July 13, 2022 • 47 mins
Why is the preservation of video games such a complicated mess? And what's the big deal with preserving them in the first place? We look at how enthusiasts and historians are trying to find ways to prevent old games from being forgotten.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And
how the tech are you? You know? I thought today
I would talk about the issue of video game preservation.
(00:25):
I was inspired to do this because of something that
recently happened with Ubisoft, a game company that's well to
put lightly, It's had a pretty darn controversial few years.
But Ubisoft makes lots of different game titles, and one
particularly popular franchise from them is the Assassin's Creed series. Well,
one of the entries in this long running franchise came
(00:48):
out way back in two thousand twelve, and it was
called Assassin's Creed three Liberation, and it's notable for a
few reasons. One was that the player controls the character
named Aveline de grand Pre, who happens to be the
first female assassin in the series that the player could control.
Before that, they were all male protagonists. Later on, would
(01:11):
be Soft released a remastered version of the game titled
Assassin's Creed Liberation h D. Anyway, Steam, which is the
video game store, the digital video game store so it's
an online store. It's run by Valve, which used to
primarily be known as a video game developer now is
mostly known as the company that runs Steam. Anyway, Steam
(01:32):
posted a message on July eleven, two thousand twenty two
that's said, at the request of the publisher, Assassin's Creed
Liberation h D is no longer available for sale on Steam,
which is fair enough. These things happen. Companies will allow
something to technically kind of go out of print, although
in this case that's kind of a misnomer because we're
(01:53):
talking about digital sales. But it would be Soft decided
to stop selling copies of this game now it would
be Soft had also previously announced that it would be
ending multiplayer functionality for several of its games, including Assassin's Creed.
Now that could be disappointing to hardcore fans, but at
the same time, you can kind of understand why it's happening,
(02:16):
because supporting multiplayer means that a company has to run
servers that host those multiplayer sessions, which also means maintaining
those servers and responding if something goes wrong with them.
So for older games, the player base that's still accessing
multiplayer might be so small that it's difficult to justify
(02:37):
the ongoing expense of keeping those servers online, particularly if
it's a game that doesn't have a subscription model to it.
Right Like, if it's a game where multiplayer was part
of the features of the game that you got with
the purchase of the full game, and it's not an
ongoing expense, then the company is footing the bill for
(02:58):
providing that service even after people are no longer really
buying the game. Um, it's a bummer, but you know,
it's kind of understandable from the perspective of the business. However,
these days, a lot of games require at least some
sort of online component, typically as part of digital Rights
Management or DRM, which is terrible, but here's how it goes.
(03:22):
The basic idea is that the game you're running on
your local device, like on your computer or whatever, checks
in with a home base server that belongs to the
company in order to verify that the copy of the
game that you are playing is legitimate. And at that
point the home base server says, yeah, go ahead, let
(03:42):
let them play the game. Or if the game isn't legit,
or if the connection can't be made for some reason,
the server tells your local machine, hey, don't let us
jerk face play that game. They probably stole it. So
for players who just want a single player experience, right like,
it's a game that's just meant to be played on
your computer. There's no online component, there's no multiplayer component.
(04:06):
If those those folks have a poor internet connection or
no connection to the internet, this kind of DRM is
a huge hassle because it means there's no real way
to access the game legitimately. But that's the nature of DRM.
I've done full episodes about this in the past. All right,
let's get back over to Ubisoft. So, in its initial
(04:26):
message that was published on Steam, the implication was that
the Assassin's Creed game wouldn't just be unavailable to purchase
from that point forward, but would in fact be rendered
completely unplayable. That people who had purchased a copy of
this game would be unable to access their game at all,
even if they were just trying to play local single
(04:49):
player mode, nor would they be able to run any
of the downloadable content or DLC that they had purchased
for the game. Steam would issue a follow up s
eatement that said people who own the game already would
still be able to play it, they would even be
able to read download it. So on Steam, you have
a library of games. These games may or may not
(05:12):
actually be downloaded to your computer, but it's a record
of all the games you have purchased throughout your time
using Steam, and if you want, you can read download
a game to install it on a new machine. Let's
say that you're upgrading your computer. You've decided to, you know,
switch to a brand new new computer system that can
(05:32):
run the latest games, but you also have a soft
spot for some older games. Well, you can re download
them to your new machine. So ubisof said players will
still be able to do that. They'll still be able
to access the game that they purchased. However, they will
not be able to access online content or DLC for
that game. That would be unavailable anyway. That whole ness
(05:54):
prompted this episode because with so many games requiring online
services to function, even if the games themselves are otherwise
confined to a local device, what happens when the company
that provides that online service goes out of business, because
that has happened more than once in the video game world,
(06:14):
or what happens if a company like Ubisoft decides to
shift resources away from continuing support of older games that
have smaller player bases, the thing you purchased suddenly becomes inaccessible.
Even if the code is fine, and even if you
have a machine that otherwise could run the game without
a problem, you still can't access the game. That approach
(06:36):
means it becomes difficult to preserve such games, and in
some cases it could even be illegal for you to
try and do it. In other cases, it might not
be illegal, but it might be practically impossible, and so
these games are lost in time like tears in Rain.
Let me know if you've got that reference. Now, some
(06:58):
of y'all might be saying, I didn't even know video
game preservation was a thing, or maybe a few of
you could be saying, why is it important to even
preserve video games in the first place. And it's totally
fair that not everyone is into video games. That's cool, right.
I'm not into every kind of art there is. Doesn't
mean the arts bad. I'm just not into it that
(07:19):
there are a lot of folks who are really into
video games, including those who consider video games to be
a type of art. I happen to be one of
those people. I don't necessarily think video games, at least
not most of them, typically qualify as high art. But
I do think there's a lot of artistic expression that
goes into creating video games. Whether it's from character design
(07:42):
or level design, or even gameplay elements, or the textures
that you use to enhance visuals or the story that
plays out over the course of a game. There are
a lot of avenues for artistic expression. Some of them
you might not classically think of as artistic, like gameplay elements.
You might think, oh, you know, pressing a to jump,
(08:02):
that's nothing. But you look at some of these games
and some of the elegant approaches to gameplay elements in them,
you start to think there is an art to this,
and people who are particularly artistic can create really transformational
experiences through that. So even if you strip all the
art away, right if you if you deny that there's
(08:24):
anything artful about video games, the fact remains that people,
and a lot of people in many of these cases,
I mean some of these games have hundreds of folks
who worked on these Well, those people worked really hard
to make that game happen. They labored over getting the
various components up to snuff, and then they also worked
(08:45):
really hard to make sure all these different components actually
work together so that one thing doesn't break something else.
And let's be fair, video game companies are not always
successful in doing this. There are plenty of examples of
broken games out there. Some of them got less broken
over time thanks to patches and stuff, but we have
seen no shortage of you know, games that just didn't
(09:08):
work properly. But I still feel like the work of
the people who who dedicated their time and their their
skill and their knowledge to creating these games should be
acknowledged and it should be preserved. I think two big
things that prompt people to question the need to preserve
games are that there's still this perception among some people
(09:30):
the video games are meant for kids, like video games
are for babies. They're just silly diversions, and there's really
no reason to put any effort into preserving those things.
There's another perception that undermines the concept of preserving video games,
and that's that they are so tightly connected to commerce.
They are a product, you know, like you would go
(09:53):
out and buy a hammer, but you wouldn't necessarily want
to preserve the hammer for posterity. And you know, not
all games are made specifically to be sold, but the
vast majority of them are, so they aren't really considered
art by some folks. However, I would argue that most
art is actually meant to be sold. It's not just
meant to hang on a wall, and the artist makes
(10:16):
no money from it. I mean, if art was never sold,
artists wouldn't make a living. Um, you know, whether it's
patronage or it's selling it through an exhibition or whatever.
Art and commerce always have a relationship with each other.
Otherwise you'd run out of artists because they all starve
to death. And of course there are countless examples in
(10:39):
say the fashion world, where people spend truckloads of cash
on designer goods and they consider these art. Like the
fashion world, that is art art that has been made
to be worn in some way. But even while people
are spending those truckloads of cash on the latest fashions,
(10:59):
they do so knowing that the stuff they are buying
is going to be out of fashion in six months
to a year, Like the thing that is avant garde
and desired today is going to be almost dismissed in
a year's time, which that is the stuff that wrinkles
(11:20):
my brain. Video games. I get fashion. I mean, you
just have to take one look at me and you
would know he doesn't get fashion. That's fair. And I'm
not saying that fashion is silly or frivolous. I just
don't get it. But let's talk about video game preservation.
