnt out back in '99. When the cable channels switched once, ugh! Anyway, once that died, I was stuck with composite. The technology had to be altered, but I could still play given some extra effort.

 

Still, I don't mind remastering. I understand the "cultural" aspect of having older technology, but the common gamer wants to play and so we will have it as a continual option. Considering there are gaming museums, especially the one at E3, there are some "archives." Though, most often these devices are artifacts rather than viable entertainment mediums and so you could see them more as graveyards. Something like an NES cartridge can die because of the battery inside. Discs, given time, can warp.

 

Not trying to sound like the devil's advocate, but there's much more to the technology than storage. We're going to need a medium to continual operate and authentically manipulate the games. Not every game can benefit from keyboard operation.

[Baconrath]

I've lost count of how many old PC games I can't play because they don't jive with my newer OS or that it won't work without hardware/driver/whatever combo X.

 

We've stopped doing the latter, right?

[deanb]

Well old style controllers can still be made. You can pick up NES USB pads if you want.

 

There's also rendering technologies developed to allow LCD screens to replicate the look of the old CRTs (which aren't "480p" everywhere btw, ours were 576i and at 50hz instead of your 60hz. So that changes stuff too). At the moment games ran in emulators display pixel perfect, but this means they're usually too crisp. So there's that which is cool.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2009/05/05/crt-emulation-on-stella-emulator/1

 

 

It's going to be a big issue. And I think with a dozen console manufactures come and gone before the current 3 it's going to be hard to get the technology to be able to proeprly replicate some of the old consoles. Emulations is going to be the way it continues whole scale, but not everything is emulated so well. And not every single game is available.

 

And it'll get worse after this gen since not everything is on the disc to be ripped and stored as a ROM. DLC is going to make things hard for future generations. But we're also in an age where people are realising that archiving games is something to be done so I'd hope that publishers would help out with these initiatives.

 

There's also some effort to bring back back-catalogs too. I can go to HMV and pick up films from 1930's(maybe before too). But picking up games from before 2005 can be pretty damn hard.

[excel_excel]

Hit the nail on the head Dean. Aside from the small amount of games available digitally on consoles (putting aside the awful, AWFUL pricing of DD on consoles but I digress) there's always those games that were rare enough back in 2006, but now they are virtually impossible to find except on ebay or for 50 quid on amazon. Even now something like Nier is rare enough, yet if Square Enix put it on he DD store there would be no problem. Its the games and series that are in plentiful supply that seem to get DD on consoles like Assassins Creed and Infamous

[fuchikoma]

I actually "pirate" old games for preservation/discovery. I put it in quotes because it's sort of questionable when the game's long since off the market and often the studio isn't around anymore. I see it like unofficial abandonware.

 

It's a big issue for me though because the games I find the most interesting are the real oddball titles and those tend to vanish pretty completely. For instance, it took me years to find an ISO of the Japanese version of Unison for PS2 (silly idol dancing game where you learn the routines then perform live without an OSD/HUD!) I actually got a legit US copy of Flipnic off eBay after a few years of looking (PS2, Capcom, exploration and objective-based pinball.) I never put much effort into it, but I will probably never find a copy of Yanya Cabbalista ft Gawoo (PS2, cel-shaded skateboard game made to look like Jet Set Radio. Came with a skateboard you snap onto the Dualshock sticks.)

 

I'm happy to say though that I have a new copy of Seaman 2 for PS2 (Jpn) and Idol Janshi Suchi Pai 2 for Saturn (Mahjong with cheating, Ken'ichi Sonoda art, used to be big in Japan.) Getting more contemporary, some games really do vanish fast! A few years ago, I looked all over for Ridge Racer 7 and there was only one used copy anywhere near me - luckily it was in town. I wasn't so lucky with Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney! I figured this would be everywhere... nope. Not new, not used, not on eBay, not at online used game stores. In the end, I had to import a copy from Japan, though luckily it has all the English scripts included and you can switch between them at the title screen (but each language has its own savegame... interesting.) I don't think anyone could collect the Beatmania series now, even if they only went after the IIDX games. I never found a legit copy of 5th Mix, and it's tough even bridging the gap between 9 and 15!

 

I also have stacks of old PSX and Dreamcast games I downloaded and burned as a teenager. Some I bet are really rare now, like Pepsiman, Toma Runner vs L'arc~en~Ciel, LSD, N-Gen Racing, Kill Wheel (unreleased, may have also been called "Torc"), Thrill Kill (unreleased), and a beta or earlier copy of Rez called "K Project." I'm actually lazily copying these back to a hard disk now to preserve them because most are over a decade old and I don't trust these CDRs. I've seen studies that say CDR life may be as little as 5-10 years for some, based on accelerated aging tests that were done. I look forward to an affordable consumer-level mass long-term archival format like the sort of plastic micro-punchcards IBM was working on several years ago.

