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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?"
Games live on as long as someone is alive to remember them.
There's always a large collection of ROMs on the Internet. I'd say that almost any old game exists on numerous hard drives across the world, whether those people own the actual machine and have a legal right to have those ROMs or not. I guess piracy will preserve these classics.
Of course ROMs for newer games after they went 3D are mostly uncommon since MAME doesn't really support all that yet. There's a gap there I guess that's in danger... somewhere after 2D and before what's currently in arcades right now.
People also tend to hold on to their old console systems. I myself have a CoCo3, Atari 7800 (with 2600 and 7800 carts), Sega Master System (with 3d glasses), Sega CD/Genesis/32X, Super Nintendo, Nintendo, and more. And guess what? They're not going anywhere. Classic games will always live on through garage sales and eBay auctions and emulators. They won't die because people out there still do care about them and enjoy them.
If a company decides to drop supportor get rid of a game or console for any reason, in doing so I feel that they should also lose all rights to it, such as distrobution, copyright, development, and marketing as holding on to the rights but not the game is wrong and unrightfully witholds it from the public, as it is no longer around and yet noone else can enjoy it either.
Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither
How about if you have a dead board, but a good ROM. Is that legal? Or what if the good board had a dead rom chip and you burned an EPROM copy from a working chip. Is that board still legal? What if everything is busted, but you do own it. Do you have to keep that junk in your basement to play it legally with an emulator?
But if I were to ditch this system, it would be like shutting down the gates to a dozen little worlds: The Infocom* adventures, and the early Ultima games (including Warren Spector's early masterpiece Martian Dreams), and oddities like Hidden Agenda.
On the other hand . . . while it's nice to think about playing these old games again, I never seem to get around to it. If a flood destroyed my old PC and the associated disks, I really wouldn't feel that bad. It would almost be a relief.
If there were a computer game museum, I donate all this stuff in an instant. But I suspect that I wouldn't be alone. They'd probably be overwhelmed with donations.
Oye,gevault . . .
Stefan Jones
* I recently purchased at a flea market an unopened Infocom collection on CD-ROM. But dang it, the installer wouldn't work under Win98!
The companies that are dropping support for these games are doing so for a simple reason: They are no longer profitable and are therefore supporting them produces nothing but expense. The property rights remain but the game becomes a victim of bitrot and disappears forever.
The solution is to make these games profitable for the companies that own them. One way of doing this is to handle game rights the same way the Blender rights were handled: Get a bunch of people to donate a little bit of money and then make the company an offer to buy the rights, source code, schematics, and whatever other property makes up the games. To the companies, the choice is simple: Either throw away this game that nobody (they think) cares about, or let a bunch of geeks buy it off them for some money.
I think an organization of some sorts could be put together to accept donations and buy the rights to all kinds of old products, not just games. Anything "classic" or still useful. People donating money could specify all kinds of products they would like to preserve. Kind of like those, "We buy old houses!" or, "We buy old cars!" companies.
So now i have been dicussing the release of this remake for more than a year with both original copyright holders (ian bell and david braben). In fear of not getting the maximum output from this, they both have expressed their demands on how they want the release to be done. Unfortunately, their different demands just cannot be fullfilled at the same time. The result: They can't agree on a licence and there probably won't be a legal elite remake.
What i've learned from this: Some classic games may be lost forever and a living fan base isn't everthing that's needed to keep a game alive. Emulation can't prevent the number of legal copies of a game to decrease and some of the games may in fact just disappear.
additionally, abandonware only encompasses old software that has been released into the public domain... old software that hasn't is known as "old warez"...
also, a lot of companies don't release the rights to games because, even though they don't have any plans for the games yet, they may have an idea for something they could do with them, later. however, if they don't defend their copyright in the present, they'll have a *lot* harder time defending it in the future...
personally, i think that copyrights over software should only last five years, and can perhapes be renewable for anohter five years after that. anything longer then that, and the company would have a very hard time trying to demonstrate that piracy of that piece of software has been harming them. well, except in the case of microsoft and windows 3.1, since we all know windows 3.1 to be completly surperior, in every way, to windows 9x and beyond, and since no one would buy an inferior OS when they could instead by a surperior one, hehe :)
anyways, we should take the time to thank all the companies that have made their software public domain... rockstar studios for grandtheft auto, and recently, Revolution Software for releasing Beneath a Steel Sky and helping Scumm VM emulate it :)
and speaking of Scumm VM, Scumm VM 0.5.1 has been released (the last slashdot article mentioned 0.5.0): http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/
It sounds like you've never played Robotron or "Bounce" or similar games.