So one of the methods I have talked about in
(11:40):
fairly recent episodes of tech stuff is the main platform
and MAME is m a m E and it stands
for multiple Arcade Machine emulator. Name's purpose is to emulate
or you know, simulate if you like, the circuitry and
program ng of various game platforms. Now, the games themselves
(12:04):
come in the form of rams, r o ms or
read only memory. There there are people who have copied
the code off of classic video games to preserve those ROMs.
And originally these ROMs were programmed directly onto microchips. So
if you were to open up a classic arcade game,
you would see a whole bunch of circuit boards with
(12:26):
chips on them, and this is the game, like, the
game is physically coded onto the circuit boards, and those
microchips include the ROMs the read only memory that is
the game itself. So in order to create a copy
of that, you have to strip the code off of
the ROMs, and that's not always easy. In fact, it's
(12:47):
pretty complicated. And then you also have to create software
that imitates the operation of that actual circuit so that
the ROMs will run properly, and that also is a
non trivial thing. So the arcade machines and then later
on cartridge based consoles and also computers would have games
(13:09):
that were programmed in physical circuitry. UH. Cartridges in particular, right, like,
that's there's a circuit board in a cartridge and that's
what the game has programmed on. Then later on you
would have things like images that would be put on
optical discs. We'll get to that too. So the main
platform mimics the circuitry, allowing the copied code from whatever
(13:31):
the original ROM was to play on a computer. UH
doesn't always play perfectly well. Sometimes the emulator is just
an approximation of how the game would work. In other cases,
the approximation is incredibly accurate, to the point where it
feels like you're playing the original arcade machine. It depends
(13:51):
heavily on the level of emulation for that particular game,
as well as the specs on the machine you're running
Maime on the first place. We'll come back and talk
more about Maime and emulation and the reasons why this
is important for preservation after we take this quick break. So,
(14:18):
the original purpose of MAINE was to serve as a
way to preserve games. Now, obviously a lot of people
have used MAIN software to create like a home arcade
machine that's capable of running hundreds or thousands of different games.
Like you can even go online and find companies that
offer these things where they will have a computer, often
(14:41):
powered by a Raspberry Pie, which is a very basic
computer that's running main emulation software and has a like
a smart card just loaded with gigabytes of ROMs on it.
But that was not the original intent of creating main
Like what the idea wasn't hey, let's create a way
(15:01):
for people to get access to these hundreds of arcade
machines in the comfort of their own home. It was
the idea that we need something that can preserve these
games because the hardware that the games are built upon
will degrade over time and eventually the last remaining cabinet
of any given game will stop working, and at that
(15:23):
point the game is lost. So this is a way
of preventing that loss from happening. It just so happens
that It also means that you could create a full
Arcade in one machine by downloading lots of ROMs. However,
you should know downloading ROMs can be illegal. It's technically
(15:47):
copyright violation because you're downloading a copyrighted work without legitimately
purchasing that work. Doesn't mean that doesn't happen everywhere. It does,
but it's still illegal. Now, never mind that in some cases,
at least, there's no way for you to buy a
legal copy of the game, or if the then may
be that the only legal way to buy the game
(16:09):
is to find someone selling it on a market like eBay,
and it might be for an incredibly expensive price that
that might be the only and there's no guarantee that
those will work. By the way, like you might go
out and spend a couple of thousand dollars buying a
Classic Arcade cabinet, find out that you need to do
a lot of maintenance on it in order to make
(16:29):
it work properly. The circuitry if it's treated well will
typically hold up for a very long time, but things
like the actual buttons and controls they wear out. I mean,
that's just wear and tear. So yeah, it could get
to a point where there's just there's very few avenues
for you to make a legitimate purchase of a game. Uh.
(16:51):
The way MAME is supposed to be used is that
someone who has a legal right to a roan, like
they own a game, or maybe they even own the
I P for the game, Well, they can download the
RAM for their own use and they can run the
main software on a computer. They can activate that RAM,
and it's totally legal. So for example, let's say that
(17:13):
you went out and purchased an arcade machine of a
classic game like Elevator Action, which I absolutely and ironically
love and no I cannot justify it, but I love
that game. Well, let's say you bought a cabinet of that.
You went out and you you purchased a copy of it.
(17:33):
You could then legally download a RAM of Elevator Action
and that could serve either as a backup or as
a replacement for the RAM on the arcade machine itself
if it had stopped working. So it's kind of like
making a backup of a recording for your own personal use.
That's acceptable, that's fair use. But if you didn't already
(17:54):
own a copy of Elevator Action, then downloading the ROM
would essentially be piracy. In fact, not essentially it is piracy.
As for Mame itself, Mame is totally legal to download.
Mame doesn't have any games on it natively, It's just
a program that emulates different kinds of hardware. Name is
(18:15):
kind of like a console in a way. It's the
thing that lets you play the games, but it is
not the games themselves. So theoretically you should not be
downloading ROMs for games that you don't already own. However,
a lot of games are otherwise unavailable, like the companies
that made some of those games have long since vanished,
(18:36):
so there's nowhere for you to go to to buy them.
Or sometimes another company has come around and scooped up
the old I P from someone who has gone out
of business. Sometimes that can be hard to track down,
Like you might think, oh, there's this great game I
loved when I was a kid. The company that made
it went out of business. I have no idea who
owns that intellectual property. Because chances are someone bought it
(18:58):
when uh the old but he went out of business.
So there are a lot of cases we're finding a
legitimate way to purchase the game you want just doesn't
appear to exist, and that is frustrating. That being said,
there are some game creators who have granted permission for
folks to download ROMs of their games. So these are
creators who have the right to do that right. They
(19:20):
are the folks who actually own the intellectual property in
the first place, so they have the capacity the authority
to grant permission to people so that they can download
the ROMs. And the main website does link to ROMs
that meet that qualification. However, you're not going to find
any real big names in that list. In fact, you
may not recognize a single title. There are a couple
(19:42):
of dozen titles that fall into this category. I actually
looked them over and I didn't recognize any of them.
None of them were titles that I was familiar with.
So to get the stuff that you you know and love,
you would have to go elsewhere. Now, I mentioned Arcade Machines,
but that is not the only hard where that MAIM emulates.
Since two thousand fifteen, the main platform has integrated a
(20:06):
separate emulator called MESS m E s S, which stands
for Multi Emulator super System. So Main's primary purpose was
to preserve arcade games that otherwise would eventually disappear once
that last working cabinet gave up the ghost. MESS focuses
more on consoles and computer systems, most of which are
(20:27):
well out of production, and MESS supports nearly one thousand
systems in total. Not all of them are fully functional, however,
so while you could count all the ones that are
included in the emulator and you would get up to
more than nine hundred, you'd have to keep in mind
some of those are only partially functional. They are really
(20:47):
big names on that list, by the way, including the
Nintendo Entertainment System or any s. The Super Nintendo Nintendo
sixty four is on their Sega Genesis, also known as
the Mega Drive is there. The Sake of Dreamcast is
on their older consoles are on there too. The AT
twenty hundred and Colico Vision and in Television are all
(21:08):
on there, and obviously lots more game consoles as well
as for computers you name it. I mean there's everything
from Texas instruments to Apple to computer systems, to Commodore computers,
to Amiga and more. Now, these are all devices that
have long since been out of production, which means you're
not gonna be able to buy a new one. You
(21:29):
might be able to find a working used one somewhere,
but chances are emulation is going to be the only
way you will experience a lot of the programming that
was originally made for those devices. Now again, in a
lot of cases, that software is not technically abandoned ware,
meaning you know, abandoned ware is something where there's no
(21:52):
legitimate owner of that i P anymore. It has been abandoned.
It is just existing on its own with no owner
above it. Someone somewhere owns the i P for most
of the software that's out there, So you might think
of it as abandoned ware because nobody has done anything
(22:13):
with it for a very long time, But legally speaking,
it's not because it does still belong to some company
or person out there. Now. It may be that that
entity doesn't care if folks download ROMs or images of
that of that program or game or whatever. Image in
this case means essentially a copy of the code, not
(22:36):
an actual picture of something. But you can't just assume that,
and it's certainly not the case everywhere. I mean, some
companies like Nintendo, for example, are really well known for
being super protective of their work, even if there is
no way to purchase the titles from the company itself anymore.
Me just look at Nintendo, and you look at how
(22:59):
for first part games the price never comes down. Like
you could look at first party games that Nintendo cells
to this day, and the games themselves might be years old,
but the price hasn't budged. That really gives you a
hint at Nintendo's perspective on this kind of thing, which
I'm not saying is a wrong perspective. I'm just saying
(23:20):
it indicates that you're not likely to find Nintendo saying, oh, sure,
go ahead download images of our games. We don't care that.
