Culture Clash

(August 2004)

Forget Me Not

Playing with posterity

Serious efforts to preserve older games are relatively green. Until quite recently, not enough have given the issue serious thought. The IGDA is looking at putting a SIG together on this issue, and other groups are springing up as well. Even the most skeptical observers must now acknowledge that video games have become a cultural icon within human society. They are a part of our communal Erector Set, and are as such worthy of preservation. As game scholars and fans alike consider protection of the art form's history, a few often conflicting viewpoints have come to the fore. Perhaps the most fundamental is whether it's more important to make games available for play in whatever state, or to accept only those in mint condition and lock them snugly in a bombproof vault.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I take a very hard line on this. I do believe that it's nice when past games are preserved in their natural habitats - packaging, documentation, etc. - but that it's equally (more) important that they be accessible for play and appreciation. That someone somewhere owns the original print of Metropolis is nice, but it's the movie that mattered, not the celluloid, and you can rent that movie at Blockbuster due to large-scale preservation efforts in cinema. Compatibility issues prevent that in games, and publishers are far too eager to squash the underground alternative. As this method may be the only feasible way to experience many old games, I support it, within reason - and so should the industry. You will be hard-pressed to convince me that a multinational publisher would lose its shirt because a ten year old emulated Joust or Cranston Manor .

Don't take that as espousing piracy. Rights management is a serious issue. But emulation remains the only realistic way to play old games on modern equipment, and older publishers were irresponsible when it came to preserving history. Today's publishers do archive their creations, but many of yesteryear are gone, and never maintained archival libraries to begin with. This was brought up at a lively GDC roundtable on the subject, hosted by gaming-posterity champion Simon Carless of Slashdot: specifically, in this industry's churn-and-buyout-happy environment, many companies have no idea what rights they own, and there is no cash incentive to find out.

Access to game history will lead to better games in the future, just as modern filmmakers often turn to past films for inspiration or direction. We've watched the genre of Survival Horror grow from stuff-smashes-in-through-the-window of Resident Evil to the flat-out shriekfest of Fatal Frame or DOOM 3 based largely on lessons developers learned from previous games. It will become increasingly difficult to say, "you know, like in Ecstatica ," when no one has played Ecstatica except the muttering fossil in the corner.

The availability of these games for study is more significant than their availability for viewing through glass. Accredited game studies programs are the future of this industry, and it is necessary that a canon of media exist for students and educators. The alternatives for these programs right now are to teach on illegal platforms or not teach game history at all. Archaeology students know the frustration of reaching " remainder is lost " in a translation. We're little better off than we would be with papyrus - at least that's 100% compatible with anyone who can read. Shouldn't we then welcome as many copies of the art's history as possible? I could live without Castlevania's box. But live without Castlevania ? It's more important that we have Penguin paperback editions of Shakespeare than that we have the First Folio.

Admittedly, play is not everything. Many organizations, like this and this - but a pair among dozens - are getting into the games preservation game; but often without intercommunication or sharing of resources. Stanford University is one of several mainstream educators working to preserve "complete" games, in original packaging; these are less for play and more for long-term posterity. These preservationists have another hurdle to deal with: long-term archiving of digital media brings up its own horrors. DVDs, rock carvings, gold LPs launched into space, none last forever. Optical media, once thought immune to time's cruelties, is as subject to them as any other.

Stop for a moment and consider the enormity of this task. We are thirty years into the evolution of this highly prolific medium, yet we've considered its posterity for barely a speck of that time. Cinema archiving began within years of its arrival in cultural consciousness. Moving pictures became available for mainstream consumption in 1894. The IMDB has entries for 46,339 of them in the thirty years between then and 1924 - many among the most important ever made, especially from the perspective of defining the art form. At thirty, games have only begun archiving in the last half-decade, often battling publishers who blindly cling to IP in the face of evaporating history. Even producing a comprehensive database of all games is nightmarish. At the GDC roundtable, we agreed that MobyGames was the most trusted resource, but it can't cover every platform, or guarantee accuracy.

One thing we have to accept is that some games are lost forever. Another is that more will suffer the same fate if no effort is made to save them. If publishers are so obsessed with the notion that ROMs will destroy civilization, they must also accept that no one is going to maintain three dozen legacy systems in their basement. Thus they have to let go of desiccated licensing restrictions and allow someone to build a machine that supports multiple extinct platforms. Make it possible to rent AutoDuel at Blockuster. If we're to salvage the first thirty years of computer gaming, drastic measures are in order. We are out of time. Every moment, a beautiful original thing is lost to history because it is forgotten. As we stand at this crossroads in a world choked on data storage, can we in conscience allow to be deleted that which has mattered so much?