Our Video Game Heritage Is Rotting Away

eldavojohn writes "There's been a movement to preserve virtual worlds but MIT's Tech Review paints a dire picture of our video game memories rotting away in the attic of history. From the article: 'Entire libraries face extinction the moment the last remaining working console of its kind — a Neo Geo, Atari 2600 or something more obscure, like the Fairchild Channel F — bites the dust.' Published in The International Journal of Digital Curation, a new paper highlights this problem and explains how emulators fall short to truly preserve our video game heritage. The paper also breaks down popular SNES emulators to illustrate the growing problem with emulators and their varying quality. Do you remember any video consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey that are forever lost to the ages?"

Comments

Vectrex

[jomama717]

I have fond memories of playing the Vectrex console when I was a kid - I suppose there must be a few working units floating around out there but based on the way the graphics worked I wonder if you could ever truly emulate it on a PC.

Even if you could emulate the graphics you couldn't emulate the clear plastic templates you had to mount on the screen depending on the game :)

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

But we replaced those things for a reason. They weren't good. It's like people complaining about how games are so easy now and how we used to not have saves and only have 3 lives.

Those things were terrible. We replaced them because they were frustrating and annoying and reduced the gaming experience. What you remember is the joy of being younger, and while remembering that system might help YOU with that, it doesn't mean that society as a whole needs to remember them and put them on pedestals and more than we need to keep our old betamax tapes and laserdisks.

Re:Vectrex

[Tackhead]

You can't? Ever see the emulations of Space Invaders that are colored? Space Invaders is black and white, the color was from plastic on the screen.

Bigger problem with the Vectrex is that it used a vector (X/Y) display. Although you can now draw lines on a raster monitor that are very smooth, and you can do glow effects that look pretty nice, it's not the same as drawing a straight line from point A to point B. No pixels, just phosphors emitting light.

Anyone who's played Asteroids on the original coin-op hardware (or even just played around with a CRT-based oscilloscope!) knows that if you dump a CRT's electron beam onto a single point, you get a spot of brightness that's radically brighter than a single white pixel on either a CRT or an LCD monitor.

For emulation purposes, I could live with rasterization. Sometimes, preserving the original hardware's important. Fortunately, there are communities in both the coin-op (big convention two weeks ago in San Jose) and console (big convention this weekend in Vegas) communities dedicated to keeping the hardware alive long enough for the software to be preserved (and as much as possible, the hardware to be reverse-engineered for emulation purposes).

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

Behold, a CRT vector graphics implementation of Asteroids. The article (in German) describes the whole project. The logic hardware is recreated as an FPGA "program". An X-Y-capable oscilloscope can be used as the display.

Re:Vectrex

[camperdave]

it doesn't mean that society as a whole needs to remember them and put them on pedestals and more than we need to keep our old betamax tapes and laserdisks.

But my laserdisk holds the proof that Han shot first.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

But most art is lost. And for good reason: because it's not worth saving. The idea that because all these obscure systems are fading out and the more popular ones are harder to find fully working versions of that history will forget video game origins is insane.

Mario will be remembered for hundreds of years. Emulators recreate the experience of the game. We can make a perfect replica of a Genesis or a NES if we need one for some gaming museum... but these obscure systems that most people don't remember? They're the other artists working at the same time as Van Gogh that nobody cares about because they aren't worth remembering. A lot of our childhood was shitty and of no merit and just because it holds special value to us personally doesn't mean it needs to be preserved by society as a whole. The important things will be remembered and preserved and the rest will land exactly where it belongs: by the wayside.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

But we don't put terrible paintings in museums (modern art notwithstanding) to "gives context to the goodness". We forget it and remember the stuff worth remembering.

Re:Vectrex

[interkin3tic]

But most art is lost. And for good reason: because it's not worth saving. ...and who decides this? You?

No, we collectively decide what gets preserved with emulation or ports, directly by what we port, and indirectly by what we buy. If there's a game that no one ports to new generations of consoles, and no one emulates it, that's a reasonable indication that no one cared about it: it wasn't worth saving.

It's a little less arbitrary than what got saved in pompei. The amount of games preserved in emulation, at least for the moment, is pretty high. Especially the early generations, I mean you could fit the entire libraries of multiple early consoles on one $5 flash drive. Much more is going to be preserved than a city that was destroyed by a volcano.

Sure, it would be nice if we had the capability to preserve every game out there. Feel free to spend your time and money doing that for games no one is interested in. Until someone wastes money like that, preserving the classics and trashing the disposable works for every art form out there, and "what games do people want to see ported or emulated" is a generous standard.

