Culture Clash

(August 2005)

Memories, Two for a Dollar

In the excitement over other major industry issues – quality of life, violence, an infantile developer that endangered the entire industry, first with its recklessly irresponsible behavior and then with the disgraceful lies it told to cover that behavior up – we've kind of lost sight of another looming problem: posterity. Unless you're the Prince of Persia, time has an irritating way of moving exclusively forward, and day after day, games of the past are receding into the distance. Those involved with the posterity movement are still debating whether old games should be made available for widespread play or just lovingly sealed in titanium boxes and thrown in the river, pristine and inaccessible for millennia. “Both” is another option that's been brought up, but within the industry, the fact remains that we've done a lot more talking than preserving.

Fortunately, corporate entities have started to do the work for us on terms ultimately beneficial to everyone. For the past several months I've been working as a consultant and content provider with Turner Entertainment on its GameTap project, an epic conglomeration effort involving hundreds of games from 17 publishers across three decades' worth of platforms. The scope of GameTap's library is really quite staggering, while the application and suite of services strongly suggest that Turner is treating GameTap not as a classics collection but the launch of a new media network. With-my-eyes observations of GameTap have sold me on its potential as an avenue of nostalgia and enhanced distribution. Lest the NDA police drag me off to Gitmo I'll refrain from outlining specifics; furthermore, I'm paid by Turner and don't mean this article to be a GameTap panegyric but a reflection on the fact that in addition to expanding play, services like this offer a partial solution to the posterity problem.

Turner is not looking at it that way, and rightly so: to them, GameTap is a business venture, and its corollary role as a preservation opportunity is just a welcome side effect. But a service like this nonetheless serves the dual positive of making literally hundreds (and eventually thousands) of games that are inches from oblivion available for play in a secure environment. Though some posterity advocates would prefer to gather mint-condition games and lock them in a vault where the vagaries of time and grubby fingers of people can do them no ill, to my mind it's more important that denizens of the future play games, not appreciate them from behind glass. GameTap provides an avenue for this, and simultaneously soothes publisher concerns over piracy by strictly controlling security and acting as a single nexus through which all game IP flows. Only a big, respected company with deep pockets and serious technological chops could accomplish that.

Content libraries like this have been tried before, with limited success. Broadband technology and a wider realization of potential benefits, however, mean that modern efforts will succeed where past ones have failed. Nintendo has announced that some sort of first-party classic content will be offered via its Revolution console, but details are still sketchy on exactly what the service will entail. Unconfirmed grumblings on the rumor mill indicate that media monster Comcast Communications may be pondering a service akin to Turner's; it already offers localized game downloads in partnership with Real. And, in a smirkingly when-the-moon-turns-blue sort of way, Infinium Labs' Phantom console represents a similar idea.

The posterity problem has become desperate, and only for-profit entities are capable of developing the necessary infrastructure for the all-encompassing library that we need to solve it. Some see profit-driven endeavors like this as distasteful to posterity. But corporate ventures are a necessity; they can shoulder the horrifying technical and not-inconsiderable legal burdens of such a project in exchange for a viable revenue stream. Corporations need to run efficiently and can't dawdle interminably discussing the hows. And after all, it's a symbiotic relationship – let them make profit, so long as the games are safe and available through one or a few reputable sources. We're already 30 years behind in dealing with preservation ourselves. The time has come for decisive action.

Responsibility for supporting said action falls to publishers, many of whom don't recognize the embarrassment of riches over which they hold sway. Some publishers think that the smart thing to do is sit on a hoard of ancient content like a dragon guarding some forgotten treasure. This old stuff is of no value to anyone, including its owner, if it's locked away. And sooner or later even the dragon will forget where he keeps his hoard, or maybe the dragon will be eaten by another dragon, or get out of the dragon business altogether, and suddenly that heap of treasure will fail to exist.

Meanwhile, those publishers that embrace the GameTaps of the world are doing the right thing philosophically, making their wealth available to a new generation of players, students, educators and (most importantly) customers. But the move also has practical value for them: it minimizes emulator-based piracy, forges corporate alliances, revitalizes forgotten franchises, opens additional creative avenues and invests in what's likely to become the distribution model of the future – and it doesn't represent a competitive threat. Those who haven't signed on are risking an awful lot for the sake of IP they may not even know they have.

The entire canon of video games exists now within living memory, but in a few decades access to the games of yesteryear will take on much more crucial importance. Gaming's creative foundation must not only be maintained, but made available to whosoever wishes to experience it. Games are meant to be played, they set free the creative mind in a way nothing else does, and to deny them the ability to enchant us is to render meaningless their very existence. The flickering evanescence or vague recollection of joy that is the half-remembered game from your childhood need not be lost forever.