21 ms·

New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable

509 points by coldpie 3y ago

cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
I love my greaseweazle. Piracy, eBay trawling, and disassembler cracking make things usable.
coldpie 3y ago
See also this companion article about the study methodology: https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/ https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/
bearjaws 3y ago
It's going to shift to 87% don't even start due to connectivity requirements to servers that are not running anymore.
- freedomben 3y ago
  It took a couple of reads of this before I realized it was saying the same thing I was going to say. Restated: in 20 years from now, it will be 87% of games won't even start/run even if you have a copy, because they are dependent on servers that aren't running anymore and are closed source.
  - lucb1e 3y ago
    > dependent on servers that aren't running anymore and are closed source. Can't do that if it's not your server. Don't we all love "the cloud" :) I think open sourcing the clients is easier because it's always possible, it takes the dev almost no time at all (compared to newly creating infrastructure documentation), and players don't have to set up their own infrastructure (which would probably require a lot of time as well as skill) to play offline. The downside is that server functionality would need to be recreated. If the game is open, you can just patch out the server dependency. Is the update, "cloud" saving, or online-friends functionality crashing the whole game on startup? Stuff not actually needed to play in single player? Comment out the line where it calls that function, maybe mock a few variables, and you're all set. A friend of mine makes a game with offline play being possible, but the main value is in the community: custom levels and online play. It's all cloud magic with google cloud this and google cloud that. Good luck pulling up that infrastructure in 20 years (having to set up a mini google datacenter, even if the components are open sourced by google in the first place, which they're almost certainly not when "sun set"). The game tries to reach the server on startup and should detect when you're offline (for me that doesn't work reliably, but firewalling google play services has weird effects on many apps), but if you just remove those calls from the game altogether, the offline parts will work with no dependencies and you can just exchange level files instead of having an online browser. Everything but realtime multiplayer would still be possible. Customizing the client code to work with much simpler infrastructure is also likely faster than trying to replicate the "cloud" setup.
- mrbabbage 3y ago
  For what it's worth—the Library of Congress published a DMCA exemption for video games that require a use of a no-longer-available verification server. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/expanded-dmca-exemption-video-game-preservation-grants-small-victory-amidst https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/expanded-dmca-exemptio...
azlev 3y ago
What's the definition of a classic video game?
- coldpie 3y ago
  > It’s hard to define exactly what a “classic game” is, but for the sake of this study, we looked at all games released before 2010, which is roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off. https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/ https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/
- codetrotter 3y ago
  From the excecutive summary of the original study: They analysed a dataset of ~4,000 video games released in the US before 2010. https://zenodo.org/record/7996492 https://zenodo.org/record/7996492
- skibz 3y ago
  I'd say it's a video game of outstanding merit relative to other video games of its time.
MattGaiser 3y ago
What percentage would run even if they were? A lot of the cracking isn't just about bypassing some DRM, but solving compatibility issues.
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  There's fairly robust emulators for most consoles up to 2000. There's even full DOS/windows environment emulators for this task. The ugly spot is the 2000s, but the ps3 and 360 emulator are quickly improving. Wii/DS/3DS/Switch emulation is basically perfect.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    It's kinda funny how GameCube emulation is still notoriously poor (remember how badly even the official Switch port of Mario Sunshine ran?) but every Nintendo console since then lends itself so well to emulation. And that's even accounting for the Wii and (3)DS's hardware gimmicks!
    - BearOso 3y ago
      I don't understand what you're talking about. GameCube emulation is excellent. You can use the same emulator responsible for Wii, Dolphin, and it has great compatibility.
      - spondylosaurus 3y ago
        Aren't GameCube games prone to weird issues and artefacts though? For example, most emulated versions of Mario Sunshine (including the official Switch release!) show these little grey debug cubes in certain levels: https://tcrf.net/Super_Mario_Sunshine#Debug_Cubes https://tcrf.net/Super_Mario_Sunshine#Debug_Cubes
        Dwedit 3y ago
        Mario Sunshine is a game where doing anything beyond the original (Running at high resolution, Widescreen mode, 60FPS mode) will break the game. I wouldn't blame Dolphin for bugs that only show up when you exceed the capabilities of the base hardware. Current Dolphin doesn't show those debug cubes.
devnullbrain 3y ago
We should really know better. The TV & film industry have already been through this.
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  They prefer it this way. Ultimately an intellectual property based economy leads to this without proactive measures limiting IP.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Circa 1980 there was a panic over color movies fading that was spearheaded by people like Richard Scorsese who saw it as a huge cultural loss, but a major factor was that home video could turn movies like the old Wizard of Oz into gold. At the time they tried bad preservation idea such as dividing the colors up into separate reels before they realized even relatively fugitive dyes would hold up for centuries if you keep them in a dry freezer.
  - iso1631 3y ago
    You could just have a land tax, as copyright is land. Let companies value their copyright, and let them pay the cost to maintain that copyright (say a 2% per year cost), and let someone buy that copyright from them at the price they value it at.
    - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
      Copyright, unlike the land comparison, is not physically limited in nearly the same way. There is a limited amount of land, but ideas are nearly infinite. I genuinely think if a company has piece of media X that they make a decision to not distribute, it shouldn't be piracy. Things like Nintendo sitting on titles teasing a fat "maybe" of bringing a subscription based access model to on limited hardware isn't cool. These games sold their last physical copy decades ago, long before an online store. They took them off the market, so fair game. There's zero difference from Nintendo's perspective, of buying a used game vs playing a rom on an emulator.
    - 3y ago
sandworm101 3y ago
Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not legally available? Streaming and on-demand content delivery, rather than purchased physical copies, does the same damage to other content as to games. Per internet traditions, the porn industry is leading the way. No doubt the copyrights to millions of porn films belong to long-defunct studios, leaving no legal access. Today is it porn, tomorrow it will be the older Futurama episodes. But industries want this state of affairs. Any time spent with old content is time not purchasing the new content. To keep the content creation industry going consumers need to forget past material. Want to watch old Simpsons episodes? Want to play the original Civilization? No. Those are dead. Here are some new versions.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  There was a show in the late 1980’s called Murphy’s Law about an insurance investigator who lived on a floor of a warehouse like the base in Sneakers and had an asian girlfriend. It had some of the best comedic pacing I’d ever seen on TV but only made one short season and never got into syndication or home video which is too bad.
  - geswit2x 3y ago
    Damn, I'm curious now
- coding123 3y ago
  I feel like TV/Movies are generally more available in Amazon for rent at least. Not great to be required to pay the same prices as we did in the past. For example the original TMNT is 3.99 to watch (rent) and $13 to buy. It seems to me like it should be $1 or free on some subscription network and $3 to "cloud own" permanently.
- tibbon 3y ago
  Books too. The vast majority of books (or paper media overall) ever printed are no longer available new. There _might_ be some electronic version, but realistically not. Library systems help fill this in, but there are so many titles are are simply difficult to obtain.
droptablemain 3y ago
Thank goodness for so-called piracy.
- kleer001 3y ago
  I prefer the term "Freelance pro bono archivist" :)
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Yeah, I know "abandonware" sounds like a euphemism (and maybe it is), but I really don't have a problem with people keeping these older things available. (And I have written a few games in the past that are now on abandonware sites, ha ha.)
_5uxp 3y ago
meanwhile some of the legally available old games are just spreading virus, literally. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101899
- hiatus 3y ago
  That seems to indicate that the game has a vulnerability which can be exploited. That is very different from actively spreading a virus.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    And most old games are run within emulators (even something like dosbox) anyway. All you can do is infect that. But in those days viruses were truly rampant. I have many Amiga disks with viruses on them. As my Amiga had no hard drive and only 1 floppy there wasn't many places for them to go though.
- kroltan 3y ago
  And some legally available contemporary mainstream games are also viruses! Hello kernel-level anti cheat developers :)
coding123 3y ago
I used to pay for Nintendo's Switch account (or whatever that was called) I was kinda frustrated with how limited the collection of NES and SNES games are available there. Played through all the Zeldas, which is great, but I wish a lot more was available. I am wondering if, for the most part, the license holder is Nintendo, it's a lot easier for them to make it available, but as soon as you get into third party developers, I imagine the people that owned the copyrights are either non findable or dead now.
- mateo- 3y ago
