Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Games

The Disappearance of Classic Video Games (gamehistory.org) 140

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The Video Game History Foundation: The Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, has conducted the first ever study on the commercial availability of classic video games, and the results are bleak. 87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered. 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. And what if no library, not even the Library of Congress, could do any better -- they could keep and digitize that VHS of Titanic, but you'd have to go all the way there to watch it. It sounds crazy, but that's the reality we live in with video games, a $180 billion industry, while the games and their history disappear.

For accessing nearly 9 in 10 classic games, there are few options: seek out and maintain vintage collectible games and hardware, travel across the country to visit a library, or... piracy. None of those options are desirable, which means that most video games are inaccessible to all but the most diehard and dedicated fans. That's pretty grim! This is where libraries and archives should come in. Anyone should be able to easily explore, research and play classic video games, in the same way that they can read classic novels, listen to classic albums, and watch classic movies. But outdated copyright laws are preventing institutions like ours from doing our jobs.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

The Disappearance of Classic Video Games More

The Disappearance of Classic Video Games

Comments Filter:

  • need to deal with abandonware in copywirte laws (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:52PM (#63674291)

    need to deal with abandonware in copywirte laws

    • You would have to fundamentally change (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @01:15PM (#63674391)
      Our political system.

      Companies don't want to have to compete with their older products. This is why Nintendo drip feeds classic games. Think about the old Disney vault.

      This means you're going to have a huge amount of lobbying preventing any changes to law that would make abandonware an official thing.

      You would need to get money out of politics and is really only one way to do that. You need a population that is so well educated and so well trained in critical thinking that advertising does not work on them. People who reflexively question any claim made to them.

      That sounds great in theory but there are so many reasons why that would get shut down hard I don't even know where to begin. I mean look at the whole critical race theory controversy. That's literally a graduate level course and there's a giant controversy about teaching it to grade schoolers.

      Now try to imagine getting support for teaching generalized critical thinking skills and the ability to evaluate arbitrary claims made by groups and individuals. Right off the bat every single organized religion will fight that tooth and nail (seriously go read your preferred holy book and try to square it with the world we live in). Then you're going to have billionaires who rely on prosperity Gospel to excuse their horrific wealth while they run their companies and the economies into the ground. If I may be so bold and suspend a little karma try to imagine if people who believe Elon Musk is a genius would continue doing that after watching him run Twitter if they had their full critical thinking skill set ingrained in them from childhood.

      There's just too much money to be made with a population that does what it's told and can't critically evaluate claims. And the only way you're ever going to get money out of politics for good is with a population like that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PCM2 ( 4486 )

        Companies don't want to have to compete with their older products.

        What? You can't compete with yourself. Whether I pay you for a new game, an old game, or a sandwich, you still make money.

    • Agreed, their should be an availability clause to material, where if the publisher no longer distributes content, after a short grace period, it should be freely available.

      No more Disney Vault crap.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It would need to require that the company does work to make it available.

        Strip out the DRM. Publish the sever code because the game requires the server to run. Add functionality to the game to allow it to use different servers, not just the hard-coded ones. Make it possible to replace the signing certificates and crypto keys that are used to prevent cheating.

        If it's a console game you are still screwed, until someone finds a way to run arbitrary code on that machine. I suppose you could mandate that the con

    • Or return copyright to a reasonable length, somewhere around 20 years. Preferably both.

    • Does not solve the issue in the slightest. Unless games are open sourced old content will eventually die the death of lack of hardware to play it on. Mind you the archaic source of classic games may not even be able to guarantee its possible to get them to run on modern hardware.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by codebase7 ( 9682010 )
      No need. The people have had their say: They don't give a fuck.

      Personally, I wish it was different. But in a country that can't even be bothered to prevent swindlers from causing electrical grid failures that get people killed, or corporate price gougers from jacking up prices on essential goods (food, medicine, shelter, etc.) because they can, or that treats women as property and forces them to go through pregnancies caused by rapists. What makes you think that the loss of videogames to the sands of time

      • No need. The people have had their say: They don't give a fuck.