> The tech at the time could only support very narrow concepts, like "eat the magic pills."
Which is exactly why game designers focused more on gameplay.
Designers focused more on gameplay back then because there was less they could do in other arenas to make the game 'good'. Also, there were fewer 'magic formulas' for making a game.. i.e. many games were truely original concepts, as opposed to today, where most are merely variants.
The point of a game is not necessarily to identify with the avatar. This what you imply when you say "it is pretty hard to thing of yourself as a yellow circle...," etc. The point of a game is to have fun... Suspension of disbelief is beside the point-- When I played board games as a kid I didn't imagine that I was the token on the board!
The real questions are:
Do graphics improve gameplay?
Do graphics by themselves make for a good game?
Sure, of course.
But pretty graphics by themselves do not a good game make... They may make a pretty photo album, but without a means of interaction... Who cares?
I've been keeping my old machines instead of selling them for YEARS. You don't get squat for them anyway. My old Mac Plus is the only machine I have that will run Rogue (Epyx, 1985), one of TEH BSET GAEMS EVAR. I have a room full of old machines, and I keep them running.
I also have my original Atari 2600 (and a backup), NES (on which I recently replaced the 72-pin connector to get rid of the "flashies"), SNES, Oddesy 2 (really), Atari 400 (my first actual computer, with my disk drives and floppies that still boot after over 20 years), and so forth. Cartridges for the games you loved and played are easy to find and cheap.
I also have a Robotron machine in my living room and a Defender on the way.
The point is: no, you can't count on new hardware to run legacy games and software. Support may be gone forever and eventually the disks will stop working, but the best way to ensure that your old games are still playable is to not garage-sale them in the first place. Take care of your old machines and they will take care of you. <dieter>TOUCH THEM, LOVE THEM!</dieter>
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I think part of it is either a game was fun to play, or it wasn't. There were very few that looked good but weren't fun.
And Pac Man, and to a greater degree Ms. Pac Man, opened up video games into the main stream. Whatever you may think of their game play now, they were relatively simple and accessible. And the point wasn't that every second something new and entertaining happened. It was a challenge. How far could you last, how high could you score, in a single setting. That was it. Very few modern games have that feel - by which I mean progress is always saveable as you move through the game. Eventually, with a guide and enough time anyone can get through them entirely, and removing the guide just means with more time.
I'm not trying to come down too harsh on modern games - I play and enjoy many of them. But sometimes I miss the simple challange of having to start over each game and trying to do better.
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 problem is that the companies have perrpetual copyright on these games, and while it is not profitable to do anything with those games, it is also unprofitable to give away corporate assets (i.e. release the games into the public domain). To do so would breach duties owed to the corporations' shareholders and bring about derivative suits. For example, releasing "Joust" into the public domain would cause the stock of whichever company who owns the rights to "Joust" to drop by 1/1000000th of a point. Likewise releasing "Joust" for the PS2 wouldn't be profitable b/c it doesn't have gangbangers, rap music, car theft, or even the slightest bit of full motion video. Thus, the end result is the game gets shelved and rots away.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Well if they were smart, the arcade game makers would bundle MAME with some of their older ROMS on a CD-ROM and sell it for $30 - $40 USD as Arcade Classics or something. They would have to modify MAME to encrypt and decrypt the ROMs so someone wouldn't just copy them and upload them via a File Sharer to some friends.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I grew up during the 70s and 80s, and played most of the classics when I was a kid. Needless to say, I'm rather fond of them compared to most new games.
As an experiment, I gave a decent MAME set to a bunch of the kids I'm currently in school with. Most of them are about 20 years old, and in fact most had never been into an arcade (they simply no longer exist here). The odd pinball game, or Ms PacMan is about as much as they've seen. To them, it's all about 3D.
It took a bit to get over the low-res graphics, but it's amazing: they're ALL playing these games now. In fact, several have actually uninstalled newer games from their laptops (like Battlefield 1942 and Warcraft III) to free up space for more MAME roms. These kids have no 'happy memories' of the old games, yet love them as much (and in some cases more) than the new stuff.
