For every person out there, there are certain thoughts that keep them awake at night. From the fear of death to paying the mortgage. For yours truly, one of these thoughts is game preservation: the fact that there are some games out there that have become unplayable because the guys responsible for them didn’t care. I’m not talking about old games available for download on Abandonware websites or games in copyright limbo, so the only way to get them is through piracy. I’m talking about games that do not exist anymore; games with destroyed source codes or games with online functionality that could not even be cracked, and after their servers were shut down, they vanished.
Such games do exist: a while back, I was informed of the existence of a MOBA game called Infinite Crisis that featured DC superheroes. I thought to myself: wow, that’s cool. I wish I could try that. But the servers were shut down in 2015, and no trace of the game exists anywhere.
Examples of such games are increasing day by day:
- Darkspore
- Titanfall 1 (almost)
- LawBreakers (last Cliff Bleszinski game)
- Babylon Fall
These are games that have been erased from the annals of history. Not even in the darkest depths of piracy websites one can find any trace of them. Even when some MMORPGs get shut down (like Star Wars Galaxies and The Matrix Online), the fans set up unofficial servers and keep the game going for the small fanbase. But there are so many games that never had the chance to take off, so they never got the same treatment and just coldly got deleted
Of course, for most people, none of this matters. The reason these games cease to exist is either because they are terrible (like Babylon Fall) or they’re multiplayer only games and they never had a player-base (like LawBreakers), so what’s the point of keeping them afloat?
Why Game Preservation Matters
If you think just because something is bad, it doesn’t deserve to be preserved; you are missing the whole point behind game preservation. The reason we preserve things is not that they are meant to be just as entertaining in the future; the reason is that they are a time capsule for a very specific time and place.
There are texts from Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient Greece that are not interesting to read for anyone, and 99.99% of the population are never going to read them, but for that 0.01%, it’s a lifesaver for their research; and the results of their research helps humanity to gain a new understanding about itself. In other words, they have historical value and games are no exception.
Apart from that, for some creative minds, the only true source of inspiration is all the obscure things no one cares about. Think of someone like Quentin Tarantino: he proudly claims that he steals from his favorite movies; it just happens that very few people have watched his favorite movies. I would go as far as to say that most great artists take inspiration from what is unknown and obscure, not the popular stuff; because to do what great works have already done means to be buried under their shadow, and that’s the opposite of what greatness is all about. Who is to say that 20 years from now, Game Artists & Game Designers couldn’t take some neat ideas from Darkspore? For this hypothetical designer, Darkspore could play the same role that an obscure 1960s TV show played for Tarantino in his creative process.
Because of these two reasons, the preservation of every single thing that ever gets published matters, no matter how bad, irrelevant or obscure it is. Because in every thing that is a product of human thought, there are traces of a state of being, a time and a place that can be helpful for future generations to access, even if it’s 1 person. Because that 1 person could be the Tarantino of his generation.
A line of dialogue in the movie The Social Network is relevant here: “The internet’s not written in pencil, it’s written in ink.” There was a time when we all believed that; we thought just because something is posted on the internet, it will exist forever.
But all you have to do to realize this is not true is to go back to a forum discussion from 10 years ago and click on all the links: you are bound to find a LOT of dead links. With the way so many things are getting deleted on the internet – from Youtube accounts to whole websites – it looks like the Internet is written in pencil after all; you have to wait 10 or 20 years for the eraser to take effect. For example, there was a Youtuber by the name of Kassem G who was a big name in the early 2010s and produced a lot of cool edgy videos. A while back, he removed most of his videos from his channel and I couldn’t help but to feel sorry that a small piece of Internet culture was lost forever.
There are already whispers of old accounts on Twitter and Youtube getting deleted. Whether these claims are true or not, it’s not that far-fetched to think that in 10 or 20 years, so many things are going to be deleted, either by the people who made them or the owners of the platforms they were posted on.
The point is that unlike what we think, the Internet and the Online world is very fickle. Most games published on a physical device (Floppy, Cartridge, Disc) and were playable offline still exist, even if the publisher stopped supporting them. But “Online-only” games from last year have already ceased to exist.
The Online nature of games these days is a huge existential threat regarding their preservation for the future. The fact that it was recently announced Alan Wake 2 won’t be released on disk is something that should concern us.
In order to prevent a crisis of game preservation in the future, there is something we need to accept: game publishers are not doing a great job respecting what they put out there. The fact that pirates do a better job preserving some games than game publishers speaks volumes of how bad the situation is. We need a change of attitude in this field because every game is the product of the passion, creativity, and endeavor of human beings and as a community, it’s in our interest to respect that. Here are some suggestions on how to do this:
How to Make Game Preservation Easier
Stop Making Games Online-Only
In their crusade against piracy, some game publishers have made their games online only, even though that is completely unnecessary. Some publishers think they’re invincible, and they’re always out there, supporting their games. But this industry is the graveyard of giants. Some companies went down that people thought were untouchable. There is no guarantee that companies like EA and Blizzard will still exist in 20 years, so if they go down, all of their online-only games will go down too.
Allow Players to Play with Bots
The main reason Titanfall 1 is a dead game right now is because EA had this genius idea to not only make the game multiplayer only, but also made it impossible to play with bots. Since the game has a story mode, people could have still played it with bots and finished the story, but just because such a simple feature is absent, the game has died, because it’s almost impossible to find enough players to run a mission nowadays.
Always Have the Older Games Available on as Many Platforms as Possible
This includes making consoles backward compatible and releasing older games on Steam and GOG with a low price and even for free. Recently, Bethesda published both The Elder Scrolls 1: Arena and The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall on steam for free, which is much appreciated. On the other hand, Rockstar had made GTA 1 and GTA 2 freely available on their website a few years ago, but then took them down and never made them available anywhere else again. That’s awful on their part.
