8 ms·

Where Games Go to Sleep: The Game Preservation Crisis (2011)

92 points by korethr 10y ago

krzrak 10y ago
I am often thinking this: we put lots of effort into preserving pieces of art, architecture, writing, etc. from the past (which is, of course, good and desired). On the other hand we often don't treat modern creations as an equally valuable artifacts (so called modern "art" or "performance", etc. is a subject for another rant on real value of art;). People put tremendous effort into creating video games, movies, etc. which are of great artistic value, but we let them slip into oblivion. So, it's great to see that something is starting to happen in this subject.
- ido 10y ago
  Haven't read the article yet, but from skimming it it doesn't seem to mention The Internet Archive's work in preserving classic arcade, computer and console games (not sure if it was already underway in 2011): https://archive.org/details/software https://archive.org/details/software It is quite extensive and growing all the time.
  - msl09 10y ago
    Well, the internet archive stores the games, not the source or the development material. Maybe they could start doing so, but I guess it would cost them a lot to find storage space for that.
    - badpenny 10y ago
      I've been trying to collect as much video game source code as I can at https://github.com/videogamepreservation/ https://github.com/videogamepreservation/.
      - hd4 10y ago
        Please add Allegiance (open source space sim by Microsoft). Also Mechcommander 2.
        badpenny 10y ago
        They're pretty big repos (461MB and 785MB compressed) but I'll try to get them uploaded ASAP.
      - cableshaft 10y ago
        That is awesome. Thank you for doing this.
  - moonshinefe 10y ago
    They're doing good work and I work in the preservation industry. Unfortunately, many games in the last 5-10 years and maybe even a bit earlier than that have been moving to "if the company isn't running the centralized black box server, this game simply can't work" model. I think the main reason being anti-piracy and DRM, but the side effect is those games are much harder to preserve.
- mysterydip 10y ago
  I think part of the reason is we put effot into preserving valuable art, architecture, etc. Creation effort does not equate to value (of course everyone values things differently but there is a level of majority consensus on certain things). Modern creations have a much lower barrier to entry so more gets made, which is great, but also makes preservation more difficult. There's hundreds of new games on the App store each week (don't recall the exact numbers). Preserving each one, especially the history of development (art assets, source code, design docs and discussions) would take more time than any organization has and also not be very useful to the public. Yet there are good, worthwhile, interesting, and historically significant games in that haystack somewhere. How do we filter the noise before the stuff worth preserving is lost?
  - moonshinefe 10y ago
    It's a good point / thought. I feel like the same question could be asked of any preserved art form or valuable cultural item. I think it's ultimately just up to people and their feelings / how significant they feel a game is/was to put the resources in to preserve it. I also feel like some games are clearly more notable than others that a consensus would agree with. Mario Bros 3, Zelda, WoW, Skyrim... I could go on for hours I'm sure, but certainly some games have a much larger impact and are more historically notable than others. Maybe it's partially subjective, and I'm not sure what the solution is. Do we legislate these things must be preserved? That seems pretty extreme. Do we ask nicely? It seems most companies won't listen if there's no profit there. I'd be interested in hearing other people's ideas on that and how to make it happen. I think it'd be a real shame if in 20 years, given all our technology, these things were lost to history somehow still.
    - userbinator 10y ago
      How do we filter the noise before the stuff worth preserving is lost? Storage is extremely cheap now, so filtering might not be needed at all. HDDs are around $30/TB, and 1TB in the context of game sizes is already quite a lot. Historical games tend to be smaller anyway, as the storage available at the time was much smaller too.
- js8 10y ago
  In Czech Republic (and I would assume other countries as well) there is a law requirement that you have to deposit copies of a newly published books (and perhaps other works) into a library. This should be requirement for games, too, I think.
  - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
    It's required in the US to provide a copy to the Library of Congress in order to register a copyright, but registration is no longer required for copyright to cover a work (since the Berne Convention).
- vocatus_gate 10y ago
  I have a decent-sized personal collection of older software and games I've come across over the years. Much of it is getting hard to find online, but I hang on to it in the hopes someone someday will find it useful or entertaining.
  - runningskull 10y ago
    Archive.org has a really impressive collection of old software and emulators to run it. Check out https://archive.org/details/software https://archive.org/details/software They and their patrons (myself included) would likely be very interested in anything/everything you're willing to upload.
- itomato 10y ago
  On the whole, video games aren't elevating society to the extent great literature or even mediocre performance art do. Call of Duty - what is the grand result? Familiarity with Militarization. Katamari Damacy - Hoarding for the King. Pokemon - you tell me.
drops 10y ago
This thing launched just this week: http://gamehistory.org http://gamehistory.org
moonshinefe 10y ago
