Only 13 percent of video games are readily playable and accessible. No other form of media is as endangered as video games. There is no legal path to preserve or archive video games. You can go to libraries and archives for books years out of print. You can rent a movie or download a pdf. There is no legal equivalent for video games. Games companies do not double as archival organisations and they never will. They have never been about preserving. They are about selling. Which is not inherently evil compared to anyone else but they along with the law are directly preventing archivers and preservationists from doing their job and allowing this entire medium to be experienced in the future.
Think of some of the most influential video games of all time. How many of them can you play right now. Without piracy. How many of these could your not very technology literate friend play. How do you think this is affecting not only the wider industry now but also people in the future. And for completely arbitrary meaningless reasons.
And also think about the games that aren't the most influential ones, but are important to you. How many people have that one weird edutainment game/indie game/bootleg game that they played a ton as a kid, that they quote to this day?
Those are rarely the ones that are considered super-influential or super profitable. They don't get rereleases or remakes. They just... fade away. Many of them don't even get pirated, so you can't even find illegitimate copies!
We're never gonna lose Super Mario 64. But if you grew up playing Croc: Legend of the Gobbos instead, you may be in trouble.
(at least until the HD remake eventually comes out)
I really hate those huge essay length “actually here’s the correct take” tumblr post additions, but VGHF is so close to being one of those vague associations that joan didion made fun of in the 60s that they deserve at least a little scrutiny, plus I’d like to think I’m at least a tiny bit knowledgeable on the subject.
What they mean by “87% unavailable” is that the majority of games aren’t being represented in the contemporary game market. They are not lost. The archives they’re asking for already exist thanks to hobbyists (really, google no-intro or redump) but this dips into piracy, which the article handwaves as being “not ideal”. Frank Cifaldi, the Video Game History Foundation’s founder, clarified on twitter that kids THESE days may not have the software literacy to operate an emulator or torrent roms or whatever. Anecdotally, I learned how to do those things in elementary school, but the point has some validity until you question what the proposed alternative is. do these same kids have hardware literacy? or an interest in retro games altogether?
which gets to the root of the problem i have with VGHF and the “game preservation” meme as a whole - that nobody can really define what the goal is in a tangible way. What do game libraries look like? Are they really going to check out aging consoles and CD-Rs like books? Or is the goal instead to have companies charge for emulation packages, worthwhile extras included if they whim so? It’s weird to assume that the shortcomings of these solutions don’t outweigh the supposed complication of booting up an emulator (this is just me being cruel, I highly suspect that VGHF has to maintain some sort of front of legality)
But people who illegally copy game roms are almost definitely the front line here, alongside emulator developers. What this article fails to draw from its comparing video game archives to film or literature is the tethering of video games to specific consoles with unique architecture. It’s a unique component of games, and not necessarily a bad one, but it makes the realistic accessibility of entire libraries borderline impossible. Except through emulators. You just need one computer. It’s moot point to say that the experience isn’t hardware accurate if the alternative is just retail emulation as well.
but to be fair, yes: many obscure games haven’t been preserved, even in a illegal capacity. but I’m curious what Frank Cifaldi, defender of prototype hording and WATA grading, suggests be done about that. I do agree that awareness helps, but I’m not sure why this would ever need to fall out of the hands of hobbyists and into those of companies who have demonstrated little care for video game availability or into those of VGHF, whose website is stuffed with vague corpo-speak and very little concrete mission statements
tl;dr croc is literally under no risk at all of disappearing. The aficionados who care enough already have access to that game and it’s really curious what this kind of fear mongering is supposed to accomplish.