I can't imagine that ever happening. However, let's put aside
the ownership question for a moment to get back to
the central point of this episode. The main and mess
platforms and others that are like them aim to provide
(23:41):
a way to preserve the games and other programs as well,
but we're focusing mostly on games that had been made
for these old platforms that are no longer in production.
Without the emulators, we would gradually lose access to that work.
We would be fully dependent upon companies re issuing work
which they might not ever do. And computers changed so
(24:04):
quickly that a lot of stuff that was made for
older systems becomes impossible to access otherwise without an emulator.
Right Like, you can get old PC programs and try
to run them on a modern PC, and sometimes it
just becomes inoperable. You can't even use it. I remember
distinctly having a version of the classic Star Wars arcade game,
(24:27):
the wire frame game that you saw in the arcades
way back in the eighties, and I had a PC
version of that game, and I said it aside and
kind of lost track of it. And then we upgraded
computers a couple of times. This is when I was
a kid, and I found the game and I thought, oh,
I want to play this. I haven't played in a
very long time. Loaded it up. Could not play the
(24:48):
game because now it ran so screamingly fast that just
touching the joystick would make it uh jerked to the
left or jerked to the rider up or down or whatever.
And things were moving so quickly on the screen you
couldn't see anything, and you blink once and you would
see game over. So it became impossible to play. I
needed to have an emulator in order to run that
(25:10):
code at the proper speed, and I did it, so
that game just became inaccessible to me. Let me give
you another less frivolous example. So both of my parents
right novels, and when I was a kid, my parents
bought an Apple to E computer. My dad used it
primarily so that he could write books in short stories
(25:31):
using the Apple, although he would also play the occasional
computer game on there too. In fact, I remember him
being particularly fond of the game Wizardry, which was kind
of a a D and D style dungeon crawler computer RPG.
But anyway, Dad used a relatively primitive word processor program
on the Apple to write out his first few books,
(25:52):
and he saved these chapter by chapter onto floppy discs.
It would take more than a dozen floppy disks to
hold a single novels manuscript. In fact, I once accidentally
deleted an entire chapter of his work because he had
left the computer to go do something else and he
had not saved the file for a little bit, and
I thought he had just left the computer on, so
(26:13):
I was thought I was being conscientious and not wanting
to waste electricity, so I turned the computer off. Whoopsie.
So if you ever wondered why the novel Moon Dreams
didn't go the way you thought it was going, that
was probably because of me. Anyway, flash forward, It's been
a couple of decades since we had a working Apple computer.
So assuming the data on those floppy disks is still intact,
(26:36):
which is a very big assumption because magnetic storage is
not permanent. It will degrade over time. But assuming it's
still intact, we would still have to find either a
working Apple to E computer and a copy of that
work processing program in order to access those files, or
we'd have to get an emulator that would run on
a modern computer, plus an external floppy disk drive could
(27:00):
connect to a modern computer, possibly through an interface like
USB or something. Otherwise, that data is just going to
slowly rot on those floppy disks, which honestly is probably
what's gonna happen. Now. The good news is those are
really books all published, right, so you can actually track
down copies of the books, though it could take a
lot of searching. Most of those books have been out
(27:21):
of print for nearly forty years. But as for the
earlier drafts of those books, some of which were had
notable differences from the published version of the book. There's
one children's novel in particular, my dad wrote where I
thought the original draft was in every way superior to
(27:41):
the published version of the book. Those might be lost forever.
So emulators are one method we can use to preserve
games and other types of coded content. And that works
pretty well for local games, as in games that are
meant to run on a local device that may or
may not be connected to the internet. But like I
(28:03):
said earlier, there are a lot of games, an increasing
number of games in fact, that rely in part or
entirely on some sort of online component. And let's tackle
the d r M games. And like I said, I've
talked about DRM a lot in fairly recent episodes, so
we won't go into too much detail here. Now some
(28:24):
games might just need an initial check in, but increasingly
lots of games require a persistent online connection. These games,
and and just to be clear, it's not just games
that do this, lots of different software does this too.
These games have what's called an always on DRM or
persistent online authentication requirements. So if you lose your connection
(28:47):
to the internet, you're likely to get a little pop
up notification within the game explaining that the connection to
the authentication server is down and that this is going
to affect your experience in some way. For example, the
game might no longer count any progress toward achievements because
it can't verify that you're not cheating, or it might
(29:07):
be unable to save your progress in the game as
you play it. Now today, a lot of games will
save progress locally on your computer, and then once you
have re established a connection with the authentication server, it
might give you the option to either revert to the
save that was established by the server the last time
you are connected, or you can choose your local save,
(29:30):
which is probably more recent, and then that will just
overwrite the older one on the server and you can
go from there and there's no other interruption. But if
that server, that authentication server goes offline, either due to
malfunction or the company chooses to no longer support it,
then legitimate owners of this game suffer they're unable to
(29:53):
access all the features of their game, or in some
cases that they are not able to launch the game
at all. Thus, there is a single point of failure
for this game, and it's not even within the player's
control to address it. Their hardware might be working just fine,
but because of this connectivity requirement, they are unable to
(30:13):
play the game that they legally purchased, which doesn't seem fair. Well,
I'm going to talk more about that and how this
ties into the issue with piracy in just a moment
and then get back into video game preservation. But first
let's take another quick break. Okay, So we were talking
(30:40):
about how any sort of issues with connecting to an
authentication server can create an untenable experience for a legitimate
owner of a video game copy. Well, meanwhile, you've got
people who are engaged in piracy, who are illegally downloading games.
They're stealing games, they're cracking those authentication requirements because obviously,
(31:03):
if you're stolen a game and the server detects that
this is not a legitimate copy, you're not going to
have access to those features. So you've got to get
around that, right, So pirates can launch their copy and
play it with no problems, at least for games that
are local. Single player games. It's a little bit different
from multiplayer games because getting around authentication servers for online
(31:25):
play requires a lot more work, but at least for
single player experiences, it's not an issue once the game
has been cracked. Yeah, you might not have access to
things like achievements, but you'll be able to play the game.
So a lot of folks have gone on to say
that always on DRM is just playing bad technology, like
it's it's just doesn't work. It's it's a bad idea
(31:47):
because it does not do what it's supposed to do.
It's supposed to prevent piracy, but people are still pirating games,
and meanwhile it creates a bad experience for legitimate owners.
You know, the people who actually spent money to purcha
just a real copy of the game. They're the ones
who get affected by always on DRM. The pirates have
worked away around it, so it's a double whammy, right.
(32:08):
It doesn't do what it's supposed to do, which is
stop piracy, and instead it impacts the people who are
legally purchasing the games, which you could argue drives more
and more people to piracy. It's kind of a self
defeating tool. Anyway, back to the video game preservation. So
in this case, the Cracked games might be the only
(32:29):
games that can stick around, because if a company were
to go out of business or to shift assets away
from supporting a particular title, like Ubisoft is doing, then
at that particular title might lose some or all of
its functionality. The Cracked games, which have severed this connection
to home base will continue to work, or at least
(32:50):
work as much as they possibly can, since online functionality
will still be affected if the company stops running servers
to support whatever that functionality is. Let's consider the MMO
world for a second. MMO stands for massively multiplayer online,
so it's kind of a general category and there are
(33:12):
a lot of subcategories under it, and MMO pretty much
describes one aspect of what these games are all about. Namely,
these are games that are played online, so an Internet
connection is required, and they support a large number of
simultaneous players, thus the massive multiplayer. A popular subset of
(33:32):
MMO games are m m O rpg s, or MMO
games that are role playing games. A famous one that's
still going on is World of Warcraft. That's kind of
like the flagship example of m m O RPGs. Historically speaking,
but there are other games that came and went and
would have totally disappeared if it weren't for dedicated fans
(33:53):
who would commit their own resources to keeping instances of
the game running by running their own own servers. One
such example is Star Wars Galaxies, which is obviously a
game set in the Star Wars universe. That game originally
launched back in two thousand three, and it received numerous
updates and expansions, but the player base diminished slowly over time.
(34:19):
By two thousand nine, Sony Online Entertainment, which ran the game,
alerted players who had characters on certain servers that those
servers would soon be shut down and the player would
be given the capability to transfer their character to one
of the remaining servers that Sony would continue to operate. However,
(34:40):
in two thousand and eleven, Sony would shut down the
whole shebang. So why did it do that? Well, one
reason was that the Star Wars based m m O
RPG Star Wars the Old Republic was about to launch,
so the company wanted to dedicate its resources to supporting
the new game and also push people to move over
(35:01):
to the new title. Keep in mind these m m
O RPGs. The way they generated revenue is that these
were subscription based services. Right for the most part, you
would subscribe and pay a monthly fee in order to
maintain access to the game. So unlike most video games
where you purchase it once and that's it, this was
(35:24):
a model where you are having a recurring payment to
the company. And this is before we get into stuff
like you know, uh, in game content and micro transactions,
which is the predominant revenue generation model that we see today. Like,
that's how how video game companies are really making revenue
(35:45):
now is that they have ways to continue to sell
you stuff within a game so that you keep on
spending money on a title. Uh and a lot of
those titles end up being free to play, but to
get access to all the cool stuff, you've got to
cough up the big bucks anyway. So and he decides
to shut down Star Wars Galaxies. Now, Star Wars Galaxy
(36:05):
has had a pretty robust set of features, including a
player centric economy in which players could buy and so
goods that other players had crafted or that they had crafted.
