Help promote this video by retweeting twitter.com/MRIXRT/status/1539669903803817990 Thank you so much to my patrons. Notes on this video in this comment Notes: -While I believe the interviews are valuable and help tell the story, they are always at the end of a chapter unless directly related to the subject at hand. You can safely skip to the next chapter if you do not care about interviews.
@@reallycool You're welcome, you seem like a real underrated channel and the video got me thinking about some concerns of how the games very unusual ending will be preserved when eventually the online additional features cease. Stumbled across your channel yesterday getting reccomend the Limited Run video and you seem to cover a whole bunch of interesting topics usually not discussed. And I'm always down to listen to a good video essay while I play games, and you make very nice content my dude.
When it comes to games that got multiple versions; I think all versions deserve being preserved. From the perspective of preserving history, it doesn't make sense to throw out something unique just because something somewhat different existed before or after it when you have the choice to preserve it; with that kind of thinking, you might as well not preserve history at all and just stick with what's the present.
Indeed. That's my main problem with the video as he's focusing too much on this abstract notion of experience and not enough on history or preservation of each title. I don't want to focus on "experience" The code base and everything about it matters too. I don't care if we can't get it working exactly the same, it matters that we have the game itself and we get it running as close as possible regardless of the experience. It's not about sentimental value and which game is most popular it's about history. He has a very defeatist take on this belittling those who wish to preserve as much as possible. I cannot stand his point of view that we should all just stop and preserve very specific titles so we can focus on "his" definition.
Part of the problem with "piracy" is that we've let the definition become muddled. Originally, media "piracy" meant unauthorised and unlicensed selling of physical media. e.g. video taping a movie in a movie theater and then selling copies of the tapes. We've allowed file sharing, unauthorized and unlicensed free distribution of digital media, to become not only equivalent but definitively a part of "piracy". But morally file sharing and piracy are not the same thing. Piracy in most cases can be categorized as a type of theft because the person buying the pirated media has the money to do so. So it is likely depriving the original rights-holder a sale of the product. File sharing is different because there are a lot of completely legitimate reasons for doing so, the law be damned. Perhaps the person torrenting the files is in a country where they cannot purchase the product in any form. Or the product is not available for sale. Or the product will never be available for sale again. Or the product was never available for sale (prototypes and such). Or it's not actually a product that can be bought, but is still under copyright for some reason. Or my copy was defective and I can't get a replacement without torrenting it. Or the publisher attempted to replace all legitimate licensed copies with an inferior version. Or the current publishers come along ten years later and censor the remaster because of their political agenda. Or the current publishers just refuse to republish the product in question. And in none of these cases is money being exchanged. Alternately, we could all wait for everything to become public domain. Remind me again how long that takes? At least eighty years after the "death of the author"? So like I said: the law be damned.
But...isn't attempting to give a 'legitimate reason' for doing something while also saying 'the law be damned' kinda contradictory? If you're saying you don't care about the law, that sounds like you're willing to break or ignore it to get something that you want, and you can't really get any further from 'legitimate' than that.
@@thechugg4372 Regardless, the law is the law. How old or whether or not someone personally agrees with it isn't going to change whether or not someone's allowed to break or otherwise disregard it, until or unless that law is changed/eliminated.
@Thechugg That's more or less exactly what I meant. Although, to be specific I'm more irritated by the aging boomers that were out of college before they ever saw a Pong machine than by the legal system itself. @@qactustick If you don't bring a bale of hay with you next time you take a taxi ride in London, you need to turn yourself in to the police. The law is the law. It doesn't matter how obsolete a law is. No excuses.
I personally think that arcade game preservation is pretty underrated. It's arguably one of the more consistent forms of preservation thanks to stuff like Arcade Archives, yet people don't talk about it that much.
Game preservation sort of fascinates me. Video games are not like other mediums, like movies or books where you can just easily keep a record of it. Games have a mixture of code and assets designed to work within certain digital environments that can become difficult to replicate as time goes on. However, I think one of the biggest misconceptions I see around game preservation is that physical media is the most effective form of preserving games. Sure, it's the easiest form of preservation, but you're really only preserving the game for yourself. Game consoles, PCs, and game discs will eventually degrade over time, stop functioning, and their only value will be as artifacts for people to look at. There's a lot of hurdles when it comes to preserving games, but I see the biggest one as being DRM. I don't think there's an industry that's as strict about copy protection as video games are. Sure, the music industry gives games a run for their money, but you can still easily access most music files and copy them. I believe that if you can't gain access to the files of something and copy that thing, you're going to have a very hard time preserving it for future generations to see. Piracy is a very nuanced issue and people's opinions on it may vary, but it cannot be denied that it is the most effective form of game preservation (please note that I'm not saying that you should go and pirate every game in existence). It gives the general public the most direct access to game files to be shared and kept around for years to come. What's required to preserve games can bring people out of their comfort zone and into more legal issues than any other medium, and that's why I think there's been so many debates over things like emulation over the years, even though it's basically necessary for game preservation. Video games are still a fairly young medium, and it should be no surprise that corporations don't see the value in preserving them as much as other mediums. This happened when film was still a young medium. There are so many films from the early years of the medium that are just lost to time because the companies that produced them never saw any value in preserving them. I think it's unfortunate that we'll never be able to see most of those movies ever again, but it just goes to show that corporate mindsets are at odds with preservation. I am not inherently against remasters and remakes either (The RE2 remake was one of my favorite games of 2019), but companies only produce these when they see value in doing so, not to preserve anything out of the goodness of their hearts. If we truly wish to preserve games, we need to take matters into our own hands to a certain degree. Video games are possibly the most challenging type of media to preserve, and for some people the struggle of preserving many games may not seem worth the time, effort and legal issues required. I believe that it's important that we preserve games for historical purposes, but I don't necessarily blame some people for turning a blind eye to it. Actual game preservation is a legally grey area and is rarely ever thankful because of that. Game preservation often lacks in easy or quick solutions, so if you think it's worth it, you may have to accept some measures that are outside of your comfort zone, and that's the main problem with it.
I think that the idea of remastering games is interesting altogether. Like, yeah, some "remasters" are obvious, soulless, greedy cash grabs, but then there's lots of them that actually do feel like they're made with love and care. And there is something to be said for making these games more accessible on many levels. It's not just graphics in a good remaster. A lot of the time it's also UI and QOL improvements like adding saves to a game that only had level codes or none at all, fixing jank that might have been acceptable in the past but are borderline unplayable today, modern aspect ratios and FOV - which is actually really important for preventing motion sickness, etc... Not to mention resolving what would be _actual_ game breaking problems by adding better driver support, patching in modern 3D API support (when was the last time your GPU supported Glide out of the box?), Adding modern OS support/ integration (because if a game requires tinkering with DOSBox for and amount of time greater than 0 seconds, then that game is simply never going to be played), modernizing the networking, etc... A good example of this would be the System Shock remaster. It leaves most everything alone, but it makes the interface something other than excruciating to use and it just freaking works out of the "box." Then we get the grey area of "community supported remasters." Herein lies your Daggerfalls, Doom's, Roller Coaster Tycoon's, etc... The games are all inarguably superior to how they were at launch in pretty much every respect. They don't remove anything, they eliminate limitations of the old tech without destroying the charm.
There's also an issue that many games are unpreservable. Even if we have all the code, all the hardware, etc, to run, say, original Team Fortress, that will still only be a pale imitation of what playing that game was. Because we cannot preserve the players who played them, and their culture and habits and in-jokes and memes. It'd be like trying to store an entire village in amber.
I'd say yes, but officially? The Games Industry has done a terrible job preserving a lot of games. Japan in particular, as they love to throw away or lose the original source codes. Recent example, Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2. Microsoft made a good attempt with their backwards compatibility system on Xbox One X and Xbox Series X, but they are no longer updating it. Sony's classic game lineup for Plus Premium is a joke. And Nintendo is well, Nintendo.
None of the big boys seem to have any real demonstrated interest in making preservation a priority, but I'm hoping more information can at least start the conversation
Oof Japan hurts the most. Feels like 70% of all Japanese games up until the PS3 era had their source code thrown away after development. So many classics will never have proper remasters.
Thank you so much for asking me to be a part of this, i might not be the biggest gamer but you did help me realize how important games have been for me throughout my lifetime 🤗
No matter what we think of video game preservation, I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of it is thanks to how the internet works. Without it, things would be a lot more difficult for people to show, share, play, and even get abandoned games and prototype builds for. I have nothing but respect for anyone who tries to dig up something and make them usable again, no matter how obscure and what they originate from. I have the same type of respect for people who try to recreate the coding and make their own fan games directly inspired or even connected to them as well.
It's a shame you don't have more subscribers. I don't think your current amount reflects the well written, long-form video essays that plenty of people like me enjoy. Hope you get the recognition you deserve
Counter point to only/mostly preserving games with cultural relevance. Penn and Teller Smoke and Mirrors was an unreleased game for the Sega CD, it had little to no cultural relevance until someone found a way to preserve it and put it online. Then a group of people made an annual charity stream centered around one of the mini games in it called Desert Bus. Now they've finished their 15th year of doing thr stream and have raised over $9 million for charity since they started it.
Just stumbled upon you from getting reccomend your LRG video yesterday and now you've released a nearly 2 hour essay the day after I found you, I'm liking this luck of mine, you seem like a real hidden gem man, good work!
Just going off the title alone- Yes absolutely. Just discovered blue Maxima flashpoint and having a blast playing all these minigames from my childhood. I hope that's mentioned in here somewhere, that community has done an outstanding job.
I think also a minor part of games preservation that I'm surprised wasn't covered here is *"display technology"*. like we all know that as stated visuals of the game can often be integral part of the experience and unlike movies where any modern tv can easily scale a video, video games are interesting since it's also requires players input and modern tech can't always replicate that well resulting in problems with experiencing old games (more specifically from 1st generation to the 6th generation) that were made to utilize Tube television tech like CRT, CRT monitor , you often see many proclaim that these are as important as playing on original hardware to maintain the pure experience, specially recently with many outlets and competitive players talking about how CRT Monitors are essential to games like Counter strike and Doom with often fast refresh rate that still competes with modern tech, but as we know these products been long out of production and with every year they will grow in scarcity eventually losing potential experience of specific long gone era, it's interesting how with shift to Plasma, projector TV, LCD, LED and OED Which I believe displays a black levels that's close to an CRT's Black levels, It's why even for none retro fans Video Scaler is widely popular specially for upcoming streamers and content creators who often want to represent the original content at it's purest form as possible other than that this is was fantastic video and highlighted specially why I started to not bother getting physical goods since nowadays I feel like it's more marketed towards collectors and rich folks over really us the enthusiast who actually play those games, preservation became sad justification for a shady market that monopolized by likes of WATA and LRG sorry if this was long one but this was quite neat kickstart for interesting conversation
The problem with Amiibo's has been solved, assuming you're either willing to mod your console hardware or pirate. The actual functional part of an Amiibo is just an NFC chip embedded in the toy with a unique identifier, with a modded console you can read the Amiibo's you do own and then save the identifier for use with an emulator. It's not a perfect solution, but for preserving the functionality of games that use them, it's perfectly doable.
It's less about the individual solution for that specific piece of hardware, and more about how there are a lot of factors to take into consideration--many of which are forgotten about until they're already lost.
Fantastic video, not enough people really have a solid grasp of game preservation besides being able to play the game in some way. Nothing about the media, history and experience surrounding the game. The only thing I wouldve possibly added is a section on unofficial translations. Some are more faithful to the original developers intent than the official release and also makes untranslated games important to the industry playable in other languages, like Sweet Home. But thatd be tricky to fit in to the vid and might derail it.
Personally ran into a problem in a preservation project where a significant portion of the game I'm trying to preserve is missing due to the game I'm preserving having weekly event stages that were deleted after their week was up. The individual updates were handled in a way that despite tons of people who were cheating with a save editor needing to dump the extra data files for the game in question, being Pokemon Shuffle to use the save editor, they haven't been uploaded anywhere since the people who were doing this weren't trying to preserve the game, just cheat. I've gotten some of them found through dataminers of later updates and am trying to implement them, but having to recreate 2-3 years of stage updates isn't looking fun.
The Destiny 2 example makes me fear for future game preservation especially as someone in his mid-20s who has been emulating games I've played in my youth recently. I've had a great time playing licensed games like the SpongeBob Movie game, or Scooby Doo games. But the fact that's the only way I can play them without having the original hardware because of licensing issues, and the fact that someone who I don't know dumped those games thinking it would be "worth preserving." In these days if say an avid kid who liked a certain licensed game in these days, who's to say 20 years later because of patches/updates/DRM/etc that game cannot be documented or experienced? Even so called "bad" games too that someone might of found enjoyment in? Its scary to think that about it for future generations.
52:05 The solution to the Amiibo problem has been solved by cloning or spoofing the Amiibo binaries and using Amiibo emulation applets with custom firmware or emulators. For the Nintendo Switch, there's a applet called Emuiibo that does this. I'm not sure of a solution exists for the Nintendo 3DS Custom Firmware however.
I bought Ultimate Doom in 1997 in the Depths of Doom Trilogy. Because the source code is out there I was able to just keep the WAD files saved one way or the other these past decades. Here I am 25 years later and I can run it in Dosbox, or Chocolatedoom to try and play it how I remember. But I can also still mod it, make levels for it, play new games from it's engine, and it's still the feeling I got when I was a kid. Doom is one of the best games of all time not because what it did for FPS, but because it cannot fade away.
I enjoyed this video, but I found the “profiles” (for lack of a better word) a bit confusing. Like, I’m not sure if they contributed to the thesis of the video. I’m thinking a lot were included to demonstrate that the emotions we associate with games are an impossible thing to replicate, but honestly I’m not sure what the goal of the emotional interludes was. Either way I watched through the whole thing and enjoyed myself. Now I need to go throw more money at night dive studios
Ngl , I skipped through a bunch of those " emotion " interview , I felt they didnt brought a lot to the viewing experience compared to the others that actually work on preservation in the software sense of it. Still a great and important video. Good work 👍
@@reallycool It's understandable, but some literally whos talking about how they like some games takes watchtime which is just pointless filler to most, if not all viewers. I mean, we clicked on a 2 hour video about preservation of videogames, we already care about the medium to the point of wanting to watch a video of this sort. We don't need someone else telling us that they care, because no shit, we know people care, we care too, that's why we're here. It's a great video otherwise, this is my single biggest gripe with it. Good luck with your channel, you seem to have some bright future ahead.
