Is Our Video Game History Rotting?

If you’re a gamer, and it doesn’t really matter for how long, chances are good that you have some fond memories of old games you used to play in years past. These games could have been on the PC, or consoles, mobiles or any other device… it doesn’t matter. Personally, I have a lot of fond memories from games, and for a variety of platforms, and if there’s one thing that bugs me, it’s the idea that at some point in the future, I might lose access to them for various reasons.

The largest reason is due to degradation. Old consoles like the original Nintendo (NES) are not exactly build to last 50 years, so at which point are these consoles going to start dying and we’ll be left without a working one? And of course, the NES is just one example… there are tons more. Then we come to the games… what about them? What if 25 years from now, you couldn’t revisit your youth via way of playing a classic game?

Many people will say “use an emulator”, but those have their own problems. First is the fact that very rarely are games ever properly represented as they were originally intended. And I admit, I am one of those people who have used the screen smoothing option to clean up old NES titles, but even if you don’t use that option, it still doesn’t look 100% like an old NES game. Of course, it doesn’t help anything when we’re playing these games on high-definition monitors, rather than old-school tube TV’s.

The article that spawned all these ideas is at a site called Technology Review, and the writer mentions many more problems, such as the fact that the software emulators themselves might not even exist until the end of time, due to copyrights or even due to how they were originally coded. Plus, there’s always the issue that all of these emulators are designed by hobbyists, so there’s no telling when one will up and die. Then there’s the fact that current consoles don’t even have emulators. Even the Sega Dreamcast, which was released in 1999, doesn’t have a reliable emulator today. So what about games for that console?

I sure hope emulators don’t die, though, because video games, whether it seems foolish or not, are a part of history, and should be preserved. Things like movies and music are easily preserved, but video games are certainly another story.

Even if preservationists had the resources to develop the kind of emulators that can stand the test of time, their task would be made all the more difficult by the tendency of game companies to worry more about piracy than preservation. This means that documentation on how their machines work is either non-existent (if the company goes out of business or fails to preserve it) or secret, so makers of emulators must laboriously reverse-engineer existing hardware.