They could become bounty hunters or smugglers or you know,
a Jedi or whatever. It was a game that received
pretty positive reviews, and the players who were still with
the game toward the end weren't really ready to say goodbye,
(36:29):
so some of them didn't. There are a couple of
different groups that set out to emulate the server system
that ran Star Wars Galaxies. One such group formed the
s w G EMU project, so it's s w G
e m U, and that actually aimed to create servers
that ran an earlier version of Star Wars Galaxies, one
(36:50):
that it didn't include a change that was made to
the game's combat system a little later on. There's another
group called Project s w G that has set out
to create emulation did versions of the servers running the
later versions of the game, so the one that actually
did incorporate some of those changes to combat, plus other expansions.
So there are fan run servers out there. Some of
(37:13):
them are still under construction, and these are keeping that
game alive and otherwise it would just be gone. That's cool,
but not all companies are keen to allow unofficial servers
to operate. For example, Electronic Arts or E, a company
that was once said on a pole from a consumerist
(37:35):
to be the worst company in America used to rely
on a company called game Spy to manage online multiplayer
functions for some of their titles, titles like Battlefield Heroes
and Battlefield two. But you know, there's always a bigger fish,
and sometimes bigger fish have different ideas of what they
(37:56):
want to support. So what happened with game Spy. I
g N merged with GameSpy in two thousand four, then
Ziff Davis acquired I g N, and then Ziff Davis
decided to shut down a whole bunch of services that
had been run through I g N and GameSpy because
it was, you know, an expense. It was it was
(38:17):
having to maintain and run these things, and Ziff Davis is, like,
why are we paying to do this? Hardly anyone uses it,
shut it down, and that included online multiplayer functions that
games like the Battlefield ones I mentioned we're using. So
a group of fans began to run servers that would
allow players to keep playing the online multiplayer functions of
those games. To get to be able to do that,
(38:39):
they had to get copies of the games that would
be compatible with this approach, and you know, their their
view was that this is the way of preserving a
game they love and preserving a part of the game
that was a big part of the experience. There are
players who bought the battlefield games just for these multiplayer
modes because that's really where the meat of the game was.
(39:01):
Like there there are plenty of examples of games out
there that might have some limited single player content, but
the vast majority of the experience is really aimed at multiplayer.
So why should you just accept that the thing you
bought no longer has all the features that it was
supposed to have available to you? Why should that be allowed?
(39:22):
So the fans ran the servers for a few years,
but in e A sent a legal note to them
and asked them to shut it all down, which they did.
And when you think about you can understand EA is
a big company. It's got deep pockets. You don't really
want to get in an i P dispute with them.
And EA was saying, hey, you know what, you don't
(39:43):
have the authorization to do stuff like distribute content that
has our logo on it and our trademarked content and
intellectual property on it. And the people running the server said,
you know what, You're totally right, we don't have that authority.
It's not our right. We can't present ourselves as representing
(40:04):
a company when we don't have any connection to that company,
so they shut it down. Now, for many fans and preservationists,
this kind of activity has become a huge point of frustration.
If there are no legitimate ways to access or to
preserve a game, then there is a risk that that
game is just going to fade into obscurity forever. All
that work will just be forgotten. The game's industry has
(40:28):
argued that the nature of their work means that an
old title can re emerge on a new platform pretty
much any time, and technically that is true. If a
company deems that there's enough of a market to justify
the effort that would be involved, they can make those
old titles available again, and in some cases it could
(40:50):
be a relatively trivial effort, but in others it could
require the creation of an emulator, or they might have
to port the original game to new platform, and that's
not really the same thing as preserving a game, because
ports of games can really alter fundamental aspects of a title.
But it is hard to argue against that industry perspective
(41:13):
because it is technically possible to bring back these games.
I mean, that's obvious because of the emulator community. They
they're doing it themselves without the authority to do so,
so it is possible. Enthusiasts and historians have already proven
that's possible to bring these games back and to run
them on modern hardware, sometimes with almost perfect replication. So
(41:36):
if enthusiasts and historians can do it, then surely the
companies that own the I P can do it too.
And sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't. They can
choose not to do that. In many cases, they probably
wouldn't choose to do it because the effort to do
it would not end up being paid off. There'd be
too few people to go out and buy the new
(41:57):
version of the game. Uh. Even if you know there
are people who really really love that game, they're not
enough of them to justify the effort of doing this.
So because they have the right to do it, that
means we're kind of stuck, right Like, they can reissue
a game if they want to, but they don't have to.
And because of that, that's why we get into this
(42:20):
situation where preserving games gets to be difficult. Occasionally, groups
like the Electronic Frontier Foundation or e f F will
attempt to argue that the case for preservation should serve
as an exception to copyright and fall under the umbrella
of fair use, so that it should be perfectly legal
to create these emulators and copies of games. But that's
(42:41):
tough battle because the companies that own the i P
tend to be pretty convincing to politicians. Now, you could
get cynical and say that's because these companies spend a
lot of money to lobby politicians and that the politicians
listen to people who give them money, or you could
just say that they can afford to have really influential
all yours. Both arguments hold some validity to them. Now,
(43:03):
the good news is there are a lot of people
working to make sure these games don't just disappear. That
folks in the future will be able to access and
experience these games, at least on some level. The games
will likely not have the same appeal because the graphics
are going to be outdated, the scope of the game
will be much less ambitious, but the ideas and the
(43:25):
presentation could inspire people to create new games that they
otherwise never would have imagined. They could spark something. I mean,
that's part of creativity is building upon things that you
have encountered before. Well you can only do that if
you're able to encounter those things. So that's why preservation
is so important. Plus, do we really want to live
(43:45):
in a world where you can't play Elevator Action if
you want to? Because I don't. So that's kind of
this current situation about video game preservation, how it has
sort of a uncertain ground. And I think for the
large part, like the wrong community, the main community, even
(44:07):
though you've got tons of people who are using mame
quote unquote illegally, in many cases that's overlooked because companies
aren't really doing anything with the i P anyway, Like
they're not actively trying to reissue old arcade machines because
the arcade model no longer really exists, at least not
(44:27):
on a sustainable grand scale. But that's not the case
across the board. You do occasionally get these moves like
um like the fairly recent trend of companies to reissue
small versions of old hardware like the Nintendo Entertainment System,
the Supernintendo, where you get really, what's an emulator in
(44:51):
a box that has you know, a couple of dozen
games on it. You have cases like that, So there
are ways that companies are cashing in and on this
old I P and thus there is a very strong
argument to say, like, we can't allow people to just
download this for free because it is part of our
(45:12):
our assets and we are actually doing stuff with them.
But for every title that is getting kind of a reissue,
there are hundreds that just kind of are gathering dust.
So yeah, it's a complicated situation, and you can definitely
see arguments on both sides that have validity to them. Uh.
I definitely want to see titles preserved, but I would
(45:36):
love to be able to see a an approach where
there's collaboration between the industry and the historians so that
the process can be one that isn't going to encounter opposition, right, Like,
isn't going to be legally challenged and then possibly shut down,
(45:56):
because that would just mean that all that work would
have gone to waste. So that's kind of what I
hope for. I don't anticipate it happening anytime soon, but
I do hope. And for the record, there are some
video game creators out there who definitely feel that way,
who feel like preservation is a legitimate and important thing.
All right, that's it for this episode. I do have
(46:17):
another episode where're gonna I'm gonna be talking about preserving
data and the challenges of preserving data in a way
that is long lasting and accessible. Uh, that's gonna be
It's it's inspired by a listener request actually, so look
forward to that because it does tie into some of
the things we've talked about here today. If you have
suggestions for topics I should cover in the future, there
(46:39):
are a couple of ways to reach out. One is
you can leave me a message on the I Heart
Radio podcast app or really I Heart Radio app. You
just download it for free. Navigate to Text Stuff. There's
a little microphone icon you click on that you can
leave a voicemail message for up to thirty seconds if
you want me to use the message in the context
of an episod, so go ahead and let me know
(47:02):
and I'll be sure to do that. Or you can
reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the
show is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk
to you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
(47:23):
visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And
how the tech are you? You know? I thought today
I would talk about the issue of video game preservation.