Videos can capture feelings and moments in time that can't be replicated long after the fact, for gaming especially. When I started posting gaming content here this year, I was in a dark place and kind of just wanted to backup some personal gaming memories for after I died for anyone that cared to watch. Then things finally started to improve in my life, at the same time I started dealing with this platform's region blocks, processes for appeals and copyright strikes. That sort of drained my remaining interest in uploading. I felt as though my videos weren't even getting views in comparison to the hassle I'd deal with behind the scenes. But I'm realizing now that all of this is bigger than myself, so I should keep trying. Many games won't last forever, and neither will any of us. But video creators can capture those feelings, memories and moments in time. And we can do what we can to preserve those feelings. Not just for ourselves, but for those that come after. Nothing will last forever, everything will fade eventually. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, right?
I’m just a random voice on the internet, so take my nothing opinion for what it is, but I think this is your best video yet. You really captured not only the importance of preservation, but also helped illustrate why games are just as important and valid as other art, if not more for some. Thank you.
Monster video. You and Tim Rogers really are setting a new high bar for games journalism, and as a video game preservationist myself, I'd say that what you do is a part of video game preservation. Thanks for the time and effort you put into this. Absolutely killer.
1:37:10 “What is the definitive version of a game?” For me, that would have to be the initial 1.0 release, then after updates (if there are any), a complete/definitive edition of the game should be released to replace the original 1.0 release.
Do we release a definitive edition only of the final cut, or just the most important big changes? What is 1.0 is bad, 1.2 is the game everyone remembers, and 1.4 is the last update?
It's inevitable that some content vanishes with the way things are legally and practically, I just sorta accept it, there is really nothing we can do realistically. What I really like is how many emulators try to have 100% functional compatibility with the consoles. Sure, it is unlikely to ever be 1:1, but one could say that it preserves the console forever on a technicality. Eventually we will get to the point where every single Gamecube and Wii could just break with no one knowing how to make a reproduction-console and I would still technically be able to program a new authentic Gamecube-game and just play it with a very high chance that if someone could actually track down a real GC or Wii(Or even Wiiu with homebrew), that it would run perfectly on it too. 32:00 Well, yes and no. There are actually two pullrequests live that implement basic support. The games aren't even close to running because the base board's missing, but they at least manage to boot, assuming that stuff gets merged eventually.(I hope it does before I die, but who knows?) So yeah, seems like the dream in this case isn't dead, it might just take a long time. On the question of which version to preserve: Yes. And that is another reason why I just say "we should try, but somethings are just gone." Version 1.0 of a version has just as much legitimacy as the day 1 patch and that has just as much legitimacy as the final version and the remaster and so on and so fourth. Getting every public version of an offline game is already a hassle, but that becomes even worse with an online game. Because not only is it oftentime impossible to backup every single version as it is currently live(As one regularly also needs to back up server-data), but one also either needs a server-network that actively hosts every single version and gives easy access to the version of choice.... or keep the data and instructions to host each version on a github or sth. It's a hard backpain in a world where many deserving games don't even get even a single version of their game preserved before it's lost to the ether(And I am moreso talking about online games that can be played alone because multiplayer MMOs as the video discusses are too volatile. It's possible to get 0 players on the official server before shutdown or capped playercount on the fanserver. It depends too much on what is effectively random chance).
Most games can't be found online though. There's a huge wealth of 8-16 bit Japanese games that just are basically dead now. Same with alot of doujin games that never hit off outside of Japan have become lost media now pretty much either because every link 404s or it's not had any way to be preserved to run on modern systems
I just found out your channel and man, your videos are top tier elaborated and soooo much effort and work goes into this channel. I'm glad I found you out. Hope you get the recognition you deserve in the future, because you truly deserve way more audience. Lots of love.
Def Jam: Fight For New York is one of the ones I'd like to see properly preserved. It's about the only Fighting Game I've ever found that had impactful RPG elements, and a decently fleshed out story that gets you involved. It had five styles to choose to fight with, and investing in any of them saw definite improvements in your ability to fight. It had physical stats that again, improved your ability to damage opponents, or endure hits. It's an awesome game... that's fucked forever; because of so much lisenced music/the actual rappers who were voice acted in the game, appearing as themselves. It's been emulated, but I have no idea how to use one, and I honestly prefer consoles or at the very least a console controller over the keyboard and mouse. I find the controller easier to control. Funny thing that, I know... I personally would have liked Def Jam Icon to have continued on from Def Jam: Fight For New York, and show that MC having saved his girl, built a family and taking over the territory to build his empire. Instead of what we got. But it'll never happen now. It'd be too expensive to get the song lisences with the rappers attached, and I believe the company has soured on the notion it was a good idea to start with. Because of how convoluted it became at the end, legally. Still, I'm glad I got to play the game, and that it was a new experience as I tend to Just RPG. I do value it for that point, but upgrading consoles and the fact I don't tend to keep games after I'm done with them for space concerns (or at times trade in value for store credit, since games are often expensive even outside of Ebay and Amazon price jacking) I don't have the game to play anymore. Which does suck, because I did enjoy it enough to be able to actually beat the game. (Though Crow was massively assholish to beat, which is funny, because I tend to create "beef wall" MC's if I can, and Snoop Dogg ended up looking comparatively like a stick figure...) I'd also like Web of Shadows, which is now impossible to get because Activision lost the lisencing rights. The only game where they let Pete get with Felicia and of course I never got to play it. Damn it...
For multiplayer games, where culture is an important component; we're gradually getting to the point where it might be possible to use advanced AI (the real kind not just the simple stuff used for classic NPCs) to replicate the behavior of the players, given it's documented well enough. It's gonna be a little bit more challenging where the community, the relationships with real people, are a significant factor; replicating the experience of having people you care about even when not playing the game, is a bit more complicated than just providing a semi-stateless snapshot of play-style and in-game communication; not to mention it raises all sorts of ethical questions....
the dot hack games did an interesting job of actually emulating an mmo. i'd almost try using that as a framework for the future (but tailored to the culture of a given game at a given time)
Good depending on context, if you can reasonably afford the game and the devs have at least some level of integrity and it's accesabile it is much better to actually support the creators so they are rewarded for their work and can make more, but it is a very important fallback in case the the game is unavailable or filled with something garbage like securom or the company is something like Activision. Nothing wrong will downloading some old GBA roms or pirating a game like Dohna Dohna which is locked to 3 installs, but piracy for piracy's sake is rather scummy.
For me video games are a form of modern art, and in many cases story telling. Culturally GTA V is every bit as important as Game of Thrones, The Mona Lisa, or Michael Jacksons Thriller album. For this reason I feel it is important to make older video games available to newer generations. Seeing how the art form progressed through the Atari 2600 and Odyssey 2, into the ZX Spectrum and NES years, and so on. The answer, for me, is emulation. So long as emulators exist on modern hardware digital rips of older games can be made accessible. The big issues revolve around accuracy of the emulator, the complexity (and thus compatibilty with) the system being emulated, DRM, reliance to bespoke obsolete servers, and the industries general apathy about preserving its legacy and making older titles available to new audiences. This is then wrapped in a quagmire of licencing and copyright. Personally I think one great solution would be better copy protection laws in favour of culture and presevation rather than the bank balances of big corp. I see little reason why any media can't be automatically in the public domain after 25 years. Questionable legalities aside, the Internet Archive is doing a cracking job of preserving a very large proportion of gaming history. If anything happens to the archive it will leave a gapping hole culturally.
One perspective on the "what to preserve" question is that it's hard to know what will be culturally relevant to future generations. For instance, there are many pieces of old media that have taken on new life in recent years because of their striking similarity to modern-day memes. Like "How You Think You Look When A Flashlight Is Taken" (1921 illustration), or a still frame Charlie Chaplin's "Pay Day" (1922) sometimes referred to as "Original Distracted Boyfriend". Sometimes a franchise is rebooted or otherwise revived after a long, long dormancy, such as Sol Cresta (2022) being a direct sequel to Terra Cresta (1985). That can give old works a new relevance to modern audiences, even if they weren't considered particularly important in the intervening years. Even in your video you mention Earthbound which is now considered a "classic" but was a bomb when it released. Obviously it's not possible to give every single title the best possible treatment but I don't think we should start by deciding that only the best of the best are worthy of preservation.
Wow, i feel super greatful to have found your channel, you are making some of the most interesting, informative, and well made gaming journalism I've found in my decade consuming such content, thanks for making it!
Bro, this really is some in-depth analysis, and I'm glad I had several hours to listen to a couple of your vids. I don't have much of sustenance to add other than this: don't tell people "if you skip this, I understand." To me, that signifies weakness on your end and unfairly invalidates the material you are providing us by representing it as either "unimportant" or "too complicated to understand." Let your audience make that distinction, as you are making intelligent content for intelligent people. Push our boundaries, and let us determine where our comfort levels are.
42:54 Development Checkpoints and Bots. More specifically, advanced learning bots taught on the pre-recorded player behaviors of the time. There've been a few examples of this already, we just need to figure out how to keep the bots at specific levels of play.
The Virtual Console version of Super Mario Bros is not a ROM downloaded from the internet. That assumption was made because it has a header similar to other illegal roms (iNES emulator header), but that just isn't the case. NES roms need headers and some tired/lazy dev at Nintendo just used the most popular format for their emulator.
I've been working through your backlog after appreciating every appearance of "Sausage Doom Guy" on EFAP for a long time now. Your content is extremely well thought-out and articulated, and this video is my favorite of yours so far! I'm always looking forward to your next upload, and I hope more people come to the channel and appreciate all the work you put into these videos.
The last years I was hearing this topic about preservation on games, personally I could never understood very well since it always was a big debate that 95% of time ends in a non-sense trolling comments and fights but now thanks to this video, finally I can understand very well, lol! Anyway, I think that... well... yeah, it's important to keep and preserve the games for future generations or at least have a very secure backup for: " Who knows what the future awaits us?" (servers shutdown, global internet shutdown or *insert another disaster here*), besides if no one secure very well the original source codes on games probably we could end up getting more disasters like the Silent Hill HD Collection back on PS3 and X360... But still how is the gaming industry of nowdays, probably no much will care in presevartion, either the big companies or even the Indie developers I mean seriously this is actually a wild idea that I hardly ever see someone do it but why no one release their games digitally first, then address everything on it like: fixing problems, DLC support, add player's feedback ideas, etc..., then when you think everything was addressed release the game physically with every patch, content, etc... inside the disc/cartridge, no download or internet required and there you go a game fully complete and preserved (or at least a good backup for the: "Emulation's World", lol!).
Part of growing up was playing games with my dad and the most time we spent playing a game together was on City of Heroes. When I found out that it was still around AT ALL (legitimately or not) after all these years being left with nostalgia for a pastime, I had to try it myself that night. My dad's face lit up as soon as I told him. Not only could we finally continue exploring the world, the costume creator, the powerset combinations, but to do so with hundreds of others that either remembered the Live days or only now had the chance to experience the game for the first time with helpers at the ready. Part of the old experience was also preserved in the sense of knowing that the MMO was being actively worked on again by the community developers (balance changes, new powers and archetypes, costume customization options, performance optimizations, graphics features), picking up what the old devs had to drop. This was largely only possible because the server source code was leaked. I can't officially condone piracy, but, without official support, running private servers like this is likely the only way to experience dead online games. How can we expect people to otherwise live these experiences and enjoy the developers' works when copyright doesn't expire until life and 70 years when most companies don't have a good track record of lasting that long, let alone preserving their source media to the end?
37:22 There is an attempt at resurrecting/preserving version 1.0 of FFXIV, but it's been an extremely slow and limited process. The last time I tried it out, it allowed you to look through the world and watch cutscenes, but the people working on it hadn't gotten combat or the quest systems functioning properly. If you're interested, search for FFXIV 1.0 Project Meteor. But as you've indicated, it's not an easy process by any means, and requires a lot of work even to get what I mentioned playable.
1:08:13 This guy just talks like a business, "I believe artists own their game" 90% of the time with these old games it's a company that own the games who bought out another company or did a hostile takeover of a company or just got the rights to a bunch of games because another company had folded into another company and this was just part of the stuff they had kicking about and the "artists" who made the game don't own or get 'shit' when it's stuck up on steam with no patches. No offence to Night Dive who do good work. But to bring it down to protecting 'artists' is just disingenuous, as is his 'Truck' analogy, it's not about taking your truck, it's about making an unlicensed copy of your truck, which may mean when it comes time to sell your truck, it's worth less. OR possibly people have seen me driving your truck about town which has kept up interest in your truck and it's actually worth more now than if I'd never made a copy.
The whole patch culture problem really pisses me off. Every game should have a version that can be played from start to finish on disc. I can understand ironing out minor bugs but having gamebreaking bugs on the disc version or not even having the game at all on disc like they did with Halo Infinite is just unacceptable.
@@reallycool Well lots of games still have playable builds on disc. Metro Exodus Complete Edition on Xbox comes to mind as it has an entire second disc for the DLC (while the PS5 version just has a lazy download code). But they are starting to become the exception.
@@thatssomegoodpie Xbox still needs to get their shit together when it comes to being able to install and then play physical games offline. Many xbox smart delivery games have the xbox one version on the actual disc, which the Series X cannot play without updating to the proper version. Physical games being download keys is very true for the Series X.
@@JC-xq2qe Yeah it's a big issue but look at it from another angle. Only Smart Delivery titles are affected by this DRM problem. While the Series X versions will seize to exist without internet connectivity those Xbox One build are still preserved on disc and most of the time fully playable offline on Xbox One consoles. Smart Delivery effectively requires both versions to be delivered to the customer and physical discs simply can't hold both versions, except for a few exceptions. The Xbox version of Ballan Wonderworld for instance has both the Xbox One and Series X version on disc and does not require internet to be played. The game is small enough for both versions to be included on disc. Once games stop coming to the Xbox One smart delivery will stop being a thing thus Xbox Series X games will be released on the actual disc and not require connectivity to be upgraded aside from the usual patches.