Frankly It's a little pretentious to take GP's observation in the way that you did. He didn't nominate himself to be the one deciding which games were good and which ones were bad.

Permanent archiving is impossible

[JeffSh]

Lost amidst all of the desire to permanently archive and hold on to every bit of past memory is the idea that we're supposed to forget. It's built into our DNA. I'm not convinced that it is a practical or necessary goal to hold on to and remember every little thing, especially video game heritage.

Some people may choose to make it a hobby, or an obsession, and that's their prerogative, but as a society and as a species there's certain things that once they're lost they're just gone. And future generations will not be robbed of some great cosmic truth when there are no longer any more NES machines capable of playing an NES cartridge. We will keep this memories in our own minds until we ourselves perish, and then the next generation takes over and creates something new themselves. I don't feel there's any sense pining over this eventuality.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[localman57]

The problem as I see it is that we, now, don't know what will be valued in the future. Whatever clown decided to make the same rock with Hieroglyphs, demotic, and greek would have no idea that at the time he was creating one of the most important archiological artifacts ever.

In short, preserve it now, let future generations decide what to study and what to ignore.

By the way, I wonder what medium we should use if we want to store data for a really, really long time. It'd be nice if there was an "Ask Slashdot" on this. Ah well. One can only dream...

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[eldavojohn]

I don't feel there's any sense pining over this eventuality.

Well, if you firmly believe that video games and the digital interactions they provide to the player are art and part of our culture (and I personally do) then yes it does make sense for society to have a prerogative to save these video games. Why give up on video games when we've spent so much time, money and resources saving the Mona Lisa, Sistine Chapel, the Statue of Liberty or old phonograph recordings of dead musicians? Your view is quite callous to the hours spent developing and imagining these video games as well as the hours spent enjoying them.

Whatever plan that can be instituted to save games should be done now before too many consoles are lost to the ages.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[LordPhantom]

That's a bit short-sighted, don't you think? Do you similarly think we shouldn't attempt to preserve the works of Beethoven or Picasso? There may not be a great cosmic truth contained in many different works of art but that doesn't mean there isn't irreplaceable creative value in it.

That's not to say that every game was noteworthy, but there are some that are worthy of preservation, not because of nostalgia but because they have value inof themselves.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Monkeedude1212]

Lost amidst all of the desire to permanently archive and hold on to every bit of past memory is the idea that we're supposed to forget. It's built into our DNA. [...] I don't feel there's any sense pining over this eventuality.

Wow - way to attack every single historian, archaeologist, paleontologist, archivist, librarian, and anyone interested in history in the planet by basically boiling it down to "It doesn't matter". If thats what you think, your history teacher wasn't very good. We learn from the past, we learn from history. Not just the mistakes, but also the successes. Not just the massive events, but also the mundane.

To say that "Forgetting" is in our DNA does not make a connection that "It is meant to happen" - that correlation needs to be shut down right away. Cancer is in your DNA. Ironically fitting, so is Alzheimers, which you may or may not get, which affects your memory. In fact, one of the greatest attributes humans have that give them an advantage over every other species is our memory.

If you don't care about your heritage, than you basically don't value your society. If you don't care that your grandparents fought in a war for YOUR freedom, you wouldn't value your freedom, because you wouldn't know you had it. Keeping Super Mario Bros. 3 in its original state might seem like a ridiculous goal now - but 3 or 4 generations from now, people will ask "What did people do with all their spare time?". It'd be great if we had that stuff in a museum for them to research, so that they can care about their heritage.

And like someone else said - let them decide what's important. Perhaps entertainment will be the main industry in the future, once industries are farmed out to robots.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[HeckRuler]

Yeah, I read that slashdot story too. It's a crock. You are quite literally arguing FOR ignorance.
Imagine if the investment bankers (or better yet the politicians who deregulated them) had remembered the horrors of the great depression.
Imagine if people had remembered Vietnam when we went in and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. (or even just when the Russian got tired of dying in Afghanistan)
Now, our "video game heritage" isn't nearly as important or weighty as that. But I like the patent for a hammer-mill strapped to a Cadillac that my grandfather had framed. I like the old silverware dad brought back from Thailand. I even like his super-ancient record of "the electric prunes".

So I really don't get the glorification of forgetting and ignorance. Starting with a black slate sucks.

Although, in an apparent about face, I'd agree that getting rid of useless junk and casting of materialism is a healthy thing to do. But keep the good stuff. (And that old TI machine with munch-man cartridge counts as "the good stuff").

