[HN] Study: 87% of classic video games are not legally available
New study reveals most classic video games are completely unavailable
cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/41704
[ comments | sourced from HackerNews
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Most classic everything is no longer available. This is a function of time and the general human desire to make new stuff. Otherwise antiques wouldn't really be special.
If we want our stuff more permanent, this will be a change from the past that we need to specifically enact. Otherwise it's just people being subtly out-of-touch with how time will eventually destroy not just them, but their works too. Only the influences it left behind echo into the future, for as long as our art does anyway.
This is a new trend thanks to so many products requiring web services to function. Back in the day the only thing that made products inaccessible was the fact they were not produced.
Nowadays a lot of stuff is just a useless brick purely because an unnecessary web endpoint has been shut down. Especially video games.
I would say it's not new per se, just a new mechanism for an old phenomenon.
If that one problem were solved, it would improve the situation, but not perfectly remedy it. This just makes it more noticeable, it reeks pretty badly of planned obsolescence.
But it isn't the inevitable ravages of time that take away digital media. It is easier to preserve than anything before, and there's no lack of interest to do it. The real obstacle are laws that put corporate profits above public interest and demand that we expect an untenable amount of time such that old media just completely decays. Often old digital media only gets preserved in direct defiance to the law.
It really concerns me how this mindset has been spreading, where games and media get wiped away due to companies ceasing services with no interest in preservation, then people start to wax poetically about the inevitability as if this is Ozymandias' statue from the poem. Not even Ozymandias himself is truly lost to time. No, a decade is nothing in terms of cultural loss, that's not whats wiping out those works. What is responsible for it is a business strategy of disposability enabled by laws with no regards for our culture.
I genuinely think it's inevitable, with our current technological, economic and legal frameworks. While that can change, I think the amount of effort it would require far outstrips the gain.
The entire issue bugs me a little bit, actually. It only gets so much attention because its games and the internet has a lot of gamers. There are far bigger challenges to tackle though.
There are volunteer emulator developers. There are people who downright reverse-engineer online games whose servers close down. If loss was inevitable, this couldn't happen. The limitations can't possibly be so great that this is easier than, you know, the company releasing server code and technical information as they phase out projects
The limitations are not technological in any sense, and they are only economic in so far as we are subjected to whatever the interests of wealthy executives and investors are as the main priority, because those pushing back against it manage to do a lot even having very little money compared to those businesses. The biggest obstacle is the law, and the law is not unchangeable. This is just a matter of the political tendencies of these years.
While I personally care particularly about games, this isn't really just about games. As the copyright length increased, we got to a point there are old movies that also got lost because they studios behind them didn't preserve them properly and nobody else was allowed to, so they rot away. This applies to all digital media. While I could see some limits like backing up the whole of YouTube, there is no reason why major movies or online games should just become lost by delisting.
And maybe even backing up the whole of YouTube could be possible if there was a major concerted effort among international governments to preserve all forms of digital media, rather than leaving it to the efforts of hobbyist archivers. But no, apparently all that international governments will come together to is to enforce copyright and punish piracy.
Of course there are volunteer devs. Do you think each project will always have some though? Particularly passion projects that have no profit? Just because things are a certain way now, does not mean they will be 10, 20, 40 years from now, when who knows what computing looks like.
This is the technological aspect, its swiftly changing nature making everything require maintenance. It's a fundamental principle that seems like it will remain true for the foreseeable future. Perhaps I've gotten used to it simply due to the sheer quantity of projects I have seen fall by the wayside in the past decades, but it's just a lot. The basic idea is this: At no point can you just stop and say "this thing will work for the next few decades". Your software will go out of date, your hardware will break and replacement parts will go out of production. Etc etc. I feel like it's just part of tech for now.
So sure, we've identified the problem and that's great. But it has no good solutions. Which is why it bugs me as a debate. As I said earlier, the effort to fix this, the political will it would require, is just not worth the benefit of preserving art large-scale for the first time in human history. That's just not good enough to fight for, in such a problematic world. Imo at least.
Btw, thanks for the engaging discussion. I've never debated this particular topic actually.
It's true that not every game will keep being updated to play on the latest Windows and Android, and I agree that this would be an unrealistic expectation, But we do have a solution even for that. There are virtual machines and emulators and compatibility layers we can use to replicate these older software environments. I can play a 1990s DOS game or an Atari game just fine today, even if we don't have River Patrol for Windows 11.