  And I'm sure if they posted it anyway, those owners would be findable or reanimated pretty quick :)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  The NES isn't that old. 1985-1993 was when it being produced in the U.S. SNES was 1991 through 1996 or 1997. I bet both systems' Japanese counterparts were produced at least twice as long. Entities that produced the games and likely were assigned the copyright are game companies, which should be trackable, and in some cases, still exist (like Capcom or Konami). You might have problems hunting down copyright owners for unlicensed games like the Wisdom Tree games, but those all sucked anyway. It's not like an 8-bit computer platform where individuals produced a lot of content and are hard to find.
- jjice 3y ago
  The thing that's so disappointing to me is that the library was _so_ much large for the Virtual Console on the Wii, and the Wii launched in '05 I think. They create artificial scarcity of the games so they can slowly roll them out or do a remaster. It's a real shame since I _love_ old Nintendo games, they really did a fantastic job, but the limited access is sad.
marcodiego 3y ago
Copyright should adapt to modern world. Currently, what happens are a bunch of laws made by politicians under strong lobby from giant corporations. This doesn't benefit the public neither the artists. There are lots of new categories where works of art (video games included) can fall into which simply didn't exist when copyrights were introduced. The worst part: as copyrights evolved it made legal access to older works harder. I like how GoG is running their business but it doesn't include everything and laws should get modernized so that hundred of similar companies like GoG can flourish and thrive. For the cases where getting access to copyrights holder is not viable... well, for that users and fans should have the right to use, copy and distribute it legally. Nobody is making any money from works nobody can get access.
- jimmaswell 3y ago
  Unfortunately we're seeing a sudden pendulum swing towards favoring draconian creator-centric copyright laws as a kneejerk to AI. The same artists etc. who would have complained about Disney's practices a year ago now think copyright doesn't go far enough in forbidding algorithms from learning from their publicly visible work, the same way artists have learned from looking at each other's work for millenia.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    Copyright law is notionally intended to benefit society (read: people). Artists are people. AI (at least in this context) is a pile of computers at some big corporation. It doesn't seem weird to suggest that there ought to be different rules for different categories of entities.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      AI can also be a single laptop owned by some random person. You only need a big pile of computers if you train a base model. Extensions need far less computing power.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >Copyright should adapt to modern world. Currently, what happens are a bunch of laws made by politicians under strong lobby from giant corporations. I mean, by what you said, copyright did, just not how we wanted it to.
aquova 3y ago
I know there are many people who find this appalling and wish that companies did more to re-release their older titles, but I've frankly just accepted that emulation will be the best and perhaps only way to play a majority of these titles. Unlike movies, where you simply need a method to playback a video and audio stream, getting interactive media to continue working isn't trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly as it did before (otherwise what's the point). I wish rather than taking the effort to port the game themselves, they'd be more receptive to fan preservation efforts, although some companies are more friendly towards this than others. It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. The more people ask for older titles to be re-released, the more developers realize there's a market for it, so rather than release the source or future-compatible files, they instead will port the game to their latest system once a decade to resell it.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  > Unlike movies, where you simply need a method to playback a video and audio stream, getting interactive media to continue working isn't trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly as it did before (otherwise what's the point). Even getting a 20-year-old console (which in the retro gaming world isn't that old) to work with a modern HDMI TV is a headache! Despite owning the hardware and plenty of games, I had to drop a couple hundred bucks on a RetroTINK scaler to make my PS2 playable again. Which is no hate to the RetroTINK, because it's an amazing little gadget (and its output looks great), just kind of sad that it takes so much money and effort to keep playing a console I've owned since I was a kid.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    There are probably cheaper HDMI adapters, though probably with a weaker picture quality. (And latency will probably always be higher than analog, no matter what.)
    - spondylosaurus 3y ago
      Yep, spot on. The rabbit hole I fell down that eventually led me to the RetroTINK started with those cheap $30 HDMI upscaling devices, but they do weird stuff to your picture and add wicked amounts of lag. People who know more than I do have assured me that the RetroTINK in particular minimizes lag compared to other analog-to-digital converters, although I'm sure it's not quite as good as a setup without a converter at all. I can confirm that the picture quality is phenomenal though. You can tweak about a million different settings and even add fake scanlines!
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
It’s actually infuriating. This video game generation has offered very little major releases. However it’s still worth being apart of for the great collected editions. But the amount of games, many that were of major importance that are simply gone.
- bollos 3y ago
  Luckily on the XBOX you could at least play some older titles you might've never played pretty easily. PlayStation in that regard is, as far as I know, still lacking. The only console I've considered worthwhile for this generation is the Switch.
yason 3y ago
If something is not legally available then copyright law ought to make it eligible for free distribution. The authors nor the rights owners certainly don't see the content making money anymore (or they'd be selling it) and thus they can't lose money (that they never meant to charge in the first place). Copyright, as originally envisioned, should be a temporary privilege instead of a de facto ghost racket for perpetual extortion.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Huh. If I own a Picasso and it's not for sale, then you should be able to take it? Strange argument on the face of it.
  - tail_exchange 3y ago
    The supply of Picassos are limited, since there is only one of each piece. Software and other digital medias don't have this constraint.
    - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
      True. But to take and distribute freely somebody's copyrighted material is essentially taking all the value out of the material. Some similar in that way.
      - hyperhopper 3y ago
        Value? I don't get less enjoyment out of a video game because somebody else played it. In fact I might get even more enjoyment because of that since we could play it together or discuss it! So that means the value stays the same or even goes up in my book!
- rullelito 3y ago
  It could also be that I make a game, then a somewhat similar sequal, and I only want to sell the sequel. What right as a consumer do you have to distribute the first one for free then?
neilv 3y ago
All the emulators, etc., work has had its merits, both for cultural preservation effects and for the hacker-y craft achievement, but... Business-wise, had that bootleg environment not happened, I suspect someone could've made a killing by re-releasing vintage games on current devices. Now I suspect most of the nostalgia/familiarity demand is satisfied, and won't return even if you were able to delete every existing emulator, unlicensed ROM image and AV assets, etc.
- the_af 3y ago
  > "Business-wise, had that bootleg environment not happened, I suspect someone could've made a killing by re-releasing vintage games on current devices." In many cases, the "legal re-release" is leveraging the technology that was used to emulated the games in "less than legal" situations. For example, GOG wraps DOS games with DOSBox, which is how we in the (illegal) abandonware community used to run them anyway. Another thing to consider: back in the 2000's or so when I discovered abandonware, almost nobody was legally wrapping the games I wanted to play. I wanted to play them back then; now I have no interest. So the illegal abandonware way was the right way for me. Who cares what would eventually happen 10 or 20 years later? I wanted to play the games then.
  - neilv 3y ago
    > I wanted to play them back then; now I have no interest. IIUC, you're saying that a commercial effort couldn't/didn't offer the vintage games at the time that you wanted to play them, and now you no longer want to play them? You're also saying that, although you played the games then (with abandonware), the reason you no longer want to play the games now isn't because the abandonware satisfied the desire? (You think the nostalgia was time-limited, or something else changed for you? Is this generalizable to the rest of the market for vintage games?)
    - the_af 3y ago
