
Where Games Go to Sleep: The Game Preservation Crisis (2011) - korethr
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134641/where_games_go_to_sleep_the_game_.php
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moonshinefe
A lot of it is due to companies centralizing games and putting up huge
barriers to even make games functional without their black box servers. After
many of these games die off population wise, the companies just drop them
instead of giving back to the community to preserve it.

Look at TF2--it could foreseeably be modified and anyone can run a server for
it. It may be possible to preserve it. Blizzard's Overwatch on the other hand,
which is somewhat of a successor to it, they won't let the game to work at all
without their servers since it's a gigantic, centralized black box. Those
servers might go away.

The only reason WoW is preserved for the future at all with third party
vanilla servers is because during the beta they made a mistake and leaked a
ton of debugging info and world data early on. Ideally (from the company's
perspective), we wouldn't even had that and one of the biggest blockbuster
MMOs in history would simply be lost.

Not picking on Blizzard in particular, but they've gone from a decentralized
model in the Diablo 1, War 2 BNE, and Starcraft 1 days to massively
centralized. If there isn't a profit to be had, I think they'll be very happy
to let the history die there, which is very unfortunate and seems to be a
model many AAA game companies are taking at this point, not just Blizz.

~~~
xg15
The irony is that a lot of games before the era of centralisation have active
preservation communities and will probably live on - but a lot of newer games
likely won't, for the reasons you described.

I think it's very likely people will still play Tetris, Final Fantasy IV and
Star Craft in 50 years. Star Craft II and Final Fantasy XV? Not so much.

~~~
degenerate
Life, uh, finds a way. As long as you have talented people that love a game,
they will find some way to preserve it. Even though Blizzard is still running
Battle.net to this day (bless them for that) -- people have created spin-off
servers for Starcraft by analyzing the netcode and mimicking the servers:

[https://freeablo.org/](https://freeablo.org/) (diablo)

[https://shieldbattery.net/splash](https://shieldbattery.net/splash)
(starcraft broodwar)

[http://www.openwow.com/](http://www.openwow.com/) (world of warcraft)

If Blizzard ever shut down battle.net 2.0 there will be a group of people
putting their heads together to mimic the server. Or, if needed, recreate the
entire game engine from decompiled code or scratch. Look at OpenRA and OpenBW
for these examples:

[http://www.openra.net/about/](http://www.openra.net/about/)

[http://www.openbw.com/](http://www.openbw.com/)

And if that's not good enough, game preservation might become a new industry
just like art preservation. We already have GoG releasing classic titles by
working with publishers and digital rights holders to re-release classic
games; this model can be extended to those "black box" games where the server
code is saved in a repository for years but never released until someone like
GoG comes along and revives the game the legal way:

[https://www.gog.com/](https://www.gog.com/)

So, if a game is loved by enough people it will live on.

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pjc50
To expand on a comment downthread: preservation is piracy and piracy is
preservation. Unfortunately this is unpopular with games publishers.

Traditional archive preservation relies on preserving the media. But for many
games now there is no media, or it's optical disks which aren't going to last.
In order to preserve it it has to be copied. The publishers have no interest
in this and the rights may become mired in uncertainty when the publisher goes
bankrupt.

Conversely, many things we only have copies of because copies were made
illegally. Not just games but TV programmes as well (the notorious early Dr
Who episodes for example).

And if we look at some of the other "big content" industries, they find it
might not be in their interest to allow their old content to compete with
current content for attention. Disney don't make all their films available on
the market at the same time ("disney vault") for this reason.

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krzrak
I am often thinking this: we put lots of effort into preserving pieces of art,
architecture, writing, etc. from the past (which is, of course, good and
desired).

On the other hand we often don't treat modern creations as an equally valuable
artifacts (so called modern "art" or "performance", etc. is a subject for
another rant on real value of art;). People put tremendous effort into
creating video games, movies, etc. which are of great artistic value, but we
let them slip into oblivion.

So, it's great to see that something is starting to happen in this subject.

~~~
ido
Haven't read the article yet, but from skimming it it doesn't seem to mention
The Internet Archive's work in preserving classic arcade, computer and console
games (not sure if it was already underway in 2011):

[https://archive.org/details/software](https://archive.org/details/software)

It is quite extensive and growing all the time.

~~~
msl09
Well, the internet archive stores the games, not the source or the development
material. Maybe they could start doing so, but I guess it would cost them a
lot to find storage space for that.

~~~
badpenny
I've been trying to collect as much video game source code as I can at
[https://github.com/videogamepreservation/](https://github.com/videogamepreservation/).

~~~
hd4
Please add Allegiance (open source space sim by Microsoft). Also Mechcommander
2.

~~~
badpenny
They're pretty big repos (461MB and 785MB compressed) but I'll try to get them
uploaded ASAP.

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ideonexus
There's a parallel with the early film industry. In the early 1900s, when a
film had completed its run at the theaters, no effort was made to preserve it.
The amazing science fiction classic "Metropolis" was a famous example. We
still don't quite have a complete copy of this groundbreaking visionary film,
and until recent years (when missing scenes were discovered) DVD releases of
the film had placeholders describing the action that was missing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film)

It sounds like we are doing a better job preserving our early video game
history than we did preserving our early film history.

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cableshaft
I've got some things from old jobs in the game industry, which at least for
now I'm sitting on because I don't want to get in trouble for releasing it and
want more time to pass before doing so (I've already waited almost a decade).

But I care very much about game preservation and would like to see the
information get out there in some form someday.

None of the games I worked on were high profile, but I do have some
interesting documentation on them.

I also started keeping a personal design diary as of last November that keeps
my thoughts and ideas on my game designs and how they change over time that I
might one day release to the public (or a descendant might).

I also used to make and release Flash games and I'm investigating ways to keep
those available once the web moves on 100% from Flash. I've got some
documentation from the design of those that could be interesting as well.

I need to find the time to sit down and compile all this, though, in addition
to working on new things.

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drops
This thing launched just this week:
[http://gamehistory.org](http://gamehistory.org)

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match
Many of these companies are having to choose control and the ability to
continue to make profit from their intellectual property vs they're games
effectively being free in a historical archive.

Wonder if any of them would be willing to partner with a company or non-profit
(such as the IA) if they offered to archive the code and artifacts for safe
keeping but not automatically release it unless legally allowed to do so. Some
things would probably stay under wraps for a long time, but at least it
wouldn't be lost that way.

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prophesi
I used to play Maplestory back in the day. When I came back, I was upset to
find that it had undergone a huge patch that changed most of what I enjoyed
about it. Luckily, there are a handful of private servers that still run
legacy versions of the game. My favorite pastime would have been lost forever
if a few clever people didn't update their game.

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josephtobin
He/she probably can't. The concept is not new. Here's a flash version of the
same game [http://bagario.net](http://bagario.net) . it is a few years old.

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cooper12
Part Two:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134653/where_games_go_...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134653/where_games_go_to_sleep_the_game_.php)

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programmernews3
I thought this was going to be about leaving older consoles, like the SNES, on
overnight when you couldnt save

