An Alarming 87 Percent Of Retro Games Are Being Lost To Time

[OhioYJ]

Summary

As we all know, license agreements come to an end, servers get shut down, and companies move to new hardware. A study was recently released showing how many games are no longer available. (With no legal way to archive / back these up. *see quote #2) 

 

Quotes

Quote

the study claims that just 13 percent of game history is archived in libraries right now.

 

Quote

laws around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) largely prevent folks from making and distributing copies of any DRM-protected digital work. While the U.S. Copyright Office has issued exemptions to those rules so that libraries and researchers can archive digital material, video games are explicitly left out, which makes it nigh impossible for anyone to effectively study game history.

 

Quote

When the eShop shut down the availability of the Game Boy library, [the number of available Game Boy games] went from something like 11 percent to 4.5 percent,” Lewin said. “The company wiped out half of the availability of the library of Game Boy games just by shutting down the Nintendo eShop.

 

 

My thoughts

I think as Frank Cifaldi said , and pointed out "Porting, by its nature, will always be a derivative work.... A ported game is not the original game it is a remake. While remakes can be great complementary pieces to the original work that original work should also be available." I get to many people they are "just video games", however they are just like art, or a literary work, and should be preserved as well.

 

Sources

https://zenodo.org/record/7996492 (Actual Study)

https://kotaku.com/classic-games-history-foundation-preservation-yakuza-1850623857

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/87-of-classic-video-games-are-critically-endangered-its-claimed/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyhsZE6QIJ4 (The Completionist - Companies Don't Want You Playing Classic Games)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZE27yEFXCs (Yong Yea - The Games Industry Is Failing To Preserve Classic Games)

 

 

[tikker]

That is sad to hear. So this is about what is available through official means right? I am curious about what the percentage is when illegitimate copies are taken into account. I understand they can't endorse or encourage piracy, but it would be an interesting comparison.

[OhioYJ]

20 minutes ago, tikker said:

So this is about what is available through official means right?

Correct. You can get a ton of stuff though "questionable" means. However even then that wouldn't account for everything. There is likely still stuff that would be lost that was only available in the online stores. Look at all the stuff that people thought was garbage in the e-shops over the years, was that archived anywhere?

[Doobeedoo]

I wonder if all of them were packed how much storage would that be.

[starsmine]

 

1 hour ago, OhioYJ said:

I think as Frank Cifaldi said , and pointed out "Porting, by its nature, will always be a derivative work.... A ported game is not the original game it is a remake. While remakes can be great complementary pieces to the original work that original work should also be available." I get to many people they are "just video games", however they are just like art, or a literary work, and should be preserved as well.

I can agree with the sentiment, but im not sure I agree with what is said here.

I would not call a copy of a movie on Blu-ray, DVD, VHS, Laserdisc, and film, 5 different movies. I would call it ports of the same movie
Remasters and remakes are different to an extent sure, but not ports.

The Majority of movies and TV shows are also out of print. And there is no storefront that has a bunch of them New Old stock.

That all said, its still not difficult to get those old movies running or legally rented from a video store or library so long as its not lost media. There is no company actively getting in the way of preserving those films and TV shows so long as they are not illegally distributed. There are often enough reprints that outside of some unusual cases prices are not unobtanium. 

The whole turning used games into assets instead of just collectibles that happened over the pandemic broke the used market as well. 

Digital distribution has decimated the commercial availability of games in a way that has yet to effect movies or books, in ways that just dont make sense, You have a working emulator, why not sell all the products you have a license for? I know the Disney vault thing back when physical media was a thing to keep the value of movies high, BUT because it was physical, the second-hand market sustained preservation between the vault openings. 

[Sauron]

yeah, turns out allowing companies to own ideas for over 100 years was a stupid move.

 

this happened to movies and it was inevitably going to happen to videogames as well. there's also the fact that some games might technically be available but not truly playable because they're multiplayer games and their servers have shut down or the vast majority of players have left for some other reason.

[OhioYJ]

17 minutes ago, starsmine said:

I can agree with the sentiment, but im not sure I agree with what is said here.