        It's worse than that. People are so naive, they are actively fighting against their own best interests.

        A while ago, Valve announced they are ending support for Steam under Windows 7, and made it clear that games will not work at all unless you upgrade to a newer version of Windows. I balked about this, suggesting that if they refuse to support the DRM on older OSes, that the DRM should simply expire, so I can continue to play my games on Windows 7. Amazingly, I was blasted and downvoted into oblivion, in

    • Re:need to deal with abandonware in copywirte laws (Score:4, Interesting)

      by narcc ( 412956 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @02:08PM (#63674665) Journal

      Indeed. Just last week, I posted here about the need for a 'use it or lose it' provision to copyright. Another user, alexgieg, has a similar idea he calls 'copyduty'. That is, if you have the 'copyright' then you also have a 'copyduty' to make the work available. I'm of the opinion that this should be applied to any work that was previously made available. If the copyright holder loses interest in the work and stops distributing it for some predetermined period, then they forfeit their copyright and it returns to the public domain.

      This ambiguity around abandonware frustrates software preservation efforts by keeping them underground. I've written emulators for quite a few old computer systems, but distributing things like firmware or other necessary software along with them feels like you're including a time bomb. Not that the owners, if any exist, would know or care, but whoever is hosting your files probably has a policy that forbids it.

      The Internet Archive has been helpful here, playing host to an unimaginable amount of old software that would otherwise be scattered across the internet or never uploaded in the first place.

      Time isn't on our side with this stuff. Software is unique in that it needs to be actively preserved, along with a ton of information about the hardware that it was designed to run on. It doesn't take long for us to forget things either. There's hardware less than 30 years old that I can't find any information about. That leaves you guessing about what the software is supposed to be doing and you can never be quite sure if you've got it right.

  • Nintendo needs to stop forcing re buying for each new console of the older games they have on there own emulation system

  • Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:54PM (#63674299)

    Piracy may not be desirable, but it is necessary for an archivist. The games aren't endangered, it's just that the preservationists are persecuted for preventing the endangerment.

    The copyright term is ridiculous, especially for digital assets, and there should be an abandonment clause that places IP in the public domain. If there is no economic activity associated with the IP, the whole point of the copyright term is defeated.

    • some paided emulation systems suck next to the free ones.
      You know what will be better to be able to just buy the roms and use your own emulation apps. But even then you may not be able to buy the beta roms / (rights to use the modded roms) / etc.
      also some paided emulation systems force censorship on the rom code vs what they used to be.

      • All paid emus suck compared to free ones, and all closed source ones suck compared to the open ones.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Z80a ( 971949 )

          It's interesting how it generally goes.
          Most people just don't care or have knowledge on how to make the emulation better. but then there is ONE person that does, and this ONE PERSON alone fixes everything if its possible to do so, which is generally only the case with open source emulators.
          It's not the dream of having hundreds of developers making a difference (unless it's mame), but there is one person that will come, and your emulator must be ready to accept this person.
          https://games.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dddux ( 3656447 )

      Absolutely agreed on the copyright issues. When I saw the title I was like "what?" since I'm playing like mad on my Debian Linux (!) and I'm using only MAME, PSX and PS2 emulators. There are so many games to choose from that I don't even need anything else. But yes, I'm not a gamer at all. I just play for fun at times.

  • Piracy is democratic archival (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Currently_Defacating ( 10122078 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:57PM (#63674307)
    When companies use pirated games/software to offer old IP they have lost themselves, maybe we should question the whole copyright thing.
  • I think being able to download and play the majority of games ever created on a modern computer for free is pretty cool, personally. Itâ(TM)s basically what I wished for as a kid.

  • https://caextreme.org/ [caextreme.org]

    Classic video game convention. Pay some cash, play all day. If you are into classic games, that is the convention for you, and there's a lot of collectors there to connect with.

    Seriously, it's awesome.

    • some of that hardware is hard to keep running.
      Also laser disk arcade games are hard to find working players for

    • So unless you're going to take the games home that's not going to scratch the itch. And the problem with taking the games home is the price of them is skyrocketing due to market manipulation. Go look into some of the crap companies like brian's toys and entertainment Earth and WATA are doing.

