Lost in Time: How Video Games Go To Die

 

On both the professional and enthusiast sides of the the gaming industry, the predominant view is that games are disposable products. We buy them, weplay them, then we sell/trade them and forget about them. Sure, games float around the used market, but 99% of that market is recent titles that have been resold and are now going to people who either can’t afford new releases, or just would rather get a bargain. Where do they go from there? Some go back to resell. Others stay in personal gaming libraries/collections. A lot just disappear. In the film or music industry, it is easy to rush out and buy a replacement DVD or CD/mp3 should you get the desire to reacquaint yourself with a forgotten classic. These mediums are distributed on standardized formats that thousands of different consumer products support. But what if this was not the case? Imagine a world where many of the most culturally significant recordings of the past century are trapped on dead formats such a 8-track tape, gramophone records, or cassette. That music will eventually be lost to time without a proper re-release. But what if the master tapes have degraded or worn out beyond usability since the last release? Well then that song/album would be essentially condemned to a slow death. Without the masters from which to form a re-release, the surviving copies out in the wild would be the only physical record of that music’s existence. When they all wear out from use or age, they are gone forever.

But music fans are fortunate. Their medium has been blessed with a combination of standardized formats and digital preservation technologies that combine to provide equal preservation of both timeless classics, and obscure rarities that would otherwise eventually be lost to time. This is good, because in decades past, music that was thought to be past its commercial shelf life or was no longer relevant product to the current generation of consumers was cast aside to be forgotten. Imagine what could have been lost had digital recording technology not come along when it did in the early 1980s. Want to hear classic Blues music (the mother genre) from 1902? You can’t. Most of the music (except for a select few saved from poorly preserved turn of the century recordings) have been swallowed up by time. In the 1970s a similar thing was happening to the movie industry. Since there was no real home video industry, films had little commercial life beyond their initial life and were allowed to rot in often unsanitary film vaults. This included movies like The Godfather and Stars Wars, so you can imagine what treatment “lesser” films received. Movies and music are easily transferred to new standardized formats as technology advances, and legacy works not deemed commercially suitable for re-release are easily preserved because they are now digital. Video games however, are not as lucky.

Old game cartridges/CD-Roms/GD-Roms/Hue Cards/Floppy Disks/ect are basically dead formats released for players (consoles) no longer in production, or supported by their original manufacturer (if the original manufacturer is even still around). When all the worlds NES consoles are exhausted, every NES game ever made is a worthless chunk of plastic. If all the copies of a rare and elusive title are tossed, recycled, or otherwise somehow destroyed, that game is gone. Period. It can’t be re-released; and even if it was, what would you play it on? It isn’t like Nintendo is going to suddenly put the NES back into production. Of course, there is the Virtual Console, but after seeing the service in action for four years, its safe to say that commercial video game emulation is never going to be a definitive means of preserving classic works. Complicated legalities and tangled licensing issues keep the majority of software releases from ever reaching the service. Other times it comes down to technical issues. Even the mighty Nintendo hasn’t yet been able to transplant Yoshi’s Island or Star Fox over to the download services due to emulation hiccups. Fans did it years ago, but but perhaps the money crunchers at Nintendo don’t think the revenue generated from a 17 year old game is worth the time and financial investment necessary to produce the necessary emulation software.

Video game emulation is a complicated thing. It takes a mammoth amount of computing power and technical know how to emulate old hardware. Most of these machines were custom made and optimized to perform very specific tasks in often very unconventional ways. Even a console as simple as the Super Nintendo is an unruly beast to emulate. It was a very complicated machine for 1990 made up of dozens of custom picture processing chips that were poorly documented outside of the companies that manufactured them (such as the case with most old computer hardware). Regular emulators such as the one Nintendo uses for the Virtual Console are very inaccurate by technical terms, but they are adequate to play games in a presentable manner. However even this average emulator significantly tasks the Wii – an 800mhz machine – to play games from a machine that didn’t even hit 4mhz. If you want perfect, low level hardware emulation that can perfectly replicate the conditions of the Super Nintendo and reproduce games exactly as they were in a software environment you’ll need at least a 2.4ghz PC. If the old-school yet very mainstream Super Nintendo is this difficult to emulate, imagine the difficulties of emulating current generation video game hardware.

Most of us look at console emulation in simple black and white terms. Industry pundits generally view it solely in a negative light for what it is commonly abused for – piracy. There will always be cheap, selfish jackasses who abuse emulation to get access to free games and literally steal from hard working development teams who bust their asses in crunch time to deliver us the games we love. However, there are just as many folks out there who view emulation as a way or preserving endangered video games. Look at MAME (the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) for an example of this duality. Without MAME, lots of arcades titles from the past four decades would already be lost. However, there’s also a bunch of middle-aged douche-bags who download it just to pirate Pac-Man. While this is unfortunate, a world without MAME is a world where arcade games are released to the wild, used for their brief window of profitability, then thrown in the trash to be forgotten. The same exact nightmare applies to console games from any generation.

You can emulate most any console from the GameCube going backwards. Anything past that however is a dark area of uncertainty. Modern consumer level PCs have in recent years taken a turn away from the continual progression towards “bigger and faster” in favor of “small and more convenient”. As a result of this change in focus, the prospect of emulation for contemporary platforms grows ever distant (with the Wii being the sole exception since it is essentially an overclocked GameCube in a more attractive case). What will happen to the world’s supply of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 titles in say, twenty years? Will there even still be a working Xbox 360 is ten years, or will they have all red-ringed by then, leaving the console’s library in video game purgatory?

Emulation is difficult, so you might think that a more realistic situation is that lots of the more beloved classics can just be ported to contemporary platforms, but this depends solely on whether or not the original publisher still possess the source code to the game in question, and the sad truth is that most don’t. Sega is the most tragic example of this. Sometime during the Sega/Sammy buyout, Sega lost the source code to every game they produced prior to about 1999. Its all gone. Every Saturn game, Genesis game, Arcade game… everything. Sega can’t port anything because they have nothing to port. Remember the Sonic Mega Collection for GameCube/Xbox/PS2 released back in 2002? Those “ports” were actually running on a fan made Genesis emulator called DGen that Sega had purchased a year prior since they didn’t have the Sonic source code to port, or the technical know-how to produce an emulator themselves. Even more ironically, the Sonic ROMS contained on the disc had actually been taken from internet ROM sharing sites that Sega later served papers and had shut down. Even now, fan made Genesis emulation technology is still superior to Sega’s own internally produced emulation software. You can be certain that Sega isn’t the only example of publishers treating their IP library like disposable trash, but they certainly are the most tragic.

There are mountains of old video game software released for dozens of dead formats that while commercially irrelevant, still hold a special place in either the history of our medium, or simply within the hearts and souls of the players that experienced them once upon a time. What is junk to one person, may be a artifact from a happier time, a priceless childhood memory, or just a really damn good game to another. The definition of a “classic” is totally subjective, and no one authority should ever truly be able to determine what is a classic and what isn’t. That’s why you preserve everything rather than a select few. Much like film and music historians before them, when will our industry mature enough for video game historians to step up and preserve our history?

The clock is ticking, and you never really know when things are all going to come crashing down at once.