I would not call a copy of a movie on Blu-ray, DVD, VHS, Laserdisc, and film, 5 different movies. I would call it ports of the same movie Remasters and remakes are different to an extent sure, but not ports.

Linking to the specific speech that quote was taken from. (At the time of the quote, as the speech / video is an hour long)

 

That however is a different type of media. I don't necessarily think transferring a video to a different type of format is changing "much" Although, some might argue you do lose things or the way it was intended to be "viewed." 

 

Porting however is a different animal, are bugs being fixed / introduced? We all know games where "bugs" became part of the game. Some ports need to remove or incorporate different mechanics to compensate for lack of hardware or to be played without say a console. Things will be changed, making it a different game.

 

Returning back to film and TV though, often things going back and forth to different formats, things are lost. I'll reference Cinemassacre's Top 10 Reasons Blu-ray Sucks - Cinemassacre (2:33 Seconds), where Jame's Rolfe mentions DVD's having Extras, then Blu-Rays being absent of these.

 

My biggest complaint of films / TV, is can we keep things in the aspect ratio they were intended. I don't care so much about the format.

[RejZoR]

Services like GOG keep them alive. And many "Abandonware" sites that are considered as piracy by most, but are really keeping the gaming history alive.

[OhioYJ]

10 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Services like GOG keep them alive. And many "Abandonware" sites that are considered as piracy by most, but are really keeping the gaming history alive.

Just a small percentage though. GOG and such help with PC games however not so much with consoles. 

 

I'm not so sure there much debate about the "Abondonware" sites. Those game rights are owned by someone. I'll use an "old" game I play that pops up on them. Hugo's House of Horrors. Not actually Abondonware, still sold by the developer from his own website. Infact you can by the trilogy. I did actually. This could be an outlier, but an example.   

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'm against emulators, or Abondonware sites, etc.  This stuff is needed, especially with the way things are currently. I just wish companies would realize if "legal" options exsisted (that were reasonable) it likely would be another source of income. I'd be curious to know how much money David Gray makes from the Hugo series from people like me. While probably not a huge amount, I'm sure its not nothing either. 

[Delicieuxz]

Related:

 

Saving video gaming’s source code treasures before it’s too late

 

"Over 90 percent of pre-2000 gaming source code may already be gone."

[Kisai]

On 7/16/2023 at 5:41 AM, OhioYJ said:

Summary

As we all know, license agreements come to an end, servers get shut down, and companies move to new hardware. A study was recently released showing how many games are no longer available. (With no legal way to archive / back these up. *see quote #2) 

 

 

 

A lot of the stuff being lost however is shovelware tier. It doesn't mean it deserves to be lost though.

 

I can list a pile of stuff that I have that either:

a) does not work under any condition

b) only works on the original hardware

c) only works in an emulation environment that uses the original hardware firmware

 

For A, there's a bunch of licensed movie-tie-in stuff. Flash stuff. Silverlight stuff. early HTML/VRML pre-canvas javascript stuff. This stuff can not run in any working state today unless you have the original hardware and have never updated the OS or web browser. DOS software from like Capstone and Activision, has never been re-released, and never will be re-released.

 

For B. There are DOS-era games, Everything made for the Apple II, C64, Amiga and Pre-PPC Mac's. These are games that only work because they use special hardware features that emulators do not provide. A few examples of this include DOS games that use the PCjr/Tandy 1000 sound chip, ReelMagic or other Mpeg-1/Mpeg-2 hardware, Early S3 Virge and 3DFX games and demos. It won't match the authentic experience because CRT's are no longer manufactured, and you need a 4K screen to actually do correct  integer "aspect ratio correct" scale + CRT filters correct-enough. And doing so adds latency the original system didn't have.

 

There are not piles of games that fall under this, but GOG often doesn't set games up to use the "best configuration" of the game, only what a typical PC would have had, which was not how the developer had intended it to be played in most cases. Most games after 1990 were designed to have some kind of wavetable midi, in an era when the rubbish sound card included with the PC only supported emulating a 8-bit mono sound blaster with OPL2 audio, and virtually no sound cards had wavetable midi until Microsoft buried a generic 2MB GM/GS wavetable in Windows XP.

