Game Preservation SIG/White Paper/2008 brainstorm/Compelling Examples

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Contents

Devin Monnens

Examples and notes by Devin Monnens.

Why Should We Preserve Videogames?

Categories of need include:

Necessity, Historical, Design, Security, Cultural, and Keeping Track, and Fun

Necessity

Technological Obsolescence – Both hardware and software become obsolete over time and are no longer compatible with the latest technology. As a result, old games that run on these hardware and software platforms are incompatible with today's platforms and are unreadable and unplayable.

Bit Rot/Hardware Decay – Over time, the storage medium on which a game is stored will degrade. As a result, even an original game that is perfectly preserved will have a finite lifespan, and one that will not outlast its copyright protection period. This is particularly a problem with magnetic storage, as the disk will slowly lose its magnetic charge, resulting in unreadable or corrupted data, and has also been observed with early disc-based software as well. Next to technological obsolescence, this is the greatest problem that concerns digital media archival today.

Rarity – A game may have been produced in limited quantities or may have become scarce over time. As a result, the game will not be easily accessible to those interested in playing it. It is ironic that a digital medium should be limited by material constraints. However, it is also a risk to the game's longevity in that a game of which only a handful of copies exist is at risk of being lost forever as copies become lost, decay, or are destroyed. By making archival copies of rare games, we can ensure these titles remain available.

Time – The rate at which a piece of software decays or becomes obsolete is far faster than the speed at which a copyright runs out. As a result, many games stored on proprietary media or 'volatile' media such as magnetic disk and compact disc, are unlikely (or in the case of magnetic data, simply unable to) survive until the copyright runs out and it becomes legal for archives to make backups of this software. As a result, we must act quickly before irreplaceable games are lost to us forever.

Histroical Need

Documenting an Emerging Art Form – Games are an emerging art form, if they have not achieved that status already. Games have the ability to tell narratives, a key component of film and literature. They also have the ability to affect us emotionally and change the way we look at our world. Yet just like the films of the 19th Century, it is impossible to tell where the medium will go within fifty or a hundred years. Could we have predicted Man with a Movie Camera by using only penny arcades and The Great Train Robbery as examples? How easy would it have been to predict the special effects of Star Wars by watching only A Trip to the Moon? Likewise, how could Shakespeare or Italo Calvino have been predicted by Beowulf and Gilgamesh? It is important that we have a range of examples – both good and bad – from the medium of the game in order to observe its evolution as a medium and an art form. It is very rare that we have such an opportunity, let alone the resources to do so, and we should take as full advantage of it as possible.

To Document the History of Design – Similar to documenting the emergence of an art form, we should also be interested in preserving games to help document how games have been designed over time. How Pac-Man was designed can tell us something about how Super Mario Galaxy was created, just as how Ultima IV was made can tell us something about Tabula Rasa. If we lose part of this history, we lose some of the knowledge about our medium and how games are made.

History of Technology and Interactive Media – Videogames have been instrumental in pushing digital technology. In large part, computers have been successful because they could play games. Playing a game is a lot more interesting than doing a spreadsheet, and the game requires much better visuals, and better audio capabilities. Videogames have pushed computer graphics technology and processing power which has allowed us to have visually complex operating systems and programs. 3D graphics have also influenced the film industry, and many of the visual effects seen in blockbuster Hollywood films have had their counterparts in games. Games have also influenced the way we think about digital media and the way in which works in other mediums are created. Videogames are important for these reasons.

Documenting the History of a Studio, Brand, Franchise, or Designer – Having a complete collection of works by an author or studio or from within a particular brand or franchise can tell us how those works have evolved over time. The roots of a master's greatest masterpiece lie in the earliest works of his or her career, and without having access to those materials, we know less about this great work. What is Stephen Spielberg's Jaws without The Duel, or Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket without Paths to Glory? How do the original Batman films affect Batman Begins? Likewise, we can draw on comparative analysis: how have the works of Buster Keaton affected Johnny Depp and Jackie Chan? How has Rashomon affected Western cinema? What about the works of an entire studio, like Disney or Studio Ghibli? By knowing the history of an artist or a group of artists, we can study how their work has changed over time and how the latest works have been affected by the earliest. Preserving games will help us do this by providing us with a body of information from which to draw research, and ultimately will help us to better appreciate our medium.