I find this same argument comes up every time Star Wars is mentioned: the whole 'the first movies actually sucked, the only reason you think they're any good is that you were a kid then'. Bullshit. Most adults at the time (my 50's-era parents included) enjoyed Star Wars back then. Lucas didn't make his millions off of just 8 year old boys.
Again, I use some of my schoolmates as examples, because many of them are simply too young to have ever seen the original Star Wars movies. Guess what? They think the new movies are pretty bad, for the most part. People my age seem to actually like them BETTER than people who've never seen the first trilogy.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
This will probably be modded down as a troll, but I think this needs to be said.
No one cares whether you think old games are better!
"Pure gameplay"? The vast majority of old games have 1 or 2 buttons and endless repetition. I enjoy these types of games (I own 5 arcade boards of various old games and my own cab to play them), but everyone who waxes nostalgic for the "good old days" of videogames needs to take a hard look at what they're saying. The power of modern consoles opens up genres that never could have existed before. Look at RPGs on the PSX and SNES vs the offerings on NES and its ilk. You can call FF1, DQ1, and DW1 classics all you like, but the NES was too constrained for decently varied location graphics, orchestrated soundtracks, or even a decently realized storyline.
Similarly, Joust, Defender, Pacman, and others have their place, but to claim that they are gaming in its "purest" form is denying the possibility that the advancement of technology has improved gaming at all. Blends of multiple genres were not possible in the past. FPS, RTS, and more simply didn't exist! If gaming was purest in the 70s and very early 80s, why does anybody play Starfox, Xenogears, Metroid, Zelda, Final Fantasies past 3, Metal Gear Solid, Counter-strike, Baldur's Gate, etc?
Remember, technology is a tool to allow the developer to more fully realize the world he/she desires to create. Older is not necessarily better.
The problem, as usual, is that we "geeks" are almost ignored by politicians and lawmakers.
Sort of. The _bigger_ problem is that there exist consortiums of corporations which hate abandonware. Despite the size, organization, and good intentions of the abandonware community (check out this webring, for instance), there are stubborn corporations that will see practically no profit but want to retain their copyrights on silly-but-fun games forever. Slashdot has covered the IDSA's legal maneuverings in the past; Mobygames has an excellent feature that discusses some of the issues around the legal status of abandonware.
Nobody is going to pay absurdly inflated (probably price-fixed) shelf prices of $40 or so for old games. If the companies won't sell their copyrighted software, these games -- good games, like Civilization or Colonization or Wolfenstein 3D -- will gravitate towards an open trade on the Internet. They're often smaller than MP3's, and they're considerably more fulfilling. This kind of "copyright infringement" is usually ignored and not typically prosecuted; the situation's more or less fine as it is. But it's damned annoying trying to find a safe venue for sharing what is, in a way, cultural heritage. oh, and:
The problem, as usual, is that we "geeks" are almost ignored by politicians and lawmakers. It'd be interesting to see a future article describing why that's the case...but who really knows the answer?
IDSA=money
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
I asked him if he knew what Pac-Man was and his eyes lit up. "You have Pac-Man? Can I play it?" He had played all the old-school games I mentioned, Joust, Spy Hunter, etc.
The staying power of the 80's arcade games is incredible. Being constrained by such small amounts of memory and processor power forced the programmers to innovate and squeeze every bit of playability out of the limited resources they had.
Modern game designers should take note. You can learn a lot about PLAYABILITY from the 80's arcade games.
Games are no different than any other medium. If someone wants to archive them, open a library or museum. That individual would buy an individual copy off ebay (accept donations, find them in the attic, etc) then archive it under the fair use rules provided for libraries and museums under copyright law. They could legally make backup copies for archival purposes to avoid bitrot. Think microfilm and magazines. They can allow people to come into the museum and play the games. They can even loan out the legally aquired instance of the game to other people in the same way a library checks out a book. If any individual on /. truly cares about this issue, that individual should do this. Sounds like a genuine not-for-profit business opportunity in this weak job market.
Outside of that, this thread is about justifying copyright infringement, and I'm not buying it.
Seriously, the copyright system was designed to promote the arts with the evental intent that the works would go into the public domain. If the work will be destroyed because it was abandoned under the copyright system, then I bet if you took a company to court to get their ROMs released into the public domain, the court would stand a reasonable chance of seeing things your way.