The one guy's analogy of stealing his car is yet another poor example of understanding "piracy"; downloading a ROM of a video game doesn't physically take that game away from anywhere.
I really enjoyed being a part of the video, and I think you did a great job at bringing up important questions that hadn't initially occurred to me. Keep up the great work!
preservation is to keep things as they are and to keep them alive to make sure it's reachable remakes and reboots don't count as its a different version of what you wish to preserve for example you preserve food so its still usable and it doesn't go bad ports are a way to keep the memories alive but they can be quite off some are bad and some are too good and could you're judgment
Emulators and pirated version don't often make them exactly as the real version that goes for online only games you're only getting a small percentage of the game
ports emulators and pirated version are like holograms illusion of what you want to preserve you're keeping its memories alive but it's core body is long gone everything in some way are like us we are struggling to preserve ourselves we currently can only preserve memories of our existence it will be up to the next generation to continue it until it no longer possible
A really insightful dive. Turned me on to a great deal of things in preservation I'd never considered and corrected some of my misconceptions. Great work as usual, man.
Awesome video! Like what AntDude mentioned, I always wanted developers to offer their classic games in ROM format for us to use on whatever emulator/rom cart/etc we please.
Interesting perspective. The cultural impact of a game tends o get lost as time goes by. Waiting for Super Mario Bros 3 was an event. Now explaining it sounds like trying to understand what life was like before the automobile or planes. That's why I like some game museum approaches like getting period accurate furniture to go along with it. And it's one of the reasons why I've been so adverse to using emulation over the original cart with a CRT. Even avoiding modding my consoles to accept a clearer signal. The warm fuzzies of playing a game the way you remember is a rare occurrence but when you active it, the world isn't such a hostile place.
Man, this video is so good. But whenever I return to this video, I keep wondering why you didn't have so much more views and subs. Worry not, i'm one of the subs. It's just that, man. I wish you just had more of it. I know you deserved more of it, with all your efforts
One minor correction: Android emulators on PC aren't emulators, they're virtual machines. They aren't emulating. If you disable virtualization on your PC, you can still run emulators like Dolphin, but you can't run an Android "emulator" like Bluestacks. This distinction is relevant for cloud gaming PC services like ShadowPC where they have virtualization disabled. But I guess you could say they do the same function as an emulator even though they're technically not emulation.
@@reallycool I agree with you that the technicality of the definition of "emulator" isn't important, but it's something I wanted to point out. The function of an emulator and virtual machine aren't different, although that difference does have implications for situations where an average user might have virtualization disabled and not know why their Android emulator isn't working. It was more of an "ackchually" clarification. Probably not important enough to do a re-upload, although I would have liked a minor detour to clarify the technical distinction.
@@immortallix Sure, but Android "emulators" still won't run on a system with virtualization disabled, while something like Dolphin will. So even if it fits the semantic definition of "emulator", it doesn't fit the technical definition of "emulator".
Thanks for making this video and getting so much input from so many different people online. It really adds a sense of authenticity considering we only really hear from influencers or larger figure heads in gaming. Hearing these stories about how some of these folks used gaming as an escape were so relatable in a sense that some of us have done things like emulation, modding or piracy or have found people in the community.
Ideally you'd have every version preserved with them all available to play, maybe highlight the most stable versions or the versions before major changes to funnel would be players there so they aren't spread out super thin.
As a Doctor Who fan who will never be able to watch 97 episodes, preservation is important to me. I'm glad we're getting decompilations and PC ports of old games, they're a massive help in preservation, giving us a better game in the process. Remakes are definitely not preservation. The Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Crash N-Sane Trilogy preserving the PS1 originals. On the piracy thing, I buy most of what I can. Piracy for me is for things like TV shows I literally can't get any other way, or for decades-old ROMs you can't buy officially anyway.
Let's take a minute to remember Byuu/Near, developer of bsnes/higan, who dedicated his life to videogame preservation, specially of the Super Nintendo and Super Famicom.
Very pleased you enjoy it. Majora's Mask was easily in the Top 3 most mentioned game for people's fondest memories. A lot of people mentioned that it helped them get through depression or difficult times
I've often wondered how much of my own desire for preservation is selfishly motivated. I've got a fairly sizable collection of hardware and software, and it's comforting to know that I will have a chance to experience titles from as far back as I was aware of computers and games at all, to ones of the current day, any time I'd like. I am curating my own little museum of nostalgia and missed opportunities, and that is great. For me. And maybe a few people around me that might also find it entertaining. But it doesn't do much for anyone else, and especially not for future generations. But one question I face, if I'm being honest, is will future generations care? I have a deep attachment to a lot of this stuff. Some of it is cocooned in memories from my childhood, but the overwhelming majority of what I have now is totally new to me. Maybe I had heard of it in 199x, or maybe not. Even for a game that I never knew about as a kid, it's still tangentially related to experiences I hold as dear to me. What happens when that association is broken? I don't lament the lost painting someone did in their parlor in the late 1800s. I'm only mildly curious what daily life was like to someone from that time. But I would give A LOT to step into a time machine and stand in front of a store display of new-in-box Nintendo Entertainment Systems, with R.O.B. the robot operating buddy. I would LOVE to sit down on a shag carpet in front of a big ugly console TV and play Super Mario Bros through a coax input. I'm doing everything I can to recreate that experience, and fighting against physical limitations of time and space and money and parts viability. Do I expect someone in 2070 to feel the same thing I feel when I hold my boxed copy of Super Mario Bros 3? Would an emulated version give them everything they want to know, and more? They won't remember driving to high school graduation while listening to the Wipeout XL soundtrack, and if any of those tunes ever popped up on Spotify, maybe they wouldn't care at all. It feels vital to preserve now, because we are at a point in time where we have access to some original, perhaps untouched items and paraphernalia -- potentially for the last time ever, and those things hold immense value to me. It's now or never, and _I_ want to be able to relive those old times in as vivid a way as possible. I wonder whether the desire will die with the opportunity, though, and once it's gone, nobody will be all that concerned about it.
Data hoarding is bad. If you have something rare, like a rare game booklet or guide or some sort of extra material or hell some lost game itself -- share it. Otherwise, this sort of preservation is pointless, because once you die -- it's gone.
The Dark Souls online community will host these little anniversary events where, for a weekend, everyone would agree to go play one specific game in the franchise and participate in the multiplayer. It's not perfect, and the game functions singleplayer any other time of year still, but it could give players - both new and old - the closest thing to a time capsule for what it was like to be there in the trenches with other players. For MMO's, assuming you're able to get past the software and server issue, seems like the best reasonable solution to me. Block off when the game is playable to a specific period of time, so that the most people who want to experience the title will be there together at the same time. Similat to how - if you want to experience music with other people - you need to go to a scheduled concert. Make November the "A Realm Rediscovered" month where players can play the original FF14. A game with multiple patches can cycle through all (or at least, all available and replicable) versions of itself in a sort of rotation system similar to how many live service games already handle their content. Want to play the original Wrath of the Lich King? Cool, that's next week. The biggest problem with this concept, outside of simply how to gain access to this stuff - is that it shoots player progression in the foot, which is arguably a more important aspect for many games. But at least with the ones that cared about the size and interactivity of it's community, it's the compromise we might be able to attain, similar to emulation of singleplayer titles.
The deeper the rabbit hole goes, the less I can take video games seriously as an actual art form, because the companies that control them still sees them as a product, as a toy. Companies beat the crap out of people who risk their necks and their time and their money to preserve "Bubble Blaster Action Man 3000" but then these monolithic companies suddenly forget that they are erasing history when they are about to basically delete an entire eshop. It's all fine and good when companies are in control to SELL them to you, but by god do they not want you to enjoy your purchase, because that would mean that you may not need the sequel. As long as a game has a single cent of value, companies wouldn't dream of sharing their "art" with you. I don't buy it for a second that these games are worth defending. A lot of games are factory-produced these days, which tells me that the medium stops becoming an art form. Usually riddled with problems after release, needing dozens of patches to make it even playable in certain cases. Can you imagine buying a book, but then having to go back every three days to the book store because you notice that certain pages are missing, and then being told to wait a little while longer? I mean, is Cyberpunk 2077 worth preserving? The developers themselves don't really give two shits about it. One of the most catastrophically disappointing games of all time, a game that for years had been sold on complete lies, still sits at a 78% "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam. Is Assassin's Creed 514: Even More Assassinating worth preserving? True, it's the size of three galaxies, and I especially love the skybox on Planet Hillys, where it's confirmed that the Beyond Good and Evil universe takes place in the grander Ubisoft multiverse, which ensures endless sequels of games that are absolutely worth preserving. Can't forget about the three different side quests too. The video game industry stinks of greed and insincerity. It's a factory, in the most literal way possible. A true artistic vision and direction for a project (usually decided on by one person or, at the most, a handful of people) is rarely if ever a part of video games. I say let it burn.
There have been big talking around physical copies degrading to an unplayable state such as disc rot on cd's, but I've seen most people actually say seeing dots with light through your disc isn't really disc rot. Its rather just manifacturing error in the label/picture of the disc and the disc is okay. Disc rot doesn't have dots, it rather have this scratch kind of holes rather than round holes. I checked some of my discs, from music Cd's to ps3 discs and some have these holes that light shine through them, but they all play without any problem.
those holes are absolutely disc rot, and as long as they're not in an area of data that's trying to be read it'll work. you wouldn't be able to make a 1:1 copy anymore with the holes, and as soon as the wrong portion of that disc rots it'll be unreadable at all.
@@RetroDoneRight It isn't a bunch of holes, some disc have a single hole and I've checked close up on them and noticed that the printed label at the front of the disc has the hole in it which makes it a manifacturing error. Could even find them in new discs like for ps4. I have seen pictures similar to it online and they compare Disc rot to the print label error and you do notice a difference.
At this point, piracy laws is just corporations monetizing the concept of sharing. If they could, they would want to get money for you sharing a pencil to your classmate.
Correction for at 32:23: - The claim that Nintendo sold pirated ROMs from the internet has been debunked. It's due to (I believe) Nintendo using iNES headers to some extend. The creator of the iNES header was hired a while back to help out with emulation ever since Pokémon Stadium and Animal Crossing. - HOWEVER, it has been discovered multiple times Nintendo used downloaded ROMs and emulation internally during development. But they never shipped a product out with downloaded ROMs.
Thank you for informing me about this video. As something of a preservationist myself and admissible a snob for certain biases therein, this was enlightening and expanded my view of it
When it comes to MMOs the "ideal Version" is whichever is the closest to the overall artist intended experience. When it comes to something like Destiny, the "Ideal Version" involves backporting assets from the original releases to the last version (be it by hackery, or by source code modification and recompilation), as to have the COMPLETE experience in place. MMOs like TERA and WoW where the game has had several complete overhauls to the experience would need checkpointed versions to be "fully preserved". In TERA's case (notable because ALL servers are in the process of shutting down right now), you'd need builds from May 2013, January 2014, December 2019, and the final build "v111" from last month. We have ALL of Retail December 2019 and Retail June 2021, excluding source code, but including the official server software (only thanks to a state-level threat actor hacking and releasing it) archived, but we're missing a lot of the earlier builds, and the latest build.
Once hardware gets sufficiently fast, got enough memory etc, there are cases where you can make it equivalent to running on the original hardware; add to that appropriate display devices, and input devices that recreate the physical experience of the original input devices, and it gets pretty hard to argue that the hardware side of the experience, from the perspective of the person playing the game, and from the perspective of the game software itself, has not been reproduced. There's of course still certain psychological matter of how people feel about the machines, what they had to do to get it etc, but when it comes to hardware and software, emulation can actually do a pretty good job of reproducing the original experience in many cases.
Wow, absolutely mesmerizing and well-documented video. It sure took days, weeks or months to pull off with all the interviews and editing. Love the topic you're presenting to us, gamers. I am Spanish and game preservation involves many aspects that you explained through all the documentary. But what about the languages/translations of all this video games? For example, I played most of the games in my childhood in Spanish and when I was a bit older I played the same games in English and I got a total different vibe/experience with the same game but different language/translation. I wish game preservation also include this kind of topic as, for example, MGS for PS1, the Spanish version is very well known for its outstanding dubbing. Perhaps the best PS1 Spanish dubbed game. Anyway, props and kudos for your video and channel! You deserve so much more views/subs!
I'm a bit late to this video, but damn dude you really hit like every point when it comes to game preservation. I think the general rule of thumb is that if a game is inaccessible to the average consumer, and can only be acquired through purchasing it through some method in which the original copyright owners don't receive the funds, it should be made available to the public. I think a lot of companies are going about releasing old games in a very poor sense. You touched on how it wasn't profitable for them to release a lot of these, but I think the root cause for that is that they're charging far too much for a game that's considered dated. I personally wouldn't pay $5 Nintendo for the original SMB, but I would probably pay like 25 cents or so. I think if they made much older games on their eshops cheaper, they could turn a profit from people buying them up, similar to Steam's sales. Patches are a fascinating topic, because take for example Doom Eternal, a mostly single player game. The game patched a crucial bug that was utilized for speedrunning the 1.0 version, but since its gone people have to go through the ridiculous process of downpatching which can be a real pain and often times quite sketchy. Meanwhile, the Cuphead developers made it so that the original release version is available to download to owners of it so that people can experience the original glitches and feel of the game despite it lacking many new graphical and gameplay features the current version has. Fortnite is a very interesting topic, since the game is constantly evolving and replacing aspects of the map, and sometimes the map entirely. It's impossible to officially play older versions of the map... Through Epic's services. There are some preservationists who've made server emulators that allow people to explore the map solo and even access developer debug features so that they can spawn in items or objects to try them out. Epic's even made a statement saying they're okay with this so long as multiplayer servers aren't made to be a regular thing, and that NO cosmetics are made available. It's not and never will be the original 100 player BR experience from those different versions, but it is a great way to kind of see and explore the way the map used to be without browsing videos or screenshots. Source code is definitely an interesting topic, and you made some solid arguments for it. I distinctly remember an old project to bring back 2007 TF2 and how it was decently popular at the time, but because of the lack of consistent players it died very quickly. Having the option, however, for people to get a group of friends or people together to play it is always a welcome opportunity though. There's currently some really fascinating projects going on for Super Mario 64 and LoZ:OoT that decompiled the game and cleaned up the source code, which have lead to some incredible modding and PC porting breakthroughs. It's not the same as playing it through an emulator or on the original hardware, but it is definitely keeping the games alive much more than the Switch service is doing for'em. I think when it comes to physical media, preserving the images from the boxes, manuals, and even disks is the closest thing we can get to proper preservation. There's a wonderful website I always recommend to my friends for ROMs that does its best to archive all of these things for whichever game its applicable for. This was sincerely an absolutely gripping, and criminally underrated/underviewed video. Here's hoping that game preservationists keep going strong despite all these troubles they endure
I prefer to keep a physical copy of all my games, when possible, but I know they're susceptible to disc rot, corrosion, etc. Re-releases of games (like Capcom Fighting Collection and TMNT Cowabunga Collection) are sometimes great and I try to support them if it's a game I enjoy. It's cool to have ROM dumps of your games that can be played in an emulator or flashed to a cart and played on original hardware or reproduction hardware like the Analogue, now excuse me while I hide from Nintendo ninjas.