A lot of it is due to companies centralizing games and putting up huge barriers to even make games functional without their black box servers. After many of these games die off population wise, the companies just drop them instead of giving back to the community to preserve it. Look at TF2--it could foreseeably be modified and anyone can run a server for it. It may be possible to preserve it. Blizzard's Overwatch on the other hand, which is somewhat of a successor to it, they won't let the game to work at all without their servers since it's a gigantic, centralized black box. Those servers might go away. The only reason WoW is preserved for the future at all with third party vanilla servers is because during the beta they made a mistake and leaked a ton of debugging info and world data early on. Ideally (from the company's perspective), we wouldn't even had that and one of the biggest blockbuster MMOs in history would simply be lost. Not picking on Blizzard in particular, but they've gone from a decentralized model in the Diablo 1, War 2 BNE, and Starcraft 1 days to massively centralized. If there isn't a profit to be had, I think they'll be very happy to let the history die there, which is very unfortunate and seems to be a model many AAA game companies are taking at this point, not just Blizz.
- xg15 10y ago
  The irony is that a lot of games before the era of centralisation have active preservation communities and will probably live on - but a lot of newer games likely won't, for the reasons you described. I think it's very likely people will still play Tetris, Final Fantasy IV and Star Craft in 50 years. Star Craft II and Final Fantasy XV? Not so much.
  - moonshinefe 10y ago
    Exactly right, we're looking at a hole in modern video game archival history with the way the industry models their games these days. The older games aren't nearly as hard to preserve.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
    And that's just single-player games. Will MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV still be playable?
programmernews3 10y ago
I thought this was going to be about leaving older consoles, like the SNES, on overnight when you couldnt save
prophesi 10y ago
I used to play Maplestory back in the day. When I came back, I was upset to find that it had undergone a huge patch that changed most of what I enjoyed about it. Luckily, there are a handful of private servers that still run legacy versions of the game. My favorite pastime would have been lost forever if a few clever people didn't update their game.
pjc50 10y ago
To expand on a comment downthread: preservation is piracy and piracy is preservation. Unfortunately this is unpopular with games publishers. Traditional archive preservation relies on preserving the media. But for many games now there is no media, or it's optical disks which aren't going to last. In order to preserve it it has to be copied. The publishers have no interest in this and the rights may become mired in uncertainty when the publisher goes bankrupt. Conversely, many things we only have copies of because copies were made illegally. Not just games but TV programmes as well (the notorious early Dr Who episodes for example). And if we look at some of the other "big content" industries, they find it might not be in their interest to allow their old content to compete with current content for attention. Disney don't make all their films available on the market at the same time ("disney vault") for this reason.
match 10y ago
Many of these companies are having to choose control and the ability to continue to make profit from their intellectual property vs they're games effectively being free in a historical archive. Wonder if any of them would be willing to partner with a company or non-profit (such as the IA) if they offered to archive the code and artifacts for safe keeping but not automatically release it unless legally allowed to do so. Some things would probably stay under wraps for a long time, but at least it wouldn't be lost that way.
cableshaft 10y ago
I've got some things from old jobs in the game industry, which at least for now I'm sitting on because I don't want to get in trouble for releasing it and want more time to pass before doing so (I've already waited almost a decade). But I care very much about game preservation and would like to see the information get out there in some form someday. None of the games I worked on were high profile, but I do have some interesting documentation on them. I also started keeping a personal design diary as of last November that keeps my thoughts and ideas on my game designs and how they change over time that I might one day release to the public (or a descendant might). I also used to make and release Flash games and I'm investigating ways to keep those available once the web moves on 100% from Flash. I've got some documentation from the design of those that could be interesting as well. I need to find the time to sit down and compile all this, though, in addition to working on new things.
ideonexus 10y ago
There's a parallel with the early film industry. In the early 1900s, when a film had completed its run at the theaters, no effort was made to preserve it. The amazing science fiction classic "Metropolis" was a famous example. We still don't quite have a complete copy of this groundbreaking visionary film, and until recent years (when missing scenes were discovered) DVD releases of the film had placeholders describing the action that was missing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film It sounds like we are doing a better job preserving our early video game history than we did preserving our early film history.
cooper12 10y ago
Part Two: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134653/where_games_go_to_sleep_the_game_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134653/where_games_go_...
josephtobin 10y ago
He/she probably can't. The concept is not new. Here's a flash version of the same game http://bagario.net http://bagario.net . it is a few years old.