      That's a fair question. Let me clarify: there was a time in my life, almost two decades ago, where I had no family obligations and lots of spare time, and I went through a nostalgia thing where I played lots of DOS games from my youth. Nowadays this thing holds no interest for me, except more abstractly: I want old games to be preserved, as curious artifacts of an ancient time. I'm sad when a game "dies" of neglect. But playing them? Not for me anymore. Back then there were "sub-communities" in abandonware. Most abandonware groups were keen to make a difference between them and the so-called "warez kiddies", i.e. people who just downloaded games because they didn't want to pay for them, often recent games but usually whatever. Abandonware in contrast was about preservation, i.e. "how can I play this game? Is there a legal way, or must I pirate it?". There were different degrees of compliance with this "line", but almost everyone understood that Abandonware was about preserving old games, not about piracy just because. Legally there was no difference, piracy is piracy -- but for people in the abandonware community, there was a world of difference. One of the biggest abandonware websites back then was Home of the Underdogs. The webmaster (a Thai woman who was an investment banker in her country) made a big deal about legality: if she received a takedown notice, she promptly took the download down. And if she found a way to link to a legal way to buy the game, she did so. She provided reviews of the games, so HOTU wasn't just a link farm. If people requested game downloads for games that were obviously available commercially, they got banned promptly. So let me get back to your final question: > You think the nostalgia was time-limited, or something else changed for you? Is this generalizable to the rest of the market for vintage games? - Yes, nostalgia was definitely time-limited for me. I seldom buy DOSBox-wrapped games in GOG anymore; I prefer newer indie games (that I end up not playing because I lack the time, anyway). - Yes, something changed in me: I grew older, my interests changed, and my spare time became more limited. - Yes, this is generalizable to all vintage games: if copyright owners don't make an artifact of the digital past available for playing -- and games "want" to be played, they are not static webpages -- then I have the moral right to download them. Within reason, I'm talking about games neglected for decades, not a game temporarily unavailable. Common sense applies. Would I want to play those oldies now if I hadn't played them back then, thanks to abandonware websites? I dunno. I doubt it, but everything is possible in the realm of "what ifs". Who really cares though? Publishers didn't care back when I had the time and inclination to play them, and that's all that matters ultimately.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Eumenes 3y ago
This prompted me to find out that MediEvil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediEvil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediEvil) has a remaster ... nostalgia incoming
segphault 3y ago
It's bizarre that companies aren't just selling the roms for classic arcade games that are otherwise completely unmonetized. There's an audience that would happily pay money just to be able to legally do what they are already doing with emulators and homemade arcade cabinets.
BashiBazouk 3y ago
Probably because 76% of them sucked. Well, maybe that's a bit strong but having lived through most the history of video games, a lot of mediocrity out there. From a preservation and historical standpoint I could see this as a problem but as a large store of video games that most people would want to play, not so much.
- devinjon 3y ago
  Mediocrity aside, I generally prefer pre Y2K games to their contemporary brethren. Maybe I'm in a tiny minority, though.
cubefox 3y ago
If it is any consolation, it seems morally, if not legally, permissible to pirate unavailable classic games.
mustacheemperor 3y ago
Just last weekend I wanted to play Cryostasis after seeing a playthrough on YouTube. It's a pretty unique mid 00s shooter that is relatively light on the shooting and heavy on atmosphere - you're a researcher meeting an icebreaker to leave Antarctica in 1981, but when you find the ship it's been wrecked since 1968, and the game follows you unraveling the mystery using supernatural time-jump powers. Instead of a health bar, you have to keep your body temperature high enough. It's a genuinely unique title that approaches the genre differently from pretty much any other...and it's literally impossible to buy. It's been delisted from Steam, Good Old Games, and any other storefront I could find online. People resell genuine retail keys that can get the game activated on Steam for ridiculous sums. Reposted hearsay online is that the original source code is lost so there will never be a remaster. There's a copy up on Archive.org, and without it from what I can tell this title would just be lost to time. There's so many cool, weird, obscure games from the 90s and 00s and its their weirdness and obscurity that puts them most at risk for disappearing and becoming unattainable.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
  My go-to example of game that are "lost" is No One Lives Forever and its sequel. In this case, though, I don't know about the source. All I know is that studio M&A have rendered these titles to be in eternal copyright limbo.
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
    Definitely great examples. Those games are fantastic, so unique, so full of heart, and just gone.
- Solvency 3y ago
  I mean, there's a point where the blame lies on every single developer and business person involved with these projects. You don't pour years of manpower and creativity into a game like this and then .... not even save a single .ZIP file to your personal HD. It just casts such a nihilistic ephemeral shadow on all of this.
DangerousYams 3y ago
THIS is what NFTs should be designed to solve, instead of whatever it is they have actually become.
- shmde 3y ago
  How do people jam NFTs in the most random of places. Global Warming ? NFT. Inflation ? NFT
- anthk 3y ago
  NFT, Web3... stop the snake oil, please. Retroemulation people have been preserving the classics since decades, even more with libre (FLOSS) implementations made with SDL/SDL2 making these games ultraportable and eternal. What does your lovely NFT solve here? Explain.
  - DangerousYams 3y ago
    Not my lovely NFT at all. Imagine the retro game and emulation required to run it forever preserved in a standard format. That's what a concept like NFT SHOULD be addressing. I'm lamenting that it's not doing so.
    - anthk 3y ago
      We already have these standards. Binary ROM dump formats with headers. There's no need for NFT's.
- DangerousYams 3y ago
  jeez guys, please read before dumping on me :) I'm saying ideally, NFTs SHOULD prevent obsolescence of digital assets They don't. But if you think about it, it ought to be one of the primary purposes of a concept like NFT, right? That's all I'm saying. Sorry to use the trigger word :P
ghusto 3y ago
This is why piracy is nearly always the best option. Want to play the original Tomb Raider? Well it's for sale, in many stores, and for many platforms. Trouble is they're all glitchy. Meanwhile, download a PS1 emulator and the ISO, and it works perfectly. Saw something on Netflix a while ago that you're only now getting round to have time for? Woosh, it's gone. Meanwhile, download it from BitTorrent and it's yours forever, no internet needed. Same with Spotify and songs. Pay for things legally, get treated like crap. The piracy option is just a better experience.
- megmogandog 3y ago
  The problem being that availability is a function of popularity and age. If you want something older that isn't a celebrated classic, it can be a lot more difficult to access...
  - toastercat 3y ago
    In some piracy circles and torrent trackers, sharing rare/obscure titles is a way of gaining rep, so at least there, there is incentive in finding and distributing the un-celebrated classics.
  - szatkus 3y ago
    But that's rarely a case. There are people maintain huge packages with thousands of old games. I can only think about maybe one or two titles that I couldn't find on the internet after some search. Besides, if a game is really obscure, chances for a legal release are close to zero.
- gochi 3y ago
  These fixes were not available in the original. What you are experiencing is altered and is not at all what people are talking about when it comes to preservation. For most people this is ok, but when we're talking about preservation it's the ability to play the game as it existed at that time with no barriers, and not something upscaled to 4k with widescreen patches and framerate changes to make it feel like a modern game with blocky aesthetics.
kleiba 3y ago
> Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it. Well, maybe not for "Titanic" but there are tons of movies for which the process is pretty much exactly like that. Video games as a broadly consumed medium are a relatively young feature - let's say some 40 to 50 years. Now, try to easily access most films from the first 40-50 years of cinema! And even for newer films, if it wasn't for streaming, you would find yourself in the situation that you either watch your favorite movies on outdated technology, or that you have to keep on rebuying the same movies over and over again. And even streaming services provide a fraction what e.g. the original Netflix DVD rental had to offer.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Abyss, also by James Cameron, is in this state. Not in print.
firebirdn99 3y ago
Another thing I noticed lately is a lot of iPhone games that were built in the early days like 2008 to 2014 and beyond even, get removed from the app store once the developer cannot maintain enough resources to update the code to the latest iOS version. I tried downloading a lot of games I fell in love with with in the early days of the app store but cannot. This is sad too.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  Another thing I noticed lately is a lot of iPhone games that were built in the early days like 2008 to 2014 and beyond even, get removed from the app store once the developer cannot maintain enough resources to update the code to the latest iOS version. Aurora Feint I Love Katamari
  - phendrenad2 3y ago
    Oh man Aurora Feint. Who knew they'd go on to make Discord
  - lucb1e 3y ago
    What?
    - mauvia 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Katamari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Katamari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Feint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Feint They're examples.
    - Freedom2 3y ago
      [dead]
- lucb1e 3y ago
  I was surprised nobody cared when Google announced they'd be pulling every app from their repository that hasn't been updated in, what was it, 2 years or so? Things that are functional and complete don't need updating. Why require a subscription model rather than a finished product in a frozen state? From f-droid I have a few apps that were last updated 11 years ago or something, works just fine. Just tried to find an example, e.g. pizza cost calculator is an app mostly for amusement that had its last real update in 2015 (then in 2021 and 2022 there were updates to support more recent android versions) but I used it literally two hours ago and found that the smaller pizza is cheaper per cm². On my previous phone (2018--2021) I used a 'share to clipboard' app from f-droid, which installs itself as a sharing target. It only ever released v1.0.0 in 2011. Super simple functionality that indeed doesn't need updating; would still use it today if my new phone didn't have that built in. Google would have removed that from their store a decade ago.
tiku 3y ago
"marketplace". Ah ok. Good thing they are all preserved on the torrent network then.
agentultra 3y ago