(00:25):
I was inspired to do this because of something that
recently happened with Ubisoft, a game company that's well to
put lightly, It's had a pretty darn controversial few years.
But Ubisoft makes lots of different game titles, and one
particularly popular franchise from them is the Assassin's Creed series. Well,
one of the entries in this long running franchise came
(00:48):
out way back in two thousand twelve, and it was
called Assassin's Creed three Liberation, and it's notable for a
few reasons. One was that the player controls the character
named Aveline de grand Pre, who happens to be the
first female assassin in the series that the player could control.
Before that, they were all male protagonists. Later on, would
(01:11):
be Soft released a remastered version of the game titled
Assassin's Creed Liberation h D. Anyway, Steam, which is the
video game store, the digital video game store so it's
an online store. It's run by Valve, which used to
primarily be known as a video game developer now is
mostly known as the company that runs Steam. Anyway, Steam
(01:32):
posted a message on July eleven, two thousand twenty two
that's said, at the request of the publisher, Assassin's Creed
Liberation h D is no longer available for sale on Steam,
which is fair enough. These things happen. Companies will allow
something to technically kind of go out of print, although
in this case that's kind of a misnomer because we're
(01:53):
talking about digital sales. But it would be Soft decided
to stop selling copies of this game now it would
be Soft had also previously announced that it would be
ending multiplayer functionality for several of its games, including Assassin's Creed.
Now that could be disappointing to hardcore fans, but at
the same time, you can kind of understand why it's happening,
(02:16):
because supporting multiplayer means that a company has to run
servers that host those multiplayer sessions, which also means maintaining
those servers and responding if something goes wrong with them.
So for older games, the player base that's still accessing
multiplayer might be so small that it's difficult to justify
(02:37):
the ongoing expense of keeping those servers online, particularly if
it's a game that doesn't have a subscription model to it.
Right Like, if it's a game where multiplayer was part
of the features of the game that you got with
the purchase of the full game, and it's not an
ongoing expense, then the company is footing the bill for
(02:58):
providing that service even after people are no longer really
buying the game. Um, it's a bummer, but you know,
it's kind of understandable from the perspective of the business. However,
these days, a lot of games require at least some
sort of online component, typically as part of digital Rights
Management or DRM, which is terrible, but here's how it goes.
(03:22):
The basic idea is that the game you're running on
your local device, like on your computer or whatever, checks
in with a home base server that belongs to the
company in order to verify that the copy of the
game that you are playing is legitimate. And at that
point the home base server says, yeah, go ahead, let
(03:42):
let them play the game. Or if the game isn't legit,
or if the connection can't be made for some reason,
the server tells your local machine, hey, don't let us
jerk face play that game. They probably stole it. So
for players who just want a single player experience, right like,
it's a game that's just meant to be played on
your computer. There's no online component, there's no multiplayer component.
(04:06):
If those those folks have a poor internet connection or
no connection to the internet, this kind of DRM is
a huge hassle because it means there's no real way
to access the game legitimately. But that's the nature of DRM.
I've done full episodes about this in the past. All right,
let's get back over to Ubisoft. So, in its initial
(04:26):
message that was published on Steam, the implication was that
the Assassin's Creed game wouldn't just be unavailable to purchase
from that point forward, but would in fact be rendered
completely unplayable. That people who had purchased a copy of
this game would be unable to access their game at all,
even if they were just trying to play local single
(04:49):
player mode, nor would they be able to run any
of the downloadable content or DLC that they had purchased
for the game. Steam would issue a follow up s
eatement that said people who own the game already would
still be able to play it, they would even be
able to read download it. So on Steam, you have
a library of games. These games may or may not
(05:12):
actually be downloaded to your computer, but it's a record
of all the games you have purchased throughout your time
using Steam, and if you want, you can read download
a game to install it on a new machine. Let's
say that you're upgrading your computer. You've decided to, you know,
switch to a brand new new computer system that can
(05:32):
run the latest games, but you also have a soft
spot for some older games. Well, you can re download
them to your new machine. So ubisof said players will
still be able to do that. They'll still be able
to access the game that they purchased. However, they will
not be able to access online content or DLC for
that game. That would be unavailable anyway. That whole ness
(05:54):
prompted this episode because with so many games requiring online
services to function, even if the games themselves are otherwise
confined to a local device, what happens when the company
that provides that online service goes out of business, because
that has happened more than once in the video game world,
(06:14):
or what happens if a company like Ubisoft decides to
shift resources away from continuing support of older games that
have smaller player bases, the thing you purchased suddenly becomes inaccessible.
Even if the code is fine, and even if you
have a machine that otherwise could run the game without
a problem, you still can't access the game. That approach
(06:36):
means it becomes difficult to preserve such games, and in
some cases it could even be illegal for you to
try and do it. In other cases, it might not
be illegal, but it might be practically impossible, and so
these games are lost in time like tears in Rain.
Let me know if you've got that reference. Now, some
(06:58):
of y'all might be saying, I didn't even know video
game preservation was a thing, or maybe a few of
you could be saying, why is it important to even
preserve video games in the first place. And it's totally
fair that not everyone is into video games. That's cool, right.
I'm not into every kind of art there is. Doesn't
mean the arts bad. I'm just not into it that
(07:19):
there are a lot of folks who are really into
video games, including those who consider video games to be
a type of art. I happen to be one of
those people. I don't necessarily think video games, at least
not most of them, typically qualify as high art. But
I do think there's a lot of artistic expression that
goes into creating video games. Whether it's from character design
(07:42):
or level design, or even gameplay elements, or the textures
that you use to enhance visuals or the story that
plays out over the course of a game. There are
a lot of avenues for artistic expression. Some of them
you might not classically think of as artistic, like gameplay elements.
You might think, oh, you know, pressing a to jump,
(08:02):
that's nothing. But you look at some of these games
and some of the elegant approaches to gameplay elements in them,
you start to think there is an art to this,
and people who are particularly artistic can create really transformational
experiences through that. So even if you strip all the
art away, right if you if you deny that there's
(08:24):
anything artful about video games, the fact remains that people,
and a lot of people in many of these cases,
I mean some of these games have hundreds of folks
who worked on these Well, those people worked really hard
to make that game happen. They labored over getting the
various components up to snuff, and then they also worked
(08:45):
really hard to make sure all these different components actually
work together so that one thing doesn't break something else.
And let's be fair, video game companies are not always
successful in doing this. There are plenty of examples of
broken games out there. Some of them got less broken
over time thanks to patches and stuff, but we have
seen no shortage of you know, games that just didn't
(09:08):
work properly. But I still feel like the work of
the people who who dedicated their time and their their
skill and their knowledge to creating these games should be
acknowledged and it should be preserved. I think two big
things that prompt people to question the need to preserve
games are that there's still this perception among some people
(09:30):
the video games are meant for kids, like video games
are for babies. They're just silly diversions, and there's really
no reason to put any effort into preserving those things.
There's another perception that undermines the concept of preserving video games,
and that's that they are so tightly connected to commerce.
They are a product, you know, like you would go
(09:53):
out and buy a hammer, but you wouldn't necessarily want
to preserve the hammer for posterity. And you know, not
all games are made specifically to be sold, but the
vast majority of them are, so they aren't really considered
art by some folks. However, I would argue that most
art is actually meant to be sold. It's not just
meant to hang on a wall, and the artist makes
(10:16):
no money from it. I mean, if art was never sold,
artists wouldn't make a living. Um, you know, whether it's
patronage or it's selling it through an exhibition or whatever.
Art and commerce always have a relationship with each other.
Otherwise you'd run out of artists because they all starve
to death. And of course there are countless examples in
(10:39):
say the fashion world, where people spend truckloads of cash
on designer goods and they consider these art. Like the
fashion world, that is art art that has been made
to be worn in some way. But even while people
are spending those truckloads of cash on the latest fashions,
(10:59):
they do so knowing that the stuff they are buying
is going to be out of fashion in six months
to a year, Like the thing that is avant garde
and desired today is going to be almost dismissed in
a year's time, which that is the stuff that wrinkles
(11:20):
my brain. Video games. I get fashion. I mean, you
just have to take one look at me and you
would know he doesn't get fashion. That's fair. And I'm
not saying that fashion is silly or frivolous. I just
don't get it. But let's talk about video game preservation.