I'm almost 7 minutes in, but I just wanna say that my definition of Game Preservation is to prevent something from becoming Lost Media, and having it accessible for future generations to experience
@@reallycool Oh yes absolutely, this wasn't meant to be a rebuttal 😆 the idea of 'experiencing' something in itself gets philosophical when you start to think about it, and I look forward to your take in this video when I get around to finishing it
Many early VR games will be totally forgotten. I am sure "Daedalus VR" will be lost to history in 20 years. I have my copies on my Oculus Go and Meta Quest 2.
I would hope that many of them can be saved, just to help show how very confused developers were by the new medium--how they had to struggle to figure out simple mechanics
We already have a problem of pre-alpha Oculus Rift games being completely unplayable even through ReVive, Oculus’ own runtimes, and older SteamVR games have some technical issues (specifically with input, how older versions of UE4 handled upscaling/downscaling, and how hacked together some ports are) that cause bugs with new versions of the runtime. The only way you are gonna get old Oculus pre-development games up and running is by hoping that it uses Unity and can let you decompile the code to project files that could be upgraded to a more recent version.
Trying to preserve every game ever is not a pointless effort and we should strive to do what we can to preserve every title in its final form. You're creating an unnecessary abstraction layer between what is considered final or original and your use of the word "experience" to define how one person should correctly enjoy the game. A game is to be played with knowledge of said context but also enjoyed as is with it as close to the original as possible. It is possible to have it be as vanilla as possible in order to get an authentic and true insight into what the game was actually like and how it functions. Even if said game lacks community, videos and player base to support it. There is a precise and logical way we can approach this without having to rely on popularity as that would cause issues with cult classics or hidden gems that deserve to be preserved. I want to preserve every game I enjoy and love and I don't think it's fair for someone like you to decide that it shouldn't be preserved because it's not popular enough. Final fantasy 7 remake does not count as preservation of the original whatsoever as it is an artistic retelling and reiteration of the original. Counting it as a preservation when it is clearly a reimagining of said title is antithetical to preservation. It's not about experience, you are doing a great disservice to game preservation by discounting efforts made by people who did their best to preserve the original game and keep it as close as possible in terms of function. Clementine is not "wasting time" just because they can only recreate so much from the original mmo. They're doing what they can to preserve it and have it played as closely as intended. We should strive to make it as close as possible to the original and not worry about the "experience" It's simply too abstract to agree on what the original experience would even be like.
I cannot and will not accept forgiveness for companies to do a bad job at game preservation. The solution is to change copyright law and fight to undo the damage that Disney had done. Copyright holders and workings with corporations will only hurt preservation. Piracy will always be the best way to preserve a title and will always be the final resting place for any game after said store is shut down
This is a very well researched video on what is a very complicated topic that many people are passionate about. I liked that you touched on mmorpg's and was hoping you'd eventually mention Star Wars Galaxies and SWG Emu which is run by fans. After the game was shut down many years ago a few passionate people built the server infrastructure to get the games on the disc to communicate with the servers and have a playable game in state that most SWG players agree it was when the game was at it's best. Without these companies releasing their server codes mmorpg's are pretty much dead after their publisher decides to end support. Of course they aren't going to release their proprietary code to the public, especially when there's no monetary incentive to do so but also because it could expose potential exploits and weaknesses to their other products. My stance on this is emulation and piracy are the most effective way of preserving games. I know people with big physical game collections see themselves as preserving gaming history but they really aren't, they preserve them for themselves and they aren;t going to have time to play like 99% of their library so they just sit and rot on their shelves. Games are meant to be played to be experienced and emulation and piracy provides people with the option to play and experience these games. I'm against pirating anything that's current gen or that you can purchase from the publishers but if it's old games I'm ok with it.
42:32 this whole part just made me sad. I've been playing TF2 for about 12 years, and while I still enjoy it, it's a shell of what it once was. It used to be full of creative servers with all sorts of custom maps and game modes. Stuff like Smash Fortress and Fort Wars, idle servers that recreated Clock Town from Majora's Mask, Saxton Hale servers that recreated Mega Man and Portal stages. There was even a server I played on that built Pac Man and the Donkey Kong arcade game into full maps. I spent more time playing stuff like that than I did the normal game modes, and it's _all_ gone now. And the worst part is I don't even have my screenshots of them anymore, because I never uploaded them on Steam and the laptops I played on are long gone. 50:44 my Dreamcast won't read discs. I've already had to fix it once (it was some weird issue with the system not realizing the lid was closed) and I _hope_ it's just the same issue again, because it's an easy fix. If it's something like the laser, it would be easier just to buy a new Dreamcast.
I think another interesting thing that is rarely brought up in regards to game preservation is in regards to older and sometimes even newer PC releases of games. I constantly hear about how “PC releases of games are a good way to have them available many years down the line”, but I constantly see situations where a port is bad enough to where it tarnishes the original release at best, and outright will fall apart given that the port does stupid stuff (the biggest things that come to mind in my eyes are messing up controller support, hardcoding resolution options, or badly implemented framelimiters and game logic not behaving properly at an arbitrary rate). Some older games, like Sonic Heroes, you will have less issues getting running in Dolphin properly than the native PC release (which is hard to find on Ebay). Modders aren’t going to always be at the rescue because the skill set to modify a game’s binary code through assembly patches and API injections is already pretty high compared to other mods. One example of a game that I can think of where the PC port is a downgrade from the previously worst release (the Switch version) compared to the original release (the PS4 release) that we never got in English was Mary Skelter 2. The PC version has more game breaking bugs than the Switch release, which already had destructive lighting and rendering changes and downgrades that ruins the tone of the game, and then throwing a busted framelimiter which runs the game several frames faster than intended (because the game never got adjustments to run at arbitrary framerates, even if they left the original logic intact and used interpolation for smoothing like Doom and Halo MCC uses) if you have a refresh rate slightly over 60Hz (this bug isn’t present below that because VSync is always on). And this is on top of how the PC releases are completely unavailable to buy in Japan without a VPN and a sockpuppet Steam/GOG account. You are frankly better off emulating that game than giving Ghostlight your money. Another example I can think of is the Grand Theft Auto releases past the PS2 release. The Xbox and PC versions already were buggy (and the ladder at least has dedicated enough modders to fix), but the Xbox 360 and the recent remasters are based off the mobile ports which has even more rot and bugs. I think Sonic Adventure DX is the absolute prime example of what a bad port can do for a game down the line. Nearly every subsequent release of the game used this base and had even more bugs, and both UA-camrs and legacy gaming media constantly circlejerk about “Sonic having a rough transition to 3D” or that the game “aged poorly”, but given the time to play the Dreamcast release or a heavily modded Steam release, the game has held up better than I expected, and even better than Sonic Adventure 2, which has the opposite reaction from the community. I feel like the discourse around SA1 has been rotten thanks to the DX release and never being developed with the original staff.
And yet, I feel gaming's probably better preserved than say the equivalent time of cinema or recorded music. If I want to revisit my childhood on the Amstrad CPC, I can find those games a lot easier than say films from 1905-1920. As a young medium, it's benefitted from being technology led and enthusiast-driven.
As someone whom only play gacha games, I am used to my games completely disappearing regardless how much money I spent on them. I have no attachments but I value the fun experiences I had. Realistically even games I do physically own... I barely ever play them again once I 100% them, there is just not enough time to replay usually as the market is oversaturated af and there is always a new game around the corner. In real life, you cant "preserve" the best moments of your life. you just experience them and have fun memories of them....
from my understanding and perception - preserving a game, laws and regulations aside, means to keep the game easily accessible. that means for me that people who invented emulators and dumped game roms are the people that kept many games easily accessible. therefore, i would say that they preserved them. that's probably just scraping the surface. preservation is really complicated i'd assume
Thanks for putting the time into something like this. I have always thought it's important to preserve and keep as much media as accessible as possible. It's no where near perfect, but I would much rather have something in some form then not have it at all. When it comes to gaming I am glad to see more games get released across more platforms, consoles becoming more PC like, and a company like Sony releasing some of their PC ports DRM free. Again not perfect, but this goes a long way to make it easier to at least have some form of a game's existence (Like a DRM free/cracked PC version of a game) easily archived and accessible 25 years from now. That's also one of the reasons I think it is important to push back against DRM when it shows up in any media. Because it limits what you can do with the product you paid money for, it more often then not gets cracked anyway, and it can leave people who paid money for the product cut off from accessing what they paid for. Meanwhile people who "pirated" the game might not have spent any money on it, and they don't have to worry if a server goes down, a company goes out of business, or a contract expires. I tend to see digital as a format get thrown under the bus. However a lot of people don't seem to realize just because something is on a disc or cartage does not guarantee it will work. It's usually DRM that cause the issues people dread when they hear digital. Just because a Nintendo Switch cartage works when you put it in a Switch does not mean there is no DRM, or that one day that cartage won't get locked out. That same DRM can also stop discs or cartridges from working. If Sony had not fixed the CBOMB issue after awhile the PS4 would stop booting discs or digital games. You can't even set up a Xbox Series console without being online, and some Smart Delivery games only include the Xbox One version on the disc.
The only one problem I have with game preservation is how much more it's treated than other preservation efforts, sure there are a lot of complex systems to preserve, but why is no one bothering to preserve the original releases of the Star Wars trilogy for example, or you seem to know what beethoven's music sounds like, do you? Do you actually know what it sounds like? Even if we re record it today with digital instruments or newer instruments, it will never be the same, we will never know the original audio, and this is also a problem video games are suffering from right now. tldr: all forms of preservation are flawed and screwed unless we actually do something about it, video games are no different than others for that reason.
People are preserving the original cuts of those movies, you can get bootlegged copies and even torrent and stream them. You couldn't have picked a worse example.
Help promote this video by retweeting twitter.com/MRIXRT/status/1539669903803817990
Thank you so much to my patrons. Notes on this video in this comment
Notes:
-While I believe the interviews are valuable and help tell the story, they are always at the end of a chapter unless directly related to the subject at hand. You can safely skip to the next chapter if you do not care about interviews.
I linked it on the NieR Automata Steam Forums while discussing a related fear for the game if that helps at all.
Every share helps
@@reallycool
You're welcome, you seem like a real underrated channel and the video got me thinking about some concerns of how the games very unusual ending will be preserved when eventually the online additional features cease.
Stumbled across your channel yesterday getting reccomend the Limited Run video and you seem to cover a whole bunch of interesting topics usually not discussed.
And I'm always down to listen to a good video essay while I play games, and you make very nice content my dude.
Will you review Simpson Hit and run
BS Zelda has actually been completely patched with the original "episodes" format. We truly don't deserve how amazing emulation is.
“One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
That reads like something Socrates might've said!
@@ScottofOakland Indeed.
When it comes to games that got multiple versions; I think all versions deserve being preserved. From the perspective of preserving history, it doesn't make sense to throw out something unique just because something somewhat different existed before or after it when you have the choice to preserve it; with that kind of thinking, you might as well not preserve history at all and just stick with what's the present.
Indeed.
That's my main problem with the video as he's focusing too much on this abstract notion of experience and not enough on history or preservation of each title.
I don't want to focus on "experience"
The code base and everything about it matters too. I don't care if we can't get it working exactly the same, it matters that we have the game itself and we get it running as close as possible regardless of the experience.
It's not about sentimental value and which game is most popular it's about history.
He has a very defeatist take on this belittling those who wish to preserve as much as possible.
I cannot stand his point of view that we should all just stop and preserve very specific titles so we can focus on "his" definition.
bruh game preservation makes no sense electronic media ages like spoiled milk and most likely will disappear in 60 years
@@slapshotjack9806 Doesn't the fact electronic media has a short lifespan actually reinforce the need for preservation?
@@tiagotiagot not really because it’s a form of entertainment not history so nobody really cares
@@slapshotjack9806 So you think we should tear down libraries, museums etc?
Part of the problem with "piracy" is that we've let the definition become muddled. Originally, media "piracy" meant unauthorised and unlicensed selling of physical media. e.g. video taping a movie in a movie theater and then selling copies of the tapes. We've allowed file sharing, unauthorized and unlicensed free distribution of digital media, to become not only equivalent but definitively a part of "piracy". But morally file sharing and piracy are not the same thing.
Piracy in most cases can be categorized as a type of theft because the person buying the pirated media has the money to do so. So it is likely depriving the original rights-holder a sale of the product.
