For this week's edition of "Game On," the Fly spoke exclusively with Jason Scott, software curator and free range archivist at the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit digital library. The Archive contains a large collection of older video games that can be played via a built-in browser emulator, and just recently added 2,500 MS-DOS games to its software library.
GAME PRESERVATION: Preservation of older games has been a topic of focus in the industry in recent years, as decades-old hardware begins to decay over time, making certain games at risk of being lost forever. In an interview with The Fly, Jason Scott stressed the importance of preserving old games and making them accessible for public consumption when possible. “Unquestionably, to me, video games have been a critical part of the culture now for decades," he said. "They have become one of the dominant media of both expression, in some cases politics, in some cases teaching, education. Being able to produce these touchstones that people understand… there’s novels that many people share, but there’s also video game characters and locations that people care and share about, which these games represent. But unlike these other media, they are fantastically fragile and short-lived and commercial products for whom once support withdraws, they often disappear. So, they have this element of fragility that can’t be depended on. You can have a pile of books, and nobody cares about it, and then in 50 years we pick up the pile of books and we all take amusement at how things are written or photographed. But for video games, you just don’t have that ability. They’re on magnetic or optical media that is proven to rot within a decade or two, definitively within three decades. And if actions aren’t taken to convert them and maintain them, they just disappear utterly in a way where you can’t even find evidence of the original files. And we have many cases of what we think are completely lost programs that are advertised, that are mentioned, that have articles written about them and there’s no evidence of them and we can’t find any record. So fundamentally, that is a given.”
The curator added that, as part of his work at the Internet Archive, he wants to find old CDs or floppy disks containing games from decades ago and make them available in the same way older music and literature are available. “I wanted that for video games, for computer experiences, for console systems," Scott said. "The ability to say, ‘Can you believe Pillsbury made an educational game, here it is!’ And you’re playing it instantly. So towards that approach, we created this system for taking a number of really well-regarded emulators and making them run in browsers without requiring you to install them on your local system. You can go to a cafe or a library or your own system, go to a webpage, and you’re immediately playing this stuff.”
DEMAND: When asked whether he believes there is particular demand for the MS-DOS games he added to the Internet Archive, Scott said that the games fundamentally have "a lot to offer to people," noting that some of the DOS games were simply lost to history. "There are games that have all the skills and qualities and are really well made, and there was no way to see them," he said. "Especially if they were foreign games, and you’re in a different country, or they’re games that only had limited distribution, or came as a wrap-in. And so those games gain interest and people link to them and more people play them and talk about them.” Scott also noted that the ease of accessibility through the Internet Archive makes playing these games much simpler. “I love sharing [a game] with people, and the fact is that all I have to do is Tweet a direct link to it, and I know that however many people look at it are probably going to be able to instantly play it and make a judgement call within 30 seconds," he added. "And that’s the magic of it, for me.”
STOREFRONTS: New video game storefronts and services are emerging constantly, including the Epic Games store, Apple Arcade (AAPL), Google Stadia (GOOG), and the Rockstar launcher (TTWO). When asked whether increased free availability of older games could disrupt a portion of the video game store economy, Scott rejected the notion, saying he doesn't see "any situation where a person is going to use those services and then find out we have [these games] and not use those services." The software curator noted that the Internet Archive is not "chasing down" platform exclusives and that browser emulator his organization offers is meant mostly for previews or reference materials. Scott also noted that the Internet Archive won't include a game on their emulator if a rights holder does not want it there.
"But then you also get into the question of what part do libraries play? Is a library killing bookstores? Is a library murdering a music store? It’s a community collection allowing you access to materials that by its very nature tends not to compete on a pure level with something like Stadia, which is essentially interactive cable television," Scott added. "The infrastructure that provides that isn’t something that we would do. I don’t see them as competitors, I don’t see them as even the same family of stuff in our particular case. We’re not really going to expand into a subscription service that’s going to provide ads. There’s never going to be a platform exclusive on the Internet Archive! I don’t see that happening in our existence. And we’re certainly not going to get the newest epic megagames, multiplayer game playing at the Internet Archive."
NINTENDO: Japanese gaming giant Nintendo (NTDOY) has been subject to headlines in recent years for suing to take down ROM or emulator sites that offer its games illegally. While Nintendo holds the rights to such games, critics of the company claim that such ROM sites do a good job of preserving older games and people might be less inclined to download games from those sites if Nintendo were more proactive in making their older content available. On this subject, Scott said that while he "can't fully speak" to the legal side of the matter, he recognizes that "there are sites for whom they use content as a way to drive traffic for the purpose of revenue generation. Whatever they can do to attract the most attention, because when you get there adware and ads play, and they make money. And they will claim it’s to support infrastructure, but they’re there to primarily make money."
“What ends up happening is that companies like Nintendo shut them down because they’re one of the baits in the trap," he continued. "That’s what’s going on, and I think that’s important to understand. That’s a very big difference from a library making things available for people to see. But Nintendo specifically is very different from almost any other video game company because they have been on a 20-year mission to 100% control the narrative of mentions of Nintendo online. So they’re on a very specific path that I think no other video game company at all is doing. And unfortunately, people let Nintendo kind of inform the conversation as if it’s a binary argument.”
BETTER EFFORTS: When asked what more gaming giants could do to preserve their products, Scott noted that, for example, modern Hollywood films often generate "one hundred or a couple hundred" terabytes of data related to the production of the movie, and that while must of that data will likely disappear, the movie will probably exist "for longer than that." "In the case of video games, not only are we always at risk for getting none of that work product--the source code, the original assets, the correspondence that generated it--we are at risk of not having the final product anymore at all," the software curator said. "And the problem is that video game companies have very, very little incentive to store it."
"And we’re still seeing the companies don’t even take the beginnings of those steps," Scott continued. "And so, that’s where you start getting weird things like Nintendo making an old game again, and people have figured out they’ve used a ROM taken from the internet to make that game run again, because they don’t even have it. And you can see Sony (SNE) licensing a relatively well-known PlayStation emulator that ran inside their PlayStation Classic product they put out recently. You can see that there’s a dearth even from the largest companies, which means the smaller companies that are living hand to mouth year after year that are 15-20 people and a bunch of contractors...they don’t have a hope of having a historical archive. And you try to communicate with them to say, ‘Look, we’ll take your product. We’ll take your old hard drives. We’ll store them, just to ensure that this stuff persists.’ And it’s not a conversation that goes very far with many of them because they turn out to be really day-to-day, pick up the stakes, move on to the next town, get started again."
Jason Scott also said that while game makers aren't "culturally structured" to maintain their products and production data, filmed video game footage from a place like YouTube could be the "primary evidence that the game existed." "That will be, in the contemporary world, how the vast majority of understanding of a game will come from," he said. "It’ll just be movies of the games because everything else seems too difficult for the medium. It’s not a great situation, but we can always hope occasionally somebody will zip up all of their assets and upload them to a place like the Archive. Occasionally, a place will drop everything on GitHub and we’ll get a copy of it. That’s happened a few times."
“I don’t think it’s a do or die for the culture, or the world, if we don’t know everything about how a video game was made," Scott added. "But it’s a needless waste, considering there is such an influence video games have on our culture, and their digital nature lends them to pretty easy transfer and pretty easy storage. So I wish that we took it more seriously, and maybe over time we will.”
"Game On" is The Fly's weekly recap of the stories powering up or beating down video game stocks.
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