I wonder how all of this will work with the current games, in the age of steam digital publishing, reliance on cloud servers, and purposefully bloated games to hundreds of gigabytes so that they are harder to pirate. This also makes it harder to archive them.
Steam is a double-edged sword. I have access to 15 year old games on all of my computers today. This would be a challenge for a game distributed on a disk with DRM. However, my 1000+ USD library could vanish with one internet outage, if steam goes bankrupt, if steam makes legal missteps, if steam decides they don't like me, etc.
I de-googled to avoid being at the mercy of a for-profit company for more important identity-related matters, but it'd be a sad day if I ever lost access to the archive of games.
At least some of those aspects are only temporary, if they are an issue at all: Already in the 90s we had 10MB games that were shipped on a CD with the rest of the CD being filled with the game soundtrack as CD Audio. Pirating the whole game including the soundtrack was unrealistic for most people back then, but these days you'd laugh at the size. The same will be true for this generation's "huge" games in just a few years. The real obstacle to preservation are the DRM schemes you mentioned.
> purposefully bloated games to hundreds of gigabytes so that they are harder to pirate
This is an unfair claim. Games aren't purposefully bloated so they are harder to pirate. 4k textures are 16 times larger than 1k textures, so even with large amounts of compression, just the switch to 4k textures will likely make games 10x larger than they were. Games nowadays come with localised audio which is often uncompressed because storage has gotten larger, cheaper and faster, and it drastically reduces the cpu overhead of audio playback which can be a significant chunk of time and is a very noticeable issue when it stutters.
Games also have significantly more content than they had in the earlier days because people demand it. Starfox (a game mentioned in the article) has a "completionist" time [0] of 5 hours - compre that to a game like Monster Hunter Rise (I used this as an example as I'm playing it right now), that has a main story play time of 15 hours [1].
Star fox and Monster Hunter are different kinds of games. RPGs and dungeon crawlers have asked for dozens of hours of grinding for a very long time.
However, it is much more pleasurable and less of a grind when fighting monsters made up of a million 3D triangles as opposed to one made up of 100 2D squares.
I seem to remember that some old program was in fact purposefully bloated (by including a copy of ... something(?) encrypted with a random key, i.e. essentially a chunk random data, on the installation CD) to make it harder to transfer via the slow connections of the time.
(I wanted to make a snarky irrelevant note but now I want to remember what it was.)
I don't believe the intention was padding the size, given the main shipping format was disks rather than downloads, but perhaps you're thinking of this?
Often times designers copy the same resource many times to build a level/game. Maybe they modify the resource a little bit, but it's still mostly a copy. There is no deduplication, the n copies get stored n times. Admittedly, it's also done to improve load times, but making piracy harder is I think another benefit for the game creators.
What I think it's harder to preserve is the fact that modern games are often constantly updated with new content to the point that sometimes not much of the original experience remains. For example Terraria 1.0 is wildy different from 1.4 released almost 10 years later and this can be said of most modern titles, especially ones that were released in early access.
Not to talk about online games, titles like Fortnite, Warframe, Destiny to name a few are all constantly evolving with new content releases that alter basically everything. Good luck preserving and replaying some specific updates if you ever feel nostalgic about it.
Same thing with mobile games, they’re constantly adapting to trends or doing seasonal updates. I feel like this is overlooked because “serious” gamers don’t care about mobile games, but one day people are going to be nostalgic for the Halloween 2014 update of candy crush.
Additionally games at this point are effectively incomplete and "Day One Patches" are leveraged to get extra time to fix bugs.
Now mostly this is leveraged to finish up the online features (ie. pvp), as one obviously can't play online without connecting to the net, and then that's an opportunity to download a patch. However, these patches do have other fixes and surely there are some companies that are leveraging this significantly more than others for general fixes that have nothing to do with online features.
Reliance on servers controlled entirely by the developer is the biggest enemy of video game conservation by far.
Digital games can be pirated. DRM that runs on the client can be fooled or bypassed with enough effort. Storage is becoming cheaper as time goes by. Time is generally not critical for any of these.