      You've got a market with steady demand and a guaranteed limited supply. Somebody is always going to notice that and move in to screw the market for their own profit. And it doesn't take much. I remember a retro game

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      That kinda falls under "Travel to the Library of Congress".

      I'm in Europe. Are you saying the only reasonable way I have for playing old video games is hopping on a flight to California at a specific time of year?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xevioso ( 598654 )

        Yes. San Jose is quite nice in August, and also, you will be smack in the middle of the tech center of the world (Silicon Valley), so you can do lots of other things too.

        • San Jose has nothing that I couldn't get here. And I don't even like to go to the stuff here.
          What does San Jose have? A desert? I have seen beaches. Not impressed. I doubt a giant sand field is worth seeing in person.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PCM2 ( 4486 )

          On the contrary; San Jose is a wasteland all year round.

    • Fuck no! That is fucking terrible. I am not paying $60 to get into a room with a bunch of old video games.
      Especially wouldn't travel for it.

  • I prefer the classics (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:59PM (#63674325)

    I love the classic video games from the 70's through the 90's. I've even gone as far as to program my own 100% cloned versions to play them. So much could be learned from their source code if game manufacturers would only allow 20+ year old games to enter the open source arena. Nothing inspires new programmers like the thought of learning how to make their own games.

    • Most of the major classics have been so thoroughly analyzed by lunatics who know way too much assembly for their own good that if you're looking to develop for a classic game console unless it's something really obscure like the Bally astrocade you have an insane amount of resources now. And anything from the PlayStation 2 era and on has developer kits and tools leaked online.

      The craziest is that the source code for Zelda 64 and Mario 64 haven't been leaked they've been reversed engineered by the compil

    • Nothing inspires new programmers like the thought of learning how to make their own games.

      And nothing demotivates more than learning some old archaic language or trick that doesn't apply or worse flat out fails in the modern era. I'm all for preservation, but there's nothing to learn from old games other than how to make games for hardware that is no longer available.

      • there's nothing to learn from old games other than how to make games for hardware that is no longer available.

        Couldn't disagree more. A lot of those old games were pioneers of various techniques and technologies, so you can oftentimes find simple examples of early technical approaches to collision detection, 3D rendering, or other needs that still exist today. A lot of those approaches became significantly more sophisticated with time, until eventually them were abstracted away and then subsumed by engines like Unreal or Unity, making them that much more difficult for programmers to easily understand if they want t

      • Those old game source codes are a master class in game programming. Just the algorithms alone used in Pac-Man's ghost chases are genius. Do programmer's today understand the trig involved to determine distance, collision detection, line intersection, etc.. or do they rely on an engine to do those now? No sir, you are wrong, MUCH can be learned from 20 year old game code. The first time as a novice programmer you get ray tracing working correctly to create a simple Wolfenstein 3D level feels powerful. Let th

  • FFS, you can find products like this [amazon.com] all over the place that sell virtually every game for a particular platform on a single cartridge or standalone glorified RPi.

    I can't recall the last time I saw a story about Nintendo taking much action over this since it appears that they're making the money they want to make now courtesy of Switch Online. We spend $3.99/month for SNES support. To be honest, I think Nintendo's low key attitude toward companies that get their old stuff pirated is now "fuck all y'all bitc

    • The company selling that is located in India. Does India recognize copyright of other countries? I know when I was stationed in Bahrain during Desert Shield/Storm you could purchase ANY media for $1. Software, books, CDs, cassette tapes, anything. They would copy it right there while you waited. I was told they could do this because Bahrain did not recognize international copyright law. Not sure if that was/is correct but it was bargain central for us Marines. I still have a few of the cassette tapes in my

  • A lot of early movies are lost as well. 87% is probably not even exaggerated [wikipedia.org]. If for different reasons. In the early days, copying a movie wasn't as easy as it is today. There was no need for copy protection, copying a movie meant that you had to have pretty expensive equipment in the first place. Only with the advent of magnet tapes, namely Beta and VHS, easy copying became a reality for the majority of people. That was only about 50 years ago. For the first 80 years of movies, there was a very real threat

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Torodung ( 31985 )

      Now games are facing the same fate.

