The recent report about game preservation from the Videogame History Foundation paints a very bleak picture about the state of our industry. It is one where even the best games of each year are inevitably treated as trash and meant to be thrown out. In a recent chat I had with Digital Eclipse, we spoke about the hurdles of making people care about these games and I wanted to talk more about how these games should be presented to a modern audience.
Selling the Development
Speaking with Chris Koeler from Digital Eclipse, we discussed some of the challenges of making classic games “palatable” to a modern audience. And one of the aspects that DE came up with is that it’s not so much about playing these games. As we’ve spoken about, a lot of games that were considered “classic” don’t hold up that well for today’s audience.
Just releasing the game as is will get people who played the original, and this was the strategy that GOG.com employed, but this is an ever-shrinking market. There are two ways to give life to these games, improving the remaster that I’ll talk about next, and selling the story around the game.
Game development continues to be a mysterious aspect for a lot of people. One reason why I love talking to developers is demystifying this, and why I don’t care about doing simply PR stuff for games. I want to know the decision making behind something, how did this work, what didn’t work with a game? Digital Eclipse’s strategy with their Making of Karateka and future Golden Collection offerings is to not only sell the game but weave it into a greater look at the history and development of it.
You’re not just getting a port of a classic game, but learning about all the work, all the PR, and the story that went into making this product. This to me is a museum-quality restoration for a videogame. Is everyone going to be interested in hours of archival footage, interviews, and early design docs? Definitely not, but this is the information that adds more value to preserving games than just slapping a ROM on an emulator and charging $9.99 for it.
The Ultimate Remaster
And to that point, making people care about these games is also about making sure that they can play them as well. Many classic, and not-so-classic games are bordering unplayable for today’s market. While it is important to preserve the original game that people played, if you want more people to be interested in them, that means making it so that they can enjoy it today.
This is where a lot of work must be done on the remaster side, and what Digital Eclipse is banking on making their collections successful. You’re not just getting the game and all the history around it, but you’re getting the best possible version of that game, beyond just being a well-executed emulation. This is where having the option to skip through stages, rewind levels, and options to improve the playability and UI/UX of a game. Even going as far as changing the UI of a game to match modern platforms and peripherals. There will of course be people who will want to play the original as close as possible, with all the screen flickering, slowdown, and archaic controls, which made up the original release. However, that market is not the focus of these remasters — it’s for people who want playable history of these games.
Piracy is not the Answer
One of the points we talked about, as two people who know about game preservation and the emulation space, is how piracy has become intertwined with it. For people who don’t care about this work, they will just say “pirate the ROM”, and there are plenty of sites and emulators out there for someone who wants to do all that work.
Emulation, and rare remasters should not be the norm of preserving games
Just like with copy protection in general, its intended use is to not stop the hardcore person from pirating these games, but the general consumer. And the same can be said about emulators and why they are not a long-term solution to game preservation. The goal isn’t to make the act of preserving and playing games this kind of “back-alley deal”, but to make it as commonplace and as easy to do as going to a library and reading a book or visiting a museum to learn about a topic.
Fighting the Collector’s Market
I’ve said this before, but I am not a huge fan of the video game collector market and how it has removed the act of playing video games in favor of just something to hang on a wall or display case. One of the reasons why I appreciate GOG.com was them providing a way for people to experience these games without having to spend hundreds of dollars on a title.
From the last section, a GOG.com equivalent for console and handheld games is what I would like to see happen at a minimum. I remember the time when games like Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne were going for hundreds of dollars thanks to low copies and scalpers. I’m still very much annoyed that people ruined the whole “Mini console” trend by scalping and now asking triple the price for a NES classic.
The point of classic games is to not treat them as something you never touch again, or something to earn a quick buck from, but to let more people be able to play them and learn from them.
What Needs to Happen?
Everything about game preservation must begin with legislation, full stop. There needs to be a law that establishes an “end of life” for games to enter the public domain, or at least be allowed to be preserved by a third party. We can’t just keep hamstringing this along, and it’s been proven that just trusting the original rights holders or platforms to do this is not going to work.
To put this in perspective for you reading this, in five years from me writing this, The Last of Us 2, Elden Ring, Smash Brothers Ultimate and Death Stranding, will be viewed as nothing but garbage meant to be thrown out. And in another five years, outside of PC (or emulated) versions, it will be next to impossible to play them…unless you want to spend $80 every few console cycles for a new version of it. And if the thought of your favorite game being treated as trash makes you angry or annoyed, don’t take it out on me, start pushing for the industry to do better at preserving its history.
My interview with Digital Eclipse will be going up in a few weeks, and you can watch it over on the Game-Wisdom YouTube channel
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