Video Game Preservation: What's In A Game?
For years, and especially during my extremely cumbersome move to a new apartment late last fall, I have been teased mercilessly for A) my harebrained attempts at upconverting older technologies so that they will integrate with new ones and remain functionally relevant, and B) keeping several boxes of "important game history" "stored" on my patio. (I'm not sure what cultural contributions I have packed away in there, but I'm sure someone reading this can relate.)
Aha! And here's author Clay Risen's piece, "Pac Rat: The fight to preserve old video games from bit rot, obsolescence, and cultural oblivion," from the March 2010 issue of The Atlantic.
The column serves really only as an overview of some of the reputable institutions attempting to archive and preserve "documents," "information," and "synthetic worlds," but it has more than its fair share of moments.
From the article:
Video-game preservation is tricky. First, a definitional question: Is a video game just lines of code, or does it include the disk, box, and console? "To preserve an Atari 2600, do you need a piece of shag carpet?" asks [English professor Matthew] Kirschenbaum. He’s only half joking: this year a team at Georgia Tech made an emulator that lets old games be played on today’s computers, but makes them look fuzzy, as if they were on a TV circa 1977.
Because I loathe emulators, I actually really like the idea of this one. I know I am not the only anti-emulation retro gamer around. I have been pro-tactile -- I am for exposed wires, for the clack a cartridge makes as it is worked into the machine's drive, for the rubber bellows at the base of a joystick slowly tearing away -- because these details are part of the fullest experience. So maybe I really do need the shag carpet, too.
But with archiving collections of old, aging games, there is the matter of "getting the games onto stable media" before the code somehow fails or erodes, and here, Clay Risen must be talking about the biggest emulation project ever:
You still need to find devices that can access them. Even big firms are nervous about sharing codes and production details of complex games, which can involve scores of patents. Moreover, games for different consoles were sometimes written in different programming languages; how do you make them universally accessible?
Comments
Preserving old games and systems are child's play compared to preserving today's games in the future. I wrote recently about how hard this is going to be: http://blog.quaddmg.com/2010/02/06/museums-of-the-future
I really think this needs some attention, as there are currently museums which not only have old hardware, but as a part of their exhibits they'll actually let you play the games. I think the whole idea of preserving old games is almost a "solved problem", even without emulation. I think preserving *current games* in the future is going to be the real challenge.
Posted by: Sunny Kalsi | February 10, 2010 9:30 PM
I'd imagine videogames would be the hardest medium to keep a usable, vast record of. One so ingrained in, and in part a motivation for technological evolution.
As new paradigms arise and replace old ones, it will be hard to keep old technologies easily usable, or even interesting, as time goes by.
These initiatives seem to mostly arise from small, not very powerful entities, and they're probably mostly regarded as some fetishist, non reasonable interest my most of the industry's consumers and developers. It's a sad state of affairs.
Posted by: John | February 11, 2010 1:59 PM
For a MUCH more in depth look at this topic, check out Lara Crigger's piece on the videogame archive up in Rochester.
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/106/1064646p1.html
Posted by: Julian Murdoch | February 11, 2010 7:40 PM