Poll of the Day > Imagine if all retro media were as inaccessible as video games.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like, what if the only legal way to watch To Kill A Mockingbird was on a projector with the original film, or the only way to read War and Peace was with a first edition that people wanted thousands on Ebay for.

What?

.... What????

I can play games from the 80s no problem on brand new hardware. WTF are you talking about with projector film?

Sounds like you just discovered hardware based DRM. Congrats, that's the entire point of consoles.

We legit know how Cuneiform sounded... ya

I dont understand

SinisterSlay posted...

Sounds like you just discovered hardware based DRM. Congrats, that's the entire point of consoles.

That's the point he's making. Far more so than other media, retro games are restricted by the hardware they were released on, outside of comparatively rare ports/remakes that make them accessible with modern stuff, and efforts to pirate stuff that isn't available on modern systems tend to be treated more harshly than pirating other media. Part of that is that the medium is relatively new and nothing is public domain yet (nor will it be for quite some time), but console games in particular have been quite deliberately designed to be accessible for only a very short period of time.

adjl posted...

That's the point he's making. Far more so than other media, retro games are restricted by the hardware they were released on, outside of comparatively rare ports/remakes that make them accessible with modern stuff, and efforts to pirate stuff that isn't available on modern systems tend to be treated more harshly than pirating other media. Part of that is that the medium is relatively new and nothing is public domain yet (nor will it be for quite some time), but console games in particular have been quite deliberately designed to be accessible for only a very short period of time.

I never noticed. Emulators do a pretty good job of ignoring this problem

adjl posted...

That's the point he's making.

It's a flawed point, though.

Using "To Kill A Mockingbird on a projector with the original film" or "War and Peace as a first edition" as examples ignores the fact that the only reason you can watch To Kill a Mockingbird on anything other than the original film reels or read War and Peace in later editions is because they're both continually reprinted or updated as new media evolves. But the same thing happens with games - in precisely the same way you might have a film reel copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, a VHS copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and a DVD copy of To Kill a Mockingbird (and you need specific and unique hardware to play all of them, and none of them are cross-compatible), a popular game like, say, Halo gets released on the original Xbox, gets an updated port for the 360, gets released as part of the Master Chief Collection, and so on.

Combined with virtual libraries becoming more and more common on both consoles and services like Steam, and tons of past games are still perfectly available to modern players on modern systems even if you don't own the original hardware a game was on. And that's not even taking emulators into account.

Sure, there are games that eventually slip through the cracks, but that's true of every other media as well. For every To Kill a Mockingbird, there are tons of movies that don't get later updated releases (and which most people may have completely forgotten the existence of) - and there's a reason why this page exists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films

For every War and Peace that gets repeated in dozens of editions across 100+ years, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of books that will show up on bookshelves, disappear, and mostly are never to be seen again. Even many critically acclaimed (at time of release) books by extremely notable authors stop getting reprinted eventually, and modern readers may have no idea they ever existed (even now, this is a huge problem for fans of New Wave sci-fi from the 60s and 70s, which rarely gets reprinted).

We have a skewed view of how well media was preserved in the past because we really only remember the things that were preserved. Most of us have no idea just how many shows, films, or books were published before we were born that have simply vanished and will never be seen again. Or even ones that still exist, but which are relatively difficult for the average layperson to access without using archival means.

Games may have a greater rate of loss, and have unique aspects (like abandonware being a thing), but overall it's not that qualitatively different from any other form of media.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_television_broadcast
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work

Apparently a lot of older TV is lost because networks would literally tape over stuff that was no longer airing, to save on tape costs

There is tons of old, lost media because masters were lost, or taped over, etc. Not every movie ever made is available on current devices. Old albums that never got a reprint are collectors items.

SinisterSlay posted...

I never noticed. Emulators do a pretty good job of ignoring this problem

They do, but that's where the "legally" part comes in. It's significantly more common to get in trouble for downloading a SNES ROM than for downloading a digitized version of a film that was only ever released on projector reels. Part of that is the age (if the projector film didn't get a VHS or DVD release in the last 60 years, nobody really cares about it, while 30-year-old yet-unported SNES games do sometimes get rereleased), which gets into the fact that the medium is relatively new, but the issue remains that there are legal concerns around emulation.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

We have a skewed view of how well media was preserved in the past because we really only remember the things that were preserved.