So one of the methods I have talked about in
(11:40):
fairly recent episodes of tech stuff is the main platform
and MAME is m a m E and it stands
for multiple Arcade Machine emulator. Name's purpose is to emulate
or you know, simulate if you like, the circuitry and
program ng of various game platforms. Now, the games themselves
(12:04):
come in the form of rams, r o ms or
read only memory. There there are people who have copied
the code off of classic video games to preserve those ROMs.
And originally these ROMs were programmed directly onto microchips. So
if you were to open up a classic arcade game,
you would see a whole bunch of circuit boards with
(12:26):
chips on them, and this is the game, like, the
game is physically coded onto the circuit boards, and those
microchips include the ROMs the read only memory that is
the game itself. So in order to create a copy
of that, you have to strip the code off of
the ROMs, and that's not always easy. In fact, it's
(12:47):
pretty complicated. And then you also have to create software
that imitates the operation of that actual circuit so that
the ROMs will run properly, and that also is a
non trivial thing. So the arcade machines and then later
on cartridge based consoles and also computers would have games
(13:09):
that were programmed in physical circuitry. UH. Cartridges in particular, right, like,
that's there's a circuit board in a cartridge and that's
what the game has programmed on. Then later on you
would have things like images that would be put on
optical discs. We'll get to that too. So the main
platform mimics the circuitry, allowing the copied code from whatever
(13:31):
the original ROM was to play on a computer. UH
doesn't always play perfectly well. Sometimes the emulator is just
an approximation of how the game would work. In other cases,
the approximation is incredibly accurate, to the point where it
feels like you're playing the original arcade machine. It depends
(13:51):
heavily on the level of emulation for that particular game,
as well as the specs on the machine you're running
Maime on the first place. We'll come back and talk
more about Maime and emulation and the reasons why this
is important for preservation after we take this quick break. So,
(14:18):
the original purpose of MAINE was to serve as a
way to preserve games. Now, obviously a lot of people
have used MAIN software to create like a home arcade
machine that's capable of running hundreds or thousands of different games.
Like you can even go online and find companies that
offer these things where they will have a computer, often
(14:41):
powered by a Raspberry Pie, which is a very basic
computer that's running main emulation software and has a like
a smart card just loaded with gigabytes of ROMs on it.
But that was not the original intent of creating main
Like what the idea wasn't hey, let's create a way
(15:01):
for people to get access to these hundreds of arcade
machines in the comfort of their own home. It was
the idea that we need something that can preserve these
games because the hardware that the games are built upon
will degrade over time and eventually the last remaining cabinet
of any given game will stop working, and at that
(15:23):
point the game is lost. So this is a way
of preventing that loss from happening. It just so happens
that It also means that you could create a full
Arcade in one machine by downloading lots of ROMs. However,
you should know downloading ROMs can be illegal. It's technically
(15:47):
copyright violation because you're downloading a copyrighted work without legitimately
purchasing that work. Doesn't mean that doesn't happen everywhere. It does,
but it's still illegal. Now, never mind that in some cases,
at least, there's no way for you to buy a
legal copy of the game, or if the then may
be that the only legal way to buy the game
(16:09):
is to find someone selling it on a market like eBay,
and it might be for an incredibly expensive price that
that might be the only and there's no guarantee that
those will work. By the way, like you might go
out and spend a couple of thousand dollars buying a
Classic Arcade cabinet, find out that you need to do
a lot of maintenance on it in order to make
(16:29):
it work properly. The circuitry if it's treated well will
typically hold up for a very long time, but things
like the actual buttons and controls they wear out. I mean,
that's just wear and tear. So yeah, it could get
to a point where there's just there's very few avenues
for you to make a legitimate purchase of a game. Uh.
(16:51):
The way MAME is supposed to be used is that
someone who has a legal right to a roan, like
they own a game, or maybe they even own the
I P for the game, Well, they can download the
RAM for their own use and they can run the
main software on a computer. They can activate that RAM,
and it's totally legal. So for example, let's say that
(17:13):
you went out and purchased an arcade machine of a
classic game like Elevator Action, which I absolutely and ironically
love and no I cannot justify it, but I love
that game. Well, let's say you bought a cabinet of that.
You went out and you you purchased a copy of it.
(17:33):
You could then legally download a RAM of Elevator Action
and that could serve either as a backup or as
a replacement for the RAM on the arcade machine itself
if it had stopped working. So it's kind of like
making a backup of a recording for your own personal use.
That's acceptable, that's fair use. But if you didn't already
(17:54):
own a copy of Elevator Action, then downloading the ROM
would essentially be piracy. In fact, not essentially it is piracy.
As for Mame itself, Mame is totally legal to download.
Mame doesn't have any games on it natively, It's just
a program that emulates different kinds of hardware. Name is
(18:15):
kind of like a console in a way. It's the
thing that lets you play the games, but it is
not the games themselves. So theoretically you should not be
downloading ROMs for games that you don't already own. However,
a lot of games are otherwise unavailable, like the companies
that made some of those games have long since vanished,
(18:36):
so there's nowhere for you to go to to buy them.
Or sometimes another company has come around and scooped up
the old I P from someone who has gone out
of business. Sometimes that can be hard to track down,
Like you might think, oh, there's this great game I
loved when I was a kid. The company that made
it went out of business. I have no idea who
owns that intellectual property. Because chances are someone bought it
(18:58):
when uh the old but he went out of business.
So there are a lot of cases we're finding a
legitimate way to purchase the game you want just doesn't
appear to exist, and that is frustrating. That being said,
there are some game creators who have granted permission for
folks to download ROMs of their games. So these are
creators who have the right to do that right. They
(19:20):
are the folks who actually own the intellectual property in
the first place, so they have the capacity the authority
to grant permission to people so that they can download
the ROMs. And the main website does link to ROMs
that meet that qualification. However, you're not going to find
any real big names in that list. In fact, you
may not recognize a single title. There are a couple
(19:42):
of dozen titles that fall into this category. I actually
looked them over and I didn't recognize any of them.
None of them were titles that I was familiar with.
So to get the stuff that you you know and love,
you would have to go elsewhere. Now, I mentioned Arcade Machines,
but that is not the only hard where that MAIM emulates.
Since two thousand fifteen, the main platform has integrated a
(20:06):
separate emulator called MESS m E s S, which stands
for Multi Emulator super System. So Main's primary purpose was
to preserve arcade games that otherwise would eventually disappear once
that last working cabinet gave up the ghost. MESS focuses
more on consoles and computer systems, most of which are
(20:27):
well out of production, and MESS supports nearly one thousand
systems in total. Not all of them are fully functional, however,
so while you could count all the ones that are
included in the emulator and you would get up to
more than nine hundred, you'd have to keep in mind
some of those are only partially functional. They are really
(20:47):
big names on that list, by the way, including the
Nintendo Entertainment System or any s. The Super Nintendo Nintendo
sixty four is on their Sega Genesis, also known as
the Mega Drive is there. The Sake of Dreamcast is
on their older consoles are on there too. The AT
twenty hundred and Colico Vision and in Television are all
(21:08):
on there, and obviously lots more game consoles as well
as for computers you name it. I mean there's everything
from Texas instruments to Apple to computer systems, to Commodore computers,
to Amiga and more. Now, these are all devices that
have long since been out of production, which means you're
not gonna be able to buy a new one. You
(21:29):
might be able to find a working used one somewhere,
but chances are emulation is going to be the only
way you will experience a lot of the programming that
was originally made for those devices. Now again, in a
lot of cases, that software is not technically abandoned ware,
meaning you know, abandoned ware is something where there's no
(21:52):
legitimate owner of that i P anymore. It has been abandoned.
It is just existing on its own with no owner
above it. Someone somewhere owns the i P for most
of the software that's out there, So you might think
of it as abandoned ware because nobody has done anything
(22:13):
with it for a very long time, But legally speaking,
it's not because it does still belong to some company
or person out there. Now. It may be that that
entity doesn't care if folks download ROMs or images of
that of that program or game or whatever. Image in
this case means essentially a copy of the code, not
(22:36):
an actual picture of something. But you can't just assume that,
and it's certainly not the case everywhere. I mean, some
companies like Nintendo, for example, are really well known for
being super protective of their work, even if there is
no way to purchase the titles from the company itself anymore.
Me just look at Nintendo, and you look at how
(22:59):
for first part games the price never comes down. Like
you could look at first party games that Nintendo cells
to this day, and the games themselves might be years old,
but the price hasn't budged. That really gives you a
hint at Nintendo's perspective on this kind of thing, which
I'm not saying is a wrong perspective. I'm just saying
(23:20):
it indicates that you're not likely to find Nintendo saying, oh, sure,
go ahead download images of our games. We don't care that.
I can't imagine that ever happening. However, let's put aside
the ownership question for a moment to get back to
the central point of this episode. The main and mess
platforms and others that are like them aim to provide
(23:41):
a way to preserve the games and other programs as well,
but we're focusing mostly on games that had been made
for these old platforms that are no longer in production.
