Preservation of Video Games- Do You Care?
So recently, due to my dissatisfaction with the way video games are going in (DLC and microtransaction spam), I decided to buy a PS1 through Ebay, and am currently in the process of getting the first three Silent Hill games and a PS2 when I get a job this year. It made me think about how future generations won't be able to experience these games then they naturally degrade to the point of dysfunction. It's scary to think the games we play today will just be tossed aside and forgotten someday. It's why I think it's important to preserve the games of past and present for future generations who otherwise won't be able to experience gaming history. Sadly, copyright laws around the world prevent the use of emulators to preserve games through a PC, ensuring that each generation of gaming will be forgotten and lost, just like the ancient ruins around the world falling apart due to poor care.
So would any of you support changes to copyright laws in order to preserve gaming and technology history? I know I would.
Comments
You're being a bit dramatic don't you think? I do agree that they should be remembered though.
Nope, game companies want a 1982 Came Crash, No one is going to spend 60 dollars on DLC. THe microtransactions are going to be the knife that killed Gaming, watch. It will get worse, and worse, until every game is a PTW game.
I am totally a hoarder of information. I cry at the idea that important media is no longer going to be available due to technological advances. Video games is in the extreme - in 20-30 years the industry has changed so much and there needs to be a place where information is free and preserved. LIke a library of congress of video games.
Am I? Why is media going digital, then? CD's wear out eventually, as do old consoles if not cared for properly. My PS1 is pre-owned, so how long will it be before that thing stops working even if I take proper care of it? If this stuff can't get moved digitally to a PC and used with an emulator, what's stopping us from losing it for good?
I'm sure there is someone out there with a who has every game, like James Ralphie.
Oh Copyright laws, Schmopyright laws.
They haven't prevented a single fucking thing from happening so far lol people are gonna get their hands on things no matter what.
It's already happened. I played games 30 years ago that you'll never know existed. You can't even get the equipment they ran on anymore. For the few people who still have it, if it breaks, there are no replacement parts.
A lot of people have been inspired by this, which is why we have the likes of MAME and SCUMMVM. Without those, even more games would have been lost to the ages. Even then, though, only the most popular games (and the ones that happened to be coded for similar platforms) were saved. Anything else, like third-party one-off games, you pretty much have to give up on.
Games are still being made, though, so we're not dying of boredom. If you played all the old stuff, there would be less time to play the new stuff.
well there's the internet. console games might die out (there's, like, about 3-4 major console companies, how long until they go defunct?) but it's not like every book/picture ever was preserved.
you can play both SH2 and SH3 on pc btw, SH3 is probably one of my favourite games bar none (yes, i liked it more than sh2)
I agree with you about that videogames should be remembered.
It is scary to think that the games some of us gamers play today are forgotten within a short time, but not everybody does it. I, for an example, am still playing Call of Duty: World at War. Yeah, Call of Duty, the franchise that tosses its previous game within a lifespan of a year.
But, see, the problem is not who does what now, if not who does what in the future. Our future generations will completely ignore the games that we played when we were at our age of playing. Each game and gaming generation will be lost due to not be played or being played on. That's why I'm in favor of the PC (although I mostly play on console): we can play old and new games on it.
I'll vote for a new Crisis of '82 to shake the gaming industry. #WeWant1982Back
The ScummVM team is more of a hobbyist project that focuses on games that the individual team members enjoy (since the work in this project relies on reverse engineering instead of emulation, so the games have to be added on a case by case basis, which makes it more time consuming).
In the case of MAME, however, they really do strive to be a video game preservation project. There are quite a few games that MAME team members dumped and emulated that were very nearly completely lost and forgotten before the team discovered them, such as the case of Poly Play, which was a game created in East Germany where 1,500 machines were recalled to be destroyed after the fall of the Berlin wall. Only 3 machines survived, and the MAME team was able to dump and emulate it. It's quite likely that the game would eventually have been completely lost if not for their video game preservation efforts.
Wow that's really cool to know.