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Will Classic Games Disappear Forever?
Knightfall writes "Who doesn't remember pumping tons of quarters into games like Joust and Tron? I shudder at the thought of what could have become of that large quantity of money. Well, it seems remembering those games may soon be all that is left. As companies are dropping support, but not property rights to our old favorites, many are in danger of vanishing forever. There are a few trying to prevent this though. An article in Wired tells a little about it. I for one still find these games, on a pure gameplay level, better than most anything out there currently. What can we do to prevent them from no longer being available?"
MAME
Mame has support for probably every classic arcade game in existence. While not quite legal it does allow us to do a bit more than "remember" these games.
http://www.mame.net
Because MAME does not preserve those games. It barely emulates them.
Running Hard Drivin' ROMS with MAME and using the keyboard as controller is *NOT* playing Hard Drivin' the arcade game with 3 analog pedals, ignition key, force feedback steering and clutch. (just an example)
Buy one?
Seriously, buy a used machine, learn to keep it repaired and running (or find someone who can), and enjoy!
I enjoy classic pinball machines and that's what I did. I play them almost every day, worth every penny.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
When a product is no longer available for purchase, there is nothing wrong with violating the copyright. Technically, I'm sure there is. Morally, there is nothing wrong at all.
I can sleep at night 'stealing' ROMs for product that is no longer available.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
do you find these games better than anything from a gameplay perspective because that's the case or because you have the whole 'happy memories while growing up' angle?
For every revolutionary game (think Robotron, tempest, bosconian, pacman) there were many others that we remember fondly only because we have other memories associated with them (like summers growing up, friends etc. etc.)
-- the cake is a lie
Start collecting classic games and learn how to repair them.
If nothing else collect the ROM's. I know they're copyrighted, but if they're going to let them die then F'em. What the companies need to do is simply come out and sell the roms they currently own or license someone to handle it for them, stick them on a CD and sell it for $10-20 with a copy of MAME included. I'd pay $20 for a licensed library of SNES or Atari console roms.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
But then I feel that games are becoming like much other software in becoming more and more bloated. I can do much of my work in a bash shell with vi (used to be emacs but ...) but still I run Win2K at work packed with all of these features that are just continually tacked on (and not, to me, entirely necessary).
...) or even just Space Invaders. I don't think the Old School games have to worry, if they truly are Classics, because their draw is still there. I still keep Space Invaders for NES on my computer.
Myself, I work at a financial software company, and I just see our system getting larger and larger and more and more bloated (running more and more slowly). It's the same problem that occurs with growing corporations that eventually get too big for their own good.
Getting back to the topic, I don't necessarily think good graphics and realistic gameplay are bad things, but games will gradually reach the point where everything is excess and there are simply all these features thrown in because there "may" be a use for them or because they are "cool". It has to reach a point of diminishing returns where these features just become frivolous.
I mean there has to be a reason why I find myself more often craving a good Doom map over anything in Quake (sure, Quake sucked
I hate to sound bitter, but I've heard quite a bit about folks who claim to "love" classics and want to keep them alive, and then take minimal to no steps to actually accomplish this. They have fond memories, but their actual love for the games has died away and in truth they're indifferent to the demise of what I daresay is history that is no less valuable than, say, a government document from the 1800s.
In my entertainment center, under my TV, VCR, DVD player, and newer consoles, is an Apple II Plus with one 5.25" drive and a joystick -- all that's needed to play games like Boulder Dash, Galaxian, Joust, Mario Bros., Flip Out, Night Mission Pinball, Miner 2049er, Congo Bongo, etc. I have literally hundreds of games on 5.25" disks and I actually play them at least two or three times a week. I've made redundant copies (some games on as many as three different floppies) just in case a disk goes bad. I love these games, I play them, and I take several steps to ensure they survive, at least until I die.
How many others can say they've done the same?
The coolest voice ever.
So did I. Loved it, even. Yet, as is often stated on Slashdot in discussions of other matters (mostly those concerning the RIAA or MPAA), noone has the right to make a profit. If people don't want these games, what can we do? Force them to want them? Remembering the Good Old Days is all too frequently a sign of a common and very dangerous disease called Nostalgia, and a known symptom of that condition is a refusal to acknowledge that what one likes about a certain thing may be more due to associations rather than its intrinsic nature. I'm sure people will root for Doom and Warcraft in much the same way in 20 years, while not bothering much for the titles we (as in me and other old-time farts) care for so deeply, or, for that matter, for the new ultra-hyper-flashy game that we can't even conceive of today.