 

With region locking, I couldn't have had that copy of Phoenix Wright... or other exclusives I've imported like Ouendan 1 and 2. It's also riskier to mod consoles now that they're always updating the firmwares. As a collector this makes me sad because it restricts what I can run, and while Sony's finally region-free, I have tracked down many games now as ISOs that just aren't available on retail discs anymore even used - and here I've even listed a few that were never even released, but I still want them in my collection... (If I keep thinking, more come up... Starfox 2, or Earthbound for NES!) I hope pirates and emulator enthusiasts will continue finding success in helping us to preserve the gameplay experiences of contemporary games - like if someone cracks all PSN/XBL/Wiiware games and puts them up for download in another 8-10 years or something. Maybe they have? I'm out of the loop now.

 

(Well... that was circumlocutious...)

[MasterDex]

Here's a god article that talks about piracy and archiving via The Sunday Papers. It touches on some things we discussed in the piracy thread lately, like the suitability of copyright law in the digital age.

[deanb]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/40457/Warren_Spector_We_have_a_chance_to_preserve_our_video_game_history.php

[TheMightyEthan]

This is actually one area where I think piracy will be a huge benefit to the industry. Think of all the roms of old games that are available to download that no one would ever get to play otherwise.

[Battra92]

This is actually one area where I think piracy will be a huge benefit to the industry. Think of all the roms of old games that are available to download that no one would ever get to play otherwise.

 

What's sad is the only way to play some games these days is to hunt down the cartridge or CD or pirate it. I'd much prefer to do the former but without the latter, some games will simply fade from memory.

[Yantelope V2]

Yeah, I really want to go the crazy man route and start buying bulk lots of game carts on ebay. If I had room to store the games and more disposable income I'd probably have already started.

[Battra92]

Yeah, I really want to go the crazy man route and start buying bulk lots of game carts on ebay. If I had room to store the games and more disposable income I'd probably have already started.

 

That was me in high school and college. Anyone want to buy 10 NES decks?

[WTF]

Whatever happened to that VideoGame preservation library that was trying to run and maintain small self-sustained servers of long dead MMOs and also other games? Or did they just scratch that project?

 

I think there's always going to be collectors and you'll find most games existing in some form or the other. I think it'll be amusing to see something a few 100 years from now stating - The Museum thanks blah and blah for their donation of X game collection.

 

While we think not much of it, cultural media is always going to be lost, what we see today is but a tiny percentage of what once existed. Sad but true - there's not much we can do about it because society changes, borders,wars, etc. A 100 years from now someone will remember some mainstream games and a few cult classics but everything ranging from titles like say Valkyria Chronicles to games such as the 80s transformers game etc will all be forgotten. It's how society works.

 

We can and should try to preserve as much as we can so that some of it survives but a good chunk is going to get destroyed/buried/forgotten over time. (i.e. I'm saying we should try to preserve so that some survives instead of it all going to waste).

[Battra92]

While we think not much of it, cultural media is always going to be lost, what we see today is but a tiny percentage of what once existed. Sad but true - there's not much we can do about it because society changes, borders,wars, etc. A 100 years from now someone will remember some mainstream games and a few cult classics but everything ranging from titles like say Valkyria Chronicles to games such as the 80s transformers game etc will all be forgotten. It's how society works.

 

What's sad is that all of Michael Bay's Robot Testicle movies still survive and will be seen for decades to come and 90% of all silent films and 50% of all taking films made before 1950 are lost forever. It's not just ancient history we lose but more but recent stuff is lost forever.

[WTF]

Absolutely, take a look at all the villages, cities etc that were abandoned over the past 70 years and we'll see that many are badly preserved. Something that most people aren't totally aware of is that there's at least 50 villages that were abandoned during WW2 that were not returned to. The ones that had civil buildings like a church were somewhat maintained the rest were left to die.

[TheMightyEthan]

I'm not sure we will lose our games, and it goes back to piracy. I won't link to it here but it took me less than a minute to find a torrent that contains every single game ever made for the Colecovision. We might lose the physical media and hardware, but the essence of the games, the code, will remain.

 

*Edit* - Cities and nations rise and fall, but the internet is truly global and it would take a disaster on a global scale to wipe it out as a backup system.

Edited February 24, 2012 by TheMightyEthan

[WTF]

Actually we could lose it, I mean it's so easy for data to get corrupted. Hard drives, physical media, magnetic media, SSDs anything and everything we store data can be corrupted. It's not like in times of calamity or war we're going to make sure our data is safe. Best way to keep it safe is to make another Voyager probe but with games and films this time .