File sharing is different because there are a lot of completely legitimate reasons for doing so, the law be damned. Perhaps the person torrenting the files is in a country where they cannot purchase the product in any form. Or the product is not available for sale. Or the product will never be available for sale again. Or the product was never available for sale (prototypes and such). Or it's not actually a product that can be bought, but is still under copyright for some reason. Or my copy was defective and I can't get a replacement without torrenting it. Or the publisher attempted to replace all legitimate licensed copies with an inferior version. Or the current publishers come along ten years later and censor the remaster because of their political agenda. Or the current publishers just refuse to republish the product in question. And in none of these cases is money being exchanged.
Alternately, we could all wait for everything to become public domain. Remind me again how long that takes? At least eighty years after the "death of the author"? So like I said: the law be damned.
But...isn't attempting to give a 'legitimate reason' for doing something while also saying 'the law be damned' kinda contradictory? If you're saying you don't care about the law, that sounds like you're willing to break or ignore it to get something that you want, and you can't really get any further from 'legitimate' than that.
@@qactustick Pretty sure this just means that the law isn't keeping up with the world.
@@thechugg4372 Regardless, the law is the law. How old or whether or not someone personally agrees with it isn't going to change whether or not someone's allowed to break or otherwise disregard it, until or unless that law is changed/eliminated.
@@qactustick "the law is the law" 🤓🤓🤓
@Thechugg That's more or less exactly what I meant. Although, to be specific I'm more irritated by the aging boomers that were out of college before they ever saw a Pong machine than by the legal system itself.
@@qactustick If you don't bring a bale of hay with you next time you take a taxi ride in London, you need to turn yourself in to the police. The law is the law. It doesn't matter how obsolete a law is. No excuses.
I personally think that arcade game preservation is pretty underrated. It's arguably one of the more consistent forms of preservation thanks to stuff like Arcade Archives, yet people don't talk about it that much.
Hamster's Arcade Archives series kicks ass! Got Karnov's Revenge, Xexex, and Sunset Riders, all excellent ports. They deserve much praise
36:40 "how do you preserve a game that has deleted 2/3 of iself?" has me SCREAMING at R* for deleting 180+ cars from the online stores
Game preservation sort of fascinates me. Video games are not like other mediums, like movies or books where you can just easily keep a record of it. Games have a mixture of code and assets designed to work within certain digital environments that can become difficult to replicate as time goes on. However, I think one of the biggest misconceptions I see around game preservation is that physical media is the most effective form of preserving games. Sure, it's the easiest form of preservation, but you're really only preserving the game for yourself. Game consoles, PCs, and game discs will eventually degrade over time, stop functioning, and their only value will be as artifacts for people to look at.
There's a lot of hurdles when it comes to preserving games, but I see the biggest one as being DRM. I don't think there's an industry that's as strict about copy protection as video games are. Sure, the music industry gives games a run for their money, but you can still easily access most music files and copy them. I believe that if you can't gain access to the files of something and copy that thing, you're going to have a very hard time preserving it for future generations to see. Piracy is a very nuanced issue and people's opinions on it may vary, but it cannot be denied that it is the most effective form of game preservation (please note that I'm not saying that you should go and pirate every game in existence). It gives the general public the most direct access to game files to be shared and kept around for years to come. What's required to preserve games can bring people out of their comfort zone and into more legal issues than any other medium, and that's why I think there's been so many debates over things like emulation over the years, even though it's basically necessary for game preservation.
Video games are still a fairly young medium, and it should be no surprise that corporations don't see the value in preserving them as much as other mediums. This happened when film was still a young medium. There are so many films from the early years of the medium that are just lost to time because the companies that produced them never saw any value in preserving them. I think it's unfortunate that we'll never be able to see most of those movies ever again, but it just goes to show that corporate mindsets are at odds with preservation. I am not inherently against remasters and remakes either (The RE2 remake was one of my favorite games of 2019), but companies only produce these when they see value in doing so, not to preserve anything out of the goodness of their hearts.
If we truly wish to preserve games, we need to take matters into our own hands to a certain degree. Video games are possibly the most challenging type of media to preserve, and for some people the struggle of preserving many games may not seem worth the time, effort and legal issues required. I believe that it's important that we preserve games for historical purposes, but I don't necessarily blame some people for turning a blind eye to it. Actual game preservation is a legally grey area and is rarely ever thankful because of that. Game preservation often lacks in easy or quick solutions, so if you think it's worth it, you may have to accept some measures that are outside of your comfort zone, and that's the main problem with it.
A very succinct summation of many of the problems
I think that the idea of remastering games is interesting altogether. Like, yeah, some "remasters" are obvious, soulless, greedy cash grabs, but then there's lots of them that actually do feel like they're made with love and care. And there is something to be said for making these games more accessible on many levels.
It's not just graphics in a good remaster. A lot of the time it's also UI and QOL improvements like adding saves to a game that only had level codes or none at all, fixing jank that might have been acceptable in the past but are borderline unplayable today, modern aspect ratios and FOV - which is actually really important for preventing motion sickness, etc... Not to mention resolving what would be _actual_ game breaking problems by adding better driver support, patching in modern 3D API support (when was the last time your GPU supported Glide out of the box?), Adding modern OS support/ integration (because if a game requires tinkering with DOSBox for and amount of time greater than 0 seconds, then that game is simply never going to be played), modernizing the networking, etc...
A good example of this would be the System Shock remaster. It leaves most everything alone, but it makes the interface something other than excruciating to use and it just freaking works out of the "box."
Then we get the grey area of "community supported remasters." Herein lies your Daggerfalls, Doom's, Roller Coaster Tycoon's, etc... The games are all inarguably superior to how they were at launch in pretty much every respect. They don't remove anything, they eliminate limitations of the old tech without destroying the charm.
There's also an issue that many games are unpreservable. Even if we have all the code, all the hardware, etc, to run, say, original Team Fortress, that will still only be a pale imitation of what playing that game was. Because we cannot preserve the players who played them, and their culture and habits and in-jokes and memes. It'd be like trying to store an entire village in amber.
@@Agamemnon2 The Pompeii of Pootis
I'd say yes, but officially? The Games Industry has done a terrible job preserving a lot of games. Japan in particular, as they love to throw away or lose the original source codes. Recent example, Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2.
Microsoft made a good attempt with their backwards compatibility system on Xbox One X and Xbox Series X, but they are no longer updating it. Sony's classic game lineup for Plus Premium is a joke. And Nintendo is well, Nintendo.
None of the big boys seem to have any real demonstrated interest in making preservation a priority, but I'm hoping more information can at least start the conversation
Oof Japan hurts the most. Feels like 70% of all Japanese games up until the PS3 era had their source code thrown away after development. So many classics will never have proper remasters.
For a country that grew up around togetherness, they sure are very possessive.
microsoft does update there backwards compatibility catalog they literally just did like a month ago
Sony isn't Japanese anymore, it's been a California company since 2016.
Thank you so much for asking me to be a part of this, i might not be the biggest gamer but you did help me realize how important games have been for me throughout my lifetime 🤗
Loved talking to you
No matter what we think of video game preservation, I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of it is thanks to how the internet works. Without it, things would be a lot more difficult for people to show, share, play, and even get abandoned games and prototype builds for. I have nothing but respect for anyone who tries to dig up something and make them usable again, no matter how obscure and what they originate from. I have the same type of respect for people who try to recreate the coding and make their own fan games directly inspired or even connected to them as well.
It's a shame you don't have more subscribers. I don't think your current amount reflects the well written, long-form video essays that plenty of people like me enjoy. Hope you get the recognition you deserve
Counter point to only/mostly preserving games with cultural relevance. Penn and Teller Smoke and Mirrors was an unreleased game for the Sega CD, it had little to no cultural relevance until someone found a way to preserve it and put it online. Then a group of people made an annual charity stream centered around one of the mini games in it called Desert Bus. Now they've finished their 15th year of doing thr stream and have raised over $9 million for charity since they started it.
Relevance at all. There's a difference between P&T being an unreleased game from culturally important celebrities, versus an eShop Match3 asset swap.
Just stumbled upon you from getting reccomend your LRG video yesterday and now you've released a nearly 2 hour essay the day after I found you, I'm liking this luck of mine, you seem like a real hidden gem man, good work!
same lol
Same here :D
Just going off the title alone- Yes absolutely. Just discovered blue Maxima flashpoint and having a blast playing all these minigames from my childhood. I hope that's mentioned in here somewhere, that community has done an outstanding job.
It is not mentioned, sadly
@@reallycool , I'll let you off, you do a great job
I think also a minor part of games preservation that I'm surprised wasn't covered here is *"display technology"*.
like we all know that as stated visuals of the game can often be integral part of the experience and unlike movies where any modern tv can easily scale a video, video games are interesting since it's also requires players input and modern tech can't always replicate that well resulting in problems with experiencing old games (more specifically from 1st generation to the 6th generation) that were made to utilize Tube television tech like CRT, CRT monitor , you often see many proclaim that these are as important as playing on original hardware to maintain the pure experience, specially recently with many outlets and competitive players talking about how CRT Monitors are essential to games like Counter strike and Doom with often fast refresh rate that still competes with modern tech, but as we know these products been long out of production and with every year they will grow in scarcity eventually losing potential experience of specific long gone era, it's interesting how with shift to Plasma, projector TV, LCD, LED and OED Which I believe displays a black levels that's close to an CRT's Black levels, It's why even for none retro fans Video Scaler is widely popular specially for upcoming streamers and content creators who often want to represent the original content at it's purest form as possible
other than that this is was fantastic video and highlighted specially why I started to not bother getting physical goods since nowadays I feel like it's more marketed towards collectors and rich folks over really us the enthusiast who actually play those games, preservation became sad justification for a shady market that monopolized by likes of WATA and LRG
sorry if this was long one but this was quite neat kickstart for interesting conversation
Yes, this is a very valid point. I think I could have made a specific callout for this, I appreciate you making the comment
The problem with Amiibo's has been solved, assuming you're either willing to mod your console hardware or pirate. The actual functional part of an Amiibo is just an NFC chip embedded in the toy with a unique identifier, with a modded console you can read the Amiibo's you do own and then save the identifier for use with an emulator. It's not a perfect solution, but for preserving the functionality of games that use them, it's perfectly doable.
It's less about the individual solution for that specific piece of hardware, and more about how there are a lot of factors to take into consideration--many of which are forgotten about until they're already lost.
You can just make your own amiibos, you should be able to make them from blank chips with your phone or whatnot.
Not every game actually support the amiibos, some get stuck in errors and it's still a pain to implement.
It's why we should honestly be f****** terrified of an all streaming future for games because then the ability to preserve anything is out the window.
Fantastic video, not enough people really have a solid grasp of game preservation besides being able to play the game in some way. Nothing about the media, history and experience surrounding the game.
The only thing I wouldve possibly added is a section on unofficial translations. Some are more faithful to the original developers intent than the official release and also makes untranslated games important to the industry playable in other languages, like Sweet Home. But thatd be tricky to fit in to the vid and might derail it.
Personally ran into a problem in a preservation project where a significant portion of the game I'm trying to preserve is missing due to the game I'm preserving having weekly event stages that were deleted after their week was up. The individual updates were handled in a way that despite tons of people who were cheating with a save editor needing to dump the extra data files for the game in question, being Pokemon Shuffle to use the save editor, they haven't been uploaded anywhere since the people who were doing this weren't trying to preserve the game, just cheat. I've gotten some of them found through dataminers of later updates and am trying to implement them, but having to recreate 2-3 years of stage updates isn't looking fun.
AW HER LIL BIRB AT THE END
The Destiny 2 example makes me fear for future game preservation especially as someone in his mid-20s who has been emulating games I've played in my youth recently. I've had a great time playing licensed games like the SpongeBob Movie game, or Scooby Doo games. But the fact that's the only way I can play them without having the original hardware because of licensing issues, and the fact that someone who I don't know dumped those games thinking it would be "worth preserving." In these days if say an avid kid who liked a certain licensed game in these days, who's to say 20 years later because of patches/updates/DRM/etc that game cannot be documented or experienced? Even so called "bad" games too that someone might of found enjoyment in?
Its scary to think that about it for future generations.
52:05
The solution to the Amiibo problem has been solved by cloning or spoofing the Amiibo binaries and using Amiibo emulation applets with custom firmware or emulators. For the Nintendo Switch, there's a applet called Emuiibo that does this.
I'm not sure of a solution exists for the Nintendo 3DS Custom Firmware however.
I bought Ultimate Doom in 1997 in the Depths of Doom Trilogy.
Because the source code is out there I was able to just keep the WAD files saved one way or the other these past decades.
Here I am 25 years later and I can run it in Dosbox, or Chocolatedoom to try and play it how I remember.
But I can also still mod it, make levels for it, play new games from it's engine, and it's still the feeling I got when I was a kid.
Doom is one of the best games of all time not because what it did for FPS, but because it cannot fade away.
I enjoyed this video, but I found the “profiles” (for lack of a better word) a bit confusing. Like, I’m not sure if they contributed to the thesis of the video. I’m thinking a lot were included to demonstrate that the emotions we associate with games are an impossible thing to replicate, but honestly I’m not sure what the goal of the emotional interludes was. Either way I watched through the whole thing and enjoyed myself. Now I need to go throw more money at night dive studios
To tldr as much as possible, my personal opinion is that preservation is not about the specific game but the emotions that surround it.
Ngl , I skipped through a bunch of those " emotion " interview , I felt they didnt brought a lot to the viewing experience compared to the others that actually work on preservation in the software sense of it.
Still a great and important video. Good work 👍
I thought I clicked on the wrong video when dude started ranting about what Ocarina of Time means to him.
@@reallycool It's understandable, but some literally whos talking about how they like some games takes watchtime which is just pointless filler to most, if not all viewers. I mean, we clicked on a 2 hour video about preservation of videogames, we already care about the medium to the point of wanting to watch a video of this sort. We don't need someone else telling us that they care, because no shit, we know people care, we care too, that's why we're here.
It's a great video otherwise, this is my single biggest gripe with it. Good luck with your channel, you seem to have some bright future ahead.