With this I'm not saying that fighting to keep some culture alive is always vain and pointless, only that sometimes it might be a good idea to take a step back and ask why something should preserved. And then I don't mean preservation for historical purposes - believe me, history will never forget Pacman no matter how much it'll want to - but in the sense of actively trying to prevent these games from being removed from the everyday life of the everyday nerd.
I love these games, but things change, and I realize that the generation they are geared at now may not love them. I don't want to force my values on that generation. You probably didn't want your fathers' Elvis records, which is perfectly OK. But in the same way, you'll have to accept that your future son may not want to play Dig Dug. Even if it'd hurt.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
From an objective point of view it does look like the rights owners are overprotective. But look at it from their point of view. Not only is can the original games be repackaged, but they can also yield sequels. The license for Spy Hunter isn't so another company can put out the same exact game, but a derivative game. There's another Ultima game coming, based on those before. Mario has come a long way from Donkey Kong. Pac Man is still chomping away.
If the rights owners don't assert themselves over the original, they risk losing the rights to control the derivatives. What degree the risk is over old ROMs may seem debatable, but each company/rights owner must decide that for themselves.
And I don't really see the 'vanishing forever' argument. There are plenty of restoration organizations, that watch and pay for older non working games to fix up. Also, have you seen the Ms. Pac Man/Galaga cabinet? Or the 20-in-1 cabinets? I've seen them in Dave & Busters. Technically, not the same controls, but the games are being put out there still. (Obviously, only those that would be deemed to do well. I doubt Stocker will be re-released.)
Irony: An add for the 10-in-1 Atari Joystick on the same page for this story.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
[The game companies] label [efforts to make older games available through downloads and emulators] piracy that could undercut future efforts to reissue such games in the form of classic compilations or to update them as remakes.
;)
Ok, so the plan is to bring out a collection of old games for the Atari XL or the ZX 81 or the C64 in the future? And there will be enough potential customers so that releasing the game into the public domain (or publishing the code) is a bad move financially??
I don't think so. And even if it was true, how many collections of old (8-Bit) games do you know? And how many follow-ups to a classic game have hit the market and made money?
I guess the real problem is that the old companies do not exist anymore, or have been bought out by other companies. And now nobody in the gaming industry knows or cares who has which rights to those games.
And with regard to 'remakes': the Duke Nukem 3D source code has been published under the GPL. Ports have been created. Will this hurt the sales of DNF? Go figure
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
See, I disagree with the argument a lot of people give that older games are superior to newer ones because 'the gameplay was better.'
There's certainly two sides to that. There is a lot of gameplay that has died because nowadays it's too trivial for anyone to pay $50... or even $10... for it, yet it's still fun. The periodic "classics" collections partially alleviate this by bundling a lot of them together.
A lot of this gameplay is surprisingly sensitive to various subtle parameters and the vast majority of freeware Flash-based re-incarnations of the classics suck pretty badly, because while they wear the outward shape of the classic they are trying to emulate they are missing the soul. If you have any question about whether these games have some really cool gameplay, compare them to their (pathetic) imitators. They are unique.
On the other hand, I was playing Grand Theft Auto III for the first time this weekend, and it was occurring to me that that is the first game I've seen in the console world that IMHO even the Dreamcast couldn't have adequately handled. (Yes, it has a Grand Theft Auto II but I've heard it's not the same at all.) Granted, the vast majority of the gameplay is perfectly doable on a Commodore 64 class machine, and much of it was indeed done, but for the driving physics, which are a huge portion of the game, contributing to its fun. Nothing much until the Playstation 2-class machines (including PCs) could have done that.
(OT note: The violence of GTA3 is highly overrated; the universe is violent because everybody is immortal, and it's all cartoon violence. "Kill" anyone and wait around and you'll see doctors swooping in and restoring them to full health; it's not much of an extrapolation to say that when it doesn't happen it's an engine failure or a failure of the game to capture the world, not a fundamental aspect of the game. Only main chars die, excluding your character. If we were all effectively immortal too, our world would look a lot more like GTA3, with much more "casual" muggings and murders and sloppy driving and such.)
I think this demonstrates one of the biggest problems in copyright law, that the 95 year expiration date assures that nothing released within our lifetimes will ever become part of the public domain.
If most software is becoming abandonware within 25 years of its release, wouldn't that say that the complete economic value of a computer program gets soaked out within that timeframe? Isn't that the point of having copyrights expire, or have we forgotten that already?
With Open Source being so popular, people can write a program to act like a Classic program and even look like it, but be a totally differnet source code frm the original. Then port it to different platforms. So we get a Classic Rewrite.