Unlike all of these things, reliance on servers has no real solution and is a guaranteed ticking timebomb. Many games released today (manly "live service" games) have no offline mode and simply cannot fully function offline even if they're reverse-engineered and modified to do so, because a significant part of the game logic code and data is simply not present on the client. Often the only real hope is attempting to reverse-engineer the server logic and capture relevant data via packet sniffing so custom server software can be developed that emulates the behavior of the official servers accurately enough to allow the game to be played, but games nowadays are becoming so complex and game logic is becoming so intertwined with the servers that this is simply not a feasible task unless you have direct access to the server data somehow.
Unfortunately, this is a problem that has largely not manifested yet, so most people don't yet realize it's a problem. Live service games only started becoming the norm in the last decade, and the vast majority of the popular ones are still in operation. In a decade or two, most live service games people love today will no longer be playable due to the servers being shut down, and developers have no financial incentive to allow them to be playable after that. Will a solution be found before then? Probably not. I'm not looking forward to it.
For a lot of games, it won’t really matter anyway. The game is the multi player experience. If the users are gone, a core part of the game is missing regardless of if it’s possible to run anymore.
However, if the game is possible to run, that creates the opportunity for there to be new fans of the game. If you can't run the game at all, there's zero chance that can ever happen.
Preserving the games themselves, including server components or emulators, is key to this. As it stands, it already requires there be someone with the personal interest in a specific game, and the technical ability to crack it. Without that, such a game won't be preserved no matter what. Requiring publishers to make such things available at some point can only help. It removes or mitigates that later requirement.
A good solution would be to legislate. Mandate by law that after a certain period of time (starting from the point on which the servers get shut down) the developer has to supply the corresponding server source code.
Why would that even make it anywhere, to be honest? The relevant lobbyists have a vested interest in having those games go away - they only like retrogaming insofar as they can make money from it. They'd much rather people be playing versions of games that they have remastered or rereleased, than the original copies that exist (and that they make no money from if one acquires them secondhand). Many major studio heads have spoken, openly, about their disdain for the secondhand market's mere existence.
No, the actual way forward for large scale preservation requires donning a pirate's hat. The people really doing legitimate preservation work are largely doing it outside of the purview of the copyright holders (and often in direct opposition to the rightsholders' desires). This has always been the case and will continue to be the case as long as copyright remains in force in the current form.
I have a passion for a very small niche within this - Preserving user-created levels for the game Quake III Arena.
When I was a kid we got our first PC just as Quake (1) released. We didn't have a modem to get online, but magazine cover disks sometimes included custom user maps and mods. I'd run around them offline, wondering in awe at these empty spaces and amazed at being able to explore a 3d space that someone somewhere else in the world had conjured from their own imagination and effort. In time I figured out the tools and techniques, and even released some of my own content to add to the mix. That sense of wonder has stuck with me for over twenty years, and while I very much enjoy playing the games, it's not just about that - Accessing and exploring the spaces themselves is fascinating and hold inherent value to me.
I recently came back to spending more time with the games, and see a great deal of that custom content dropping offline never to be seen again as the sites that used to host them wind down and dry up. A lot of it has likely already been lost. I'm digging through every available source I can to try and dig out as much content as possible, but of course it'll never be 'complete' in the same way that a ROM collection for a classic console might be.
Then, quite aside from finding and saving, there's the question of how to make it accessible (and interesting) to anyone else. I'd like to think it's of interest to more than just me, but maybe it isn't? Perhaps daves_awesome_map_v5.pk3 and the thousands of others I have stashed don't really have an audience beyond that one weirdo that saved them =)
On the offchance you're reading this and have any old Quake 3 custom content stashed away in your closet, please get in touch!
Something related to this is all the user-generated player models. Like a slice in time of pop culture, there was at least one model for any popular character at the time, plus lots of original content as well. And people did it for free!
For sure, I have hundreds of custom models and skins stashed away. I remember going to the millenium dome around y2k, and there was a booth there that would 3d scan you into a Quake 3 model! Sadly I lost my scan. Wonder if the company that did it has them all saved off somewhere. That would sit in a very weird place privacy-wise.