Videos can capture feelings and moments in time that can't be replicated long after the fact, for gaming especially. When I started posting gaming content here this year, I was in a dark place and kind of just wanted to backup some personal gaming memories for after I died for anyone that cared to watch. Then things finally started to improve in my life, at the same time I started dealing with this platform's region blocks, processes for appeals and copyright strikes. That sort of drained my remaining interest in uploading. I felt as though my videos weren't even getting views in comparison to the hassle I'd deal with behind the scenes. But I'm realizing now that all of this is bigger than myself, so I should keep trying. Many games won't last forever, and neither will any of us. But video creators can capture those feelings, memories and moments in time. And we can do what we can to preserve those feelings. Not just for ourselves, but for those that come after. Nothing will last forever, everything will fade eventually. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, right?
It is very humbling to affect so many people
We're eating tonight gamers
I’m just a random voice on the internet, so take my nothing opinion for what it is, but I think this is your best video yet. You really captured not only the importance of preservation, but also helped illustrate why games are just as important and valid as other art, if not more for some. Thank you.
Thank you, that was my goal
Monster video. You and Tim Rogers really are setting a new high bar for games journalism, and as a video game preservationist myself, I'd say that what you do is a part of video game preservation. Thanks for the time and effort you put into this. Absolutely killer.
1:37:10 “What is the definitive version of a game?”
For me, that would have to be the initial 1.0 release, then after updates (if there are any), a complete/definitive edition of the game should be released to replace the original 1.0 release.
Do we release a definitive edition only of the final cut, or just the most important big changes? What is 1.0 is bad, 1.2 is the game everyone remembers, and 1.4 is the last update?
It's inevitable that some content vanishes with the way things are legally and practically, I just sorta accept it, there is really nothing we can do realistically. What I really like is how many emulators try to have 100% functional compatibility with the consoles. Sure, it is unlikely to ever be 1:1, but one could say that it preserves the console forever on a technicality. Eventually we will get to the point where every single Gamecube and Wii could just break with no one knowing how to make a reproduction-console and I would still technically be able to program a new authentic Gamecube-game and just play it with a very high chance that if someone could actually track down a real GC or Wii(Or even Wiiu with homebrew), that it would run perfectly on it too.
32:00 Well, yes and no. There are actually two pullrequests live that implement basic support. The games aren't even close to running because the base board's missing, but they at least manage to boot, assuming that stuff gets merged eventually.(I hope it does before I die, but who knows?) So yeah, seems like the dream in this case isn't dead, it might just take a long time.
On the question of which version to preserve: Yes. And that is another reason why I just say "we should try, but somethings are just gone." Version 1.0 of a version has just as much legitimacy as the day 1 patch and that has just as much legitimacy as the final version and the remaster and so on and so fourth. Getting every public version of an offline game is already a hassle, but that becomes even worse with an online game. Because not only is it oftentime impossible to backup every single version as it is currently live(As one regularly also needs to back up server-data), but one also either needs a server-network that actively hosts every single version and gives easy access to the version of choice.... or keep the data and instructions to host each version on a github or sth. It's a hard backpain in a world where many deserving games don't even get even a single version of their game preserved before it's lost to the ether(And I am moreso talking about online games that can be played alone because multiplayer MMOs as the video discusses are too volatile. It's possible to get 0 players on the official server before shutdown or capped playercount on the fanserver. It depends too much on what is effectively random chance).
Most games can't be found online though.
There's a huge wealth of 8-16 bit Japanese games that just are basically dead now. Same with alot of doujin games that never hit off outside of Japan have become lost media now pretty much either because every link 404s or it's not had any way to be preserved to run on modern systems
I just found out your channel and man, your videos are top tier elaborated and soooo much effort and work goes into this channel. I'm glad I found you out. Hope you get the recognition you deserve in the future, because you truly deserve way more audience. Lots of love.
Yes it is absolutely essential as just like any other kinda history . Once lost they can't come back.
Def Jam: Fight For New York is one of the ones I'd like to see properly preserved. It's about the only Fighting Game I've ever found that had impactful RPG elements, and a decently fleshed out story that gets you involved. It had five styles to choose to fight with, and investing in any of them saw definite improvements in your ability to fight. It had physical stats that again, improved your ability to damage opponents, or endure hits. It's an awesome game... that's fucked forever; because of so much lisenced music/the actual rappers who were voice acted in the game, appearing as themselves. It's been emulated, but I have no idea how to use one, and I honestly prefer consoles or at the very least a console controller over the keyboard and mouse. I find the controller easier to control. Funny thing that, I know...
I personally would have liked Def Jam Icon to have continued on from Def Jam: Fight For New York, and show that MC having saved his girl, built a family and taking over the territory to build his empire. Instead of what we got. But it'll never happen now. It'd be too expensive to get the song lisences with the rappers attached, and I believe the company has soured on the notion it was a good idea to start with. Because of how convoluted it became at the end, legally. Still, I'm glad I got to play the game, and that it was a new experience as I tend to Just RPG. I do value it for that point, but upgrading consoles and the fact I don't tend to keep games after I'm done with them for space concerns (or at times trade in value for store credit, since games are often expensive even outside of Ebay and Amazon price jacking) I don't have the game to play anymore. Which does suck, because I did enjoy it enough to be able to actually beat the game. (Though Crow was massively assholish to beat, which is funny, because I tend to create "beef wall" MC's if I can, and Snoop Dogg ended up looking comparatively like a stick figure...)
I'd also like Web of Shadows, which is now impossible to get because Activision lost the lisencing rights. The only game where they let Pete get with Felicia and of course I never got to play it. Damn it...
For multiplayer games, where culture is an important component; we're gradually getting to the point where it might be possible to use advanced AI (the real kind not just the simple stuff used for classic NPCs) to replicate the behavior of the players, given it's documented well enough. It's gonna be a little bit more challenging where the community, the relationships with real people, are a significant factor; replicating the experience of having people you care about even when not playing the game, is a bit more complicated than just providing a semi-stateless snapshot of play-style and in-game communication; not to mention it raises all sorts of ethical questions....
the dot hack games did an interesting job of actually emulating an mmo. i'd almost try using that as a framework for the future (but tailored to the culture of a given game at a given time)
There's a basis for a very fascinating Black Mirror episode in this, if it could be put down in words.
Preservation inevitably spills into piracy. But piracy is good too, so it's an extra win.
Good depending on context, if you can reasonably afford the game and the devs have at least some level of integrity and it's accesabile it is much better to actually support the creators so they are rewarded for their work and can make more, but it is a very important fallback in case the the game is unavailable or filled with something garbage like securom or the company is something like Activision.
Nothing wrong will downloading some old GBA roms or pirating a game like Dohna Dohna which is locked to 3 installs, but piracy for piracy's sake is rather scummy.
Old games that can't be sold or played anymore should be open-sourced under a non-commercial license or Mozilla license.
For me video games are a form of modern art, and in many cases story telling.
Culturally GTA V is every bit as important as Game of Thrones, The Mona Lisa, or Michael Jacksons Thriller album.
For this reason I feel it is important to make older video games available to newer generations.
Seeing how the art form progressed through the Atari 2600 and Odyssey 2, into the ZX Spectrum and NES years, and so on.
The answer, for me, is emulation. So long as emulators exist on modern hardware digital rips of older games can be made accessible.
The big issues revolve around accuracy of the emulator, the complexity (and thus compatibilty with) the system being emulated, DRM, reliance to bespoke obsolete servers, and the industries general apathy about preserving its legacy and making older titles available to new audiences.
This is then wrapped in a quagmire of licencing and copyright.
Personally I think one great solution would be better copy protection laws in favour of culture and presevation rather than the bank balances of big corp.
I see little reason why any media can't be automatically in the public domain after 25 years.
Questionable legalities aside, the Internet Archive is doing a cracking job of preserving a very large proportion of gaming history.
If anything happens to the archive it will leave a gapping hole culturally.
One perspective on the "what to preserve" question is that it's hard to know what will be culturally relevant to future generations. For instance, there are many pieces of old media that have taken on new life in recent years because of their striking similarity to modern-day memes. Like "How You Think You Look When A Flashlight Is Taken" (1921 illustration), or a still frame Charlie Chaplin's "Pay Day" (1922) sometimes referred to as "Original Distracted Boyfriend". Sometimes a franchise is rebooted or otherwise revived after a long, long dormancy, such as Sol Cresta (2022) being a direct sequel to Terra Cresta (1985). That can give old works a new relevance to modern audiences, even if they weren't considered particularly important in the intervening years. Even in your video you mention Earthbound which is now considered a "classic" but was a bomb when it released. Obviously it's not possible to give every single title the best possible treatment but I don't think we should start by deciding that only the best of the best are worthy of preservation.
Wow, i feel super greatful to have found your channel, you are making some of the most interesting, informative, and well made gaming journalism I've found in my decade consuming such content, thanks for making it!
i'm about halfway through this video and oh boy is it a high quality one. Very very impressed, this is an amazing one.
We should so that companies can't charge us 70€+ each handful of years.
"The Triforce games are mostly unplayable"
*_*LAUGHS IN MODDED WII*_*
Bro, this really is some in-depth analysis, and I'm glad I had several hours to listen to a couple of your vids.
I don't have much of sustenance to add other than this: don't tell people "if you skip this, I understand." To me, that signifies weakness on your end and unfairly invalidates the material you are providing us by representing it as either "unimportant" or "too complicated to understand." Let your audience make that distinction, as you are making intelligent content for intelligent people. Push our boundaries, and let us determine where our comfort levels are.
42:54 Development Checkpoints and Bots. More specifically, advanced learning bots taught on the pre-recorded player behaviors of the time. There've been a few examples of this already, we just need to figure out how to keep the bots at specific levels of play.
The Virtual Console version of Super Mario Bros is not a ROM downloaded from the internet. That assumption was made because it has a header similar to other illegal roms (iNES emulator header), but that just isn't the case. NES roms need headers and some tired/lazy dev at Nintendo just used the most popular format for their emulator.
As that wasn't really the subject of the video, I didn't really feel a need to double-check. Thanks for the clarification
I've been working through your backlog after appreciating every appearance of "Sausage Doom Guy" on EFAP for a long time now. Your content is extremely well thought-out and articulated, and this video is my favorite of yours so far! I'm always looking forward to your next upload, and I hope more people come to the channel and appreciate all the work you put into these videos.
Thanks for being here ;)
The last years I was hearing this topic about preservation on games, personally I could never understood very well since it always was a big debate that 95% of time ends in a non-sense trolling comments and fights but now thanks to this video, finally I can understand very well, lol!
Anyway, I think that... well... yeah, it's important to keep and preserve the games for future generations or at least have a very secure backup for: " Who knows what the future awaits us?" (servers shutdown, global internet shutdown or *insert another disaster here*), besides if no one secure very well the original source codes on games probably we could end up getting more disasters like the Silent Hill HD Collection back on PS3 and X360...
But still how is the gaming industry of nowdays, probably no much will care in presevartion, either the big companies or even the Indie developers
I mean seriously this is actually a wild idea that I hardly ever see someone do it but why no one release their games digitally first, then address everything on it like: fixing problems, DLC support, add player's feedback ideas, etc..., then when you think everything was addressed release the game physically with every patch, content, etc... inside the disc/cartridge, no download or internet required and there you go a game fully complete and preserved (or at least a good backup for the: "Emulation's World", lol!).
I think they would fear that whales and hyped fans wouldn't drop $120 a year later
Some companies do that but not enough. The Cuphead devs are doing that now that the DLC is finished.
Part of growing up was playing games with my dad and the most time we spent playing a game together was on City of Heroes. When I found out that it was still around AT ALL (legitimately or not) after all these years being left with nostalgia for a pastime, I had to try it myself that night. My dad's face lit up as soon as I told him. Not only could we finally continue exploring the world, the costume creator, the powerset combinations, but to do so with hundreds of others that either remembered the Live days or only now had the chance to experience the game for the first time with helpers at the ready. Part of the old experience was also preserved in the sense of knowing that the MMO was being actively worked on again by the community developers (balance changes, new powers and archetypes, costume customization options, performance optimizations, graphics features), picking up what the old devs had to drop.
This was largely only possible because the server source code was leaked. I can't officially condone piracy, but, without official support, running private servers like this is likely the only way to experience dead online games. How can we expect people to otherwise live these experiences and enjoy the developers' works when copyright doesn't expire until life and 70 years when most companies don't have a good track record of lasting that long, let alone preserving their source media to the end?
This is my favorite channel now, this video was so good holy heck
37:22 There is an attempt at resurrecting/preserving version 1.0 of FFXIV, but it's been an extremely slow and limited process. The last time I tried it out, it allowed you to look through the world and watch cutscenes, but the people working on it hadn't gotten combat or the quest systems functioning properly. If you're interested, search for FFXIV 1.0 Project Meteor. But as you've indicated, it's not an easy process by any means, and requires a lot of work even to get what I mentioned playable.
That's very cool. I'll add the information to my pinned comment later this week
1:08:13 This guy just talks like a business, "I believe artists own their game" 90% of the time with these old games it's a company that own the games who bought out another company or did a hostile takeover of a company or just got the rights to a bunch of games because another company had folded into another company and this was just part of the stuff they had kicking about and the "artists" who made the game don't own or get 'shit' when it's stuck up on steam with no patches. No offence to Night Dive who do good work. But to bring it down to protecting 'artists' is just disingenuous, as is his 'Truck' analogy, it's not about taking your truck, it's about making an unlicensed copy of your truck, which may mean when it comes time to sell your truck, it's worth less. OR possibly people have seen me driving your truck about town which has kept up interest in your truck and it's actually worth more now than if I'd never made a copy.
Well, he is the business manager for a major developer, so it makes sense where his thoughts lie
The whole patch culture problem really pisses me off. Every game should have a version that can be played from start to finish on disc. I can understand ironing out minor bugs but having gamebreaking bugs on the disc version or not even having the game at all on disc like they did with Halo Infinite is just unacceptable.
It's part of why it's hard to view a physical game disk as anything other than a physical steam key.
@@reallycool Well lots of games still have playable builds on disc. Metro Exodus Complete Edition on Xbox comes to mind as it has an entire second disc for the DLC (while the PS5 version just has a lazy download code). But they are starting to become the exception.