 

For C, pretty much everything made for MacOS pre-M1 is considered lost, because even though there is a translation layer "now" there isn't a way to play PPC or 68K on an M1. But this is likewise the same argument for trying to run DOS or Win3.1 software on 64-bit Windows 11. The difference is that many 80's and early 90's systems, especially MacOS and the Amiga had the entire OS in ROM, and other systems like the Tandy computers or IBM PC/XT systems had ROM BASIC or BASIC on a floppy, and you could not run software for one on the other, nor could you access the special hardware on a different device.

 

This also doesn't get into all the homebrew-ish stuff people made in BASIC in the 80's, nor the foreign home computers (eg MSX) that require firmware because of entire Kanji set used by the language is in firmware. There are also proprietary accessories for the Famicom that allowed the user to use the famicom as a computer, and likewise the predecessor to the Sega Master System was also a fully functional computer, and games developed on those SG1000/SC3000 systems worked on the SMS. At least if they were on a cartridge.

 

There are also piles of 80's computer games that pretty much never made it out of their home city/market.

 

But we're seeing a return to "Games being lost", not because of the inability of players keeping the media alive, no we're now in a "the publisher hates money" era where Nintendo only keeps 6% of it's titles alive in any shape to be played, and if you're not a first party, go remake your game for something else, Nintendo don't care.

 

Remakes are nice when the hardware advancement justifies it. FF7 remake perhaps goes TOO far and does what players didn't really ask for, but it's nice. The kind of remakes I feel are what players want are the kind that Zelda Links Awakening pulls off, where it's the same game with a visual and audio aesthetic for current gamers, not so much trying to port the original over and over.

 

And ports are usually "Good enough" in many cases. But they are not the original experience, and look no further than Final Fantasy IV to see how many times Square/Squaresoft (and later SquareEnix) nerfed it between versions. The Pixel remasters are nice, but they're also easier than the original games due to retrofitting newer mechanics into the older games. 

 

But I still think about all those movie tie-in shovelware games that were at least a good hour of gameplay or had some good ideas but poor execution, that are forever lost because the company who published it doesn't have the rights to it, and the license is too expensive to re-release what was a poor cash grab originally.

 

[dizmo]

13 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

Correct. You can get a ton of stuff though "questionable" means. However even then that wouldn't account for everything. There is likely still stuff that would be lost that was only available in the online stores. Look at all the stuff that people thought was garbage in the e-shops over the years, was that archived anywhere?

If it was considered garbage, is it really a loss? 

[da na]

28 minutes ago, dizmo said:

If it was considered garbage, is it really a loss? 

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, for example, is a "fun-bad" trash fire that has become infamous for its horrible nature. 

 

Even shovelware deserves to be preserved. Someone somewhere will miss it if it's gone forever. Easy for things like DDI's Wii games, since there are physical releases but delisted iOS/Android games, eShop content, etc... very difficult.

 

Some kid in the future will be nostalgic for those "Amazing Spider Rope Hero Grand Theft City HD Free" games on the Play store. 

[suicidalfranco]

a corporations wet dream.

 

[Brooksie359]

On 7/16/2023 at 7:45 AM, tikker said:

That is sad to hear. So this is about what is available through official means right? I am curious about what the percentage is when illegitimate copies are taken into account. I understand they can't endorse or encourage piracy, but it would be an interesting comparison.

Honestly if something isn't available through legal means I don't see how piracy is even illegal at that point. I mean there would be zero damages to the copyright holder as again it's not like they could have paid for said game. Honestly I think copyright holders should lose their copyright if they don't have the copyrighted material available in a legal means or they are currently working on a project related to the copyrighted material. 

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Honestly if something isn't available through legal means I don't see how piracy is even illegal at that point. I mean there would be zero damages to the copyright holder as again it's not like they could have paid for said game. Honestly I think copyright holders should lose their copyright if they don't have the copyrighted material available in a legal means or they are currently working on a project related to the copyrighted material. 

