Our Video Game Heritage Is Rotting Away 492
eldavojohn writes "There's been a movement to preserve virtual worlds but MIT's Tech Review paints a dire picture of our video game memories rotting away in the attic of history. From the article: 'Entire libraries face extinction the moment the last remaining working console of its kind — a Neo Geo, Atari 2600 or something more obscure, like the Fairchild Channel F — bites the dust.' Published in The International Journal of Digital Curation, a new paper highlights this problem and explains how emulators fall short to truly preserve our video game heritage. The paper also breaks down popular SNES emulators to illustrate the growing problem with emulators and their varying quality. Do you remember any video consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey that are forever lost to the ages?"
Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
Lost amidst all of the desire to permanently archive and hold on to every bit of past memory is the idea that we're supposed to forget. It's built into our DNA. I'm not convinced that it is a practical or necessary goal to hold on to and remember every little thing, especially video game heritage.
Some people may choose to make it a hobby, or an obsession, and that's their prerogative, but as a society and as a species there's certain things that once they're lost they're just gone. And future generations will not be robbed of some great cosmic truth when there are no longer any more NES machines capable of playing an NES cartridge. We will keep this memories in our own minds until we ourselves perish, and then the next generation takes over and creates something new themselves. I don't feel there's any sense pining over this eventuality.
No fear. (Score:5, Insightful)
There will ALWAYS been crazy collectors that keep these things working, even if it means having parts custom made. If people can still own old automobiles that are drivable, they can still own old gaming consoles kept in tip-top shape.
Fair use (Score:3, Insightful)
Copying a game you own in order to run it on a different machine is fair use and doesn't require permission from anyone. The writers of this paper seem to take Nintendo's word as to what type of emulation is actually legal.
But then again, what do you expect from a paper that uses the term "128-bit system"?
Re:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the fact we forget is the very reason we end up reliving the same nightmares over and over again. I'll forgo the foray into politics...
Re:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, preserve it now, let future generations decide what to study and what to ignore.
By the way, I wonder what medium we should use if we want to store data for a really, really long time. It'd be nice if there was an "Ask Slashdot" on this. Ah well. One can only dream...
Re:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't feel there's any sense pining over this eventuality.
Well, if you firmly believe that video games and the digital interactions they provide to the player are art and part of our culture (and I personally do) then yes it does make sense for society to have a prerogative to save these video games. Why give up on video games when we've spent so much time, money and resources saving the Mona Lisa, Sistine Chapel, the Statue of Liberty or old phonograph recordings of dead musicians? Your view is quite callous to the hours spent developing and imagining these video games as well as the hours spent enjoying them.
Whatever plan that can be instituted to save games should be done now before too many consoles are lost to the ages.
And to think emulation is fought fiercely (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks to emulation, many of these older games have secured their spot in the memory of a digital society. Shame that the current generation of consoles is locked down in every way imaginable; perhaps historical obscurity is getting what they deserve. They will be remembered for their litigiousness rather than their art.
Re:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not to say that every game was noteworthy, but there are some that are worthy of preservation, not because of nostalgia but because they have value inof themselves.
Documentation (Score:1, Insightful)
If they properly document the systems they create (along with their eccentricities that programmers take advantage of) then it wouldn't be such a big problem... but when you get cases such as the PlayStation 2, which Sony can't reliably emulate, that's where you have a problem.
Computer Games Too! (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, I'm even worried about computer games. I collect old Macs and games to play on them. While the machines are still out there, various accessories for such are getting harder to find as are the actual games. While on the PC, theoretically, they'll play on a newer machine, the Mac platform has had a couple of changes of processor types that make sit hard to carry software over. Classic isn't even an option on the Intel Mac. There are tons of old games for the Mac toasters alone that formed a good deal of early computer gaming history and are still fun to play: Net Trek, Lunar Rescue, Ancient Art of War, etc. Every now and then I find a copy to buy, but I don't even have the games I played on an those old Macs, let alone the ones I never got to play.
I bet that even really old PC games have lots of issues, if you can track them down. I don't even want to think about what has happened to hardware and games for the old Apple ][s.
