New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable(gamehistory.org)
gamehistory.org
New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable
https://gamehistory.org/87percent/
472 comments
Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not legally available?
Streaming and on-demand content delivery, rather than purchased physical copies, does the same damage to other content as to games. Per internet traditions, the porn industry is leading the way. No doubt the copyrights to millions of porn films belong to long-defunct studios, leaving no legal access. Today is it porn, tomorrow it will be the older Futurama episodes.
But industries want this state of affairs. Any time spent with old content is time not purchasing the new content. To keep the content creation industry going consumers need to forget past material. Want to watch old Simpsons episodes? Want to play the original Civilization? No. Those are dead. Here are some new versions.
Streaming and on-demand content delivery, rather than purchased physical copies, does the same damage to other content as to games. Per internet traditions, the porn industry is leading the way. No doubt the copyrights to millions of porn films belong to long-defunct studios, leaving no legal access. Today is it porn, tomorrow it will be the older Futurama episodes.
But industries want this state of affairs. Any time spent with old content is time not purchasing the new content. To keep the content creation industry going consumers need to forget past material. Want to watch old Simpsons episodes? Want to play the original Civilization? No. Those are dead. Here are some new versions.
Just last weekend I wanted to play Cryostasis after seeing a playthrough on YouTube. It's a pretty unique mid 00s shooter that is relatively light on the shooting and heavy on atmosphere - you're a researcher meeting an icebreaker to leave Antarctica in 1981, but when you find the ship it's been wrecked since 1968, and the game follows you unraveling the mystery using supernatural time-jump powers. Instead of a health bar, you have to keep your body temperature high enough. It's a genuinely unique title that approaches the genre differently from pretty much any other...and it's literally impossible to buy.
It's been delisted from Steam, Good Old Games, and any other storefront I could find online. People resell genuine retail keys that can get the game activated on Steam for ridiculous sums. Reposted hearsay online is that the original source code is lost so there will never be a remaster. There's a copy up on Archive.org, and without it from what I can tell this title would just be lost to time.
There's so many cool, weird, obscure games from the 90s and 00s and its their weirdness and obscurity that puts them most at risk for disappearing and becoming unattainable.
It's been delisted from Steam, Good Old Games, and any other storefront I could find online. People resell genuine retail keys that can get the game activated on Steam for ridiculous sums. Reposted hearsay online is that the original source code is lost so there will never be a remaster. There's a copy up on Archive.org, and without it from what I can tell this title would just be lost to time.
There's so many cool, weird, obscure games from the 90s and 00s and its their weirdness and obscurity that puts them most at risk for disappearing and becoming unattainable.
This is why piracy is nearly always the best option.
Want to play the original Tomb Raider? Well it's for sale, in many stores, and for many platforms. Trouble is they're all glitchy. Meanwhile, download a PS1 emulator and the ISO, and it works perfectly.
Saw something on Netflix a while ago that you're only now getting round to have time for? Woosh, it's gone. Meanwhile, download it from BitTorrent and it's yours forever, no internet needed. Same with Spotify and songs.
Pay for things legally, get treated like crap. The piracy option is just a better experience.
Want to play the original Tomb Raider? Well it's for sale, in many stores, and for many platforms. Trouble is they're all glitchy. Meanwhile, download a PS1 emulator and the ISO, and it works perfectly.
Saw something on Netflix a while ago that you're only now getting round to have time for? Woosh, it's gone. Meanwhile, download it from BitTorrent and it's yours forever, no internet needed. Same with Spotify and songs.
Pay for things legally, get treated like crap. The piracy option is just a better experience.
I know there are many people who find this appalling and wish that companies did more to re-release their older titles, but I've frankly just accepted that emulation will be the best and perhaps only way to play a majority of these titles. Unlike movies, where you simply need a method to playback a video and audio stream, getting interactive media to continue working isn't trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly as it did before (otherwise what's the point). I wish rather than taking the effort to port the game themselves, they'd be more receptive to fan preservation efforts, although some companies are more friendly towards this than others. It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. The more people ask for older titles to be re-released, the more developers realize there's a market for it, so rather than release the source or future-compatible files, they instead will port the game to their latest system once a decade to resell it.
Copyright should adapt to modern world. Currently, what happens are a bunch of laws made by politicians under strong lobby from giant corporations. This doesn't benefit the public neither the artists.