92 points by korethr 10y ago

I am often thinking this: we put lots of effort into preserving pieces of art, architecture, writing, etc. from the past (which is, of course, good and desired). On the other hand we often don't treat modern creations as an equally valuable artifacts (so called modern "art" or "performance", etc. is a subject for another rant on real value of art;). People put tremendous effort into creating video games, movies, etc. which are of great artistic value, but we let them slip into oblivion. So, it's great to see that something is starting to happen in this subject.

ido 10y ago
Haven't read the article yet, but from skimming it it doesn't seem to mention The Internet Archive's work in preserving classic arcade, computer and console games (not sure if it was already underway in 2011): https://archive.org/details/software https://archive.org/details/software It is quite extensive and growing all the time.
- msl09 10y ago
  Well, the internet archive stores the games, not the source or the development material. Maybe they could start doing so, but I guess it would cost them a lot to find storage space for that.
  - badpenny 10y ago
    I've been trying to collect as much video game source code as I can at https://github.com/videogamepreservation/ https://github.com/videogamepreservation/.
    - hd4 10y ago
      Please add Allegiance (open source space sim by Microsoft). Also Mechcommander 2.
      - badpenny 10y ago
        They're pretty big repos (461MB and 785MB compressed) but I'll try to get them uploaded ASAP.
    - cableshaft 10y ago
      That is awesome. Thank you for doing this.
- moonshinefe 10y ago
  They're doing good work and I work in the preservation industry. Unfortunately, many games in the last 5-10 years and maybe even a bit earlier than that have been moving to "if the company isn't running the centralized black box server, this game simply can't work" model. I think the main reason being anti-piracy and DRM, but the side effect is those games are much harder to preserve.
mysterydip 10y ago
I think part of the reason is we put effot into preserving valuable art, architecture, etc. Creation effort does not equate to value (of course everyone values things differently but there is a level of majority consensus on certain things). Modern creations have a much lower barrier to entry so more gets made, which is great, but also makes preservation more difficult. There's hundreds of new games on the App store each week (don't recall the exact numbers). Preserving each one, especially the history of development (art assets, source code, design docs and discussions) would take more time than any organization has and also not be very useful to the public. Yet there are good, worthwhile, interesting, and historically significant games in that haystack somewhere. How do we filter the noise before the stuff worth preserving is lost?
- moonshinefe 10y ago
  It's a good point / thought. I feel like the same question could be asked of any preserved art form or valuable cultural item. I think it's ultimately just up to people and their feelings / how significant they feel a game is/was to put the resources in to preserve it. I also feel like some games are clearly more notable than others that a consensus would agree with. Mario Bros 3, Zelda, WoW, Skyrim... I could go on for hours I'm sure, but certainly some games have a much larger impact and are more historically notable than others. Maybe it's partially subjective, and I'm not sure what the solution is. Do we legislate these things must be preserved? That seems pretty extreme. Do we ask nicely? It seems most companies won't listen if there's no profit there. I'd be interested in hearing other people's ideas on that and how to make it happen. I think it'd be a real shame if in 20 years, given all our technology, these things were lost to history somehow still.
  - userbinator 10y ago
    How do we filter the noise before the stuff worth preserving is lost? Storage is extremely cheap now, so filtering might not be needed at all. HDDs are around $30/TB, and 1TB in the context of game sizes is already quite a lot. Historical games tend to be smaller anyway, as the storage available at the time was much smaller too.
js8 10y ago
In Czech Republic (and I would assume other countries as well) there is a law requirement that you have to deposit copies of a newly published books (and perhaps other works) into a library. This should be requirement for games, too, I think.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  It's required in the US to provide a copy to the Library of Congress in order to register a copyright, but registration is no longer required for copyright to cover a work (since the Berne Convention).
vocatus_gate 10y ago
I have a decent-sized personal collection of older software and games I've come across over the years. Much of it is getting hard to find online, but I hang on to it in the hopes someone someday will find it useful or entertaining.
- runningskull 10y ago
  Archive.org has a really impressive collection of old software and emulators to run it. Check out https://archive.org/details/software https://archive.org/details/software They and their patrons (myself included) would likely be very interested in anything/everything you're willing to upload.
itomato 10y ago
On the whole, video games aren't elevating society to the extent great literature or even mediocre performance art do. Call of Duty - what is the grand result? Familiarity with Militarization. Katamari Damacy - Hoarding for the King. Pokemon - you tell me.