I joined a group of vintage computing enthusiasts recently, dedicated to a specific platform. During a recent online meetup, I watched as one of the members attempted to archive newly discovered cassette tape copies of previously unavailable commercial software applications from the late '70s. These may well be the only copies in existence - at least as far as we know now they are.
During the meeting, there was a hairy moment where the tape broke and got tangled up and likely ruined. This happened because of an old splice, but fortunately was at the end of the tape just as everything got successfully archived (at least one copy of it anyway).
It was a cool moment to observe, and I now have copies of these applications in my possession.
I'm far from a beard-and-suspenders type who got to use those systems when they were current, but my understanding is that When a tape tangles it doesn't affect the magnetic data stored on the tape: only a sufficiently powerful magnet can do that - even if it got tangled-up inside the tape machine one would hope the machine was designed to not energize the erase or write heads unless the tape was known to be moving smoothly through the tape transport.
When I worked in systems engineering, some of the folks a decade or two older had supported tape-based computing systems. Tape damage happened all the time. They would splice it back together, manually repair corrupt bits and bytes with something like a hex editor, etc. I don't know all of the details, but IIRC sometimes they'd use magnetic viewing film, which you can still buy.
It might not be documented well online, but if that really is the last copy in existence, it would be worth tracking down some mainframe-era sysadmins to ask for tape recovery advice, IMO.
I really appreciate the work this subculture does. I was a big fan of Soul Reaver back in the late 90s, and it was famous for having about 1/5th of the game removed before release. Twenty years later, I finally got to see what it would have looked like, just because someone stashed a few prototypes away.
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, especially of unfinished games that were never released, like Sierra's Babylon 5 space combat sim, Dead Phoenix on the GameCube, etc.
There's a section in the bonus material for the Blade Runner final cut where someone mentions that the only reason they have the unused footage is that someone intentionally ignored instructions to destroy a palette of film back in the 80s. The film world finally caught on about archiving that material. Hopefully the game industry will sooner or later as well.
This is a topic dear to my heart. I also think it is important to preserve prototype and prerelease versions of games from all possible sources - they can give an insight into a game's development that can only be matched by the actual developers speaking on the process. Such versions of games are at far more risk of being lost to time - how many prototype cartridges or discs are holed up in publisher/developer vaults, and how many of those do they actually pull out and test from time to time to make sure their archive isn't rotting away? Very few seem to do this, or if they do they're not open about it. Retail-released games usually have several extant specimen to be able to preserve. With prototypes the total number of copies of any specific build may be single-digit.
This also includes builds of games used for public display at events like E3. A personal example - I am part of a decently-sized community centered around the Harmonix-developed Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. For years, we've known that a handful of illegitimate copies of the Guitar Hero II E3 2006 build have existed. However, the two people we've talked to that actually possessed such copies either no longer have them, or the disc does not work. We also know that the official copy of this disc exists within the walls of Activision. One of our community members was in a position to be able to ask them if they could potentially have the disc. The response? "Sorry, we must hold onto it or destroy it." What chance do we have to preserve many of these games, if destruction is even an option?
Speaking of that. If anyone reading this had access to the Malaysian video game black market in early to mid 2006, and you bought a chipped PS2 bundle with two third-party guitars and two discs labeled "A" and "B", please get in contact with me (my email is in my profile here). We believe the "B" disc to be the GH2 E3 build, and we'd like to double check whether the "A" disc is retail GH1 or not. Or, if you got any weird copy of GH2 on the black market, anywhere. We're also looking for a pressed copy of the GH1 demo, which would have the game ID SLUS-29177. We do know it exists, we narrowly missed an eBay auction for one last year (and in fact, that auction is the only reason we even have a picture of that disc).
Fortunately, we also know that Harmonix is really diligent at archiving their games. I have seen a photo of their GH2 binder with burns of daily builds, and I also have it on good authority from a former employee that they also have an extremely thorough digital archive. But, still, none of these are accessible for datamining and analysis, which is vital to truly preserving these games.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 93.8 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/user/chilledsanity/videos
I de-googled to avoid being at the mercy of a for-profit company for more important identity-related matters, but it'd be a sad day if I ever lost access to the archive of games.