There is also a noteworthy distinction between keeping a game updated or available. Maybe we could get to a point when nobody cares about Ultima Online or Club Penguin, although it's noteworthy that it didn't happen yet. But we could go through decades of dust gathering only for someone to become interested in it again. Why shouldn't we keep at least the codebase and assets and documentation available as they are for when that time comes? Then they could put the effort into porting it, or maybe just study it for learning and inspiration. And we have the means to do that today, it's the matter of copyright infringement that gets in the way.
I'm glad you enjoyed the discussion. It's a topic I care about a lot as you can tell.
The main problem I foresee is scaling. Right now the number of consoles that has ever existed is still fairly manageable. That's slowly changing. Once the current generations of players have died away and everyone with a personal, nostalgic relationship with the oldest art is gone, it becomes more of an academic matter for future generations.
I'm sure they'll keep some of it around, but over time I expect most of it to start to fade more rapidly at that point. It's still a very young medium. I doubt many films were lost in their first 20 years of existence. But the 20 years after, and the next, etc etc causes accumulating attrition.
I'd certainly like to see the problem solved, if it was feasible. I think the closest we'll get is long-term physical storage from pirated sources though. Which some future-dweller could then design an emulator for on whatever the current state of hardware is. I certainly don't expect corporations to care, or for us to overpower them any time soon.
Movies also have been lost for the same reasons game do, because the law is more concerned to restrict who get to keep copies of it than to preserve the cultural history. All it takes is a neglectful company or a bankruptcy and they are left to rot in a basement. Comes to mind how many works only escaped being completely lost because of people recording VHS tapes, to the chagrin of movie industry executives.
Even without formal methods to do so, people will preserve works that they love, and that's how we can keep up. This is only an issue in the case of video games because of online games that are split between the player's client and the servers that they rely on. It's why we have nearly complete collections of games released in the 1980s but completely lost many 2010s games.
If we talk about bulk of works being released as far as the inability to keep up matters, then it still seems like videos are the works that are most threatened. Games are a complex multimedia art form, so they cannot be created quickly enough such that an overwhelming number of them will exist, when you consider our capabilities society wide. A single person can keep entire collections of games for previous consoles. In what other medium is that even remotely believable? No personal library could approach the number of physical books created during a decade. As much as technology goes obsolete, the digital format gives games a huge advantage when it comes to preservation.
It's downright impressive to consider things like Flashpoint, where collections of games were preserved even despite obsolete online technologies and that most of them came from small teams and hobbyists. If this is what volunteer archivists can do, our society is capable of much more than that. Which shows that when a high profile game disappears, it has nothing to do with how technically difficult it is to preserve it, and everything to do with deliberate obstruction.
Yes, I'd like to move past the heavy emphasis on how corporations and their regulatory/legal capture are making it happen. That is fully understood and someone would have to be a little bit dense not to understand it, imo. They are entities that exist exclusively to create profit, they will pursue all legal means to do so, and attempt to influence the law to their own ends. This is simply the logical thing to do, in their situations. I can't blame them for it, generate profit is what we create them to do. I'm about as anti-corporate as people get, I fully expect them to obstruct to preserve every penny of potential gain they could ever possibly have, with a preference towards being short sighted. This constant criticism of them feels like shaking a baby for crying. It's just what babies do.
Unless you have some kind of plan? I understand your passion, but ... it'd be cool if we could keep moving forward instead of constantly looping back.
You did get me wondering exactly where the line should be drawn. All art is clearly not equal, shouldn't it be the ultimate responsibility of the property owner to preserve it? Whether the physical holder or the intellectual owner? Not legally speaking, again I give no fucks as I expect the law to become compromised by money, but practically speaking?
Regarding the online service games you mentioned, I hadn't even considered those, but I do know what you mean. I've played a few that are long gone now, to my dismay.
The difference here is that the data exists still and can be played via emulators still. However, it violates copyright laws to do so. It has nothing to do with “time destroying all works” (at least not yet)
Good point. And with continuous maintenance to keep the ever growing number of emulators maintained with the ever-shifting operating systems, that will remain true. The moment our maintenance of any one thing stops...
If we want our stuff more permanent, this will be a change from the past that we need to specifically enact.
It’s being done for a lot of stuff, just not videogames.
From the linked article:
Libraries and archives can digitally preserve, but not digitally share video games, and can provide on-premises access only
Libraries and archives are allowed to digitally share other media types, such as books, film, and audio, and are not restricted to on-premises access
The Entertainment Software Association, the video game industry’s lobbying group, has consistently fought against expanding video game preservation within libraries and archives