drops 10y ago

This thing launched just this week: http://gamehistory.org http://gamehistory.org

moonshinefe 10y ago

A lot of it is due to companies centralizing games and putting up huge barriers to even make games functional without their black box servers. After many of these games die off population wise, the companies just drop them instead of giving back to the community to preserve it. Look at TF2--it could foreseeably be modified and anyone can run a server for it. It may be possible to preserve it. Blizzard's Overwatch on the other hand, which is somewhat of a successor to it, they won't let the game to work at all without their servers since it's a gigantic, centralized black box. Those servers might go away. The only reason WoW is preserved for the future at all with third party vanilla servers is because during the beta they made a mistake and leaked a ton of debugging info and world data early on. Ideally (from the company's perspective), we wouldn't even had that and one of the biggest blockbuster MMOs in history would simply be lost. Not picking on Blizzard in particular, but they've gone from a decentralized model in the Diablo 1, War 2 BNE, and Starcraft 1 days to massively centralized. If there isn't a profit to be had, I think they'll be very happy to let the history die there, which is very unfortunate and seems to be a model many AAA game companies are taking at this point, not just Blizz.

xg15 10y ago
The irony is that a lot of games before the era of centralisation have active preservation communities and will probably live on - but a lot of newer games likely won't, for the reasons you described. I think it's very likely people will still play Tetris, Final Fantasy IV and Star Craft in 50 years. Star Craft II and Final Fantasy XV? Not so much.
- moonshinefe 10y ago
  Exactly right, we're looking at a hole in modern video game archival history with the way the industry models their games these days. The older games aren't nearly as hard to preserve.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  And that's just single-player games. Will MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV still be playable?

programmernews3 10y ago

I thought this was going to be about leaving older consoles, like the SNES, on overnight when you couldnt save

prophesi 10y ago

I used to play Maplestory back in the day. When I came back, I was upset to find that it had undergone a huge patch that changed most of what I enjoyed about it. Luckily, there are a handful of private servers that still run legacy versions of the game. My favorite pastime would have been lost forever if a few clever people didn't update their game.

pjc50 10y ago

To expand on a comment downthread: preservation is piracy and piracy is preservation. Unfortunately this is unpopular with games publishers. Traditional archive preservation relies on preserving the media. But for many games now there is no media, or it's optical disks which aren't going to last. In order to preserve it it has to be copied. The publishers have no interest in this and the rights may become mired in uncertainty when the publisher goes bankrupt. Conversely, many things we only have copies of because copies were made illegally. Not just games but TV programmes as well (the notorious early Dr Who episodes for example). And if we look at some of the other "big content" industries, they find it might not be in their interest to allow their old content to compete with current content for attention. Disney don't make all their films available on the market at the same time ("disney vault") for this reason.

match 10y ago

Many of these companies are having to choose control and the ability to continue to make profit from their intellectual property vs they're games effectively being free in a historical archive. Wonder if any of them would be willing to partner with a company or non-profit (such as the IA) if they offered to archive the code and artifacts for safe keeping but not automatically release it unless legally allowed to do so. Some things would probably stay under wraps for a long time, but at least it wouldn't be lost that way.

cableshaft 10y ago

I've got some things from old jobs in the game industry, which at least for now I'm sitting on because I don't want to get in trouble for releasing it and want more time to pass before doing so (I've already waited almost a decade). But I care very much about game preservation and would like to see the information get out there in some form someday. None of the games I worked on were high profile, but I do have some interesting documentation on them. I also started keeping a personal design diary as of last November that keeps my thoughts and ideas on my game designs and how they change over time that I might one day release to the public (or a descendant might). I also used to make and release Flash games and I'm investigating ways to keep those available once the web moves on 100% from Flash. I've got some documentation from the design of those that could be interesting as well. I need to find the time to sit down and compile all this, though, in addition to working on new things.

ideonexus 10y ago

There's a parallel with the early film industry. In the early 1900s, when a film had completed its run at the theaters, no effort was made to preserve it. The amazing science fiction classic "Metropolis" was a famous example. We still don't quite have a complete copy of this groundbreaking visionary film, and until recent years (when missing scenes were discovered) DVD releases of the film had placeholders describing the action that was missing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film It sounds like we are doing a better job preserving our early video game history than we did preserving our early film history.

cooper12 10y ago

Part Two: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134653/where_games_go_to_sleep_the_game_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134653/where_games_go_...

josephtobin 10y ago

He/she probably can't. The concept is not new. Here's a flash version of the same game http://bagario.net http://bagario.net . it is a few years old.