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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.