There are lots of new categories where works of art (video games included) can fall into which simply didn't exist when copyrights were introduced. The worst part: as copyrights evolved it made legal access to older works harder.
I like how GoG is running their business but it doesn't include everything and laws should get modernized so that hundred of similar companies like GoG can flourish and thrive. For the cases where getting access to copyrights holder is not viable... well, for that users and fans should have the right to use, copy and distribute it legally. Nobody is making any money from works nobody can get access.
There are lots of new categories where works of art (video games included) can fall into which simply didn't exist when copyrights were introduced. The worst part: as copyrights evolved it made legal access to older works harder.
I like how GoG is running their business but it doesn't include everything and laws should get modernized so that hundred of similar companies like GoG can flourish and thrive. For the cases where getting access to copyrights holder is not viable... well, for that users and fans should have the right to use, copy and distribute it legally. Nobody is making any money from works nobody can get access.
It's going to shift to 87% don't even start due to connectivity requirements to servers that are not running anymore.
A painful example in this context is the Philips P2000T home computer.
It was hugely popular in The Netherlands in the early 1980s, but not so much in other countries. Because the market was so small, there were nearly no commercial games. Almost all games for it were written by hobbyists, and were copied freely, using Mini-Cassette tapes.
I have been working on an emulator for it, but it seems near impossible to redistribute the original games. Most of the games do not have a copyright message, and it is often not clear who the original author was. Ironically, these games were _meant_ to be copied, but as of 1993 this is now prohibited by law, and (as far as I understand it) I can only make copies for my own use.
Note that there is a GitHub repository [1] that preserves a lot of games and information about the machine, but I wonder if this is even legal?
(An even bigger problem I face is redistribution of the P2305 Basic Interpreter ROM, which is copyrighted by both Philips and Microsoft. If anyone at Microsoft is reading this -- could you please assist me in getting a license to reverse engineer and ship the original Basic ROM with my emulator?)
[1] https://github.com/p2000t
It was hugely popular in The Netherlands in the early 1980s, but not so much in other countries. Because the market was so small, there were nearly no commercial games. Almost all games for it were written by hobbyists, and were copied freely, using Mini-Cassette tapes.
I have been working on an emulator for it, but it seems near impossible to redistribute the original games. Most of the games do not have a copyright message, and it is often not clear who the original author was. Ironically, these games were _meant_ to be copied, but as of 1993 this is now prohibited by law, and (as far as I understand it) I can only make copies for my own use.
Note that there is a GitHub repository [1] that preserves a lot of games and information about the machine, but I wonder if this is even legal?
(An even bigger problem I face is redistribution of the P2305 Basic Interpreter ROM, which is copyrighted by both Philips and Microsoft. If anyone at Microsoft is reading this -- could you please assist me in getting a license to reverse engineer and ship the original Basic ROM with my emulator?)
[1] https://github.com/p2000t
There is https://www.myabandonware.com and http://www.abandonia.com/en/game/. It's been a while since I have used abandonia. But I use myabandonware.com regularly. It is not perfect I suppose, but I get most of my childhood favourites here.
Croc 2 - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/croc-2-cj0. The only 3D colour videogame we had in our school's computer lab.
Claw - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/claw-a39
The thing - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-thing-bfm
Croc 2 - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/croc-2-cj0. The only 3D colour videogame we had in our school's computer lab.
Claw - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/claw-a39
The thing - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-thing-bfm
Another thing I noticed lately is a lot of iPhone games that were built in the early days like 2008 to 2014 and beyond even, get removed from the app store once the developer cannot maintain enough resources to update the code to the latest iOS version. I tried downloading a lot of games I fell in love with with in the early days of the app store but cannot. This is sad too.
> Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it.
Well, maybe not for "Titanic" but there are tons of movies for which the process is pretty much exactly like that.
Video games as a broadly consumed medium are a relatively young feature - let's say some 40 to 50 years. Now, try to easily access most films from the first 40-50 years of cinema!
And even for newer films, if it wasn't for streaming, you would find yourself in the situation that you either watch your favorite movies on outdated technology, or that you have to keep on rebuying the same movies over and over again. And even streaming services provide a fraction what e.g. the original Netflix DVD rental had to offer.
Well, maybe not for "Titanic" but there are tons of movies for which the process is pretty much exactly like that.
Video games as a broadly consumed medium are a relatively young feature - let's say some 40 to 50 years. Now, try to easily access most films from the first 40-50 years of cinema!