Without the emulators, we would gradually lose access to that work.
We would be fully dependent upon companies re issuing work
which they might not ever do. And computers changed so
(24:04):
quickly that a lot of stuff that was made for
older systems becomes impossible to access otherwise without an emulator.
Right Like, you can get old PC programs and try
to run them on a modern PC, and sometimes it
just becomes inoperable. You can't even use it. I remember
distinctly having a version of the classic Star Wars arcade game,
(24:27):
the wire frame game that you saw in the arcades
way back in the eighties, and I had a PC
version of that game, and I said it aside and
kind of lost track of it. And then we upgraded
computers a couple of times. This is when I was
a kid, and I found the game and I thought, oh,
I want to play this. I haven't played in a
very long time. Loaded it up. Could not play the
(24:48):
game because now it ran so screamingly fast that just
touching the joystick would make it uh jerked to the
left or jerked to the rider up or down or whatever.
And things were moving so quickly on the screen you
couldn't see anything, and you blink once and you would
see game over. So it became impossible to play. I
needed to have an emulator in order to run that
(25:10):
code at the proper speed, and I did it, so
that game just became inaccessible to me. Let me give
you another less frivolous example. So both of my parents
right novels, and when I was a kid, my parents
bought an Apple to E computer. My dad used it
primarily so that he could write books in short stories
(25:31):
using the Apple, although he would also play the occasional
computer game on there too. In fact, I remember him
being particularly fond of the game Wizardry, which was kind
of a a D and D style dungeon crawler computer RPG.
But anyway, Dad used a relatively primitive word processor program
on the Apple to write out his first few books,
(25:52):
and he saved these chapter by chapter onto floppy discs.
It would take more than a dozen floppy disks to
hold a single novels manuscript. In fact, I once accidentally
deleted an entire chapter of his work because he had
left the computer to go do something else and he
had not saved the file for a little bit, and
I thought he had just left the computer on, so
(26:13):
I was thought I was being conscientious and not wanting
to waste electricity, so I turned the computer off. Whoopsie.
So if you ever wondered why the novel Moon Dreams
didn't go the way you thought it was going, that
was probably because of me. Anyway, flash forward, It's been
a couple of decades since we had a working Apple computer.
So assuming the data on those floppy disks is still intact,
(26:36):
which is a very big assumption because magnetic storage is
not permanent. It will degrade over time. But assuming it's
still intact, we would still have to find either a
working Apple to E computer and a copy of that
work processing program in order to access those files, or
we'd have to get an emulator that would run on
a modern computer, plus an external floppy disk drive could
(27:00):
connect to a modern computer, possibly through an interface like
USB or something. Otherwise, that data is just going to
slowly rot on those floppy disks, which honestly is probably
what's gonna happen. Now. The good news is those are
really books all published, right, so you can actually track
down copies of the books, though it could take a
lot of searching. Most of those books have been out
(27:21):
of print for nearly forty years. But as for the
earlier drafts of those books, some of which were had
notable differences from the published version of the book. There's
one children's novel in particular, my dad wrote where I
thought the original draft was in every way superior to
(27:41):
the published version of the book. Those might be lost forever.
So emulators are one method we can use to preserve
games and other types of coded content. And that works
pretty well for local games, as in games that are
meant to run on a local device that may or
may not be connected to the internet. But like I
(28:03):
said earlier, there are a lot of games, an increasing
number of games in fact, that rely in part or
entirely on some sort of online component. And let's tackle
the d r M games. And like I said, I've
talked about DRM a lot in fairly recent episodes, so
we won't go into too much detail here. Now some
(28:24):
games might just need an initial check in, but increasingly
lots of games require a persistent online connection. These games,
and and just to be clear, it's not just games
that do this, lots of different software does this too.
These games have what's called an always on DRM or
persistent online authentication requirements. So if you lose your connection
(28:47):
to the internet, you're likely to get a little pop
up notification within the game explaining that the connection to
the authentication server is down and that this is going
to affect your experience in some way. For example, the
game might no longer count any progress toward achievements because
it can't verify that you're not cheating, or it might
(29:07):
be unable to save your progress in the game as
you play it. Now today, a lot of games will
save progress locally on your computer, and then once you
have re established a connection with the authentication server, it
might give you the option to either revert to the
save that was established by the server the last time
you are connected, or you can choose your local save,
(29:30):
which is probably more recent, and then that will just
overwrite the older one on the server and you can
go from there and there's no other interruption. But if
that server, that authentication server goes offline, either due to
malfunction or the company chooses to no longer support it,
then legitimate owners of this game suffer they're unable to
(29:53):
access all the features of their game, or in some
cases that they are not able to launch the game
at all. Thus, there is a single point of failure
for this game, and it's not even within the player's
control to address it. Their hardware might be working just fine,
but because of this connectivity requirement, they are unable to
(30:13):
play the game that they legally purchased, which doesn't seem fair. Well,
I'm going to talk more about that and how this
ties into the issue with piracy in just a moment
and then get back into video game preservation. But first
let's take another quick break. Okay, So we were talking
(30:40):
about how any sort of issues with connecting to an
authentication server can create an untenable experience for a legitimate
owner of a video game copy. Well, meanwhile, you've got
people who are engaged in piracy, who are illegally downloading games.
They're stealing games, they're cracking those authentication requirements because obviously,
(31:03):
if you're stolen a game and the server detects that
this is not a legitimate copy, you're not going to
have access to those features. So you've got to get
around that, right, So pirates can launch their copy and
play it with no problems, at least for games that
are local. Single player games. It's a little bit different
from multiplayer games because getting around authentication servers for online
(31:25):
play requires a lot more work, but at least for
single player experiences, it's not an issue once the game
has been cracked. Yeah, you might not have access to
things like achievements, but you'll be able to play the game.
So a lot of folks have gone on to say
that always on DRM is just playing bad technology, like
it's it's just doesn't work. It's it's a bad idea
(31:47):
because it does not do what it's supposed to do.
It's supposed to prevent piracy, but people are still pirating games,
and meanwhile it creates a bad experience for legitimate owners.
You know, the people who actually spent money to purcha
just a real copy of the game. They're the ones
who get affected by always on DRM. The pirates have
worked away around it, so it's a double whammy, right.
(32:08):
It doesn't do what it's supposed to do, which is
stop piracy, and instead it impacts the people who are
legally purchasing the games, which you could argue drives more
and more people to piracy. It's kind of a self
defeating tool. Anyway, back to the video game preservation. So
in this case, the Cracked games might be the only
(32:29):
games that can stick around, because if a company were
to go out of business or to shift assets away
from supporting a particular title, like Ubisoft is doing, then
at that particular title might lose some or all of
its functionality. The Cracked games, which have severed this connection
to home base will continue to work, or at least
(32:50):
work as much as they possibly can, since online functionality
will still be affected if the company stops running servers
to support whatever that functionality is. Let's consider the MMO
world for a second. MMO stands for massively multiplayer online,
so it's kind of a general category and there are
(33:12):
a lot of subcategories under it, and MMO pretty much
describes one aspect of what these games are all about. Namely,
these are games that are played online, so an Internet
connection is required, and they support a large number of
simultaneous players, thus the massive multiplayer. A popular subset of
(33:32):
MMO games are m m O rpg s, or MMO
games that are role playing games. A famous one that's
still going on is World of Warcraft. That's kind of
like the flagship example of m m O RPGs. Historically speaking,
but there are other games that came and went and
would have totally disappeared if it weren't for dedicated fans
(33:53):
who would commit their own resources to keeping instances of
the game running by running their own own servers. One
such example is Star Wars Galaxies, which is obviously a
game set in the Star Wars universe. That game originally
launched back in two thousand three, and it received numerous
updates and expansions, but the player base diminished slowly over time.
(34:19):
By two thousand nine, Sony Online Entertainment, which ran the game,
alerted players who had characters on certain servers that those
servers would soon be shut down and the player would
be given the capability to transfer their character to one
of the remaining servers that Sony would continue to operate. However,
(34:40):
in two thousand and eleven, Sony would shut down the
whole shebang. So why did it do that? Well, one
reason was that the Star Wars based m m O
RPG Star Wars the Old Republic was about to launch,
so the company wanted to dedicate its resources to supporting
the new game and also push people to move over
(35:01):
to the new title. Keep in mind these m m
O RPGs. The way they generated revenue is that these
were subscription based services. Right for the most part, you
would subscribe and pay a monthly fee in order to
maintain access to the game. So unlike most video games
where you purchase it once and that's it, this was
(35:24):
a model where you are having a recurring payment to
the company. And this is before we get into stuff
like you know, uh, in game content and micro transactions,
which is the predominant revenue generation model that we see today. Like,
that's how how video game companies are really making revenue
(35:45):
now is that they have ways to continue to sell
you stuff within a game so that you keep on
spending money on a title. Uh and a lot of
those titles end up being free to play, but to
get access to all the cool stuff, you've got to
cough up the big bucks anyway. So and he decides
to shut down Star Wars Galaxies. Now, Star Wars Galaxy
(36:05):
has had a pretty robust set of features, including a
player centric economy in which players could buy and so
goods that other players had crafted or that they had crafted.
