Meet the Guy Preserving the New History of PC Games, One Linux Port At a Time (404media.co) 21
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Historically, video game preservation efforts usually cover two types of games. The most common are very old or "retro" games from the 16-bit era or earlier, which are trapped on cartridges until they're liberated via downloadable ROMs. The other are games that rely on a live service, like Enter the Matrix's now unplugged servers or whatever games you can only get by downloading them via Nintendo's Wii Shop Channel, which shut down in 2019. But time keeps marching on and a more recent era of games now needs to be attended to if we still want those games to be accessible: indies from the late aughts to mid twenty-teens. That's right. Fez, an icon of the era and indie games scene, is now more than a decade old. And while we don't think of this type of work until we need it, Fez, which most PC players booted on Windows 7 when it first came out, is not going to magically run on your Windows 11 machine today without some maintenance.
The person doing that maintenance, as well as making sure that about 70 of the best known indie games from the same era keep running, is Ethan Lee. He's not as well known as Fez's developer Phil Fish, who was also the subject of the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, but this week Lee started publicly marketing the service he's been quietly providing for over 11 years: maintenance of older games. "The way that I've been pitching it is more of like, the boring infrastructure," he said. "Let's make sure the current build works, whereas a lot of times, people feel like the only way to bring a game into a new generation is to do a big remaster. That's cool, but wouldn't have been cool if Quake II just continued to work between 1997 and now without all the weird stuff in between? That's sort of why I've been very particular about the word maintenance, because it's a continuous process that starts pretty much from the moment that you ship it."
As he explains in his pitch to game developers: "the PC catalog alone has grown very large within the last 15 years, and even small independent studios now have an extensive back catalog of titles that players can technically still buy and play today! This does come at a cost, however: The longer a studio exists, the larger their catalog grows, and as a result, the maintenance burden also grows." Just a few of the other indie games Lee ported include Super Hexagon, Proteus, Rogue Legacy, Dust: An Elysian Tail, TowerFall Ascension, VVVVVV, Transistor, Wizorb, Mercenary Kings, Hacknet, Shenzhen I/O, and Bastion. [...] With the PC, people assume that once a game is on Windows, it can live on forever with future versions of Windows. "In reality, what makes a PC so weird is that there's this big stack of stuff. You have an x86 processor, the current-ish era of like modern graphics processors, and then you have the operating system running on top of that and its various drivers," Lee said. A change to any one of those layers can make a game run badly, or not at all.
The person doing that maintenance, as well as making sure that about 70 of the best known indie games from the same era keep running, is Ethan Lee. He's not as well known as Fez's developer Phil Fish, who was also the subject of the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, but this week Lee started publicly marketing the service he's been quietly providing for over 11 years: maintenance of older games. "The way that I've been pitching it is more of like, the boring infrastructure," he said. "Let's make sure the current build works, whereas a lot of times, people feel like the only way to bring a game into a new generation is to do a big remaster. That's cool, but wouldn't have been cool if Quake II just continued to work between 1997 and now without all the weird stuff in between? That's sort of why I've been very particular about the word maintenance, because it's a continuous process that starts pretty much from the moment that you ship it."
As he explains in his pitch to game developers: "the PC catalog alone has grown very large within the last 15 years, and even small independent studios now have an extensive back catalog of titles that players can technically still buy and play today! This does come at a cost, however: The longer a studio exists, the larger their catalog grows, and as a result, the maintenance burden also grows." Just a few of the other indie games Lee ported include Super Hexagon, Proteus, Rogue Legacy, Dust: An Elysian Tail, TowerFall Ascension, VVVVVV, Transistor, Wizorb, Mercenary Kings, Hacknet, Shenzhen I/O, and Bastion. [...] With the PC, people assume that once a game is on Windows, it can live on forever with future versions of Windows. "In reality, what makes a PC so weird is that there's this big stack of stuff. You have an x86 processor, the current-ish era of like modern graphics processors, and then you have the operating system running on top of that and its various drivers," Lee said. A change to any one of those layers can make a game run badly, or not at all.