And even for newer films, if it wasn't for streaming, you would find yourself in the situation that you either watch your favorite movies on outdated technology, or that you have to keep on rebuying the same movies over and over again. And even streaming services provide a fraction what e.g. the original Netflix DVD rental had to offer.
This is unironically why emulation is a necessary and moral good. We need to preserve these pieces of software so that future generations can enjoy them, if they wish.
I used to pay for Nintendo's Switch account (or whatever that was called) I was kinda frustrated with how limited the collection of NES and SNES games are available there. Played through all the Zeldas, which is great, but I wish a lot more was available. I am wondering if, for the most part, the license holder is Nintendo, it's a lot easier for them to make it available, but as soon as you get into third party developers, I imagine the people that owned the copyrights are either non findable or dead now.
The ESA's main thrust is incredibly stupid. What if we decide to re-license that content but everyone can already get it for free from the library? Think of our profit losses!
That hasn't stopped book publishers from publishing the classics over and over.
Preservation is super important. Just look at the Shoah Foundation's effort at preserving the video testimonies of survivors: preservation of digital media is complex, difficult and ever-evolving. Preserving video games is even harder: emulators that run on an ever-evolving set of target hardware have to be maintained just to play them. Current trends in video game design almost guarantee that some games are impossible to preserve: they exist as a moment in time, a memory, the articles and blog posts that were written about them.
Shame really that profit is more important than the art and medium. Not surprising. But shameful.
Update: fixed some sentences for clarity.
That hasn't stopped book publishers from publishing the classics over and over.
Preservation is super important. Just look at the Shoah Foundation's effort at preserving the video testimonies of survivors: preservation of digital media is complex, difficult and ever-evolving. Preserving video games is even harder: emulators that run on an ever-evolving set of target hardware have to be maintained just to play them. Current trends in video game design almost guarantee that some games are impossible to preserve: they exist as a moment in time, a memory, the articles and blog posts that were written about them.
Shame really that profit is more important than the art and medium. Not surprising. But shameful.
Update: fixed some sentences for clarity.
See also this companion article about the study methodology: https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/
It's bizarre that companies aren't just selling the roms for classic arcade games that are otherwise completely unmonetized. There's an audience that would happily pay money just to be able to legally do what they are already doing with emulators and homemade arcade cabinets.
This is a thorny subject.
Copyrite is, by definition, the control of the rights to copy. It is not a mandate that copying must be done, but rather an acknowledgement of the right to control the copies. And that must also, then, include the right to not distribute the work.
This must be balanced with the notion of fair use, though. However, "but I want to access it" does not justify fair use. "I bought a copy and therefore will make backups so that I may enjoy it in the future" does, in my opinion.
Libraries have exceptions codified in copyrite law. Technology has blurred the line as to what constitutes a library (just as it has for journalists, publishers, etc.).
Some advocate for an escalating fee in order to protect copyrite for more and more time. I don't know if that is appropriate, since it seems to me as a form of extortion of rights. Not quite compelled speech, but similar.
I don't know the solution, but I do feel as though our laws are broken and dysfunctional in this regard. I don't have a solution, though, because I honestly don't know enough of the problem domain. Then again, maybe that's the problem... One should not need to be a legal expert in order to keep from breaking the law!
Copyrite is, by definition, the control of the rights to copy. It is not a mandate that copying must be done, but rather an acknowledgement of the right to control the copies. And that must also, then, include the right to not distribute the work.
This must be balanced with the notion of fair use, though. However, "but I want to access it" does not justify fair use. "I bought a copy and therefore will make backups so that I may enjoy it in the future" does, in my opinion.
Libraries have exceptions codified in copyrite law. Technology has blurred the line as to what constitutes a library (just as it has for journalists, publishers, etc.).
Some advocate for an escalating fee in order to protect copyrite for more and more time. I don't know if that is appropriate, since it seems to me as a form of extortion of rights. Not quite compelled speech, but similar.
I don't know the solution, but I do feel as though our laws are broken and dysfunctional in this regard. I don't have a solution, though, because I honestly don't know enough of the problem domain. Then again, maybe that's the problem... One should not need to be a legal expert in order to keep from breaking the law!
Thank goodness for so-called piracy.
I really wish the study matched the headline. It should be 'most classic video games are commercially unavailable' To their credit, they don't try to hide it, but the sentiment in the headline is the actual problem, in my mind.