The ESA's main thrust is incredibly stupid. What if we decide to re-license that content but everyone can already get it for free from the library? Think of our profit losses! That hasn't stopped book publishers from publishing the classics over and over. Preservation is super important. Just look at the Shoah Foundation's effort at preserving the video testimonies of survivors: preservation of digital media is complex, difficult and ever-evolving. Preserving video games is even harder: emulators that run on an ever-evolving set of target hardware have to be maintained just to play them. Current trends in video game design almost guarantee that some games are impossible to preserve: they exist as a moment in time, a memory, the articles and blog posts that were written about them. Shame really that profit is more important than the art and medium. Not surprising. But shameful. Update: fixed some sentences for clarity.
Barrin92 3y ago
Article reminded me that Phil Spencer from Microsoft Gaming about two years ago did advocate for legal emulation[1] to preserve games. He seemed to be pretty passionate about it, does anyone know if they're still pursuing this or lobbying for it? Microsoft got to have at least some weight. [1]https://www.axios.com/2021/11/17/microsoft-old-games-preserve-emulation https://www.axios.com/2021/11/17/microsoft-old-games-preserv...
penjelly 3y ago
this is why emulation should be allowed forever
tb_technical 3y ago
This is unironically why emulation is a necessary and moral good. We need to preserve these pieces of software so that future generations can enjoy them, if they wish.
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
You can’t expect to hold on to stuff through the decades, but I do miss my old consoles and sometimes I wish I still had one or two them to experience playing a game on the original hardware versus an emulator.
varelse 3y ago
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varelse 3y ago
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smokel 3y ago
A painful example in this context is the Philips P2000T home computer. It was hugely popular in The Netherlands in the early 1980s, but not so much in other countries. Because the market was so small, there were nearly no commercial games. Almost all games for it were written by hobbyists, and were copied freely, using Mini-Cassette tapes. I have been working on an emulator for it, but it seems near impossible to redistribute the original games. Most of the games do not have a copyright message, and it is often not clear who the original author was. Ironically, these games were _meant_ to be copied, but as of 1993 this is now prohibited by law, and (as far as I understand it) I can only make copies for my own use. Note that there is a GitHub repository [1] that preserves a lot of games and information about the machine, but I wonder if this is even legal? (An even bigger problem I face is redistribution of the P2305 Basic Interpreter ROM, which is copyrighted by both Philips and Microsoft. If anyone at Microsoft is reading this -- could you please assist me in getting a license to reverse engineer and ship the original Basic ROM with my emulator?) [1] https://github.com/p2000t https://github.com/p2000t
unsungNovelty 3y ago
There is https://www.myabandonware.com https://www.myabandonware.com and http://www.abandonia.com/en/game/ http://www.abandonia.com/en/game/. It's been a while since I have used abandonia. But I use myabandonware.com regularly. It is not perfect I suppose, but I get most of my childhood favourites here. Croc 2 - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/croc-2-cj0 https://www.myabandonware.com/game/croc-2-cj0. The only 3D colour videogame we had in our school's computer lab. Claw - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/claw-a39 https://www.myabandonware.com/game/claw-a39 The thing - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-thing-bfm https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-thing-bfm
farawayzone0019 3y ago
Wait until they figure out that modern day games are constantly evolving and changing so the concept of "unavailable" exists today for stuff that's less than a year old. Maps, in-game content, in-game characters, etc. It's all short-lived and hardly static.
drivingmenuts 3y ago
How many of those games will actually run on modern hardware? And at what point do we tell the authors to fuck off - they’re not getting paid any more! Because that is what you are advocating.
srlowe 3y ago
It's like this with so much media, it drives me crazy. For instance, in the country I'm currently in there is no way to legally watch a lot of movies - not because of censorship or anything, they are simply not distributed, even on google-play, amazon etc. No choice but it use torrent. Why?
cush 3y ago
The opening thesis of the article is very misleading - that endangered video games would be like Titanic only being available in the library of congress. Titanic was a blockbuster released in 1997, so it would be like Final Fantasy VII only being available at library of congress, which it isn’t. In fact FFVII is continuously being rereleased on modern consoles
wiz21c 3y ago
Many movies are locked the same way because their owner think they're not worth publishing again and after all, it's their stuff, they do/don't do whatever they want with it. It'd be so much better if copyright was limited for say, 30 years. So that you could pay when you're young and get it for free when you're old... So you'd pay for novelty, not for content. Dunno...
cush 3y ago
One thing not mentioned in the article or comments here is how open source enriches the historical significance of a piece of software. No game will stand the test of time like Doom has, thanks to its source being available (and of course, elegant).
johncessna 3y ago
I really wish the study matched the headline. It should be 'most classic video games are commercially unavailable' To their credit, they don't try to hide it, but the sentiment in the headline is the actual problem, in my mind. I'm less concerned about a gameboy game that you can't buy, but you can easily play via emulators or the physical cartridges, which still exist (for now), than I am with the class of games that are truly gone/unplayable. Your online only games primarily fall into this bag, but without something like an internet archive or something similar to preserve them, we're in danger of losing the digital copies of old games as well. Personally, I'd like to see the study expanded and then some sort of index that tracks true loss of media over time.
- crtified 3y ago
  It may also be pertinent to note that it's an entirely USA-centric article and study. A distinction the article makes in it's first paragraph: "87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered". Not to unduly belittle that metric! - nobody would argue that the USA is not a major player (the biggest, in some respects) - but it's still a significant distinction. The articles nuance of copyright laws, and its figures, and its proposed activism, are all specific to that one national jurisdiction.
baerrie 3y ago
Piracy to the rescue! The companies with the endangered IP should make a deal to forgive key piracy hubs in exchange for archiving their games into perpetuity. Earthbound is a great example of an incredibly influential game that is very expensive in its original form but widely available illegally, having inspired multiple generations of game developers that played it this way that otherwise would not have. How can we simply call this “theft”?
pkaye 3y ago
How have other countries (Japan, EU countries) handled this issue of preserving access to classic video games?
padobson 3y ago
25-30 years ago, there was a game studio called 2am Games that made a series of strategy-type Java games that allowed online multiplayer. All the games were monetized with ad clicks. Click on an add, get 15 more minutes of play time. Their most popular game was an RTS called Chain of Command. You had a squad of four soldiers that you could position on an isometric board designed to look like a farm. 5-10 players would each run their four-man squads into a firefight and play some scenario - seek and destroy, capture the flag, etc. The other two games I enjoyed were a business strategy game called The Invisible Hand and another RTS where each player took a European country and conquered cities using robot-like walking tanks. All of the content from 2am Games is lost to history. Chain of Command has some clones out there, but I've never been able to find anything - roms, source code, clones, for the other games. It's a part of my childhood I'll never be able to re-experience. Edit: I got curious again and did some investigating. Here's their archived home page from 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970707215116/http://www.2am.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19970707215116/http://www.2am.co...
coreyp_1 3y ago
This is a thorny subject. Copyrite is, by definition, the control of the rights to copy. It is not a mandate that copying must be done, but rather an acknowledgement of the right to control the copies. And that must also, then, include the right to not distribute the work. This must be balanced with the notion of fair use, though. However, "but I want to access it" does not justify fair use. "I bought a copy and therefore will make backups so that I may enjoy it in the future" does, in my opinion. Libraries have exceptions codified in copyrite law. Technology has blurred the line as to what constitutes a library (just as it has for journalists, publishers, etc.). Some advocate for an escalating fee in order to protect copyrite for more and more time. I don't know if that is appropriate, since it seems to me as a form of extortion of rights. Not quite compelled speech, but similar. I don't know the solution, but I do feel as though our laws are broken and dysfunctional in this regard. I don't have a solution, though, because I honestly don't know enough of the problem domain. Then again, maybe that's the problem... One should not need to be a legal expert in order to keep from breaking the law!
miga 3y ago
Last call for preservation of our video game history. Right to preserve our culture should be enshrined in law, because otherwise it will disappear due to adverse relation with copyright law and novel art production.
phkahler 3y ago
Ever drive a model T? Can you find a 64 Mustang convertible? 1800s vintage tea cups? Lots of old things are scarce. Arcade games are in the same boat, but you've got MAME and I've got a bit-slice coprocessor and rasterizer ASIC controlled by a 6809 in I,Robot. Not sure how games are different from other antiques other than the possibility of emulation.
- terlisimo 3y ago
  The main difference is that creating a 100% perfect copy of a game costs next to nothing, and creating a new 100% perfect copy of model T is almost impossible, even if you have one to copy it from.
bbstats 3y ago
This remains to be true of the Star Wars trilogy...