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[jedidiah]

> I think the point of the question is, which medium will last and still be readable well into the future?

The Cloud.

The point of digital is to not fixate on one single point of failure to but to ensure that there is never any single point of failure. Copy works far and wide until the only way to wipe them all out is by slamming the planet with a rock the size of Texas.

The ancient works we have now did not get preserved because of better media. They were preserved because they were COPIED.

They were copied over and over again in a very labor intensive manner by very dedicated people.

COPYING preserves content.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[ultranova]

You do realize that it is not practical to perserve everything? That some things will have to be allowed to be lost to history?

See, the thing is, with exponential growth in storage space it's not only practical, but actually trivial to preserve everything. Well, for the evil pirates it is, anyway :).

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[mcrbids]

As an aside, I wrote a significant project using PHP-GTK (version 1) some years ago. (2003?) Well, the php-gtk project has moved on to newer version (2) and have all but dropped support for PHPGTK1, documentation, everything.

Yet my project is still alive and well on the old version, and I'm doing an update to that program now! My only recourse for the documentation is (of course) archive.org, which has all the old documentation (dating all the way back to 2001) which is, for my purposes, very nearly as useful as the original documentation's website was.

I'd be lost without this archive! IMHO, archive.org should be incorporated into the Library of Congress and treated as an imperpetuity electronic archive of the Internet.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[FoolishOwl]

The real joke here is, the problem with digital storage is that the only way to preserve digital information in the long term is to make many copies of it, and recopy it frequently. So, the best available way to preserve digitized cultural artifacts -- music, videos, games, etc. -- is to get them out on the peer-to-peer networks and keep them circulating. The "pirates" are doing more for the long term welfare of humanity than their opponents.

No fear.

[Pojut]

There will ALWAYS been crazy collectors that keep these things working, even if it means having parts custom made. If people can still own old automobiles that are drivable, they can still own old gaming consoles kept in tip-top shape.

Re:No fear.

[localman57]

It's easy to have custom parts made for things like the Atari 2600. It's engineering is relatively straightforward. Contrast that to a PS3, which specifically is designed with security in mind. Duplicating some of the parts there would be much, much more difficult.

And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[mykos]

It's funny how the ones who fight hardest against the spread of their works are, in effect, ensuring that their efforts will be forgotten and they will not leave a mark on gaming history. They are cementing themselves into a tomb of their own making, burying themselves alive.

Thanks to emulation, many of these older games have secured their spot in the memory of a digital society. Shame that the current generation of consoles is locked down in every way imaginable; perhaps historical obscurity is getting what they deserve. They will be remembered for their litigiousness rather than their art.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[localman57]

They want the old games to be forgotten. They want you to buy new ones. Unless, of course, they can find a way to monitize the old ones, such as the various new "Arcade" style stores that let you download old stuff for a price.

Decapping

[snarfies]

There's a very interesting project aimed at "decapping" chips from arcade motherboards. They burn the tops of the chips off with fuming nitric acid until the silicone is exposed, and the silicon is then put under a microscope, and the resulting image is then somehow processed to obtain the ROM's actual contents. I don't see why it couldn't be applied to consoles as well, if necessary. See http://guru.mameworld.info/decap/ for more details (and how you can help).

As to the article's position that emulation is not "good enough," well, perhaps not. Even assuming we have the exact decapped ROM contents, full documentation, and an absolutely perfectly coded emulator, we would still lack the original hardware - specifically the controllers and display. I used to play games on my Commodore with an old Atari 2600 joystick in a little 13-inch television. Its a tad different with my USB gamepad on my 22-inch widescreen LCD monitor, and there just isn't much for it.

Emulator experience

[jridley]

They're right, the emulator experience is not the same.

To really be accurate, the emulator would have to crash a bunch, require you to spend hours cleaning contacts with pencil erasers, screwing with cassette deck head alignment, beating on flaky equipment with your fist, and having to buy replacement cables every few months.

Kids these days don't know what they're missing with stuff that just works. I sometimes want to slap them around when they complain about hard drives that crash every 10 years on average. I had stuff that crashed every 10 minutes and I paid 10 times as much for it.

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[Hatta]

Zsnes is great, but not a model of accuracy. The audio accuracy is especially poor. It's also written partly in 32-bit x86 assembly, so it's only going to be with us for as long as x86 is.

bsnes on the other hand is written to be cycle accurate. Everything the hardware does is emulated, with no shortcuts. That is what we really need from emulators. Plus it's written in portable C++, so it will be around forever. The downside is that you need a fairly hefty machine to run it.