The only real threat is fragmentation of game stores so that you cannot get all games on a single store.
This is an unfair claim. Games aren't purposefully bloated so they are harder to pirate. 4k textures are 16 times larger than 1k textures, so even with large amounts of compression, just the switch to 4k textures will likely make games 10x larger than they were. Games nowadays come with localised audio which is often uncompressed because storage has gotten larger, cheaper and faster, and it drastically reduces the cpu overhead of audio playback which can be a significant chunk of time and is a very noticeable issue when it stutters.
Games also have significantly more content than they had in the earlier days because people demand it. Starfox (a game mentioned in the article) has a "completionist" time [0] of 5 hours - compre that to a game like Monster Hunter Rise (I used this as an example as I'm playing it right now), that has a main story play time of 15 hours [1].
[0] https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=9035 [1] https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=83169
However, it is much more pleasurable and less of a grind when fighting monsters made up of a million 3D triangles as opposed to one made up of 100 2D squares.
(I wanted to make a snarky irrelevant note but now I want to remember what it was.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32789120
https://kotaku.com/when-south-park-got-an-ea-sports-game-pul...
https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/08/13/crash-bandicoot...
Now mostly this is leveraged to finish up the online features (ie. pvp), as one obviously can't play online without connecting to the net, and then that's an opportunity to download a patch. However, these patches do have other fixes and surely there are some companies that are leveraging this significantly more than others for general fixes that have nothing to do with online features.
Digital games can be pirated. DRM that runs on the client can be fooled or bypassed with enough effort. Storage is becoming cheaper as time goes by. Time is generally not critical for any of these.
Unlike all of these things, reliance on servers has no real solution and is a guaranteed ticking timebomb. Many games released today (manly "live service" games) have no offline mode and simply cannot fully function offline even if they're reverse-engineered and modified to do so, because a significant part of the game logic code and data is simply not present on the client. Often the only real hope is attempting to reverse-engineer the server logic and capture relevant data via packet sniffing so custom server software can be developed that emulates the behavior of the official servers accurately enough to allow the game to be played, but games nowadays are becoming so complex and game logic is becoming so intertwined with the servers that this is simply not a feasible task unless you have direct access to the server data somehow.
Unfortunately, this is a problem that has largely not manifested yet, so most people don't yet realize it's a problem. Live service games only started becoming the norm in the last decade, and the vast majority of the popular ones are still in operation. In a decade or two, most live service games people love today will no longer be playable due to the servers being shut down, and developers have no financial incentive to allow them to be playable after that. Will a solution be found before then? Probably not. I'm not looking forward to it.
Preserving the games themselves, including server components or emulators, is key to this. As it stands, it already requires there be someone with the personal interest in a specific game, and the technical ability to crack it. Without that, such a game won't be preserved no matter what. Requiring publishers to make such things available at some point can only help. It removes or mitigates that later requirement.
No, the actual way forward for large scale preservation requires donning a pirate's hat. The people really doing legitimate preservation work are largely doing it outside of the purview of the copyright holders (and often in direct opposition to the rightsholders' desires). This has always been the case and will continue to be the case as long as copyright remains in force in the current form.
When I was a kid we got our first PC just as Quake (1) released. We didn't have a modem to get online, but magazine cover disks sometimes included custom user maps and mods. I'd run around them offline, wondering in awe at these empty spaces and amazed at being able to explore a 3d space that someone somewhere else in the world had conjured from their own imagination and effort. In time I figured out the tools and techniques, and even released some of my own content to add to the mix. That sense of wonder has stuck with me for over twenty years, and while I very much enjoy playing the games, it's not just about that - Accessing and exploring the spaces themselves is fascinating and hold inherent value to me.