509 points by coldpie 3y ago

I love my greaseweazle. Piracy, eBay trawling, and disassembler cracking make things usable.

See also this companion article about the study methodology: https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/ https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/

bearjaws 3y ago

It's going to shift to 87% don't even start due to connectivity requirements to servers that are not running anymore.

freedomben 3y ago
It took a couple of reads of this before I realized it was saying the same thing I was going to say. Restated: in 20 years from now, it will be 87% of games won't even start/run even if you have a copy, because they are dependent on servers that aren't running anymore and are closed source.
- lucb1e 3y ago
  > dependent on servers that aren't running anymore and are closed source. Can't do that if it's not your server. Don't we all love "the cloud" :) I think open sourcing the clients is easier because it's always possible, it takes the dev almost no time at all (compared to newly creating infrastructure documentation), and players don't have to set up their own infrastructure (which would probably require a lot of time as well as skill) to play offline. The downside is that server functionality would need to be recreated. If the game is open, you can just patch out the server dependency. Is the update, "cloud" saving, or online-friends functionality crashing the whole game on startup? Stuff not actually needed to play in single player? Comment out the line where it calls that function, maybe mock a few variables, and you're all set. A friend of mine makes a game with offline play being possible, but the main value is in the community: custom levels and online play. It's all cloud magic with google cloud this and google cloud that. Good luck pulling up that infrastructure in 20 years (having to set up a mini google datacenter, even if the components are open sourced by google in the first place, which they're almost certainly not when "sun set"). The game tries to reach the server on startup and should detect when you're offline (for me that doesn't work reliably, but firewalling google play services has weird effects on many apps), but if you just remove those calls from the game altogether, the offline parts will work with no dependencies and you can just exchange level files instead of having an online browser. Everything but realtime multiplayer would still be possible. Customizing the client code to work with much simpler infrastructure is also likely faster than trying to replicate the "cloud" setup.
mrbabbage 3y ago
For what it's worth—the Library of Congress published a DMCA exemption for video games that require a use of a no-longer-available verification server. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/expanded-dmca-exemption-video-game-preservation-grants-small-victory-amidst https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/expanded-dmca-exemptio...

azlev 3y ago

What's the definition of a classic video game?

coldpie 3y ago
> It’s hard to define exactly what a “classic game” is, but for the sake of this study, we looked at all games released before 2010, which is roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off. https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/ https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/
codetrotter 3y ago
From the excecutive summary of the original study: They analysed a dataset of ~4,000 video games released in the US before 2010. https://zenodo.org/record/7996492 https://zenodo.org/record/7996492
skibz 3y ago
I'd say it's a video game of outstanding merit relative to other video games of its time.

MattGaiser 3y ago

What percentage would run even if they were? A lot of the cracking isn't just about bypassing some DRM, but solving compatibility issues.

MSFT_Edging 3y ago
There's fairly robust emulators for most consoles up to 2000. There's even full DOS/windows environment emulators for this task. The ugly spot is the 2000s, but the ps3 and 360 emulator are quickly improving. Wii/DS/3DS/Switch emulation is basically perfect.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  It's kinda funny how GameCube emulation is still notoriously poor (remember how badly even the official Switch port of Mario Sunshine ran?) but every Nintendo console since then lends itself so well to emulation. And that's even accounting for the Wii and (3)DS's hardware gimmicks!
  - BearOso 3y ago
    I don't understand what you're talking about. GameCube emulation is excellent. You can use the same emulator responsible for Wii, Dolphin, and it has great compatibility.
    - spondylosaurus 3y ago
      Aren't GameCube games prone to weird issues and artefacts though? For example, most emulated versions of Mario Sunshine (including the official Switch release!) show these little grey debug cubes in certain levels: https://tcrf.net/Super_Mario_Sunshine#Debug_Cubes https://tcrf.net/Super_Mario_Sunshine#Debug_Cubes
      - Dwedit 3y ago
        Mario Sunshine is a game where doing anything beyond the original (Running at high resolution, Widescreen mode, 60FPS mode) will break the game. I wouldn't blame Dolphin for bugs that only show up when you exceed the capabilities of the base hardware. Current Dolphin doesn't show those debug cubes.

devnullbrain 3y ago

We should really know better. The TV & film industry have already been through this.

MSFT_Edging 3y ago
They prefer it this way. Ultimately an intellectual property based economy leads to this without proactive measures limiting IP.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Circa 1980 there was a panic over color movies fading that was spearheaded by people like Richard Scorsese who saw it as a huge cultural loss, but a major factor was that home video could turn movies like the old Wizard of Oz into gold. At the time they tried bad preservation idea such as dividing the colors up into separate reels before they realized even relatively fugitive dyes would hold up for centuries if you keep them in a dry freezer.
- iso1631 3y ago
  You could just have a land tax, as copyright is land. Let companies value their copyright, and let them pay the cost to maintain that copyright (say a 2% per year cost), and let someone buy that copyright from them at the price they value it at.
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    Copyright, unlike the land comparison, is not physically limited in nearly the same way. There is a limited amount of land, but ideas are nearly infinite. I genuinely think if a company has piece of media X that they make a decision to not distribute, it shouldn't be piracy. Things like Nintendo sitting on titles teasing a fat "maybe" of bringing a subscription based access model to on limited hardware isn't cool. These games sold their last physical copy decades ago, long before an online store. They took them off the market, so fair game. There's zero difference from Nintendo's perspective, of buying a used game vs playing a rom on an emulator.
  - 3y ago

sandworm101 3y ago

Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not legally available? Streaming and on-demand content delivery, rather than purchased physical copies, does the same damage to other content as to games. Per internet traditions, the porn industry is leading the way. No doubt the copyrights to millions of porn films belong to long-defunct studios, leaving no legal access. Today is it porn, tomorrow it will be the older Futurama episodes. But industries want this state of affairs. Any time spent with old content is time not purchasing the new content. To keep the content creation industry going consumers need to forget past material. Want to watch old Simpsons episodes? Want to play the original Civilization? No. Those are dead. Here are some new versions.

PaulHoule 3y ago
There was a show in the late 1980’s called Murphy’s Law about an insurance investigator who lived on a floor of a warehouse like the base in Sneakers and had an asian girlfriend. It had some of the best comedic pacing I’d ever seen on TV but only made one short season and never got into syndication or home video which is too bad.
- geswit2x 3y ago
  Damn, I'm curious now
coding123 3y ago
I feel like TV/Movies are generally more available in Amazon for rent at least. Not great to be required to pay the same prices as we did in the past. For example the original TMNT is 3.99 to watch (rent) and $13 to buy. It seems to me like it should be $1 or free on some subscription network and $3 to "cloud own" permanently.
tibbon 3y ago
Books too. The vast majority of books (or paper media overall) ever printed are no longer available new. There _might_ be some electronic version, but realistically not. Library systems help fill this in, but there are so many titles are are simply difficult to obtain.

droptablemain 3y ago

Thank goodness for so-called piracy.

kleer001 3y ago
I prefer the term "Freelance pro bono archivist" :)
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Yeah, I know "abandonware" sounds like a euphemism (and maybe it is), but I really don't have a problem with people keeping these older things available. (And I have written a few games in the past that are now on abandonware sites, ha ha.)

