Library of Congress Considers Archiving Games

GamePolitics reports on talks at the U.S. Library of Congress concerning archiving our digital cultural heritage, including games. From the article: "The initiative is called 'Preserving Creative America,' and plans to compile (with industry help) a list of the commercial digital content most at risk of loss or degradation. The initiative will also develop ideas for preservation, business models to help maintain archives, and promote discussions between the archives and commercial content producers so that the archives are kept up to date. CM: Hopefully the Library of Congress will consider that many PC games were rushed to market before they were ready. Critical software patches should be included in the archive. That's right Sierra, I'm talking about you."

Comments

copy protection

[gEvil (beta)]

Will the LoC also be archiving the NoCD cracks that allow these games to be played without the original media, too?

Re:copy protection

[Xabora]

IIRC, Libraries are allowed to use cracks if they dont have the original media for archival reasons.

Will they be playable in 100 years?

[eln]

This is a great idea, but in order to be worth anything, they would need to store the hardware and/or hardware emulators to play these games. A copy of, say, Super Mario Brothers is useless without an NES or NES emulator.

Ahem

[Anonymous Coward]

Torrent please.

Re:Runs only on closed systems

[TheCarp]

Hell how about the games that came on a bootable disk with custom boot sectors and all sorts of nastiness to prevent them from being easily copied.

Of course, now they have the ultimate solution to that, good luck even finding a drive to read them :)

I shudder to think how many games are all but gone just for having been stored on old floppies that were hard to copy and have since degraded.

I actually talked with an old apple 2 game developer once. He described how he used the ability to control the stepper motors in the drive to cause it to write data to the disk such that instead of being concentric rings of data, the data track spiraled down the disk.

The things people did :)

-Steve

Too good to be true?

[Opportunist]

I mean, it looks nice on paper and at first, but ... why do I suddenly have a feeling like it's targeted at so called "abandonware" and those who enjoy it?

Abandonware sites often claim they just do it "so those games don't go into extinction". With this reason gone, there's no reason anymore for game companies to shoot with big shells their way without getting bad rep. Because, they're no longer the "guardians of game culture", and game studios that want to shut them down are dirty, greedy corps that would rather see a game get forgotten before allowing it to exist for free.

With this, abandonware sites are just pirates sites to be shut down soon. So start leeching now, as long as it still works!

Re:Too good to be true?

[vertinox]

Abandonware sites often claim they just do it "so those games don't go into extinction". With this reason gone, there's no reason anymore for game companies to shoot with big shells their way without getting bad rep.

I think the point of Abandonware sites (like the-underdogs.org) is that they only host games that aren't being sold or have anyone to complain about them releasing them.

Technically, you can't sue someone over a copyright you don't own.

So game companies can't just sue someone they don't own the rights to whether they like it or not. If they can aquire the rights later down the road... Then yes they can sue.

I don't think this will take any steam out of the abandonware's argument.

It's a little late...

[192939495969798999]

They missed a bunch of stuff from the 80's-90's that is VERY hard to find now. For example, anyone remember the Apple II game "Floppy", with the little marshmallow-looking guy? If you have it, let me know... I'd be that the LOC has some freaking trouble finding stuff like that in 2006!

Re:It's a little late...

[pablomarx]

http://www.apple2.org.za/mirrors/ftp.apple.asimov. net/images/games/action/floppy.dsk.gz

Half Life 2

[ToxikFetus]

Are they also going to archive Valve's Steam servers so future generations can access Half Life 2?

Right next to the Ark of the Covenant ...

[rlp]

Right next to the Ark of the Covenant ... a copy of Duke Nukem Forever.

Mod's, S3ms, demo's

[BrookHarty]

Would be nice if all the artwork and music for demos and boot loaders where kept around. The digital expression that kick started the video game industry and hackers turned video game producers should be kept around.

Entire parts of the digital, pre-internet history are being lost with new technology.

-
Scene Music

Virtual Apple has it.

[antdude]

Play it online if you have IE6.0. ;) It works. I never seen or played this game.

Might not be a good idea...

[Karl Cocknozzle]

...I don't know about you, but I don't want my Grandkids/Wife/whoever knowing how many hookers I beat up while playing GTA3: Vice City.