Take for example Telengard for Windows a Windows re-write of the Classic C64 game. See how the game looked like and played on a C64, but on Windows instead.
We just need more people to re-write the classics to save them.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I have a snotload of modern PCs sitting around, a PS2, XBox and GC, with just about every worthwhile game either available to me here or upon request (I write for an IT web site).
I also have a Tempest, Robotron 2084, Gauntlet II, Xevious, Ms. Pacman, and Smash TV.
The new games, those that are worth opening the shrink-wrap on, a suprisingly small number, get boring really quickly, and that is by design. Read the content restrictions for Sony, MS and Nintendo for a real eye-opener, they mandate that games lose their appeal. Gameplay has become secondary to eye candy.
When we want to have fun in this house, there is nothing like an hour long Smash TV session, or seeing if you can get to the yellow boards on Tempest. 20+ years later, these games are still fun. How many PS1 games are worth the $5 you can pick them up for?
-Charlie
Stuff like this really ticks me off. Of *course* the gaming industry isn't gonna say, "Hey, don't forget to add in a few (some amount) bucks so we can preserve our history.
Gaming companies, or any company, really, has little interest in supporting games where there is 1) no more money to be had, and 2) it would seem a lack of investment.
That doesn't mean there isn't a solution though. The Internet at large is picking up the slack on its own. The geeks who want to support these games so they don't die out, will, and it won't cost the "industry" any more than letting go of their pride, and in some cases, just creating a link somewhere on their page that says "Download this deprecated, unsupported, game that is now freeware, available to all."
At least that way, the game is alive and kicking, and it would be even better if they released the source code.
This can't be a serious issue, either. When they release patches on a regular basis that are 40+ megs or so, how is a 46k file going to cost them *anything* comparable in bandwidth?
It doesn't take much to support one game, by one fanatic fiend out there on the web. Throw up a homepage, post your memories, screenshots, and the game. Gee, that'll really kill Geocities.
The gaming industry is just too lazy, but if they got their act together, it would be a great PR move for them. "Wow, Company A is so cool, becuase they released their old 80's computer game on the web!!!" Seems to me, that something like that would generate a bit of brand loyalty, and actually *stop* pirating in the process, because then people would respect their decisions, instead of circumventing the law solely to preserve history.
First of all to understand what happened to Killer, you gotta understand who Killer the Dog was. Now Killer was born to a three-legged bitch of a mother. He was always ashamed of this, man. And then right after that he's adopted by this man, Tito Liebowitz he's a small time gun runner and a rotweiler fight promoter. So he puts Killer into training. They see Killer's good. He is damn good. But then he had the fight of his life. They pit him against his brother Nibbles. And Killer said "no man that's my brother, I can't fight Nibbles" but they made him fight anyway, and Killer, he killed Nibbles. Killer said "that's it!" he called off all his fights, and he started doing crack, and he freaked out. Then in a rage, he collapsed, and his heart no longer beat. Wow.
The _bigger_ problem is that there exist consortiums of corporations which hate abandonware.
;-P
This is part of a bigger, deeper problem. Anything that satisfies any kind of need in a "commons" kind of way necessarily detracts from some corporation's profit. Whenever you decide to drink water from some natural source, that's one instance of human thirst Coca-Cola will never make a profit out of. Ditto for breastfeeding and Nestle. And for MP3s and the RIAA. And for MAME and the IDSA. And for Free Software + abandonware and the BSA.
I'm not going to complete the reasoning and look like a terminally radical Commie Pinko Dirtbag. Instead, YOU do that.
The problem is that by the time the copyright expires, finding a copy of the game is going to be tricky unless people copy the ROMs now...
This will be especially true if the Disney Senators keep extending copyrights.
Nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice.
There have been occasional suggestions that anything that goes out of production (or support, for computers) for a year becomes public domain.
Not exactly "public domain" per se, but still possibly fair use under 17 USC 107. It wouldn't be completely inconceivable to have a judge rule that if a copyright owner takes a work out of print, that counts as an admission of a lack of "potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." Though copying an out-of-print work without authorization loses on fair use factors 2 and 3, it can still win on 1 and the doubly-important 4.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Given the number of clones and workalikes that are popping up left and right, I doubt this is a big concern. Perhaps you might be worried about losing the bad games, but the good ones will certainly live on in some fashion, copyright infringing or not.
You'd be shocked how poorly the videogame companies who own these rights have taken care of archiving and preserving their own intellectual property.