_5uxp 3y ago

meanwhile some of the legally available old games are just spreading virus, literally. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101899

hiatus 3y ago
That seems to indicate that the game has a vulnerability which can be exploited. That is very different from actively spreading a virus.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  And most old games are run within emulators (even something like dosbox) anyway. All you can do is infect that. But in those days viruses were truly rampant. I have many Amiga disks with viruses on them. As my Amiga had no hard drive and only 1 floppy there wasn't many places for them to go though.
kroltan 3y ago
And some legally available contemporary mainstream games are also viruses! Hello kernel-level anti cheat developers :)

coding123 3y ago

I used to pay for Nintendo's Switch account (or whatever that was called) I was kinda frustrated with how limited the collection of NES and SNES games are available there. Played through all the Zeldas, which is great, but I wish a lot more was available. I am wondering if, for the most part, the license holder is Nintendo, it's a lot easier for them to make it available, but as soon as you get into third party developers, I imagine the people that owned the copyrights are either non findable or dead now.

mateo- 3y ago
And I'm sure if they posted it anyway, those owners would be findable or reanimated pretty quick :)
deleted 3y ago
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tenebrisalietum 3y ago
The NES isn't that old. 1985-1993 was when it being produced in the U.S. SNES was 1991 through 1996 or 1997. I bet both systems' Japanese counterparts were produced at least twice as long. Entities that produced the games and likely were assigned the copyright are game companies, which should be trackable, and in some cases, still exist (like Capcom or Konami). You might have problems hunting down copyright owners for unlicensed games like the Wisdom Tree games, but those all sucked anyway. It's not like an 8-bit computer platform where individuals produced a lot of content and are hard to find.
jjice 3y ago
The thing that's so disappointing to me is that the library was _so_ much large for the Virtual Console on the Wii, and the Wii launched in '05 I think. They create artificial scarcity of the games so they can slowly roll them out or do a remaster. It's a real shame since I _love_ old Nintendo games, they really did a fantastic job, but the limited access is sad.

marcodiego 3y ago

Copyright should adapt to modern world. Currently, what happens are a bunch of laws made by politicians under strong lobby from giant corporations. This doesn't benefit the public neither the artists. There are lots of new categories where works of art (video games included) can fall into which simply didn't exist when copyrights were introduced. The worst part: as copyrights evolved it made legal access to older works harder. I like how GoG is running their business but it doesn't include everything and laws should get modernized so that hundred of similar companies like GoG can flourish and thrive. For the cases where getting access to copyrights holder is not viable... well, for that users and fans should have the right to use, copy and distribute it legally. Nobody is making any money from works nobody can get access.

jimmaswell 3y ago
Unfortunately we're seeing a sudden pendulum swing towards favoring draconian creator-centric copyright laws as a kneejerk to AI. The same artists etc. who would have complained about Disney's practices a year ago now think copyright doesn't go far enough in forbidding algorithms from learning from their publicly visible work, the same way artists have learned from looking at each other's work for millenia.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Copyright law is notionally intended to benefit society (read: people). Artists are people. AI (at least in this context) is a pile of computers at some big corporation. It doesn't seem weird to suggest that there ought to be different rules for different categories of entities.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    AI can also be a single laptop owned by some random person. You only need a big pile of computers if you train a base model. Extensions need far less computing power.
pixl97 3y ago
>Copyright should adapt to modern world. Currently, what happens are a bunch of laws made by politicians under strong lobby from giant corporations. I mean, by what you said, copyright did, just not how we wanted it to.

aquova 3y ago

I know there are many people who find this appalling and wish that companies did more to re-release their older titles, but I've frankly just accepted that emulation will be the best and perhaps only way to play a majority of these titles. Unlike movies, where you simply need a method to playback a video and audio stream, getting interactive media to continue working isn't trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly as it did before (otherwise what's the point). I wish rather than taking the effort to port the game themselves, they'd be more receptive to fan preservation efforts, although some companies are more friendly towards this than others. It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. The more people ask for older titles to be re-released, the more developers realize there's a market for it, so rather than release the source or future-compatible files, they instead will port the game to their latest system once a decade to resell it.

spondylosaurus 3y ago
> Unlike movies, where you simply need a method to playback a video and audio stream, getting interactive media to continue working isn't trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly as it did before (otherwise what's the point). Even getting a 20-year-old console (which in the retro gaming world isn't that old) to work with a modern HDMI TV is a headache! Despite owning the hardware and plenty of games, I had to drop a couple hundred bucks on a RetroTINK scaler to make my PS2 playable again. Which is no hate to the RetroTINK, because it's an amazing little gadget (and its output looks great), just kind of sad that it takes so much money and effort to keep playing a console I've owned since I was a kid.
- cubefox 3y ago
  There are probably cheaper HDMI adapters, though probably with a weaker picture quality. (And latency will probably always be higher than analog, no matter what.)
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    Yep, spot on. The rabbit hole I fell down that eventually led me to the RetroTINK started with those cheap $30 HDMI upscaling devices, but they do weird stuff to your picture and add wicked amounts of lag. People who know more than I do have assured me that the RetroTINK in particular minimizes lag compared to other analog-to-digital converters, although I'm sure it's not quite as good as a setup without a converter at all. I can confirm that the picture quality is phenomenal though. You can tweak about a million different settings and even add fake scanlines!

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

It’s actually infuriating. This video game generation has offered very little major releases. However it’s still worth being apart of for the great collected editions. But the amount of games, many that were of major importance that are simply gone.

bollos 3y ago
Luckily on the XBOX you could at least play some older titles you might've never played pretty easily. PlayStation in that regard is, as far as I know, still lacking. The only console I've considered worthwhile for this generation is the Switch.

yason 3y ago

If something is not legally available then copyright law ought to make it eligible for free distribution. The authors nor the rights owners certainly don't see the content making money anymore (or they'd be selling it) and thus they can't lose money (that they never meant to charge in the first place). Copyright, as originally envisioned, should be a temporary privilege instead of a de facto ghost racket for perpetual extortion.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Huh. If I own a Picasso and it's not for sale, then you should be able to take it? Strange argument on the face of it.
- tail_exchange 3y ago
  The supply of Picassos are limited, since there is only one of each piece. Software and other digital medias don't have this constraint.
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    True. But to take and distribute freely somebody's copyrighted material is essentially taking all the value out of the material. Some similar in that way.
    - hyperhopper 3y ago
      Value? I don't get less enjoyment out of a video game because somebody else played it. In fact I might get even more enjoyment because of that since we could play it together or discuss it! So that means the value stays the same or even goes up in my book!
rullelito 3y ago
It could also be that I make a game, then a somewhat similar sequal, and I only want to sell the sequel. What right as a consumer do you have to distribute the first one for free then?

neilv 3y ago

All the emulators, etc., work has had its merits, both for cultural preservation effects and for the hacker-y craft achievement, but... Business-wise, had that bootleg environment not happened, I suspect someone could've made a killing by re-releasing vintage games on current devices. Now I suspect most of the nostalgia/familiarity demand is satisfied, and won't return even if you were able to delete every existing emulator, unlicensed ROM image and AV assets, etc.

the_af 3y ago
> "Business-wise, had that bootleg environment not happened, I suspect someone could've made a killing by re-releasing vintage games on current devices." In many cases, the "legal re-release" is leveraging the technology that was used to emulated the games in "less than legal" situations. For example, GOG wraps DOS games with DOSBox, which is how we in the (illegal) abandonware community used to run them anyway. Another thing to consider: back in the 2000's or so when I discovered abandonware, almost nobody was legally wrapping the games I wanted to play. I wanted to play them back then; now I have no interest. So the illegal abandonware way was the right way for me. Who cares what would eventually happen 10 or 20 years later? I wanted to play the games then.
- neilv 3y ago
  > I wanted to play them back then; now I have no interest. IIUC, you're saying that a commercial effort couldn't/didn't offer the vintage games at the time that you wanted to play them, and now you no longer want to play them? You're also saying that, although you played the games then (with abandonware), the reason you no longer want to play the games now isn't because the abandonware satisfied the desire? (You think the nostalgia was time-limited, or something else changed for you? Is this generalizable to the rest of the market for vintage games?)
  - the_af 3y ago
    That's a fair question. Let me clarify: there was a time in my life, almost two decades ago, where I had no family obligations and lots of spare time, and I went through a nostalgia thing where I played lots of DOS games from my youth. Nowadays this thing holds no interest for me, except more abstractly: I want old games to be preserved, as curious artifacts of an ancient time. I'm sad when a game "dies" of neglect. But playing them? Not for me anymore. Back then there were "sub-communities" in abandonware. Most abandonware groups were keen to make a difference between them and the so-called "warez kiddies", i.e. people who just downloaded games because they didn't want to pay for them, often recent games but usually whatever. Abandonware in contrast was about preservation, i.e. "how can I play this game? Is there a legal way, or must I pirate it?". There were different degrees of compliance with this "line", but almost everyone understood that Abandonware was about preserving old games, not about piracy just because. Legally there was no difference, piracy is piracy -- but for people in the abandonware community, there was a world of difference. One of the biggest abandonware websites back then was Home of the Underdogs. The webmaster (a Thai woman who was an investment banker in her country) made a big deal about legality: if she received a takedown notice, she promptly took the download down. And if she found a way to link to a legal way to buy the game, she did so. She provided reviews of the games, so HOTU wasn't just a link farm. If people requested game downloads for games that were obviously available commercially, they got banned promptly. So let me get back to your final question: > You think the nostalgia was time-limited, or something else changed for you? Is this generalizable to the rest of the market for vintage games? - Yes, nostalgia was definitely time-limited for me. I seldom buy DOSBox-wrapped games in GOG anymore; I prefer newer indie games (that I end up not playing because I lack the time, anyway). - Yes, something changed in me: I grew older, my interests changed, and my spare time became more limited. - Yes, this is generalizable to all vintage games: if copyright owners don't make an artifact of the digital past available for playing -- and games "want" to be played, they are not static webpages -- then I have the moral right to download them. Within reason, I'm talking about games neglected for decades, not a game temporarily unavailable. Common sense applies. Would I want to play those oldies now if I hadn't played them back then, thanks to abandonware websites? I dunno. I doubt it, but everything is possible in the realm of "what ifs". Who really cares though? Publishers didn't care back when I had the time and inclination to play them, and that's all that matters ultimately.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Eumenes 3y ago

This prompted me to find out that MediEvil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediEvil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediEvil) has a remaster ... nostalgia incoming

segphault 3y ago

It's bizarre that companies aren't just selling the roms for classic arcade games that are otherwise completely unmonetized. There's an audience that would happily pay money just to be able to legally do what they are already doing with emulators and homemade arcade cabinets.