MAME does it right (Score:2, Insightful)
Most emulators have it the other way around, and use whatever code hacks or tweaks they can to get the most popular games up and running, replete with all of the glitches and inaccurate emulation which inevitably follow. Instead, they should follow MAME's example, and code for 100% perfect emulation relying solely on hardware guaranteed to be consistent (meaning the CPU). The tradeoff is that more technically advanced games take extremely powerful hardware to run - see Gauntlet Legends or similar games - but when they do they run perfectly, preserving the experience for future generations.
Preservation first, playability second.
Re:No fear. (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem-Solution gap (Score:3, Insightful)
There exists a wide gulf between the problem ('how do we store this stuff in a museum') and the proposed solution ('make it playable in the future'). It isn't as if the any of the aircraft in the National Air and Space Museum, for example, is ever taken out and flown by the museum guests. Does anyone really expect us to believe that seeing the Spirit of Saint Louis hanging up there is anything at all like the experience of crossing the Atlantic in it?
An adequate solution would be to record samples of the gameplay onto more future-proof media, blow up huge screenshots, and otherwise fabricate museum exhibits out of what we have left. This would mirror exactly the way we preserve everything else.
Typical geek silliness, if you ask me.
Re:Vectrex (Score:5, Insightful)
Those things were terrible. We replaced them because they were frustrating and annoying and reduced the gaming experience. What you remember is the joy of being younger, and while remembering that system might help YOU with that, it doesn't mean that society as a whole needs to remember them and put them on pedestals and more than we need to keep our old betamax tapes and laserdisks.
Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
Lost amidst all of the desire to permanently archive and hold on to every bit of past memory is the idea that we're supposed to forget. It's built into our DNA. [...] I don't feel there's any sense pining over this eventuality.
Wow - way to attack every single historian, archaeologist, paleontologist, archivist, librarian, and anyone interested in history in the planet by basically boiling it down to "It doesn't matter". If thats what you think, your history teacher wasn't very good. We learn from the past, we learn from history. Not just the mistakes, but also the successes. Not just the massive events, but also the mundane.
To say that "Forgetting" is in our DNA does not make a connection that "It is meant to happen" - that correlation needs to be shut down right away. Cancer is in your DNA. Ironically fitting, so is Alzheimers, which you may or may not get, which affects your memory. In fact, one of the greatest attributes humans have that give them an advantage over every other species is our memory.
If you don't care about your heritage, than you basically don't value your society. If you don't care that your grandparents fought in a war for YOUR freedom, you wouldn't value your freedom, because you wouldn't know you had it. Keeping Super Mario Bros. 3 in its original state might seem like a ridiculous goal now - but 3 or 4 generations from now, people will ask "What did people do with all their spare time?". It'd be great if we had that stuff in a museum for them to research, so that they can care about their heritage.
And like someone else said - let them decide what's important. Perhaps entertainment will be the main industry in the future, once industries are farmed out to robots.
Re:No fear. (Score:3, Insightful)
If people can still own old automobiles that are drivable, they can still own old gaming consoles kept in tip-top shape.
What was the last car you saw that was OLDER than the Model T?
They are very very very few and very very very far between. Video games in the 80's and 90's were only just starting to penetrate the market broad enough to be considered a household item. When you look at Cars older than those that were mass produced, you have trouble finding a collector for them.
Older consoles might share the same fate - replacement parts for the crazy collector require an equally crazy technician to create the parts that have been now rendered obsolete.
Re:Vectrex (Score:1, Insightful)
If you can't show how that worked in a realistic manner, then all that remains is the rose-colored memories of old-timers who are forever fond of the games they played when they were young. If you just want to play Space Invaders, an emulator with color graphics will do. If you want to preserve the heritage, then the handling of the actual devices can't be omitted.
CRT look (Score:3, Insightful)
The article mentions attempts at simulating CRT display artifacts, but it doesn't mention the most serious problem. CRTs light up each pixel for a very short time as the beam crosses them. LCDs keep all pixels lit constantly. This makes a big difference to motion, especially scrolling as found in 2D games. The CRT will always look sharper because there is no error with respect to time for each frame. Each frame is shown as single point in time, and the human visual system is very good at reconstructing motion from that kind of sampling. With the LCD style sample-and-hold display you can think of each frame as being composed of many samples spread over time, all except one of them being incorrect (shifted into the past or future). Visually this shows up as blurring. It's completely independent of the response time of the display. Even with instant pixel switching speed you'd still see this kind of blur.