 

I always ask the question of "who will sue me?"

 

If I can buy it off GOG, or Steam, in any shape, that's good enough to not go looking for a bootleg. But what about some sometimes superior version of a game that was on another platform, and that platform is long extinct?

 

During the 80's and up until Windows 95. The Amiga or the MacOS version of something was always the superior version of a game. This was because both the Amiga and Macintosh had built in multimedia capabilities from the very beginning. The PC did not, and did not establish a baseline until "MPC2" in 1993, shortly before Windows 95 screwed it up for everyone again.

 

Pretty much every game made before DirectX9 is potentially or completely unplayable in the future. DXVK is saving "DirectX9" games from being completely unplayable, but that does nothing for the missing sound , multiplayer and input API's. Like here's a real situation I encounter a lot right now? That Stadia controller? It does not work in games unless Steam is handling the input. Same if use the Nintendo controllers. They work in Bluetooth mode, but plugging them in, only works under Steam.

 

At any rate, at a certain point, a "dosbox" style emulator should exist for obsolete systems, and the original copyright holder should release the firmware and obsolete operating system into public domain to keep that system alive (eg Commodore, IBM, Tandy, Atari ) but I don't see Apple doing that, ever, so 68K/PPC MacOS software and iOS software before iOS 11 are going to be lost forever because Apple doesn't care.

 

And as a side note. Apple always had recovery discs on their site up to OSX 10.3 that worked perfectly fine in emulators if you had the Mac firmware. It would do Apple some good to re-release the PPC rosetta emulator and also a 68K emulator to run the original System 6/7/8 software and PPC OS X to get some of these old games to work, but sadly it's a lot of effort for something that people will likely not be that interested in over time.

 

 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

On 7/16/2023 at 11:57 AM, RejZoR said:

Services like GOG keep them alive. And many "Abandonware" sites that are considered as piracy by most, but are really keeping the gaming history alive.

Have you ever seriously looked at GOG though?  The vast majority of their offerings now are not 'Old Games'.  They might be "Good' but that's the G without the OG.  Their 'Old Games' offering list is actually pretty slim in the grand scheme of things.

[OhioYJ]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

and the original copyright holder should release the firmware and obsolete operating system into public domain to keep that system alive (eg Commodore, IBM, Tandy, Atari ) but I don't see Apple doing that

The odds of any company, much less Apple doing that are essentially zero. It will be "something.. something.. proprietary information." Though what are the odds they actually have something still in use or worth protecting in something that old at this point?

[starsmine]

8 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Honestly if something isn't available through legal means I don't see how piracy is even illegal at that point. I mean there would be zero damages to the copyright holder as again it's not like they could have paid for said game. Honestly I think copyright holders should lose their copyright if they don't have the copyrighted material available in a legal means or they are currently working on a project related to the copyrighted material. 

Copyright holders own the RIGHT to copy, not the obligation or requirement to copy. 

[Brooksie359]

32 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Copyright holders own the RIGHT to copy, not the obligation or requirement to copy. 

That fine but they shouldn't have the right to stop others from copying if they refuse to allow people to obtain their copyrighted product legally. Essentially they have 0 damages if people copy their game they no longer sell as its obviously not stealing a potential sale. It would be like owning a trademark but not using it which from what I understand is not legal as you have to be using it or plan on using in the near future to actually own a trademark. 

[starsmine]

12 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

That fine but they shouldn't have the right to stop others from copying if they refuse to allow people to obtain their copyrighted product legally. Essentially they have 0 damages if people copy their game they no longer sell as its obviously not stealing a potential sale. It would be like owning a trademark but not using it which from what I understand is not legal as you have to be using it or plan on using in the near future to actually own a trademark. 

What?

No thats is exactly what it means.

If you do NOT own right to copy, you do NOT own the right to copy. Doubly so for not owning the right to copy and DISTRIBUTE. 

Its not the same as trademarks, trademarks a brand/logo. Something under the protection of copyright as a part or a whole piece of creative work. 
Not to say logos are not creative work, they are, but their use is to distinguish who made a product. 