      Except they aren't. Unlike film, the games are well preserved and documented, and well replicated all over the place in quasi-legal databases.

      But you will never be able to experience the way the people did that actually got to play it. Should've been born earlier if you wanted to experience it.

      And I will never be able to watch Kubrick's 2001 in 70mm on a screen where 70mm matters. I do miss that. I will miss novel control schemes like the yoke on Star Wars and the sit-down Star Trek captain's chair as well. If this article is about that, hate to say it, but it was written because Gen-X is getting old. Change is change. Overall, stuff is better.

  • Emulators and piracy are the solution when the copyright holders lock up their IP in "the vault" (thanks for that term, Disney).

    The bigger issue are games that died because the server-side back end was shut down. There are some Zynga games that will never be playable again, and quite a few mobile games which are destined for the same fate.

    I guess it's kind of hard to get upset over the loss of games that were primarily designed to suck money from your wallet, but it's still a bit of gaming history that is

  • As things age, they do become harder to find, and more valuable for those who really want those things. This life cycle goes faster for computer technology, than for cars.

  • Breaking of a social contract (Score:3)

    by Moof123 ( 1292134 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @01:30PM (#63674479)

    While copyright has had many serious issues, there was at least a bit of a promise that things would eventually enter the public domain. Copyright owners get protection through publicly funded federal prosecution now with the promise that we get access to the copyrighted material later. While this has been massively abused by near perpetual extensions, the agreement was at least there in theory. Many works eventually have come into the public domain.

    Companies that fail to preserve the copyrighted materials seem to have broken part of the deal. The public protects them now, and we simply never get access to the material. Ever. Maybe we should drop the criminal aspect of copyright enforcement, and leave it to the copyright holders as a civil matter? How would companies feel if they suddenly could no longer stick FBI warnings on everything? How about they have to do all the investigating themselves and people stop being put in publicly funded jails for copying or cracking a game?

  • Steam has screwed over Windows 98, XP, Vista and now 7 users. Forcing people to buy new computers just to keep the games they paid for. I am fully in favour creating a "7team" that would sell and support retro Windows versions forever as long as there is retro enthusiasts. It's a shame that I can still play on my Nintendo 64 but not my Windows 7 laptop. Piracy shouldn't be the answer either. Also classic cars being forced to the scrapheap for environmental reasons too, similar arguments.
    • *If* you can get the games DRM free, or *if* you can get them with some old physical DRM (SecuROM, Starforce, etc.), they will still work.

      For everything else, it's time to hit up SKIDROW and CODEX. No excuses anymore. Steam deciding to fuck over the legitimate buyers by refusing to provide the activation service for older systems and reneging on their promise to provide offline patches when Steam's activation service is no longer available, means that if you buy games on Steam, you're pissing away your mo

      • I've also started running into games that were fine but got patched to bugginess. RE2R added RT support a while back and additionally seems to have uglified HDR support and broken the 7.1 audio mix in a few places. Steam decided that you aren't allowed to hold games at a specific patch level anymore so stuff gets force patched to the latest whether you like it or not. RE2R at least has a "beta" that restores the old version, same for when Saints Row (3 or 4, I forget which) got updated to the Epic Game Stor

  • Back in the golden age of the internet no one used to care about old games that were no longer being sold (who would want that old stuff?) and many were archived in large collections. But once large companies discovered that there was money to be made in nostalgia they clamped down on 'piracy' of old games so hard and fast it made everyone's head spin. Up until even five or six years ago if you wanted to play an old Atari game or DOS game you could easily find it on one of several rom sites, but now most

  • I'm just fine with never watching "Titanic" again. Classic Video Games on the other hand? I do love me some Choplifter.

    • I love the IDEA of playing classic games, but every time I actually do it I quickly clue in the fact that I loved 'em because they were the best available at the time.

      Maybe once in a while I can play a couple of levels of Great Gianna Sisters, but that's about it.

  • We didn't buy that stuff when it wasn't called "classic".

