That probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to retro gaming enthusiasts, but those outside the gaming community might not even know there is a problem…
Is there no sort of common property library of video games?
I feel like after 20 years a video game should become common property for people to download and enjoy for free.
Best I can do is 70 years.
70 years after the death of the author or 120 years, whichever is less. We can thank Disney for that one.
Who is the author of a video game, however? It’s a collaborative effort of hundreds of people, sometimes.
It’s a good point that certainly complicates things. Thanks to your comment, I also found this!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_video_games
I think the Copyright section has good related information.
But I thought the Mickey mouse protection act has only served to increase the diversity, well-being and development of artists everywhere!
Right?
Or is the reality that Disney and Warner can just buy all the art rights, sitting on those for the next hundred years in an endless cycle of power and wealth consolidation?
Nobody saw that coming at all.
Right?
I’m pretty sure the system has been severely skewed unfavorably for normal people.
Should also add an addendum where if the developer and/or publisher goes out of business, that should also apply.
They certainly wouldn’t be making any money off it afterwards.
For a lot of academics, the preservation of knowledge is super fascinating.
That said I don’t think there is anything exceptional about video games in the larger scheme of things. Media, like cassettes and VHS will also suffer from this issue. If you’re a Star Wars fan here’s a random example. There is apparently a stockpile of Star Wars books turned into audiobooks accessible only for the disabled and blind. This stock is stored in some Congress library. That fact always interested me.
The situation for scientific research is similar. A lot of computational work done in the 60s-80s is lost because the media was not backed up or preserved. So thousands of scientific papers are not easily reproducible. I remember looking into a famous paper about climate change models published in the 70s. They recently asked the author if he still had the codes that generated that model and he basically said “heck no”. So all that knowledge is lost. We’ll never have an exact duplication of that important work from the 70s.
Same goes for a lot of the internet in the 90s. Some of it was backed up but a surprising amount is lost. Projects like the Internet Archive are so important for humanity’s preservation of data.
So yeah, the video game situation is interesting but in the grand scheme of things in the early tech era, it’s normal. A lot has been preserved via roms.
Humanity’s existed for hundreds of thousands of years without any kind of permanent medium, and we still do. It’s only in the very recent history of extreme archival that we’ve come to think that information should last forever.
Houses, cities, peoples, cultures, public works, countries, knowledge, technologies, languages - all that we are is ephemeral, and we’ll continue on
“Pirates” are actually “Archivists”, saving digital information for future generations to enjoy. Really, I’m not a selfish data hoarder, I’m preserving history!
Who wants to admit that there are a whole hell of a lot of bad classic games?
True, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t preserve them just the same.
I mean sure, preserve them. But that’s like saying we should be preserving poorly written trashy romance novels. I guess we could, but shouldn’t be a top priority for anyone.
Culture provides a shared experience making it easier to communicate with each other. Importantly it also provides a way for society to discuss and think about ideas as a group. That culture includes books, films, TV shows, songs, video games, oral storytelling, folk songs, etc. Each bit of culture builds upon what came before, and what is happening at the same time. The record of culture is forever imperfect, but that becomes more of a problem when parts of culture are lost for the future to be able to look at it. That loss makes it progressively harder for us to look to the past and actually understand it, besides making it harder to communicate with each other. Lack of the reference and understanding can help to perpetuate stereotypes, misunderstandings, injustice, or even actively damage stability of a society. While we are resilient, why would we want to make it harder and lose the knowledge of how we got here?
This article is arguable about forgetting a bit of history which has helped to perpetuate racism. Be aware this is about a “virulently racist song”, if that is a problem or trigger you probably shouldn’t read any further. Just know the roots of the ice cream truck song in the US at least is horrible and we should not use it. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/05/11/310708342/recall-that-ice-cream-truck-song-we-have-unpleasant-news-for-you
Imagine if you couldn’t buy classic movies or albums…
I’d be interested to know what the % is for movies and TV to be honest. I know Dr Who for example has like 100 episodes that have just been lost. There’s no copies of them anywhere that anyone knows of.
A lot of old films were lost in studio fires, or simply not putting in the effort to preserve. The software industry, and games in particular, have not learned from this at all.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Fox_vault_fire
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_MGM_vault_fire - tellingly “Despite the fire, 68 percent of silent films produced by MGM survived, the highest rate from any major studio.”
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire - reportedly nothing irreplaceable was lost. But master recording for a lot of muscians were lost.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films - “half of all American films made before 1950 and over 90% of films made before 1929 are lost forever” and “A study by the Library of Congress states that 75% of all silent films are now lost.”
A good chunk of it is due to archaic licensing rights, especially when franchises have switched publishers.
Likewise, music licensing is also notoriously a massive hold-up for these too. It’s not really Vice City if Billy Jean isn’t the first song you hear on the radio. Not to mention all of the games with EA Trax, those will likely never see a 1:1 retail re-release.
All the more reason why I’m not hopeful for the future of gaming, it feels as though the current generation will likely be the last with physical media.
Thankfully, there’s plenty of retro options available through emulation for those unwilling or unable to become retro collectors, and there’s enough quality gaming available that an individual would ever need to go past the 7th generation of consoles.
They’re flotsam, now. Only one way to get hold of flotsam.
Surprised that it’s that low TBH
Ever heard of RetroPi or Recalbox?
I’m not spending money on a game older than 20 years anyway. I can find that shit free online
I don’t want to minimize the impact to gaming history but for my retro needs de-makes on pico8 (https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php) help scratch the itch.
This is awful, to think that all this legacy would go to waste someday, I can’t fathom having all these unique experiences, all these stories and love letters to genres and cultures getting lost in the vortex of time.
I feel sad for the people that are just getting into gaming and them not experiencing games that made history, the good and the bad.
Something like this should be preserved even if just for study purposes, for those games before the digital era, the only options that are left for us are either piracy or emulation, and thankfully we do have these options but yeah we really should have future proofed this industry in some way.
I can’t fathom having all these unique experiences, all these stories and love letters to genres and cultures getting lost in the vortex of time.
Something something lost like tears in the rain. (Blade Runner)
Just know that every generation before you and every generation after feels the same about their culture/experiences. C’est la vie
Oregon Trail gone forever