Make the Source Code Available to the Public at Some Point
The source code of video games is very important. It’s what allows these games to be modified in the future. The source code of some games before the video game crash 1983 was lost, so there’s no proof of their existence apart from the physical copies sold to customers. Unfortunately, copyright is an issue here, but game preservation is so important that some programmers have made the source code of the games they have worked on available despite the possible copyright issues they might raise.
Keep the Old Games Alive by Re-Releasing and Remastering them
This idea is going around in publishers’ minds that a game remake can replace the original. Because of this line of thinking, Rockstar removed the original GTA games to sell the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. This is a very harmful notion (and we’ll get to that). Still, the perfect antidote to that line of thinking is to re-release and remaster old games without changing them, apart from increasing the resolution and modernizing the controls. This provides an excuse to sell old games with increased prices (which is what publishers are looking for) and helps keep them alive for modern audiences. Because usually, people’s problems with older games are the low resolution and the clunky controls. People interested in experiencing older games probably like them the way they were.
Take it Easy with the DRM
Now this is a complicated and controversial topic, but the thing is, apart from Live service and MMO games (or games like Diablo III, which are crypto-MMOs), all games are bound to get cracked, some of them on release day. No matter how strong the DRM measures get, they will break someday. The thing is, piracy is not as big of a deal as publishers think it is. Because the line between pirates and buyers is very clear, most pirates are either people who live in countries outside of the Western bloc’s sphere of influence (like Russians) or people who live in terrible economies and can’t afford games at full price anyway. So the number of people who decide to buy a game just because it hasn’t been pirated on the release day is very low. Some people don’t realize this, but strict DRM can damage its accessibility in the future because the online functionality that the DRM was based on might not work anymore. This is what happened to Fallout 3 and its DLCs. Many people have trouble running the game now because it uses the “Games for Windows Live” DRM, which no longer exists. It’s no wonder some games that are being legally sold on GOG.com right now – an anti-DRM platform – are the cracked versions of the game.
Release your Games on PC
There was a time when people thought PC gaming was dead. Fortunately, that didn’t happen because the PC is the best platform when it comes to preserving games. Many publishers are realizing this, because, year by year, the number of old console games getting released on PC increases. From Capcom’s “Mega Man Legacy Collection” to Konami’s Anniversary Editions of its older franchises (like Castlevania and Contra) to Sega publishing their Sega Genesis library on Steam, these efforts show that PC is the safest platform for a game to continue to exist for a very long time. All companies are realizing this now, apart from Nintendo, which is extremely protective of its IPs. Although it’s working out for them so far, hopefully, one day, we will see Nintendo’s library of games on PC too.
Where Should We Draw the Line for Game Remakes?
Game remakes deserve to be analyzed separately because they are interesting cases. They challenge our thinking about what it means to play a game.
If someone has played Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space remake, can they say they have experienced the original? Obviously not. Because these games have changed things too much, and everybody recognizes that. For this reason, the original Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 are also available.
But the line becomes a bit blurry for some other titles. One of them is Resident Evil 1. Resident Evil 1 Remake is very similar to the original for all intents and purposes. The story and the levels are the same; only the graphic has changed. There are some small changes to the content (like the addition of Crimson Heads), but the changes are not as fundamental as the Resident Evil 2 & 3 remake.
So can one play Resident Evil 1 Remake and assume they have experienced Resident Evil 1? The answer is: if we consider everything said above, no. Understandably, some people would not want to return to the original because it shows its age. And one should thank Capcom for making this remake, but still, there is value to experiencing Resident Evil 1 exactly how it was on PlayStation 1. Who is to say that PS1 graphics are not part of the experience?
So in that sense, the fact that the original Resident Evil 1 is unavailable on Steam is a shortcoming on Capcom’s part. I’m sure if they put it there, people would be interested in experiencing it. People wouldn’t say, “Resident Evil Remake is already available. What’s the point of this here?”
The Brilliance of The System Shock Remake
Some companies have realized the importance of having the original available, and they deserve to be applauded for this. The perfect example of how to do remakes is Nightdive Studios, the studio that bought the copyright for System Shock and then went on to do something with it that I think should be replicated by every other company: not only they remastered the original game (with better resolution and achievement support), but they also included the original game – exactly as it was in 1994 – in the Enhanced Edition. If you buy the game from Steam, two games will be added to your library: System Shock: Enhanced Edition and System Shock: Classic, and you can play whichever version you, please. Recently, their remake of the game has been published (titled System Shock), a complete remake/reboot in the style of Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space remakes, but still, it remains very faithful to the original structure.
This is pretty much the best approach studios can take for preserving games:
- Make the original compatible with modern systems and release it exactly as it was for game historians
- Release an enhanced version of the original with better resolution and some minor tweaks to make it more playable, but do not change a thing about its content
- Do a complete remake that basically follows this approach: “What would Game X look like if it was published now, instead of 30 years ago, considering all the Game Development Stages in game design and graphics?”
Another alternative approach to this is to include the original game inside the remake itself. For example, The Monkey Island 1 & 2 remakes and Command & Conquer Remastered allow you to switch to the original graphics anytime you like inside the game itself. This method works best for games that only need a graphic overhaul.
It’s obvious that game preservation and game remakes are a huge deal nowadays. We have a wealth of great games from the past and everyone would like to preserve them for future generations. But the only right way to do this is always to honor the original in the process and not assume that remasters and remakes can replace them.
In other words, be like Nightdive Studios, not Blizzard and Rockstar. That’s all.
