If something important seems to be missing in my form, please send me a direct message! I am trying my best to also work on my university assignments related to this!
Google Form - Video Game Preservation
Responding the form before reading any further in this post is recommended!
I have been doing some research around this topic after the Video Game History Foundation has spoken that “87% of classic games (before 2010s) are not in release, and are considered critically endangered”
What is worse, is that The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is refusing efforts allow remote access to these old games for research and learning purposes, just like a historian would do research of events by reading and viewing any historic materials, the restrictions to access of different media because of convoluted copyright laws are a real world problem!
Availability of Video Games (originally released before 2010) is approximately 13 percent, slightly above pre-World War II audio recordings (10 percent or less) and below the survival rate of American silent films (14 percent). You would think they would take more effort but no, high revenue and profits doesn’t equal to better services.
Source: https://gamehistory.org/87percent/
And then there is another can of worms like ROMs, Emulation, Recompilation and internet piracy.
I have also created a signal group if you are interested on any news related to my project.
Time to piss some people off!
You may actually want to research what museum curators and the like actually do (or just communicate with them. I have never found one who didn’t want to chat about their job).
Copyright/Trademark/IP Protection is very much a thing. It is the main reason so many museums have “no pictures” (barring the increasingly rare cases where it is genuine light concerns). And that applies a lot more when it comes to “modern” history, of which video games definitely count. But even for ancient manuscripts, the answer tends to be “if you fill out all this paperwork and can demonstrate a genuine need to our board, you can come by and read that manuscript in a clean room. Or… you can spend 20 bucks on a copy in our gift shop. Hell, if you stop bothering me I’ll spot you ten bucks toward that”
And that is more or less what we see with the video game preservation efforts… that operate more like musems than hoarders with a youtube channel. They have a few actual historians who do outreach. And, in rare cases, people CAN organize visits. But “I want to play Metroid” isn’t really a compelling argument to a board that is risking damage every time that NES is booted up.
That said, I WOULD like to see a bigger emphasis on said curators documenting things themselves. But I am the weirdo who would love to see a deep dive on Star Crusader’s DLC. Whereas most people are just going to say “Ugh, they are so boring” if it isn’t pewdiepie screaming at every jagged polygon.
But yeah. If you actually genuinely care about preservation efforts, rather than just a site to download roms, I STRONGLY encourage getting in touch with your local museums and working with them (and lobbyists) to protect those museums. Because I didn’t even get into the active war on The Internet Archive in the US (and similar efforts in other countries).
This is why I appreciate the Internet. Getting insight on how stuff I do not know about—I’m not a museum curator—works.
I do not know what Star Crusader is but I’m also in the audience for deep dives as opposed to overexaggerated YouTuber-who-wants-you-to-form-a-parasocial-relationship-with-them reactions. When I do drag my butt over to YouTube, I usually find myself watching some long-form informative gaming video. There are some people with a following who get mentioned in the comments of other informative gaming videos (Summoning Salt comes to mind) so you are definitely not alone in wanting deep dives. :)
Not sure where to find deep dive articles, but wish I knew. Someone over at [email protected] provided one and it’s stoking my appetite for them.
In terms of text articles? Ironically, you want to look at early Polygon and Kotaku. And… absolutely nobody read that and those became the hellscapes they are today. That said, Aftermath occasionally will hang out in the deep end of a hotel pool on a specific game but that is usually in the context of current sociopolitical events or a new release.
Which speaks to games media as a whole being fundamentally broken in favor of the screaming jackasses who market gambling to children (see: xqc).
That said, a few of the longer form youtubers have worked with various preservation efforts in the past. I don’t think Jacob Gellar has (outside of his work on MinnMax which is more just podcasting and interviewing) but I want to say Displaced Gamers reached out to one of the orgs to get a dump of a rare edition of a cartridge once? Although, people like Illusory Wall very much rely heavily on The Internet Archive when they are researching what the deal with the Dark Souls 1 DLC was. Which gets into the other side of “what actually IS games preservation?” that makes people just shut down and start screaming that they want ROMs.
But the big issue? If you are doing a video that can justify flying out to a bunker in Texas or whatever? It is going to be about a game people know about or are interested in. Which means it is likely already available online. MAYBE you get a “deep cut” like CyClones but the vast majority of creators can’t risk a complete dud of a video for that month or even quarter
Its also why the popular history youtubers tend to have a day job as a dealer (Matt Easton) or are running not so subtle ads for auction houses (Forgotten Weapons). And there are a LOT of mixed feelings about them (especially Ian) because of how much they profit off of museum collections.
Based off this I’d imagine it might involve backing up the game’s release announcement and some sale pages with its description online, proof the game existed, before the page gets changed because the game is no longer the hottest and newest thing or stores are no longer selling the game?
I get the feeling you know more about this topic than I do and probably have strong opinions about it.
Thanks for the namedrops of where to find articles, and what I assume are people who make long-form videos on video games!
Actually, Illusory Wall’s “How was the Dark Souls DLC Discovered?” video is probably the best example of what preservation of games actually IS and why “I can’t play that SNES” has little to do with it.
At a high level: Dark Souls 1 was notorious for how incredibly convoluted and stupid the path to the DLC is. It involves killing a boss, reloading the area, talking to an NPC at the back of a cave you might not even see, reloading, killing a DIFFERENT enemy in a completely unrelated spot in the world, reloading, and then going back to that original spot.
And there is over a decae of discussion on how people even found that and lots of nonsense theories. And IW actually searched through a mixture of blog posts, press releases, youtube videos, and even message boards to paint a picture of what actually happened. And… it is very very different.
A friend (who actually IS a curator) watched that and immediately compared it to the idea that guns are why the concept of an armored knight went away. At a very high level… it isn’t wrong. But people assume it has to do with penetration and ignore that we were sending folk into battle in what was basically plate armor all the way up to WW1 (and there are very good arguments that a modern plate carrier isn’t that far off from what a conquistador would wear).
I may have lost the plot here.
What is the “what actually happened” that is different? You do not need to explain the entire story to me, what I mean is what is this “what actually happened” concerning? Is it about how people found how to unlock the DLC? Were you commenting a commonly-believed DLC unlock path in your second paragraph but it is actually something different?
And for how this ties back to game preservation… would this be preservation of video game history?
Thanks for your replies, by the way
I am impressed with your clean text wall! Btw there has been some efforts for a museum like this one, it just released a few days ago.
https://library.gamehistory.org/
Oh yeah. You totally aren’t just an obnoxious jerk with a side hustle.
Still, kudos for actually thinking “TL/DR” is a good response. It saves people who thought you might actually be operating in good faith a lot of time.