You can see diagrams explaining the problem here:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/temprate.mspx [microsoft.com]
Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely (Score:3, Insightful)
It's funny how the ones who fight hardest against the spread of their works are, in effect, ensuring that their efforts will be forgotten and they will not leave a mark on gaming history. They are cementing themselves into a tomb of their own making, burying themselves alive.
heh.....in all honesty, if it came to a choice between having millions of dollars now, and being remembered by history after I am dead, I will take the millions of dollars now. It's not that I'm desperate for money, and I dislike DRM for other reasons, but being remembered by history 100 years from now does not matter to me at all.
Heck, for that matter I'd give up my place in history right now in exchange for a nice, slow cooked, savory cut of filet mignon. Hmmmm. Delicious. Yes, I am hungry right now, why?
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
At a sufficiently high resolution, the raster construction of a vector image is indistinguishable. I don't think a display with such high dpi currently exists, but, given enough time, it will.
Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but what a load of crap.
Disclosure time - I'm 33 years old, and my family had a Colecovision. I remember the age of the video arcade, as I grew up in it. I remember Cosmic Avenger, Gorf, and Qbert. And emulation had NOTHING to do with securing "their spot in the memory of a digital society."
What secures their spot in history was that they WERE played and enjoyed in their day. Whether there's an emulator out there for them now is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that they were played in their day, and the people who grew up playing them remembered them fondly. Emulation today is nothing more than a footnote.
Aside from which, a lot of the companies that made the original games went out of business years ago. Remember, the video games market crashed around 1990 or so. Nintendo survived, but very few others did. The Atari of today is not the Atari of back then. So who is fighting to keep them from being spread?
Now, there are some game companies that are still around, and yes, you may have to wait a while for a re-release of Final Fantasy III or the Legend of Zelda. But, seeing as I know of at least one Xbox release of classic arcade games, conservation work of a sort is happening.
And as for the current generation of consoles, they're right now the king of the hill. Furthermore, they are able to operate without the extensive DRM that is seen in computer games - and because they have a single platform to support, they work now and they will always work when plugged into a compatible system, which is more than can be said for computer games. With few exceptions, the big games are all for the consoles right now. I don't think obscurity is likely at all at this point.
Re:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if the investment bankers (or better yet the politicians who deregulated them) had remembered the horrors of the great depression.
Imagine if people had remembered Vietnam when we went in and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. (or even just when the Russian got tired of dying in Afghanistan)
Now, our "video game heritage" isn't nearly as important or weighty as that. But I like the patent for a hammer-mill strapped to a Cadillac that my grandfather had framed. I like the old silverware dad brought back from Thailand. I even like his super-ancient record of "the electric prunes".
So I really don't get the glorification of forgetting and ignorance. Starting with a black slate sucks.
Although, in an apparent about face, I'd agree that getting rid of useless junk and casting of materialism is a healthy thing to do. But keep the good stuff. (And that old TI machine with munch-man cartridge counts as "the good stuff").
So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Problem-Solution gap (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if a couple of screenshots, or even gameplay videos really preserve the work. You wouldn't think a select handful of notes from a symphony or some stills and the trailer to a movie are an adequate way of preserving the work.
In the case of the spirit of st louis, or the apollo spacecraft, i think there is a desire to convey how small this plane was, how cramped in there the astronauts were, etc. It's impractical to let anyone who wants to fly the plane across the atlantic, but i think the museum does expend a lot of resources on movies and exhibits and models trying to convey the experiences of the past to museum goers in the present.
it seems like ensuring there is an emulator capable of running metroid 100 years from now should be an easy task and preserve the game really well. Even better, the code should be preserved.
(i just picked metroid at random)
Re:New isn't always better (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
> I think the point of the question is, which medium will last and still be readable well into the future?
The Cloud.
The point of digital is to not fixate on one single point of failure to but to ensure that there is never any single point of failure. Copy works far and wide until the only way to wipe them all out is by slamming the planet with a rock the size of Texas.
The ancient works we have now did not get preserved because of better media. They were preserved because they were COPIED.
They were copied over and over again in a very labor intensive manner by very dedicated people.
COPYING preserves content.
Re:Vectrex (Score:5, Insightful)
But my laserdisk holds the proof that Han shot first.
Re:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
See, the thing is, with exponential growth in storage space it's not only practical, but actually trivial [thepiratebay.org] to preserve everything. Well, for the evil pirates it is, anyway :).