Design Need

Learning from the Past - It is important for us to preserve games as they provide examples of works that contemporary and future designers can learn from. If we did not preserve the films and literature of the past, how would our modern directors and authors be able to continually expand these art forms? If our game designers do not have access to the games of the past – both the masterpieces and the failures – then how can we continue to expand the medium and learn from our mistakes? How can we hope to understand what designers like Chris Crawford lament about when they say that games were so much more innovative and experimental back in the 70s and 80s than they are today? The only way we can tell is if we continue to have access to these games.

Learning from Others – Related to the above, having a history of games to study allows modern developers to see how other developers have created what they did, or for us to examine a particular designer's approach to his or her work. In many ways this is related to historical design.

Design Philosophy...

Security (of Information)

Loss by Accident or Disaster – Critically important data or games can be lost when there is a natural or manmade disaster. When the Library of Alexandria was destroyed, the Ancient World lost thousands of irreplaceable books. Today, we risk similar disasters with digital media. Anyone who has had their hard drive crash with all their important data saved only on that drive knows how terrible this is. But it also affects the industry, and not even large companies are immune.

In 1996, the Kobe Earthquake destroyed part of the Konami building. Within that building were irreplaceable documents from Konami's history, including the early Castlevania games. This was a terrible loss to the company as well as to the history of the industry.

Chris Crawford tells us a story about Atari in his book on game design. In 1984 when Atari closed its offices, Atari held a huge fire sale where they got rid of lots of furniture including several filing cabinets. The filing cabinets had been locked, and when the woman who purchased them opened the cabinets, she discovered some weird disks inside. When she contacted Crawford about it, he realized that Atari had given to her the gold master copies of all of Atari's games. Such mistakes are common when a company goes out of business – and game companies go out of business all the time.

It is important that we inform game companies about the importance of preservation so that data loss becomes less frequent and so that information that may be historically important years from now as well as important to the company's future is carefully preserved.

Keeping Track of Things

(I would rephrase this as something like "Security of game assets" HEL)

Okami Box Art – When Capcom ported Okami to the Nintendo Wii, the guy who made the box art was either lazy or not given the materials he needed. As a result, the Wii version of Okami shipped with an image that had been watermarked by IGN. This caused a small scandal and Capcom had to fix the cover images. Why did this Capcom employee use an image from IGN? Was it because Capcom's advertising studio did not have the assets it required? Was it because the employee was lazy? Or was it a combination of both? If companies can organize their data, which is key to preservation, then this will help prevent things like this from occurring in the future.

Studio Movement – When a studio moves, things can get lost. It is therefore important that a game studio have its materials well-organized so that both before and after the move, everything can be accounted for.

Data Backup and Migration – Similar to the above, when data has to be transferred to another machine or storage device, it is good to have that data organized.

Loss of Institutional Memory -- Cases where game companies have not had complete collections or even records of their own games.

Studio Closing – As mentioned above in the Security section, when a game studio closes or undergoes financial trouble, that studio's assets can be in danger. Studios during this period are very poorly organized. Employees aren't concerned with keeping track of assets but of how to save money and save their careers. It is a very panicky, disorganized time. The IGDA should be able to assist companies undergoing problems like this, at least by providing information to these companies on preservation techniques. If information becomes lost, then the historian's or lawyer's work becomes much more difficult.

Culture

Significant Impact on Culture – Games have a significant impact on culture. Memorabilia is everywhere, many people spend hours a week playing games, and some characters have reached cultural icon status. Mario is more popular than Mickey Mouse, and Halo has broken box office records. Because games are the most popular form of entertainment today, shouldn't we be more interested in them and in preserving them?

What the Medium Can Say – As an art form, games have the capacity to say important things about humanity and human culture and how we see our world. Because what they say can be important, it is important that we preserve them, just as we preserve similar works from other media. Games like Ultima IV, Shadow of the Colossus, Passage, and Katamari Damacy can tell us a lot about ourselves and the world we live in through how we play the game and what the game has to tell us.

What Games Can Tell Us About Ourselves – The games we play can tell us about our culture and ourselves. What do we do for entertainment? What do we find entertaining? What amuses us? Instead of fearing what entertainment can do through ignorance, we should explore what it can do. When we preserve games, we preserve human culture.