If course, I'd do this with some company that's still out there, teetering on the edge of death and hasn't sold its IP to Microsoft. Get the precident established first, and it'll be a lot harder for the big companies to employ the Chewbacca defense later on.
Oh, obIANAL, so YMMV.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Mame won't help for long.
As the official moderator of kaillera.com
(been there since the beginning) i've watched the real trend of what games are
and aren't popular in mame. (If you don't know what kaillera is, it lets you
play mame games online)
Anyways, when kaillera was first created 2 years ago, people experimented
with different mame games across its network. At first people would play
anything, Puzzle Bobble, Super Sprint, and rampart were some of the games people
played alot. Over the last year however, the trend has been more towards
Marvel Super Heros VS Capcom. In fact, if you were to browse through the
kaillera servers right now you would see that is all that's out there these
days.. In fact, now there are clans DEDICATED to just this game, it's
popularity there is astounding.
I don't know what caused this. I don't know if it was an influx of younger
people (teens-early 20's) or if people just got sick of playing the old school
games because no one would play the classics. The undeniable truth is
still that both our stats and what
i've seen show that classics (pre-capcom street fighter derivitives) are about
as popular as Grey Davis right now.
PS. Emulator is *NOT* a substitute for a classic arcade game.
No, but I think you're missing the point. How many working I, Robot machines do you think there are in the world? Not many. This was the first 3D arcade game ever made; it needs to be preserved. This is about history, not just video games. Eventually, with the passage of time everything stops working - it's just a matter of how long it takes. With this near-perpetual copyright we've got in this country these days it's possible that some game companies will sit on their IP, doing nothing with it, while all of the old arcade machines/cartridges/CD-ROM's rot and eventually die. With no copies of the original game available any longer, the games will be lost.
That's a worst case scenario that I don't believe will happen to most games precisely because there are so many people out there skirting the law with emulators. There are emulators for pretty much every major classic console and a good 95% or so of all arcade games. But that still leaves a small percentage of both home and arcade machines unaccounted for, and without good ROM dumps from those games, they can and will eventually be forgotten and lost to time in a way none of us ever thought mass-produced digital data could be. We always seem to just assume that anything put out there by a major corporation these days will just always be out there forever wether they still want it to be or not - that's not the case.
There need to be people out there who are actively trying to preserve at the very least the most important games in their original forms - that doesn't skirt anyone's IP, and it will keep the games available for when copyright runs out (fat chance at the rate we're going) or for when the company finally does put the IP in public domain (which doesn't happen very often, for reasons I'll get to in a sec). And I don't mean doing something like putting an old arcade cabinet in the corner and playing it; I mean buying up old machines, in as close to their original condition as possible, restoring them to like-new condition, and then keeping them that way. Right now there are only a few people doing this, and they're generally looked down upon by the gaming literati because "games were meant to be played" rather than stored for posterity. That's true, of course, but we're at the point in time when we do need the equivalent of real video game museums, in the same way we have television, radio and film museums already.
I have been trying to do this in a limited way but I don't have an unlimited budget to do it. I have about 30 classic game consoles, all in their original boxes, some in new condition, some in as close to it as I could find them. They've all been meticulously cleaned and, when necessary, repaired. I keep them stored in their boxes and remove them to play only every once in a while. I do the same with individual cartridges. Of course, I don't keep these things in a hermetically sealed room or anything so they're still exposed to the elements, but I do what I can in my own small way.
As for the IP rights of these old games, a lot of people seem to feel they're abandonware and that they're entitled to simply take them. I will confess to being a big MAME fan myself but I also can see it from the eyes of the publishers. These games are not abandonware, as articles like this ought to tell you. And games are not only simply re-released periodically, they're also continuously updated (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, etc.), so that IP is certainly valuable. But it would be a shame if those same IP rights were responsible for the loss of some of these classic games to history.
I am quite sure that preserving ones cultural heritage must go over IP and patents. I can't claim that I want to preserve my hertiage by pirating a copy of Doom 3 (when it is released), but I sure can with a game that nobody takes care of anymore. It would be different if there was a company who lived on these games.
Something equal to the library of congress (I hope I got that one right) should be created for digital games. And not just the game but the blueprints/source code as well.
They'd bundle their old games with new games and continually force you to buy a new game to play the old one. That way they could always port it to the new hardware and force you to buy it again!
That sounds horrible, but lots of people would probably dance at the idea of getting a retro game with every new game they bought.