@@thatssomegoodpie Xbox still needs to get their shit together when it comes to being able to install and then play physical games offline. Many xbox smart delivery games have the xbox one version on the actual disc, which the Series X cannot play without updating to the proper version. Physical games being download keys is very true for the Series X.
@@JC-xq2qe Yeah it's a big issue but look at it from another angle. Only Smart Delivery titles are affected by this DRM problem. While the Series X versions will seize to exist without internet connectivity those Xbox One build are still preserved on disc and most of the time fully playable offline on Xbox One consoles.
Smart Delivery effectively requires both versions to be delivered to the customer and physical discs simply can't hold both versions, except for a few exceptions. The Xbox version of Ballan Wonderworld for instance has both the Xbox One and Series X version on disc and does not require internet to be played. The game is small enough for both versions to be included on disc.
Once games stop coming to the Xbox One smart delivery will stop being a thing thus Xbox Series X games will be released on the actual disc and not require connectivity to be upgraded aside from the usual patches.
The one guy's analogy of stealing his car is yet another poor example of understanding "piracy"; downloading a ROM of a video game doesn't physically take that game away from anywhere.
YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CAR
I really enjoyed being a part of the video, and I think you did a great job at bringing up important questions that hadn't initially occurred to me. Keep up the great work!
Thanks so much for donating your time to this
I'm just gonna say their is a Tri Force emulator that works with Mario Kart Arcade 2, F Zero and Virtua Striker.
I really respect the effort you put into and the lengths you go to for every video you make, this is now one of my favourites.
Thank you
preservation is to keep things as they are and to keep them alive to make sure it's reachable remakes and reboots don't count as its a different version of what you wish to preserve for example you preserve food so its still usable and it doesn't go bad ports are a way to keep the memories alive but they can be quite off some are bad and some are too good and could you're judgment
Emulators and pirated version don't often make them exactly as the real version that goes for online only games you're only getting a small percentage of the game
ports emulators and pirated version are like holograms illusion of what you want to preserve you're keeping its memories alive but it's core body is long gone everything in some way are like us we are struggling to preserve ourselves we currently can only preserve memories of our existence it will be up to the next generation to continue it until it no longer possible
A really insightful dive. Turned me on to a great deal of things in preservation I'd never considered and corrected some of my misconceptions. Great work as usual, man.
Thanks for donating your time to chat with me
@@reallycool of course! Happy to be a part of this.
Awesome video! Like what AntDude mentioned, I always wanted developers to offer their classic games in ROM format for us to use on whatever emulator/rom cart/etc we please.
Interesting perspective. The cultural impact of a game tends o get lost as time goes by. Waiting for Super Mario Bros 3 was an event. Now explaining it sounds like trying to understand what life was like before the automobile or planes.
That's why I like some game museum approaches like getting period accurate furniture to go along with it. And it's one of the reasons why I've been so adverse to using emulation over the original cart with a CRT. Even avoiding modding my consoles to accept a clearer signal. The warm fuzzies of playing a game the way you remember is a rare occurrence but when you active it, the world isn't such a hostile place.
Man, this video is so good. But whenever I return to this video, I keep wondering why you didn't have so much more views and subs. Worry not, i'm one of the subs. It's just that, man. I wish you just had more of it.
I know you deserved more of it, with all your efforts
One minor correction: Android emulators on PC aren't emulators, they're virtual machines. They aren't emulating.
If you disable virtualization on your PC, you can still run emulators like Dolphin, but you can't run an Android "emulator" like Bluestacks. This distinction is relevant for cloud gaming PC services like ShadowPC where they have virtualization disabled.
But I guess you could say they do the same function as an emulator even though they're technically not emulation.
The audience for this is someone who might not understand the distinction, and it didn't feel super value to clarify
@@reallycool I agree with you that the technicality of the definition of "emulator" isn't important, but it's something I wanted to point out. The function of an emulator and virtual machine aren't different, although that difference does have implications for situations where an average user might have virtualization disabled and not know why their Android emulator isn't working.
It was more of an "ackchually" clarification. Probably not important enough to do a re-upload, although I would have liked a minor detour to clarify the technical distinction.
If you're virtualizing a device with a different architecture entirely wouldn't that consist of some sort of emulation?
@@immortallix Sure, but Android "emulators" still won't run on a system with virtualization disabled, while something like Dolphin will. So even if it fits the semantic definition of "emulator", it doesn't fit the technical definition of "emulator".
Thanks for making this video and getting so much input from so many different people online. It really adds a sense of authenticity considering we only really hear from influencers or larger figure heads in gaming. Hearing these stories about how some of these folks used gaming as an escape were so relatable in a sense that some of us have done things like emulation, modding or piracy or have found people in the community.
I'm really happy you enjoyed it
Ideally you'd have every version preserved with them all available to play, maybe highlight the most stable versions or the versions before major changes to funnel would be players there so they aren't spread out super thin.
As a Doctor Who fan who will never be able to watch 97 episodes, preservation is important to me. I'm glad we're getting decompilations and PC ports of old games, they're a massive help in preservation, giving us a better game in the process.
Remakes are definitely not preservation. The Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Crash N-Sane Trilogy preserving the PS1 originals.
On the piracy thing, I buy most of what I can. Piracy for me is for things like TV shows I literally can't get any other way, or for decades-old ROMs you can't buy officially anyway.
I give this guy props for actually interviewing someone he verbally raised an eyebrow at and changing his mind on something. Keep up the great work
which guy was that? i may have missed it
Let's take a minute to remember Byuu/Near, developer of bsnes/higan, who dedicated his life to videogame preservation, specially of the Super Nintendo and Super Famicom.
Thanks for the video, man. Incredible amount of quality research. Also, it’s time to replay Majora‘s mask…
Very pleased you enjoy it. Majora's Mask was easily in the Top 3 most mentioned game for people's fondest memories. A lot of people mentioned that it helped them get through depression or difficult times
This channel is incredibly underrated.
Thank you :)
I've often wondered how much of my own desire for preservation is selfishly motivated. I've got a fairly sizable collection of hardware and software, and it's comforting to know that I will have a chance to experience titles from as far back as I was aware of computers and games at all, to ones of the current day, any time I'd like. I am curating my own little museum of nostalgia and missed opportunities, and that is great. For me. And maybe a few people around me that might also find it entertaining. But it doesn't do much for anyone else, and especially not for future generations.
But one question I face, if I'm being honest, is will future generations care? I have a deep attachment to a lot of this stuff. Some of it is cocooned in memories from my childhood, but the overwhelming majority of what I have now is totally new to me. Maybe I had heard of it in 199x, or maybe not. Even for a game that I never knew about as a kid, it's still tangentially related to experiences I hold as dear to me. What happens when that association is broken?
I don't lament the lost painting someone did in their parlor in the late 1800s. I'm only mildly curious what daily life was like to someone from that time. But I would give A LOT to step into a time machine and stand in front of a store display of new-in-box Nintendo Entertainment Systems, with R.O.B. the robot operating buddy. I would LOVE to sit down on a shag carpet in front of a big ugly console TV and play Super Mario Bros through a coax input. I'm doing everything I can to recreate that experience, and fighting against physical limitations of time and space and money and parts viability. Do I expect someone in 2070 to feel the same thing I feel when I hold my boxed copy of Super Mario Bros 3? Would an emulated version give them everything they want to know, and more? They won't remember driving to high school graduation while listening to the Wipeout XL soundtrack, and if any of those tunes ever popped up on Spotify, maybe they wouldn't care at all.
It feels vital to preserve now, because we are at a point in time where we have access to some original, perhaps untouched items and paraphernalia -- potentially for the last time ever, and those things hold immense value to me. It's now or never, and _I_ want to be able to relive those old times in as vivid a way as possible. I wonder whether the desire will die with the opportunity, though, and once it's gone, nobody will be all that concerned about it.
A very poignant consideration, to be certain.
Data hoarding is bad. If you have something rare, like a rare game booklet or guide or some sort of extra material or hell some lost game itself -- share it. Otherwise, this sort of preservation is pointless, because once you die -- it's gone.
I remember playing Fusion Fall a mmo for cartoon network and finding that people preserved the game was awesome
The Dark Souls online community will host these little anniversary events where, for a weekend, everyone would agree to go play one specific game in the franchise and participate in the multiplayer. It's not perfect, and the game functions singleplayer any other time of year still, but it could give players - both new and old - the closest thing to a time capsule for what it was like to be there in the trenches with other players.
For MMO's, assuming you're able to get past the software and server issue, seems like the best reasonable solution to me. Block off when the game is playable to a specific period of time, so that the most people who want to experience the title will be there together at the same time. Similat to how - if you want to experience music with other people - you need to go to a scheduled concert. Make November the "A Realm Rediscovered" month where players can play the original FF14. A game with multiple patches can cycle through all (or at least, all available and replicable) versions of itself in a sort of rotation system similar to how many live service games already handle their content. Want to play the original Wrath of the Lich King? Cool, that's next week.
The biggest problem with this concept, outside of simply how to gain access to this stuff - is that it shoots player progression in the foot, which is arguably a more important aspect for many games. But at least with the ones that cared about the size and interactivity of it's community, it's the compromise we might be able to attain, similar to emulation of singleplayer titles.
The deeper the rabbit hole goes, the less I can take video games seriously as an actual art form, because the companies that control them still sees them as a product, as a toy.
Companies beat the crap out of people who risk their necks and their time and their money to preserve "Bubble Blaster Action Man 3000" but then these monolithic companies suddenly forget that they are erasing history when they are about to basically delete an entire eshop. It's all fine and good when companies are in control to SELL them to you, but by god do they not want you to enjoy your purchase, because that would mean that you may not need the sequel. As long as a game has a single cent of value, companies wouldn't dream of sharing their "art" with you.
I don't buy it for a second that these games are worth defending.
A lot of games are factory-produced these days, which tells me that the medium stops becoming an art form. Usually riddled with problems after release, needing dozens of patches to make it even playable in certain cases. Can you imagine buying a book, but then having to go back every three days to the book store because you notice that certain pages are missing, and then being told to wait a little while longer?
I mean, is Cyberpunk 2077 worth preserving? The developers themselves don't really give two shits about it. One of the most catastrophically disappointing games of all time, a game that for years had been sold on complete lies, still sits at a 78% "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam. Is Assassin's Creed 514: Even More Assassinating worth preserving? True, it's the size of three galaxies, and I especially love the skybox on Planet Hillys, where it's confirmed that the Beyond Good and Evil universe takes place in the grander Ubisoft multiverse, which ensures endless sequels of games that are absolutely worth preserving. Can't forget about the three different side quests too.
The video game industry stinks of greed and insincerity. It's a factory, in the most literal way possible. A true artistic vision and direction for a project (usually decided on by one person or, at the most, a handful of people) is rarely if ever a part of video games.
I say let it burn.
There have been big talking around physical copies degrading to an unplayable state such as disc rot on cd's, but I've seen most people actually say seeing dots with light through your disc isn't really disc rot. Its rather just manifacturing error in the label/picture of the disc and the disc is okay. Disc rot doesn't have dots, it rather have this scratch kind of holes rather than round holes. I checked some of my discs, from music Cd's to ps3 discs and some have these holes that light shine through them, but they all play without any problem.
those holes are absolutely disc rot, and as long as they're not in an area of data that's trying to be read it'll work. you wouldn't be able to make a 1:1 copy anymore with the holes, and as soon as the wrong portion of that disc rots it'll be unreadable at all.
There's lots of different kinds of degradation that can occur to physical media. It's not really a question of "if" but "when"
@@RetroDoneRight It isn't a bunch of holes, some disc have a single hole and I've checked close up on them and noticed that the printed label at the front of the disc has the hole in it which makes it a manifacturing error. Could even find them in new discs like for ps4.
I have seen pictures similar to it online and they compare Disc rot to the print label error and you do notice a difference.
Source code can be reverse engineered from compiled code
But in most cases it just takes, a LOT of work to be readable
It didn't make sense to dive into the weeds and explain the nuances for this video
Bluepoint is the best developer at doing this. All their remasters used code from retail PS2 discs
At this point, piracy laws is just corporations monetizing the concept of sharing. If they could, they would want to get money for you sharing a pencil to your classmate.
Correction for at 32:23:
- The claim that Nintendo sold pirated ROMs from the internet has been debunked. It's due to (I believe) Nintendo using iNES headers to some extend. The creator of the iNES header was hired a while back to help out with emulation ever since Pokémon Stadium and Animal Crossing.
- HOWEVER, it has been discovered multiple times Nintendo used downloaded ROMs and emulation internally during development. But they never shipped a product out with downloaded ROMs.
Thanks for the correction
Thank you for informing me about this video. As something of a preservationist myself and admissible a snob for certain biases therein, this was enlightening and expanded my view of it
When it comes to MMOs the "ideal Version" is whichever is the closest to the overall artist intended experience. When it comes to something like Destiny, the "Ideal Version" involves backporting assets from the original releases to the last version (be it by hackery, or by source code modification and recompilation), as to have the COMPLETE experience in place.
MMOs like TERA and WoW where the game has had several complete overhauls to the experience would need checkpointed versions to be "fully preserved".
In TERA's case (notable because ALL servers are in the process of shutting down right now), you'd need builds from May 2013, January 2014, December 2019, and the final build "v111" from last month. We have ALL of Retail December 2019 and Retail June 2021, excluding source code, but including the official server software (only thanks to a state-level threat actor hacking and releasing it) archived, but we're missing a lot of the earlier builds, and the latest build.
Once hardware gets sufficiently fast, got enough memory etc, there are cases where you can make it equivalent to running on the original hardware; add to that appropriate display devices, and input devices that recreate the physical experience of the original input devices, and it gets pretty hard to argue that the hardware side of the experience, from the perspective of the person playing the game, and from the perspective of the game software itself, has not been reproduced. There's of course still certain psychological matter of how people feel about the machines, what they had to do to get it etc, but when it comes to hardware and software, emulation can actually do a pretty good job of reproducing the original experience in many cases.
I'm new to this channel and am hopeful that you see success here. Very high quality work. Thanks for what you do.
This is the kind of quality content UA-cam needs more of. Your sub count is criminally low but keep delivering content like this and that’ll change!