Windows 7 games *won't* work on Windows 11? (Score:1)
Isn't that literally the only reason why people use Windows? Compatibility with older Windows software? If Windows 11 can't run a game designed for Windows 7, what's the point?
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With the current version of Office as the example, Microsoft itself wants you to use a webpage instead of actual software. To them, PC gamers don't matter. They want to sell you an Xbox.
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A lot of Windows 7 games will soon not be able to run on Windows 7 itself.
Why?
Because Valve has decided to make Steam not working anymore on Windows 7 at the end of this year. I suppose it is due to Google's decision to have its browser stop working on Windows 7, and the fact so many programs just suck Google's dick and use a Chromium derivative for their interface (yes AMD graphics panel, I'm looking at you, you swollen piece of crap taking 10s or more to open).
Thus, a lot of windows 7 games you have ((((B
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I migrated from Windows 7 straight to EndeavorOS in April of this year. I gotta say, all my games and software do run better :)
Why save Fez (Score:1)
Fez was buggy as hell and never worked.
I downloaded through steam. Ran it. It tells me to press A. I press A. Nothing happens.
This bug has persisted for many years. It was a waste of money. No response to the bug report on steam.
This turd does not need polishing.
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Fez was buggy as hell and never worked.
I downloaded through steam. Ran it. It tells me to press A. I press A. Nothing happens.
I literally just tried running it through Steam...
With controller: "Press A to start" - starts when pressing A on my XBox controller
With keyboard: "Press Enter to start" - starts when pressing the return key
Works fine.
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Nope. It wanted 'A' pressed. It said that on the screen. I was playing on a PC with a keyboard and mouse.
Being not completely stupid, I tried every bloody key on the keyboard. No starting to be had.
It was shite.
Maybe it wanted a controller. But there was no controller attached and without being able to press A, there was no apparent way to get to some configuration to change it to keyboard mode.
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Just installed it on linux.
With a controller attached is says "press A", without a controller "press Enter". Either way you Enter works.
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And this is the bug. On windows without a controller it wants a controller button pressing.
I just tried it on macos (I'm traveling and so away from my windows game PC) and it asks for enter and works.
Well it worked for a little bit, then I tried to quit. It ignored all keystrokes you might press to end the program, so I had to pull up a terminal and kill -9 it.
It's just shoddy software and I hate it as a result.
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I guess this is a rare case where the linux port is better than the native windows version.
Hats off to Ethan for such a great job.
Steam is part of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
GoG cut their teeth on preservation of old PC games. Sadly Fez still isn't available on GoG, even after all these years. The publisher should fix that.
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Also Fez works fine in Win11.
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Valve has done a lot of work with Proton to bring Windows gaming to Linux. With my own Steam Deck I can say the results are pretty impressive. There is no need to install Windows on it to try and get better compatibility or anything like that, unless you have very specific games you consider must-haves.
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Alright I got to make another command since this is still bugging me.
Steam and Valve have done a lot more to champion gaming on Linux than anyone else, I think, except maybe WINE project contributors and contributors to WINE forks (especially CodeWeavers), whose work they built on top of.
First, Steam was Windows only, which I think was understandable since gaming is largely a Windows thing. But the Microsoft once again experimented with a version of Windows that was a locked down walled garden that could on
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Meanwhile Gog still sells games from the 90s and makes them work. Linux? Meh whatever.
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By bundling them with dosbox which is not theirs. Dosbox has made old msdos games (and some programs) work in Linux for decades, before GoG even existed. Dosbox doesn't particularly care where it runs, and such travesty as running it in windows or elsewhere works. The contribution of GoG here is... presets? Look at what Steam does in comparison, their Wine fork Proton, their Linux portable, etc.
There is also the very excellent ScummVM for a bunch of games which is even better than a dos emulation, mostly si