    • Mod parent up for truthiness. The old days were glorious and piracy was expected. If your game didn't suck you'd still make money, but if it did the people who sampled it by piracy knew not to waste their money.

      Piracy is good for sales.If not for people bringing Office 97 CDs home from work the utter dominance MSFT got by that market chumming would be much reduced. Trying to get ALL the money is for when your customers are trapped by inertia or lack of alternatives your market chumming wiped out.

  • Nintendo and the rest have made it this way for a reason and will force it to continue.
    Those games are lost to time. Deal with it.
  • If you're playing good classic games, you're not paying the publishers for modern games.

  • " 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."

    No need to imagine because that is pretty much the situation with the original versions of Star Wars. The Library of Congress doesn't even have a copy because they can't get an unmolested version.

  • Not wrong but maybe a bit too alarmist? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @02:45PM (#63674819) Journal

    I feel like many of the classic 8-bit era video games are regurgitated almost endlessly, as people keep finding new ways to sell them. (EG. You can play some of the Atari classics like Missile Command on the screen in any Tesla, and mall kiosk stores were selling those miniature NES replicas with game collections pre-loaded on them everywhere, a few years back.)

    I bought one of these cocktail table type arcade "multicades" last year, thinking it would be great to have one in a spare room for guests to play, and to fool around with it myself occasionally. Like most of them getting custom built and resold on Amazon, eBay, or via web sites marketing them -- it uses one of the Chinese "Pandora Box" units as the computer brain for the whole thing. The "DX" model they used in mine allows flipping between vertical and horizontal oriented game titles by holding one of the controller buttons down for a few seconds -- so you can play the original coin-op titles the way they were intended to work on the cocktail tables. (Screen flips around so it's oriented length-ways for player 1 or player 2 as you take turns playing.)

    This one comes with literally several thousand game images on it on a micro SD card inside the unit, and you can add your own as well. Sure, it's all pirated. But it's interesting how all of these seem to fly under the radar. (Super easy to get your hands on a Pandora Box for around $100 or less.)

    Going through a bunch of the older games on there, though? I realize how probably 80% are pure "garbage" in the sense nobody I know would find them much fun to play for more than about 30 seconds to a minute, these days. Unlike a good novel, these just didn't age well. The blocky graphics with gaudy color schemes and real basic sound f/x or music aren't appealing by modern standards, and the games are often just not that fun. That's the real reason you only hear people reminiscing and wanting to relive playing the classics like Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers, Pac Man, Galaga, Space Invaders, Qix, BurgerTime, Zaxxon, Defender, etc. They're really the cream of the crop, that sometimes took one of the older, much worse quality games and elevated it to a new level by borrowing the core ideas in it. There are the random outliers that were just kind of cool but totally forgotten game titles. But having spent a lot of trying trying out as many as I could in this pretty extensive collection? I'd really say there may only be 250-350 games from the early days of coin-op gaming that most people would find worth keeping to play regularly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by coop247 ( 974899 )
      Look I grew up with old games, played the hell out of them them, loved them. Atari 2600, Commodore 64, been there done it.

      I've tried multiple iterations of "classic game" emulators, and the novelty wears off in about 5 minutes and current kids its over in about 30 seconds. Bad controls, repeated levels with no saves, brutal difficulty. They aren't fun.

    • Depends on whether you care about the authentic experience or not. Many of those devices are of poor quality, and not just in the build quality, but you may not be playing the real game. For the longest time most of those multi-game units were NES-on-a-chip devices which were crappy hardware clones of Famicom/NES hardware which would then get loaded with rough "ports" of 2600/7800 games and bootleg Famicom games and sold. To anyone who knows how the 2600 hardware works compared to the NES you may be wonderi

  • However they did it so that you could play all the games virtually in the "metaverse" that's what i want.

    • Fuck that movie. It was pure 80s nostalgia bait without any substance.
      Plus the ending was fucking terrible. So the two options are ads or some nanny asshole shit stain who decides when I can play? Fuck them both.

Slashdot Top Deals

Crazee Edeee, his prices are INSANE!!!

Close