Wow, absolutely mesmerizing and well-documented video. It sure took days, weeks or months to pull off with all the interviews and editing. Love the topic you're presenting to us, gamers.
I am Spanish and game preservation involves many aspects that you explained through all the documentary. But what about the languages/translations of all this video games? For example, I played most of the games in my childhood in Spanish and when I was a bit older I played the same games in English and I got a total different vibe/experience with the same game but different language/translation.
I wish game preservation also include this kind of topic as, for example, MGS for PS1, the Spanish version is very well known for its outstanding dubbing. Perhaps the best PS1 Spanish dubbed game.
Anyway, props and kudos for your video and channel! You deserve so much more views/subs!
I'm a bit late to this video, but damn dude you really hit like every point when it comes to game preservation. I think the general rule of thumb is that if a game is inaccessible to the average consumer, and can only be acquired through purchasing it through some method in which the original copyright owners don't receive the funds, it should be made available to the public. I think a lot of companies are going about releasing old games in a very poor sense. You touched on how it wasn't profitable for them to release a lot of these, but I think the root cause for that is that they're charging far too much for a game that's considered dated. I personally wouldn't pay $5 Nintendo for the original SMB, but I would probably pay like 25 cents or so. I think if they made much older games on their eshops cheaper, they could turn a profit from people buying them up, similar to Steam's sales.
Patches are a fascinating topic, because take for example Doom Eternal, a mostly single player game. The game patched a crucial bug that was utilized for speedrunning the 1.0 version, but since its gone people have to go through the ridiculous process of downpatching which can be a real pain and often times quite sketchy. Meanwhile, the Cuphead developers made it so that the original release version is available to download to owners of it so that people can experience the original glitches and feel of the game despite it lacking many new graphical and gameplay features the current version has.
Fortnite is a very interesting topic, since the game is constantly evolving and replacing aspects of the map, and sometimes the map entirely. It's impossible to officially play older versions of the map... Through Epic's services. There are some preservationists who've made server emulators that allow people to explore the map solo and even access developer debug features so that they can spawn in items or objects to try them out. Epic's even made a statement saying they're okay with this so long as multiplayer servers aren't made to be a regular thing, and that NO cosmetics are made available. It's not and never will be the original 100 player BR experience from those different versions, but it is a great way to kind of see and explore the way the map used to be without browsing videos or screenshots.
Source code is definitely an interesting topic, and you made some solid arguments for it. I distinctly remember an old project to bring back 2007 TF2 and how it was decently popular at the time, but because of the lack of consistent players it died very quickly. Having the option, however, for people to get a group of friends or people together to play it is always a welcome opportunity though. There's currently some really fascinating projects going on for Super Mario 64 and LoZ:OoT that decompiled the game and cleaned up the source code, which have lead to some incredible modding and PC porting breakthroughs. It's not the same as playing it through an emulator or on the original hardware, but it is definitely keeping the games alive much more than the Switch service is doing for'em.
I think when it comes to physical media, preserving the images from the boxes, manuals, and even disks is the closest thing we can get to proper preservation. There's a wonderful website I always recommend to my friends for ROMs that does its best to archive all of these things for whichever game its applicable for.
This was sincerely an absolutely gripping, and criminally underrated/underviewed video. Here's hoping that game preservationists keep going strong despite all these troubles they endure
I prefer to keep a physical copy of all my games, when possible, but I know they're susceptible to disc rot, corrosion, etc. Re-releases of games (like Capcom Fighting Collection and TMNT Cowabunga Collection) are sometimes great and I try to support them if it's a game I enjoy. It's cool to have ROM dumps of your games that can be played in an emulator or flashed to a cart and played on original hardware or reproduction hardware like the Analogue, now excuse me while I hide from Nintendo ninjas.
It is a honorable please to speak with you and to discuss a gaming aspect not widely known! This video was insightful and has broaden my horizons. 😄
I'm almost 7 minutes in, but I just wanna say that my definition of Game Preservation is to prevent something from becoming Lost Media, and having it accessible for future generations to experience
The question then becomes, "what does 'experience' mean," which is something I tried to explore in this video
@@reallycool Oh yes absolutely, this wasn't meant to be a rebuttal 😆 the idea of 'experiencing' something in itself gets philosophical when you start to think about it, and I look forward to your take in this video when I get around to finishing it
Many early VR games will be totally forgotten. I am sure "Daedalus VR" will be lost to history in 20 years. I have my copies on my Oculus Go and Meta Quest 2.
I would hope that many of them can be saved, just to help show how very confused developers were by the new medium--how they had to struggle to figure out simple mechanics
@@reallycool Or how absolutely they nailed it. I still play the game a few times a years, 5 years later.
We already have a problem of pre-alpha Oculus Rift games being completely unplayable even through ReVive, Oculus’ own runtimes, and older SteamVR games have some technical issues (specifically with input, how older versions of UE4 handled upscaling/downscaling, and how hacked together some ports are) that cause bugs with new versions of the runtime.
The only way you are gonna get old Oculus pre-development games up and running is by hoping that it uses Unity and can let you decompile the code to project files that could be upgraded to a more recent version.
@@KingKrouch I guess the DEV kept the Unity/Unreal files of the project. That is our only hope.
Trying to preserve every game ever is not a pointless effort and we should strive to do what we can to preserve every title in its final form.
You're creating an unnecessary abstraction layer between what is considered final or original and your use of the word "experience" to define how one person should correctly enjoy the game.
A game is to be played with knowledge of said context but also enjoyed as is with it as close to the original as possible.
It is possible to have it be as vanilla as possible in order to get an authentic and true insight into what the game was actually like and how it functions. Even if said game lacks community, videos and player base to support it.
There is a precise and logical way we can approach this without having to rely on popularity as that would cause issues with cult classics or hidden gems that deserve to be preserved.
I want to preserve every game I enjoy and love and I don't think it's fair for someone like you to decide that it shouldn't be preserved because it's not popular enough.
Final fantasy 7 remake does not count as preservation of the original whatsoever as it is an artistic retelling and reiteration of the original.
Counting it as a preservation when it is clearly a reimagining of said title is antithetical to preservation.
It's not about experience, you are doing a great disservice to game preservation by discounting efforts made by people who did their best to preserve the original game and keep it as close as possible in terms of function.
Clementine is not "wasting time" just because they can only recreate so much from the original mmo.
They're doing what they can to preserve it and have it played as closely as intended.
We should strive to make it as close as possible to the original and not worry about the "experience"
It's simply too abstract to agree on what the original experience would even be like.
I cannot and will not accept forgiveness for companies to do a bad job at game preservation.
The solution is to change copyright law and fight to undo the damage that Disney had done.
Copyright holders and workings with corporations will only hurt preservation.
Piracy will always be the best way to preserve a title and will always be the final resting place for any game after said store is shut down
This is a very well researched video on what is a very complicated topic that many people are passionate about. I liked that you touched on mmorpg's and was hoping you'd eventually mention Star Wars Galaxies and SWG Emu which is run by fans. After the game was shut down many years ago a few passionate people built the server infrastructure to get the games on the disc to communicate with the servers and have a playable game in state that most SWG players agree it was when the game was at it's best.
Without these companies releasing their server codes mmorpg's are pretty much dead after their publisher decides to end support. Of course they aren't going to release their proprietary code to the public, especially when there's no monetary incentive to do so but also because it could expose potential exploits and weaknesses to their other products.
My stance on this is emulation and piracy are the most effective way of preserving games. I know people with big physical game collections see themselves as preserving gaming history but they really aren't, they preserve them for themselves and they aren;t going to have time to play like 99% of their library so they just sit and rot on their shelves. Games are meant to be played to be experienced and emulation and piracy provides people with the option to play and experience these games. I'm against pirating anything that's current gen or that you can purchase from the publishers but if it's old games I'm ok with it.
42:32 this whole part just made me sad. I've been playing TF2 for about 12 years, and while I still enjoy it, it's a shell of what it once was. It used to be full of creative servers with all sorts of custom maps and game modes. Stuff like Smash Fortress and Fort Wars, idle servers that recreated Clock Town from Majora's Mask, Saxton Hale servers that recreated Mega Man and Portal stages. There was even a server I played on that built Pac Man and the Donkey Kong arcade game into full maps. I spent more time playing stuff like that than I did the normal game modes, and it's _all_ gone now. And the worst part is I don't even have my screenshots of them anymore, because I never uploaded them on Steam and the laptops I played on are long gone.
50:44 my Dreamcast won't read discs. I've already had to fix it once (it was some weird issue with the system not realizing the lid was closed) and I _hope_ it's just the same issue again, because it's an easy fix. If it's something like the laser, it would be easier just to buy a new Dreamcast.
I think another interesting thing that is rarely brought up in regards to game preservation is in regards to older and sometimes even newer PC releases of games. I constantly hear about how “PC releases of games are a good way to have them available many years down the line”, but I constantly see situations where a port is bad enough to where it tarnishes the original release at best, and outright will fall apart given that the port does stupid stuff (the biggest things that come to mind in my eyes are messing up controller support, hardcoding resolution options, or badly implemented framelimiters and game logic not behaving properly at an arbitrary rate). Some older games, like Sonic Heroes, you will have less issues getting running in Dolphin properly than the native PC release (which is hard to find on Ebay). Modders aren’t going to always be at the rescue because the skill set to modify a game’s binary code through assembly patches and API injections is already pretty high compared to other mods.
One example of a game that I can think of where the PC port is a downgrade from the previously worst release (the Switch version) compared to the original release (the PS4 release) that we never got in English was Mary Skelter 2. The PC version has more game breaking bugs than the Switch release, which already had destructive lighting and rendering changes and downgrades that ruins the tone of the game, and then throwing a busted framelimiter which runs the game several frames faster than intended (because the game never got adjustments to run at arbitrary framerates, even if they left the original logic intact and used interpolation for smoothing like Doom and Halo MCC uses) if you have a refresh rate slightly over 60Hz (this bug isn’t present below that because VSync is always on). And this is on top of how the PC releases are completely unavailable to buy in Japan without a VPN and a sockpuppet Steam/GOG account. You are frankly better off emulating that game than giving Ghostlight your money.
Another example I can think of is the Grand Theft Auto releases past the PS2 release. The Xbox and PC versions already were buggy (and the ladder at least has dedicated enough modders to fix), but the Xbox 360 and the recent remasters are based off the mobile ports which has even more rot and bugs.
I think Sonic Adventure DX is the absolute prime example of what a bad port can do for a game down the line. Nearly every subsequent release of the game used this base and had even more bugs, and both UA-camrs and legacy gaming media constantly circlejerk about “Sonic having a rough transition to 3D” or that the game “aged poorly”, but given the time to play the Dreamcast release or a heavily modded Steam release, the game has held up better than I expected, and even better than Sonic Adventure 2, which has the opposite reaction from the community. I feel like the discourse around SA1 has been rotten thanks to the DX release and never being developed with the original staff.
WarOwl’s segment was fantastic
And yet, I feel gaming's probably better preserved than say the equivalent time of cinema or recorded music. If I want to revisit my childhood on the Amstrad CPC, I can find those games a lot easier than say films from 1905-1920. As a young medium, it's benefitted from being technology led and enthusiast-driven.
Certainly game preservation has benefitted from the mistakes of film preservation.
As someone whom only play gacha games, I am used to my games completely disappearing regardless how much money I spent on them. I have no attachments but I value the fun experiences I had. Realistically even games I do physically own... I barely ever play them again once I 100% them, there is just not enough time to replay usually as the market is oversaturated af and there is always a new game around the corner. In real life, you cant "preserve" the best moments of your life. you just experience them and have fun memories of them....
from my understanding and perception - preserving a game, laws and regulations aside, means to keep the game easily accessible. that means for me that people who invented emulators and dumped game roms are the people that kept many games easily accessible. therefore, i would say that they preserved them. that's probably just scraping the surface. preservation is really complicated i'd assume
Thanks for putting the time into something like this. I have always thought it's important to preserve and keep as much media as accessible as possible. It's no where near perfect, but I would much rather have something in some form then not have it at all.
When it comes to gaming I am glad to see more games get released across more platforms, consoles becoming more PC like, and a company like Sony releasing some of their PC ports DRM free. Again not perfect, but this goes a long way to make it easier to at least have some form of a game's existence (Like a DRM free/cracked PC version of a game) easily archived and accessible 25 years from now.
That's also one of the reasons I think it is important to push back against DRM when it shows up in any media. Because it limits what you can do with the product you paid money for, it more often then not gets cracked anyway, and it can leave people who paid money for the product cut off from accessing what they paid for. Meanwhile people who "pirated" the game might not have spent any money on it, and they don't have to worry if a server goes down, a company goes out of business, or a contract expires.
I tend to see digital as a format get thrown under the bus. However a lot of people don't seem to realize just because something is on a disc or cartage does not guarantee it will work. It's usually DRM that cause the issues people dread when they hear digital. Just because a Nintendo Switch cartage works when you put it in a Switch does not mean there is no DRM, or that one day that cartage won't get locked out. That same DRM can also stop discs or cartridges from working.
If Sony had not fixed the CBOMB issue after awhile the PS4 would stop booting discs or digital games. You can't even set up a Xbox Series console without being online, and some Smart Delivery games only include the Xbox One version on the disc.
I still have an original PS1 that works. Love it!❤
The only one problem I have with game preservation is how much more it's treated than other preservation efforts, sure there are a lot of complex systems to preserve, but why is no one bothering to preserve the original releases of the Star Wars trilogy for example, or you seem to know what beethoven's music sounds like, do you? Do you actually know what it sounds like? Even if we re record it today with digital instruments or newer instruments, it will never be the same, we will never know the original audio, and this is also a problem video games are suffering from right now.
tldr: all forms of preservation are flawed and screwed unless we actually do something about it, video games are no different than others for that reason.
There's like, a billion fan attempts to preserve the original Star Wars trilogy, though?
People are preserving the original cuts of those movies, you can get bootlegged copies and even torrent and stream them. You couldn't have picked a worse example.
Star Wars was the worst example you could’ve used lol
Also the Library of Congress literally preserves other forms of art, including movies