BashiBazouk 3y ago

Probably because 76% of them sucked. Well, maybe that's a bit strong but having lived through most the history of video games, a lot of mediocrity out there. From a preservation and historical standpoint I could see this as a problem but as a large store of video games that most people would want to play, not so much.

devinjon 3y ago
Mediocrity aside, I generally prefer pre Y2K games to their contemporary brethren. Maybe I'm in a tiny minority, though.

cubefox 3y ago

If it is any consolation, it seems morally, if not legally, permissible to pirate unavailable classic games.

mustacheemperor 3y ago

Just last weekend I wanted to play Cryostasis after seeing a playthrough on YouTube. It's a pretty unique mid 00s shooter that is relatively light on the shooting and heavy on atmosphere - you're a researcher meeting an icebreaker to leave Antarctica in 1981, but when you find the ship it's been wrecked since 1968, and the game follows you unraveling the mystery using supernatural time-jump powers. Instead of a health bar, you have to keep your body temperature high enough. It's a genuinely unique title that approaches the genre differently from pretty much any other...and it's literally impossible to buy. It's been delisted from Steam, Good Old Games, and any other storefront I could find online. People resell genuine retail keys that can get the game activated on Steam for ridiculous sums. Reposted hearsay online is that the original source code is lost so there will never be a remaster. There's a copy up on Archive.org, and without it from what I can tell this title would just be lost to time. There's so many cool, weird, obscure games from the 90s and 00s and its their weirdness and obscurity that puts them most at risk for disappearing and becoming unattainable.

TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
My go-to example of game that are "lost" is No One Lives Forever and its sequel. In this case, though, I don't know about the source. All I know is that studio M&A have rendered these titles to be in eternal copyright limbo.
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  Definitely great examples. Those games are fantastic, so unique, so full of heart, and just gone.
Solvency 3y ago
I mean, there's a point where the blame lies on every single developer and business person involved with these projects. You don't pour years of manpower and creativity into a game like this and then .... not even save a single .ZIP file to your personal HD. It just casts such a nihilistic ephemeral shadow on all of this.

DangerousYams 3y ago

THIS is what NFTs should be designed to solve, instead of whatever it is they have actually become.

shmde 3y ago
How do people jam NFTs in the most random of places. Global Warming ? NFT. Inflation ? NFT
anthk 3y ago
NFT, Web3... stop the snake oil, please. Retroemulation people have been preserving the classics since decades, even more with libre (FLOSS) implementations made with SDL/SDL2 making these games ultraportable and eternal. What does your lovely NFT solve here? Explain.
- DangerousYams 3y ago
  Not my lovely NFT at all. Imagine the retro game and emulation required to run it forever preserved in a standard format. That's what a concept like NFT SHOULD be addressing. I'm lamenting that it's not doing so.
  - anthk 3y ago
    We already have these standards. Binary ROM dump formats with headers. There's no need for NFT's.
DangerousYams 3y ago
jeez guys, please read before dumping on me :) I'm saying ideally, NFTs SHOULD prevent obsolescence of digital assets They don't. But if you think about it, it ought to be one of the primary purposes of a concept like NFT, right? That's all I'm saying. Sorry to use the trigger word :P

ghusto 3y ago

This is why piracy is nearly always the best option. Want to play the original Tomb Raider? Well it's for sale, in many stores, and for many platforms. Trouble is they're all glitchy. Meanwhile, download a PS1 emulator and the ISO, and it works perfectly. Saw something on Netflix a while ago that you're only now getting round to have time for? Woosh, it's gone. Meanwhile, download it from BitTorrent and it's yours forever, no internet needed. Same with Spotify and songs. Pay for things legally, get treated like crap. The piracy option is just a better experience.

megmogandog 3y ago
The problem being that availability is a function of popularity and age. If you want something older that isn't a celebrated classic, it can be a lot more difficult to access...
- toastercat 3y ago
  In some piracy circles and torrent trackers, sharing rare/obscure titles is a way of gaining rep, so at least there, there is incentive in finding and distributing the un-celebrated classics.
- szatkus 3y ago
  But that's rarely a case. There are people maintain huge packages with thousands of old games. I can only think about maybe one or two titles that I couldn't find on the internet after some search. Besides, if a game is really obscure, chances for a legal release are close to zero.
gochi 3y ago
These fixes were not available in the original. What you are experiencing is altered and is not at all what people are talking about when it comes to preservation. For most people this is ok, but when we're talking about preservation it's the ability to play the game as it existed at that time with no barriers, and not something upscaled to 4k with widescreen patches and framerate changes to make it feel like a modern game with blocky aesthetics.

kleiba 3y ago

> Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it. Well, maybe not for "Titanic" but there are tons of movies for which the process is pretty much exactly like that. Video games as a broadly consumed medium are a relatively young feature - let's say some 40 to 50 years. Now, try to easily access most films from the first 40-50 years of cinema! And even for newer films, if it wasn't for streaming, you would find yourself in the situation that you either watch your favorite movies on outdated technology, or that you have to keep on rebuying the same movies over and over again. And even streaming services provide a fraction what e.g. the original Netflix DVD rental had to offer.

hgsgm 3y ago
Abyss, also by James Cameron, is in this state. Not in print.

firebirdn99 3y ago

Another thing I noticed lately is a lot of iPhone games that were built in the early days like 2008 to 2014 and beyond even, get removed from the app store once the developer cannot maintain enough resources to update the code to the latest iOS version. I tried downloading a lot of games I fell in love with with in the early days of the app store but cannot. This is sad too.

reaperducer 3y ago
Another thing I noticed lately is a lot of iPhone games that were built in the early days like 2008 to 2014 and beyond even, get removed from the app store once the developer cannot maintain enough resources to update the code to the latest iOS version. Aurora Feint I Love Katamari
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  Oh man Aurora Feint. Who knew they'd go on to make Discord
- lucb1e 3y ago
  What?
  - mauvia 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Katamari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Katamari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Feint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Feint They're examples.
  - Freedom2 3y ago
    [dead]
lucb1e 3y ago
I was surprised nobody cared when Google announced they'd be pulling every app from their repository that hasn't been updated in, what was it, 2 years or so? Things that are functional and complete don't need updating. Why require a subscription model rather than a finished product in a frozen state? From f-droid I have a few apps that were last updated 11 years ago or something, works just fine. Just tried to find an example, e.g. pizza cost calculator is an app mostly for amusement that had its last real update in 2015 (then in 2021 and 2022 there were updates to support more recent android versions) but I used it literally two hours ago and found that the smaller pizza is cheaper per cm². On my previous phone (2018--2021) I used a 'share to clipboard' app from f-droid, which installs itself as a sharing target. It only ever released v1.0.0 in 2011. Super simple functionality that indeed doesn't need updating; would still use it today if my new phone didn't have that built in. Google would have removed that from their store a decade ago.

tiku 3y ago

"marketplace". Ah ok. Good thing they are all preserved on the torrent network then.

agentultra 3y ago

The ESA's main thrust is incredibly stupid. What if we decide to re-license that content but everyone can already get it for free from the library? Think of our profit losses! That hasn't stopped book publishers from publishing the classics over and over. Preservation is super important. Just look at the Shoah Foundation's effort at preserving the video testimonies of survivors: preservation of digital media is complex, difficult and ever-evolving. Preserving video games is even harder: emulators that run on an ever-evolving set of target hardware have to be maintained just to play them. Current trends in video game design almost guarantee that some games are impossible to preserve: they exist as a moment in time, a memory, the articles and blog posts that were written about them. Shame really that profit is more important than the art and medium. Not surprising. But shameful. Update: fixed some sentences for clarity.