They could become bounty hunters or smugglers or you know,
a Jedi or whatever. It was a game that received
pretty positive reviews, and the players who were still with
the game toward the end weren't really ready to say goodbye,
(36:29):
so some of them didn't. There are a couple of
different groups that set out to emulate the server system
that ran Star Wars Galaxies. One such group formed the
s w G EMU project, so it's s w G
e m U, and that actually aimed to create servers
that ran an earlier version of Star Wars Galaxies, one
(36:50):
that it didn't include a change that was made to
the game's combat system a little later on. There's another
group called Project s w G that has set out
to create emulation did versions of the servers running the
later versions of the game, so the one that actually
did incorporate some of those changes to combat, plus other expansions.
So there are fan run servers out there. Some of
(37:13):
them are still under construction, and these are keeping that
game alive and otherwise it would just be gone. That's cool,
but not all companies are keen to allow unofficial servers
to operate. For example, Electronic Arts or E, a company
that was once said on a pole from a consumerist
(37:35):
to be the worst company in America used to rely
on a company called game Spy to manage online multiplayer
functions for some of their titles, titles like Battlefield Heroes
and Battlefield two. But you know, there's always a bigger fish,
and sometimes bigger fish have different ideas of what they
(37:56):
want to support. So what happened with game Spy. I
g N merged with GameSpy in two thousand four, then
Ziff Davis acquired I g N, and then Ziff Davis
decided to shut down a whole bunch of services that
had been run through I g N and GameSpy because
it was, you know, an expense. It was it was
(38:17):
having to maintain and run these things, and Ziff Davis is, like,
why are we paying to do this? Hardly anyone uses it,
shut it down, and that included online multiplayer functions that
games like the Battlefield ones I mentioned we're using. So
a group of fans began to run servers that would
allow players to keep playing the online multiplayer functions of
those games. To get to be able to do that,
(38:39):
they had to get copies of the games that would
be compatible with this approach, and you know, their their
view was that this is the way of preserving a
game they love and preserving a part of the game
that was a big part of the experience. There are
players who bought the battlefield games just for these multiplayer
modes because that's really where the meat of the game was.
(39:01):
Like there there are plenty of examples of games out
there that might have some limited single player content, but
the vast majority of the experience is really aimed at multiplayer.
So why should you just accept that the thing you
bought no longer has all the features that it was
supposed to have available to you? Why should that be allowed?
(39:22):
So the fans ran the servers for a few years,
but in e A sent a legal note to them
and asked them to shut it all down, which they did.
And when you think about you can understand EA is
a big company. It's got deep pockets. You don't really
want to get in an i P dispute with them.
And EA was saying, hey, you know what, you don't
(39:43):
have the authorization to do stuff like distribute content that
has our logo on it and our trademarked content and
intellectual property on it. And the people running the server said,
you know what, You're totally right, we don't have that authority.
It's not our right. We can't present ourselves as representing
(40:04):
a company when we don't have any connection to that company,
so they shut it down. Now, for many fans and preservationists,
this kind of activity has become a huge point of frustration.
If there are no legitimate ways to access or to
preserve a game, then there is a risk that that
game is just going to fade into obscurity forever. All
that work will just be forgotten. The game's industry has
(40:28):
argued that the nature of their work means that an
old title can re emerge on a new platform pretty
much any time, and technically that is true. If a
company deems that there's enough of a market to justify
the effort that would be involved, they can make those
old titles available again, and in some cases it could
(40:50):
be a relatively trivial effort, but in others it could
require the creation of an emulator, or they might have
to port the original game to new platform, and that's
not really the same thing as preserving a game, because
ports of games can really alter fundamental aspects of a title.
But it is hard to argue against that industry perspective
(41:13):
because it is technically possible to bring back these games.
I mean, that's obvious because of the emulator community. They
they're doing it themselves without the authority to do so,
so it is possible. Enthusiasts and historians have already proven
that's possible to bring these games back and to run
them on modern hardware, sometimes with almost perfect replication. So
(41:36):
if enthusiasts and historians can do it, then surely the
companies that own the I P can do it too.
And sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't. They can
choose not to do that. In many cases, they probably
wouldn't choose to do it because the effort to do
it would not end up being paid off. There'd be
too few people to go out and buy the new
(41:57):
version of the game. Uh. Even if you know there
are people who really really love that game, they're not
enough of them to justify the effort of doing this.
So because they have the right to do it, that
means we're kind of stuck, right Like, they can reissue
a game if they want to, but they don't have to.
And because of that, that's why we get into this
(42:20):
situation where preserving games gets to be difficult. Occasionally, groups
like the Electronic Frontier Foundation or e f F will
attempt to argue that the case for preservation should serve
as an exception to copyright and fall under the umbrella
of fair use, so that it should be perfectly legal
to create these emulators and copies of games. But that's
(42:41):
tough battle because the companies that own the i P
tend to be pretty convincing to politicians. Now, you could
get cynical and say that's because these companies spend a
lot of money to lobby politicians and that the politicians
listen to people who give them money, or you could
just say that they can afford to have really influential
all yours. Both arguments hold some validity to them. Now,
(43:03):
the good news is there are a lot of people
working to make sure these games don't just disappear. That
folks in the future will be able to access and
experience these games, at least on some level. The games
will likely not have the same appeal because the graphics
are going to be outdated, the scope of the game
will be much less ambitious, but the ideas and the
(43:25):
presentation could inspire people to create new games that they
otherwise never would have imagined. They could spark something. I mean,
that's part of creativity is building upon things that you
have encountered before. Well you can only do that if
you're able to encounter those things. So that's why preservation
is so important. Plus, do we really want to live
(43:45):
in a world where you can't play Elevator Action if
you want to? Because I don't. So that's kind of
this current situation about video game preservation, how it has
sort of a uncertain ground. And I think for the
large part, like the wrong community, the main community, even
(44:07):
though you've got tons of people who are using mame
quote unquote illegally, in many cases that's overlooked because companies
aren't really doing anything with the i P anyway, Like
they're not actively trying to reissue old arcade machines because
the arcade model no longer really exists, at least not
(44:27):
on a sustainable grand scale. But that's not the case
across the board. You do occasionally get these moves like
um like the fairly recent trend of companies to reissue
small versions of old hardware like the Nintendo Entertainment System,
the Supernintendo, where you get really, what's an emulator in
(44:51):
a box that has you know, a couple of dozen
games on it. You have cases like that, So there
are ways that companies are cashing in and on this
old I P and thus there is a very strong
argument to say, like, we can't allow people to just
download this for free because it is part of our
(45:12):
our assets and we are actually doing stuff with them.
But for every title that is getting kind of a reissue,
there are hundreds that just kind of are gathering dust.
So yeah, it's a complicated situation, and you can definitely
see arguments on both sides that have validity to them. Uh.
I definitely want to see titles preserved, but I would
(45:36):
love to be able to see a an approach where
there's collaboration between the industry and the historians so that
the process can be one that isn't going to encounter opposition, right, Like,
isn't going to be legally challenged and then possibly shut down,
(45:56):
because that would just mean that all that work would
have gone to waste. So that's kind of what I
hope for. I don't anticipate it happening anytime soon, but
I do hope. And for the record, there are some
video game creators out there who definitely feel that way,
who feel like preservation is a legitimate and important thing.
All right, that's it for this episode. I do have
(46:17):
another episode where're gonna I'm gonna be talking about preserving
data and the challenges of preserving data in a way
that is long lasting and accessible. Uh, that's gonna be
It's it's inspired by a listener request actually, so look
forward to that because it does tie into some of
the things we've talked about here today. If you have
suggestions for topics I should cover in the future, there
(46:39):
are a couple of ways to reach out. One is
you can leave me a message on the I Heart
Radio podcast app or really I Heart Radio app. You
just download it for free. Navigate to Text Stuff. There's
a little microphone icon you click on that you can
leave a voicemail message for up to thirty seconds if
you want me to use the message in the context
of an episod, so go ahead and let me know
(47:02):
and I'll be sure to do that. Or you can
reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the
show is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk
to you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
(47:23):
visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
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