Re:No fear. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, that gets back to the issues highlighted in the article. Your 1929 Model A comes from an era where cars were still relatively new and finicky. Owners were expected to have the requisite skill to repair their machines. That, combined with the relative lack of faith in the reliability of the system meant that manufacturers made the engine and drivetrain easy to service, and also manufactured lots of spare parts. In short, the Model A is like a PC - a relatively open system where third parties can make parts that fit just as well as those made by the OEM.
Your '06 Taurus, on the other hand, is more like a console. These days, cars are expected to be reliable, and most owners are not mechanically proficient enough to service their own automobiles. That, combined with the increasing prevalence of electronic controls means that systems in modern automobiles are packaged up as black boxes with proprietary interfaces. This makes it very difficult for third parties to build replacements, while the lack of mechanical proficiency amongst the owners simultaneously reduces the demand for those parts. With all that in mind, its no surprise that its more difficult to find parts for your Taurus. Open systems will have larger ecosystems than closed systems, whether its a mechanical system (Model A vs. Taurus) or an electronic system (PC vs. console).
Re:Vectrex (Score:5, Insightful)
Mario will be remembered for hundreds of years. Emulators recreate the experience of the game. We can make a perfect replica of a Genesis or a NES if we need one for some gaming museum... but these obscure systems that most people don't remember? They're the other artists working at the same time as Van Gogh that nobody cares about because they aren't worth remembering. A lot of our childhood was shitty and of no merit and just because it holds special value to us personally doesn't mean it needs to be preserved by society as a whole. The important things will be remembered and preserved and the rest will land exactly where it belongs: by the wayside.
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't need to ride a Roman chariot across cobble stone roads to visualize how primitive it used to be.
Or to imagine playing Space Invaders or watching Star Trek in black and white. It's why I got rid of my old Atari and NES consoles and just emulate them instead. Less space needed for storage, fewer parts that need constant dusting, plus it's portable (fits in a laptop or phone).
Re:Vectrex (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
But we don't put terrible paintings in museums (modern art notwithstanding) to "gives context to the goodness". We forget it and remember the stuff worth remembering.
False. We put the early works of great painters in museums all the time. Look, here's an article about how some Ansel Adams negatives could be worth 200 million dollars [msn.com] because they are "images that didn't fit in anywhere, that show he is trying to discover his voice, to fully realized Ansel Adams masterpieces.""
That is EXACTLY the same thing as showing how we went from crude games to more sophisticated ones.
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod parent up!
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>have you sat in a dark room and played Doom 3 on a large screen with surround sound?
I think Doom is boring. Most FPSes are boring - pointless button mashers. The person who survives is the guy who sprays the most bullets. If they have some kind of compelling story, like Goldeneye and the first Red Faction had, it makes it worthwhile but for the most part I get bored after ten hours.
Give me IK+ anyday. Or Populous. That was a cool game.
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
As an aside, I wrote a significant project using PHP-GTK (version 1) some years ago. (2003?) Well, the php-gtk project has moved on to newer version (2) and have all but dropped support for PHPGTK1, documentation, everything.
Yet my project is still alive and well on the old version, and I'm doing an update to that program now! My only recourse for the documentation is (of course) archive.org, which has all the old documentation (dating all the way back to 2001) which is, for my purposes, very nearly as useful as the original documentation's website was.
I'd be lost without this archive! IMHO, archive.org should be incorporated into the Library of Congress and treated as an imperpetuity electronic archive of the Internet.
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
You can still buy new NES and Genesis consoles from Asia. Obscure / difficult ones like Vextrex are right out, but a lot of this old hardware "rotting" away is actually quite accessible.
I'm reminded of old cars. There are many great old cars worth preserving from the 1930's. But you're not going to be able to keep the original leather and parts... those will eventually rot away. That's the nature of the beast.
Arcade units in the 80's were largely purpose-built machines with non-standard technology. Keeping old machines alive is quite a pain. Emulated versions can be very close, and accessible to everyone. You can't always keep the exact leather, but you can keep the soul.
Re:Vectrex (Score:5, Insightful)
But most art is lost. And for good reason: because it's not worth saving. ...and who decides this? You?
No, we collectively decide what gets preserved with emulation or ports, directly by what we port, and indirectly by what we buy. If there's a game that no one ports to new generations of consoles, and no one emulates it, that's a reasonable indication that no one cared about it: it wasn't worth saving.