Yes, I will gladly concede that survivorship bias plays a huge role in how we perceive the issue. Games being as new as they are also makes it much easier to learn about games that have been lost, as does the ongoing battle between companies protecting their IPs and emulation sites preserving games that would otherwise be lost.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But the same thing happens with games - in precisely the same way you might have a film reel copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, a VHS copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and a DVD copy of To Kill a Mockingbird (and you need specific and unique hardware to play all of them, and none of them are cross-compatible), a popular game like, say, Halo gets released on the original Xbox, gets an updated port for the 360, gets released as part of the Master Chief Collection, and so on.

Here's the thing: VHS lasted for 20+ years before DVDs replaced them, and that VHS version was sold for much of that time. DVDs have been around for 20+ years, and a DVD version of the film has been available for much of that time. Nothing is set to replace DVDs entirely (BDs have ended up as a premium alternative instead of an actual replacement), so anyone can still go out and buy a DVD player and a DVD copy of the film and watch it.

By contrast, the Xbox was available for sale for 6 years, and isn't anymore. The 360 lasted 7. Each release of Halo was available only in those windows, and if you happen to find an older copy you won't be able to play it without also tracking down the old hardware. For games less popular than Halo that don't get ported to every single generation, if you missed that initial 2-3-year window where the game was being printed, you're probably never going to get to play it without paying through the nose for one of the rare surviving physical copies (or piracy). Conceptually, older media becoming obsolete and difficult to play is nothing new, but the timeline is much shorter for games than for other forms of media, which makes it much harder to preserve it through services like libraries.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Combined with virtual libraries becoming more and more common on both consoles and services like Steam, and tons of past games are still perfectly available to modern players on modern systems even if you don't own the original hardware a game was on. And that's not even taking emulators into account.

I'd argue that that's a big part of why it seems like games are so much worse than other media in this regard. Digital libraries are indeed doing an excellent job of preserving games (with a few hiccups), which is making it that much more apparent just how many haven't been given that treatment. For the vast majority of games, there is no technical reason that they could not be available to purchase today. Companies have the ROMs and are already paying to store them, emulators already exist that can run those ROMs on most modern hardware, and every platform already has one or more digital storefront services that could be used to distribute those ROMs and emulators to anyone looking to buy them (at whatever price is needed to cover the distribution costs). That they aren't is a deliberate decision on the part of IP holders.

Loss of physical media is to be expected. Between attrition caused by normal use, other damages like fires and floods, and the simple physical reality that you only have so much storage space and therefore can't store everything indefinitely, stuff is going to be lost. Toss in that physical distribution is comparatively expensive and that stores only have so much shelf space, and you similarly expect physical media to stop being sold. Some loss is also inevitable with digital media (copying files is not perfect, after all), but not to the same extent, nor are the concerns about distribution relevant, so giving games a pass under the same standard that gives historical physical media a pass doesn't make much sense. That's not to be expected. That's a choice to create artificial scarcity, one for which I'm all in favour of criticizing companies.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Games may have a greater rate of loss, and have unique aspects (like abandonware being a thing), but overall it's not that qualitatively different from any other form of media.

Qualitatively, no, but the idea of games being playable only within 1-6 years of their release is significantly more extreme than what's seen in other media, and given the tremendous potential for far better preservation and accessibility than that, I'd say it's still worth identifying as a problem.

For every To Kill A Mockingbird and War and Peace there's probably been 100 movies and 100 books that no one cares about and forgotten. Just cause we're in the digital age doesn't mean we need to preserve every Fat Cats Big Adventure 3 on the Video Game Station 3600 and subsequent sequels.

good luck playing a laserdisc. hope all your magnetic tape is stored properly, otherwise you're screwed. entire countries worth of music in Africa has rotted away.

playing video games bootleg requires a computer. a lot of old tech is extremely inaccessible. even an old digital camera probably needs some proprietary battery/memory card. video games are honestly super accessible thanks to the community.

Emulation developer chads have you covered.