Even for commercial emulator rereleases there have been times where they've had to take advantage of things like MAME or the general collector community to piece back together their history.
This seems to be mostly a problem with American videogame companies. I haven't heard these same kinds of stories related to, let's say, Namco.
In many cases the owners have changed hands multiple times so something gets lost in each iteration. (Atari is the best example of this).
So it's more than possible that old artefacts can literally rot away, get thrown out, or forgotten entirely so that by the time these companies do decide to do something it might be too late.
The industry in general is so future-oriented that they just don't value the past enough to prioritize the preservation of their history.
It's the collectors who have to pick up the slack, and unfortunately, this involves stepping beyond the letter of the law.
Luckily we're at a point where most of the important arcade history and pre-crash console history is well preserved.
I don't think games for 8-bit home computers are as well preserved because there isn't as much interest from classic game enthusiasts and the libraries are much larger.
I also think there is a lot of work to do to improve emulation. For instance, what about all the early TTL-based arcade games that didn't have microprocessors? If you don't have a physical unit you'll never see the game run unless someone writes a simulator of some kind. What about sound emulation on things like the Cinematronics games? Sound in MAME is still a little rough in places.
It is not entirely cost prohibitive to purchase an arcade upright or cocktail table. i bought crazy climber, discs of tron (upright), and ms. pacman. Total cost about $1900.00 (incl. shipping + truck rental with a liftgate, storage, labor since my friends are skinny geeks, pizza, beer, rope/straps, and a handtruck.) if you have the space, i.e. living in your parents basement, garage, or for the lucky few, their old room. it is not such a bad idea. you could get rid of your bed and practice for the world record on your game of choice. you could also build your own arcade emulation upright, but that is illegal. i am still looking for nice and working upright or cocktail tables of journey, joust, gyruss, donkey kong, spyhunter, and tron.
a slut did tulsa
I've read that FAQ before, and I still don't see how an SNES emulator is going to cost anyone at Nintendo their jobs. They've got better things to deal with - like what went wrong with the Gamecube such that they had to halt production on it just to clear current inventories, or why they're being slapped around by competitors in the industry they were once king of.
Games are no different than any other medium.
You mean like movies, where probably the majority of early movies have been lost because the copyright owner couldn't get any money out of them, but couldn't be found or didn't care enough to authorize copying?
Different mediums, different items on different mediums, have drastically different lifespans. A few books have 95 year lifespans. The honest fact is, there's no movie that makes money in the magnitude that a movie studio wouldn't consider noise after 95 years. Maybe in another 30 years, a tiny percentage - maybe one or a two a year - of the movies that will be moving into the public domain still mattered to the movie studio. Most of the rest decayed into dust because the people who cared weren't the people who had the copyright or had the money to make archival copies to be stored. There are a handful of computer games even 25 years old that the copyright owner cares about. All but one or two released a year will rust away by the time they're in the public domain, and maybe a few will be saved by archivists decoding ancient medium onto which CD-Rs (which don't have a 95 year life span) were copied.
MONEY
How much do you want to play these games? Do you want it enough to offer cold hard cash in return for a non-exclusive license? Have you considered offering advertising links? Do you have anything else that the rights owners might like?
If the question is "How can we persuade rights owners to give us the rights for nothing", then you can't be that interested in playing them.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I have played computer-games since I got my Commodore 64, then Amiga 500 and for now the PC-generation. My favorite games on the Amiga was "North and South" and "A-train", which I enjoyed to play for a very long period. I actually just remembered how much I loved those games, when I installed UAE on my Gentoo yesterday and seing them in action again (I own the games, but was to lazy to convert them, so I downloaded them). A-train has still one of the best simulations for train and economy, eventhough it looks so simple (but it is quite hard to succeed). North And South may look like a Risk ripoff, but the graphics sure are fun. The same counts for Civilization, which I believe still have the best graphics (Inventions, starting a town, riots), eventhough Civ2 had better units-graphics (but the rest sucked, Elvis, please!).
Back on the topic: I believe that these projects can only exist if the companies give the license free and other people can develop on them further (I would like to see a A-train 2, but don't tell Maxis *ahem* EA/Maxis, they are more interested in "realism" than fun graphics).
Many game companies believe that the only solution to develop further on their games is to make them 3D. Look at Railroad Tycoon 3 in planning, Simcity 4, CC:Generals. These games maybe *look* good but the gameplay really gets deprecated when your computer has to simulate all the 3D-graphics, and you feel it isn't more to it.
Nuff said: Start developing!
(yes this can be compared with sex)