It is completely in the rights of the copyright holder to not make copies of a work to increase the perceived value of a product, like collector editions and making a run of 100 and no more. 

This argument is not there for works in the public domain. Disney really fucked that whole thing up. 

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

The odds of any company, much less Apple doing that are essentially zero. It will be "something.. something.. proprietary information." Though what are the odds they actually have something still in use or worth protecting in something that old at this point?

 

They don't. That's the problem. Like imagine if copyright-law shifted (and likely will NEVER happen under the current court system in the US) and software (BIOS, Firmware, Operating System) becomes de-facto public domain once the hardware is out of production for 10 years.

 

Unlike music, film and television shows, which can generally be sold in perpetuity, as long as the media to play it, and the ability to produce the media is still produced (*cough*streaming-IS-not*cough*) there is no argument that the copyright holder is losing money to piracy if it's the copyright holder actually withholding it. 

 

More to the point, if a production company writes off something by shutting it down, for tax purposes, or basically any reason that prevents the people who worked on it from being able to be paid (residuals for films, royalties for music) then that MUST be turned over to the public domain.

 

I'm in favor of copyright protection for media as long that media can always be legally obtained on a fixed medium. If a publisher is unwilling to produce a fixed medium to respond to demand, then the people who worked on it should be able to sue the publisher to release it into the public domain because nobody is benefiting from it being locked away.

 

But if a publisher resorts to malicious compliance (eg only producing ONE copy per year, only only selling it at 1m dollars when most media is priced at $19.99) then they should also be forced to release it into the public domain.

[Brooksie359]

2 hours ago, starsmine said:

What?

No thats is exactly what it means.

If you do NOT own right to copy, you do NOT own the right to copy. Doubly so for not owning the right to copy and DISTRIBUTE. 

Its not the same as trademarks, trademarks a brand/logo. Something under the protection of copyright as a part or a whole piece of creative work. 
Not to say logos are not creative work, they are, but their use is to distinguish who made a product. 

It is completely in the rights of the copyright holder to not make copies of a work to increase the perceived value of a product, like collector editions and making a run of 100 and no more. 

This argument is not there for works in the public domain. Disney really fucked that whole thing up. 

Again if the company isn't selling the product anymore that increase in value do to scarcity doesn't mean anything unless they actually sell a copy of the game. There are 0 damages if people take abandoned games and pirate them because a legal means to own the copyrighted material doesn't exist. Sure the copyright law might say one thing but I think the point is that the copyright law is flawed and has been for some time now. 

[RejZoR]

8 hours ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Have you ever seriously looked at GOG though?  The vast majority of their offerings now are not 'Old Games'.  They might be "Good' but that's the G without the OG.  Their 'Old Games' offering list is actually pretty slim in the grand scheme of things.

It's slim because they can't just sell everything. They need to first figure out ownership of brands and trademarks that are not held by original owners for a long time. If they can even find one. It's the legality nightmare. Another example are licenses within games, like for example why Need for Speed games of the old days are not on GOG or even remastered. Because it's pain in the rear to get permissions from all the car brands that were in the game back then and to license the specific cars, their shapes and names.

[starsmine]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

Another example are licenses within games, like for example why Need for Speed games of the old days are not on GOG or even remastered. Because it's pain in the rear to get permissions from all the car brands that were in the game back then and to license the specific cars, their shapes and names.

I dont understand why or how that type of license agreements came to be. 

Like that's not done for music, that's not done for books, that's not done for movies, but games? They just yoink out a song after the fact?
I know it has happened for TV shows, and I just. WHAT? A show should not just suddenly lose its intro 10 years later because of licensing. 

You don't just retroactively take out cars in a movie, no one expects such a thing. The fact that you can say your game can only use our IP for x years and then you can no longer sell new copies of that game with our IP in it is just unhinged to me. If you want royalties for it in perpetuity, have that be in there, not whatever this is. 

Fact is I also dont think you even need a license in many cases, Generics in TV shows and movies are done not because they need not to have a real brand, but because if a real brand is included, they can pay for the placement. Like you dont want to just give it out for free.