posted September 12, 2013 11:34 AM              

quote:

---

Originally posted by Brent Todd, Computer Games Magazine Issue# 173

Losing It

If we don’t act now, will DOOM be lost to future generations?

The original version of Cleopatra starring silent-film vamp Theda Bara. Almost all of John Ford’s early westerns, along with a great deal of Charlie Chaplin’s early comedies. Alfred Hitchcock’s Number 13 and The Mountain Eagle. Hundreds of hours of Johnny Carson’s classic Tonight Show episodes from the 1960s.

All of these relics have one thing in common: they are now considered “lost.” Something like 80% of the entire silent-film era is gone for good, along with loads of early talkies and huge swaths of the early days of television broadcasting from the 1950s and 1960s. Film canisters were thrown away to clear space in storerooms, old tapes copied over. As astonishing as it is to us today, even 40 and 50 years ago, few believed that trifles of entertainment would ever have any historical value.

I’d like to think that we’ve learned something from the above. But judging by the way that games are being neglected by the powers-that-be, it seems like we’re repeating costly mistakes. Game publishers are all but completely ignoring the history of their industry, abandoning games almost as soon as they fall off the sales charts. In a hundred years, computer and video game historians will be crying over the loss of DOOM in the same way that film buffs today are bemoaning the loss of Laurel and Hardy shorts.

Unless things change. Conscious effort has to be made to both acknowledge that games will assume greater historical and cultural relevance as the years go by, and to ensure that game code will be properly preserved in official databases maintained or financially supported by game companies.

Right now, relatively little has been lost. Ad-hoc efforts from the people responsible for Home of the Underdogs have established an archive for aging computer games. And thanks to Nicola Salmoria’s MAME and other popular emulators, vast libraries of ROMs have been collected covering the entire history of arcade and console games.

But if more official measures aren’t adopted soon, we risk losing much of what we’ve been playing over the past 30-some years. Home of the Underdogs and hacker-scavenged ROMs may be great resources, but we need official rights-holders to get involved in archiving past classics. Right now, there is no system for making sure that everything gets locked away, no Dewey Decimal System counterpart to handle the cataloguing of Archon and Leisure Suit Larry.

Also, every ad hoc game collection out there either falls into some copyright Twilight Zone or is blatantly illegal under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Of course, what doesn’t violate the DMCA? I think you can be hanged for downloading a Donkey Kong ROM. Still, this sounds fine to me. Okay, I’m not cool with the draconian measures of the DMCA, but a lot of good people have worked awfully long hours (just ask around at EA) to create the games that we love, and they should be well compensated for their efforts. Copyright law has a place in the 21st century.

I am, however, getting worried that this legislation is going to “protect” these games right out of existence. It’s one thing for a company to fight against being ripped off. It’s another to enforce ownership rights and then neglect the product until it vanishes like the Wooly Mammoth.

Look at what’s happened with MAME. During the MAME craze of 1999, classic arcade ROMs were almost as prevalent on the web as sex blogs. Over the past couple of years, a legal crackdown has so thoroughly scoured them out of existence that they are no longer available to the casual gamer. Want to relive the day in 1982 when you topped 100,000 in Moon Cresta? Tough luck.
Some undoubtedly see this as a victory for game creators. And it is, if you’re in favor of GBA compilation carts and companies such as Jakks TV wringing every last dime out of Frogger and Dig-Dug by cramming them into those joystick thingies that plug directly into TVs. But this is a loss for games and those who appreciate them. The arcade archaeologists who spent their spare time ripping circuit boards out of cocktail-table editions of Pooyan collected authentic code representing every game that gobbled up quarters in the 1970s and ‘80s. They didn’t alter the games so they could be ported to new formats, nor did they discriminate between blockbusters that might still make someone a buck today, and weird, wonderful titles like Jack the Giant Killer and Space Panic.

As a result, after a brief moment in the MAME sun, most of these games have gone back to obscurity. Which is exactly how things get lost. Each of the movies and TV shows that I listed off the top vanished because of this sort of official neglect. Now that free distribution of code has been cut off, it’s easy to imagine some games going the way of the dodo just like those extinct episodes of the late, great Johnny Carson.

It seems like only a matter of time before somebody, all hepped up on the DMCA, fires a similar legal salvo at the Home of the Underdogs. I don’t know about you, but this really saddens me. I’m already unprepared to contemplate the existence of a world without Mr. Do!, let alone a planet where I can’t log onto the net at any time of the night or day and download X-COM. Or, worse yet, a future where a game like X-COM only exists as a memory.

---

If that future is going to be stopped, efforts need to be made soon.

The article lists example of old movies and states that roughly 80% of the old relics of Cinema history as well as TV History is now lost.

As you can see from the article, the author is very concerned about various games from older eras being lost forever and at the possibilities of newer generation never having the opportunity of playing old classics like Doom and Warcraft 2.

I know gaming is relatively new compared to cinema and literature so we won't suffer the loss as profound as say many Victorian era literature or many Silent film era works. I know this article is nearly 10 years old and indeed its been nearly that amount of time since I last read it. I don't think I ever had a issue of Computer Games World outside of the issue containing this article.

But I feel the problem is as relevant today as it was in the past. Even with attempts to resell old games in modern OS such as GoG and Steam.