Barrin92 3y ago

Article reminded me that Phil Spencer from Microsoft Gaming about two years ago did advocate for legal emulation[1] to preserve games. He seemed to be pretty passionate about it, does anyone know if they're still pursuing this or lobbying for it? Microsoft got to have at least some weight. [1]https://www.axios.com/2021/11/17/microsoft-old-games-preserve-emulation https://www.axios.com/2021/11/17/microsoft-old-games-preserv...

penjelly 3y ago

this is why emulation should be allowed forever

tb_technical 3y ago

This is unironically why emulation is a necessary and moral good. We need to preserve these pieces of software so that future generations can enjoy them, if they wish.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

You can’t expect to hold on to stuff through the decades, but I do miss my old consoles and sometimes I wish I still had one or two them to experience playing a game on the original hardware versus an emulator.

varelse 3y ago

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varelse 3y ago

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smokel 3y ago

A painful example in this context is the Philips P2000T home computer. It was hugely popular in The Netherlands in the early 1980s, but not so much in other countries. Because the market was so small, there were nearly no commercial games. Almost all games for it were written by hobbyists, and were copied freely, using Mini-Cassette tapes. I have been working on an emulator for it, but it seems near impossible to redistribute the original games. Most of the games do not have a copyright message, and it is often not clear who the original author was. Ironically, these games were _meant_ to be copied, but as of 1993 this is now prohibited by law, and (as far as I understand it) I can only make copies for my own use. Note that there is a GitHub repository [1] that preserves a lot of games and information about the machine, but I wonder if this is even legal? (An even bigger problem I face is redistribution of the P2305 Basic Interpreter ROM, which is copyrighted by both Philips and Microsoft. If anyone at Microsoft is reading this -- could you please assist me in getting a license to reverse engineer and ship the original Basic ROM with my emulator?) [1] https://github.com/p2000t https://github.com/p2000t

unsungNovelty 3y ago

There is https://www.myabandonware.com https://www.myabandonware.com and http://www.abandonia.com/en/game/ http://www.abandonia.com/en/game/. It's been a while since I have used abandonia. But I use myabandonware.com regularly. It is not perfect I suppose, but I get most of my childhood favourites here. Croc 2 - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/croc-2-cj0 https://www.myabandonware.com/game/croc-2-cj0. The only 3D colour videogame we had in our school's computer lab. Claw - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/claw-a39 https://www.myabandonware.com/game/claw-a39 The thing - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-thing-bfm https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-thing-bfm

farawayzone0019 3y ago

Wait until they figure out that modern day games are constantly evolving and changing so the concept of "unavailable" exists today for stuff that's less than a year old. Maps, in-game content, in-game characters, etc. It's all short-lived and hardly static.

drivingmenuts 3y ago

How many of those games will actually run on modern hardware? And at what point do we tell the authors to fuck off - they’re not getting paid any more! Because that is what you are advocating.

srlowe 3y ago

It's like this with so much media, it drives me crazy. For instance, in the country I'm currently in there is no way to legally watch a lot of movies - not because of censorship or anything, they are simply not distributed, even on google-play, amazon etc. No choice but it use torrent. Why?

cush 3y ago

The opening thesis of the article is very misleading - that endangered video games would be like Titanic only being available in the library of congress. Titanic was a blockbuster released in 1997, so it would be like Final Fantasy VII only being available at library of congress, which it isn’t. In fact FFVII is continuously being rereleased on modern consoles

wiz21c 3y ago

Many movies are locked the same way because their owner think they're not worth publishing again and after all, it's their stuff, they do/don't do whatever they want with it. It'd be so much better if copyright was limited for say, 30 years. So that you could pay when you're young and get it for free when you're old... So you'd pay for novelty, not for content. Dunno...

cush 3y ago

One thing not mentioned in the article or comments here is how open source enriches the historical significance of a piece of software. No game will stand the test of time like Doom has, thanks to its source being available (and of course, elegant).

johncessna 3y ago

I really wish the study matched the headline. It should be 'most classic video games are commercially unavailable' To their credit, they don't try to hide it, but the sentiment in the headline is the actual problem, in my mind. I'm less concerned about a gameboy game that you can't buy, but you can easily play via emulators or the physical cartridges, which still exist (for now), than I am with the class of games that are truly gone/unplayable. Your online only games primarily fall into this bag, but without something like an internet archive or something similar to preserve them, we're in danger of losing the digital copies of old games as well. Personally, I'd like to see the study expanded and then some sort of index that tracks true loss of media over time.

crtified 3y ago
It may also be pertinent to note that it's an entirely USA-centric article and study. A distinction the article makes in it's first paragraph: "87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered". Not to unduly belittle that metric! - nobody would argue that the USA is not a major player (the biggest, in some respects) - but it's still a significant distinction. The articles nuance of copyright laws, and its figures, and its proposed activism, are all specific to that one national jurisdiction.

baerrie 3y ago

Piracy to the rescue! The companies with the endangered IP should make a deal to forgive key piracy hubs in exchange for archiving their games into perpetuity. Earthbound is a great example of an incredibly influential game that is very expensive in its original form but widely available illegally, having inspired multiple generations of game developers that played it this way that otherwise would not have. How can we simply call this “theft”?

pkaye 3y ago

How have other countries (Japan, EU countries) handled this issue of preserving access to classic video games?

padobson 3y ago

25-30 years ago, there was a game studio called 2am Games that made a series of strategy-type Java games that allowed online multiplayer. All the games were monetized with ad clicks. Click on an add, get 15 more minutes of play time. Their most popular game was an RTS called Chain of Command. You had a squad of four soldiers that you could position on an isometric board designed to look like a farm. 5-10 players would each run their four-man squads into a firefight and play some scenario - seek and destroy, capture the flag, etc. The other two games I enjoyed were a business strategy game called The Invisible Hand and another RTS where each player took a European country and conquered cities using robot-like walking tanks. All of the content from 2am Games is lost to history. Chain of Command has some clones out there, but I've never been able to find anything - roms, source code, clones, for the other games. It's a part of my childhood I'll never be able to re-experience. Edit: I got curious again and did some investigating. Here's their archived home page from 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970707215116/http://www.2am.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19970707215116/http://www.2am.co...

coreyp_1 3y ago

This is a thorny subject. Copyrite is, by definition, the control of the rights to copy. It is not a mandate that copying must be done, but rather an acknowledgement of the right to control the copies. And that must also, then, include the right to not distribute the work. This must be balanced with the notion of fair use, though. However, "but I want to access it" does not justify fair use. "I bought a copy and therefore will make backups so that I may enjoy it in the future" does, in my opinion. Libraries have exceptions codified in copyrite law. Technology has blurred the line as to what constitutes a library (just as it has for journalists, publishers, etc.). Some advocate for an escalating fee in order to protect copyrite for more and more time. I don't know if that is appropriate, since it seems to me as a form of extortion of rights. Not quite compelled speech, but similar. I don't know the solution, but I do feel as though our laws are broken and dysfunctional in this regard. I don't have a solution, though, because I honestly don't know enough of the problem domain. Then again, maybe that's the problem... One should not need to be a legal expert in order to keep from breaking the law!

miga 3y ago

Last call for preservation of our video game history. Right to preserve our culture should be enshrined in law, because otherwise it will disappear due to adverse relation with copyright law and novel art production.

phkahler 3y ago

Ever drive a model T? Can you find a 64 Mustang convertible? 1800s vintage tea cups? Lots of old things are scarce. Arcade games are in the same boat, but you've got MAME and I've got a bit-slice coprocessor and rasterizer ASIC controlled by a 6809 in I,Robot. Not sure how games are different from other antiques other than the possibility of emulation.

terlisimo 3y ago
The main difference is that creating a 100% perfect copy of a game costs next to nothing, and creating a new 100% perfect copy of model T is almost impossible, even if you have one to copy it from.

bbstats 3y ago

This remains to be true of the Star Wars trilogy...