It's a little less arbitrary than what got saved in pompei. The amount of games preserved in emulation, at least for the moment, is pretty high. Especially the early generations, I mean you could fit the entire libraries of multiple early consoles on one $5 flash drive. Much more is going to be preserved than a city that was destroyed by a volcano.
Sure, it would be nice if we had the capability to preserve every game out there. Feel free to spend your time and money doing that for games no one is interested in. Until someone wastes money like that, preserving the classics and trashing the disposable works for every art form out there, and "what games do people want to see ported or emulated" is a generous standard.
Frankly It's a little pretentious to take GP's observation in the way that you did. He didn't nominate himself to be the one deciding which games were good and which ones were bad.
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
This way of thinking really bothers me and I'm surprised to see it on slashdot.
Of course some of the games are crude and maybe considered 'not worth remembering'. But tell me, who decides that? Based on what? The graphics? On that metric almost all of them aren't worth remembering. In movies, the story is king, but in videogames, gameplay is king.
Yes some of them are crude and basic, but others have amazing gameplay and are just plain fun.
I don't care what decade it is, defender kicks ass. Asteroids kicks ass. But most youngins today would look at that and dismiss it in 5 seconds.
When attempting to preserve history, ones opinion must be put aside and preserve the good with the bad.
Re:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
The real joke here is, the problem with digital storage is that the only way to preserve digital information in the long term is to make many copies of it, and recopy it frequently. So, the best available way to preserve digitized cultural artifacts -- music, videos, games, etc. -- is to get them out on the peer-to-peer networks and keep them circulating. The "pirates" are doing more for the long term welfare of humanity than their opponents.
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>I probably won't use you as a reliable source for FPS reviews
Why not? I have modern consoles (PS2, X360, Wii) and newer games just like most people. The fact I also enjoy classic gaming (as far back as 1977) shouldn't diminish my opinion of FPSes...... on the contrary I would think it would enhance my opinion, because I and my fellow classic gamers have the longview of the genre, not just the recent past.
BTW another FPS I enjoyed was Metroid Prime..... mainly because it wasn't about shooting/button mashing. It was more of a hide-and-seek type game, just like the original NES and Super Nintendo games. Nintendo called it an "FPA" and that's probably the best description.
.
>>>There were so many different types of gameplay that 3D perspectives just can't give you!
You're right. There are a lot of Commodore=64, Amiga, and Super Nintendo game styles that simply don't exist in the modern 3D world, because the companies figure anything less than 3D won't sell. So those styles died out.
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
Business blunders don't mean it was a bad system and the company didn't have awesome engineers. To regard an incredibly innovative entire platform created through blood, sweat and tears from the ground up as irrelevant because a few greedy execs f**ked up is retarded. Vectrex was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition as far as playability and tech went. Gimme a Vectrex over an Atari 2600 any day.
The system was great and lots of fun to play but expensive to produce among other things.
Atari is dead and has been a long time, someone bought the brand name. The Atari 800 and Atari ST's were incredibly innovative platforms that are long dead as well but still culturally relevant.
Not succeeding in a business sense doesn't mean your products are shit. Analyzing older systems to gain engineering insight and see how they solved strange issues is also fascinating.
And why the hell can't we preserve everything? We could if we cared too.
In fact, I think the NES was one of the most UNINTERESTING platforms simply because they were so common and not very innovative.
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Insightful)
Pompei is an instructive example and I'm glad you used it. Archaeologists learned an ENORMOUS amount about how people lived in that era because the lava essentially flash-froze a city. The arbitrariness of Pompei was enormously beneficial to posterity because as it turns out the people between us and them had no idea what the future would want to know about the past or didn't care.
Humanity has a long history of burning, tossing, losing, and destroying its cultural history only to have scholars hundreds or thousands of years later lamenting that loss. It's unknowable what we lost when the Library of Alexandria got burned down. We nearly lost the ability to read hieroglyphs, but for the partially shattered Rosetta stone. The BBC Domesday laserdiscs were created and lost within living memory and there's no question that it would have been valuable to have kept them.
Accurate, robust, valuable archives do not work well with the stochastic market- and whim-driven collective approach that you recommend. Over and over again, the things that are uninteresting NOW become things that are extremely interesting in the future.