I recently came back to spending more time with the games, and see a great deal of that custom content dropping offline never to be seen again as the sites that used to host them wind down and dry up. A lot of it has likely already been lost. I'm digging through every available source I can to try and dig out as much content as possible, but of course it'll never be 'complete' in the same way that a ROM collection for a classic console might be.
Then, quite aside from finding and saving, there's the question of how to make it accessible (and interesting) to anyone else. I'd like to think it's of interest to more than just me, but maybe it isn't? Perhaps daves_awesome_map_v5.pk3 and the thousands of others I have stashed don't really have an audience beyond that one weirdo that saved them =)
On the offchance you're reading this and have any old Quake 3 custom content stashed away in your closet, please get in touch!
lvlworld.com - Curated, the polished and more playable end of the spectrum
en.ws.q3df.org (Worldspawn Archive) - Mostly focused on defrag (trick jumping) maps but has a lot for the standard game mixed in.
Excessive Plus's FTP server at ftp.excessiveplus.net
efservers.com/maps.php Elite Force Map Search. Has a lot of regular Q3 content buried amongst the Elite Force stuff.
During the meeting, there was a hairy moment where the tape broke and got tangled up and likely ruined. This happened because of an old splice, but fortunately was at the end of the tape just as everything got successfully archived (at least one copy of it anyway).
It was a cool moment to observe, and I now have copies of these applications in my possession.
I'm far from a beard-and-suspenders type who got to use those systems when they were current, but my understanding is that When a tape tangles it doesn't affect the magnetic data stored on the tape: only a sufficiently powerful magnet can do that - even if it got tangled-up inside the tape machine one would hope the machine was designed to not energize the erase or write heads unless the tape was known to be moving smoothly through the tape transport.
It might not be documented well online, but if that really is the last copy in existence, it would be worth tracking down some mainframe-era sysadmins to ask for tape recovery advice, IMO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Strachey
That wasn’t a video game, though. The 701 didn’t have a CRT until 1954, and that was used in a printer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_740)
So, did they ever play each other? Or do we have the programs so that we could let them play each other?
I have a coin from the empire, I think it came with a box set / special edition.
It could be from Morrowind, though.
Here's the same thing on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/icywolfy/5478409397
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, especially of unfinished games that were never released, like Sierra's Babylon 5 space combat sim, Dead Phoenix on the GameCube, etc.
There's a section in the bonus material for the Blade Runner final cut where someone mentions that the only reason they have the unused footage is that someone intentionally ignored instructions to destroy a palette of film back in the 80s. The film world finally caught on about archiving that material. Hopefully the game industry will sooner or later as well.
This also includes builds of games used for public display at events like E3. A personal example - I am part of a decently-sized community centered around the Harmonix-developed Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. For years, we've known that a handful of illegitimate copies of the Guitar Hero II E3 2006 build have existed. However, the two people we've talked to that actually possessed such copies either no longer have them, or the disc does not work. We also know that the official copy of this disc exists within the walls of Activision. One of our community members was in a position to be able to ask them if they could potentially have the disc. The response? "Sorry, we must hold onto it or destroy it." What chance do we have to preserve many of these games, if destruction is even an option?
Speaking of that. If anyone reading this had access to the Malaysian video game black market in early to mid 2006, and you bought a chipped PS2 bundle with two third-party guitars and two discs labeled "A" and "B", please get in contact with me (my email is in my profile here). We believe the "B" disc to be the GH2 E3 build, and we'd like to double check whether the "A" disc is retail GH1 or not. Or, if you got any weird copy of GH2 on the black market, anywhere. We're also looking for a pressed copy of the GH1 demo, which would have the game ID SLUS-29177. We do know it exists, we narrowly missed an eBay auction for one last year (and in fact, that auction is the only reason we even have a picture of that disc).
Fortunately, we also know that Harmonix is really diligent at archiving their games. I have seen a photo of their GH2 binder with burns of daily builds, and I also have it on good authority from a former employee that they also have an extremely thorough digital archive. But, still, none of these are accessible for datamining and analysis, which is vital to truly preserving these games.
Sadly it's an MMO, so I doubt that'll ever happen.
Edit: Not the half-assed updated version that caused most people to abandon it.