Future Possibilities of Expression – If the medium isn't saying important things with quite the sophistication that Shakespeare or Spielberg does, that doesn't mean it won't fifty years from now. After all, Citizen Kane came out over fifty years into the film industry's development – and we're still only thirty into the games industry. Pac-Man, DOOM, and Super Mario Bros. Just as Jurassic Park is as important as Moby Dick. Today's pop culture can become tomorrow's classics – we just won't know it until tomorrow arrives.

Art History – It is also important that we preserve games because it places the media within an art historical context. Not only do we examine games from a history of art in other media, but we also examine games within the context of other new media art. In many ways, the interactive story is like a video game and videogames can tell us as much about interactive stories as interactive stories can tell us about games.

Fun

We need to preserve games because they are fun. Just because something is fun does not mean it is worthless. Is Buster Keaton's The General worthless because it is fun to watch? Is Shrek and Looney Tunes? The way that we play and the way that we are entertained tells us a lot about ourselves and our culture. Fun helps us relax and enjoy life. Fun things can do more than simply provide entertainment, but a world without entertainment – a world without fun – is a gray world without life.

Sharing – We like to share with others the joy of fun. We want our friends and our children to experience the same fun that we have experienced. When we see someone else enjoying something that we, too enjoy, we become happier and enjoy that thing even more. We also get to share a bit of ourselves. And perhaps we also want to experience those things again to have more fun. What if you could never again share with someone else something that you enjoyed? If a game is lost and not preserved, then it is gone forever. No one can ever again experience the fun which that game contained or share it with others. And that is a sad thing. Preservation keeps these games accessible so that they can continue to provide fun. The people who created games many years ago would enjoy knowing that people many years from now are still playing their games.

Conclusion

As a design field, our history is as much a part of ourselves as is what is currently hot and what will be hot tomorrow. The hit titles of yesterday are just as important as the films made fifty or a hundred years ago are important to the film industry. Our history is who we are because history always informs and affects the present and future.

It should be our goal to not only preserve and set up means of preserving games but to inform development studios, libraries, and archives of preservation techniques for games and digital media for their own use.


Examples of Historical Works lost in Videogames

  • Side note: "Lost videogames" brings up the Lost videogame. Thanks Google! :/
  • Various pieces of source code, designs, betas, test packages and master programs(sans DRM or other media) etc. etc. are frequently unknown or lost (especially in the age of "bedroom programmers") from the pre-CD era of videogames. Only the larger companies are known to have any material from those era's, and no one has a hugely clear idea on what material private companies and individuals hold.
  • Any videogame company which has become defunct, there is limited knowledge of where their materials might have gone to. Much has been lost this way.
  • Examples from the mailing list:
    • The art assets (and other materials) Konami lost during the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995. That's why they haven't produced high-resolution images of the early Castlevania game art - the originals just don't exist for them to do it. I don't have a list of everything they lost, but I know the original Castlevania art was unfortunately a part of that. (Devin Monnens)
    • A few years ago, the guy who used to run the Metroid Database picked up the official Super Metroid developer's map off of e-bay. Now shouldn't Nintendo have taken better care of something that was from such a historically important game? (Devin Monnens)
    • Some MMOs have come and gone with hardly any record of what the game looked like, let alone what gameplay was like (ie. recorded video). (Jim Leonard)
    • The PCjr version of MULE was produced in 4-digit quantities and none are known to exist in the wild (only a photo of a diskette). (Jim Leonard)
    • Another M.U.L.E. anecdote - Dani Berry (Bunten) was demonstrating a new version of M.U.L.E. that she was trying to pitch to EA at the 1995 CGDC. I played it (The Fat Man, Johnny Wilson and Sid Meier were in the room as well) at the conference but I also remember that Dani didn't like the deal that EA was offering as she could be fairly uncompromising on design issues and rightly so. I think they wanted to introduce combat into it or some such. So that "new and improved" M.U.L.E. is hopefully somewhere out there. Finding that would be like turning up a Magritte in your attic. (Sam Punnett)
  • Also notewrothy for the case of having a record of what games "exist" and their copies: personal losses of data and games. In most of the disk-based cases, it hasn't been total devastation, as the games are still available on the web, but a couple of the Amiga games I've got actually haven't appeared in rom form on the web (The Logic Master, actually :P). This one is actually in the search list for the software preservation group (d'oh!). Thankfully, I know a person who was involved in their development, so I could see if she's got a copy somewhere... (Devin Monnens)

Examples of Historical Works Lost in other Media

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