I'm less concerned about a gameboy game that you can't buy, but you can easily play via emulators or the physical cartridges, which still exist (for now), than I am with the class of games that are truly gone/unplayable.
Your online only games primarily fall into this bag, but without something like an internet archive or something similar to preserve them, we're in danger of losing the digital copies of old games as well.
Personally, I'd like to see the study expanded and then some sort of index that tracks true loss of media over time.
I'm less concerned about a gameboy game that you can't buy, but you can easily play via emulators or the physical cartridges, which still exist (for now), than I am with the class of games that are truly gone/unplayable.
Your online only games primarily fall into this bag, but without something like an internet archive or something similar to preserve them, we're in danger of losing the digital copies of old games as well.
Personally, I'd like to see the study expanded and then some sort of index that tracks true loss of media over time.
It’s actually infuriating. This video game generation has offered very little major releases. However it’s still worth being apart of for the great collected editions.
But the amount of games, many that were of major importance that are simply gone.
This prompted me to find out that MediEvil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediEvil) has a remaster ... nostalgia incoming
We should really know better. The TV & film industry have already been through this.
If it is any consolation, it seems morally, if not legally, permissible to pirate unavailable classic games.
Article reminded me that Phil Spencer from Microsoft Gaming about two years ago did advocate for legal emulation[1] to preserve games. He seemed to be pretty passionate about it, does anyone know if they're still pursuing this or lobbying for it? Microsoft got to have at least some weight.
[1]https://www.axios.com/2021/11/17/microsoft-old-games-preserv...
[1]https://www.axios.com/2021/11/17/microsoft-old-games-preserv...
25-30 years ago, there was a game studio called 2am Games that made a series of strategy-type Java games that allowed online multiplayer. All the games were monetized with ad clicks. Click on an add, get 15 more minutes of play time.
Their most popular game was an RTS called Chain of Command. You had a squad of four soldiers that you could position on an isometric board designed to look like a farm. 5-10 players would each run their four-man squads into a firefight and play some scenario - seek and destroy, capture the flag, etc.
The other two games I enjoyed were a business strategy game called The Invisible Hand and another RTS where each player took a European country and conquered cities using robot-like walking tanks.
All of the content from 2am Games is lost to history. Chain of Command has some clones out there, but I've never been able to find anything - roms, source code, clones, for the other games. It's a part of my childhood I'll never be able to re-experience.
Edit: I got curious again and did some investigating. Here's their archived home page from 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970707215116/http://www.2am.co...
Their most popular game was an RTS called Chain of Command. You had a squad of four soldiers that you could position on an isometric board designed to look like a farm. 5-10 players would each run their four-man squads into a firefight and play some scenario - seek and destroy, capture the flag, etc.
The other two games I enjoyed were a business strategy game called The Invisible Hand and another RTS where each player took a European country and conquered cities using robot-like walking tanks.
All of the content from 2am Games is lost to history. Chain of Command has some clones out there, but I've never been able to find anything - roms, source code, clones, for the other games. It's a part of my childhood I'll never be able to re-experience.
Edit: I got curious again and did some investigating. Here's their archived home page from 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970707215116/http://www.2am.co...
Piracy to the rescue! The companies with the endangered IP should make a deal to forgive key piracy hubs in exchange for archiving their games into perpetuity. Earthbound is a great example of an incredibly influential game that is very expensive in its original form but widely available illegally, having inspired multiple generations of game developers that played it this way that otherwise would not have. How can we simply call this “theft”?
What percentage would run even if they were? A lot of the cracking isn't just about bypassing some DRM, but solving compatibility issues.
Ever drive a model T? Can you find a 64 Mustang convertible? 1800s vintage tea cups?
Lots of old things are scarce. Arcade games are in the same boat, but you've got MAME and I've got a bit-slice coprocessor and rasterizer ASIC controlled by a 6809 in I,Robot.
Not sure how games are different from other antiques other than the possibility of emulation.
Lots of old things are scarce. Arcade games are in the same boat, but you've got MAME and I've got a bit-slice coprocessor and rasterizer ASIC controlled by a 6809 in I,Robot.
Not sure how games are different from other antiques other than the possibility of emulation.
Wait until they figure out that modern day games are constantly evolving and changing so the concept of "unavailable" exists today for stuff that's less than a year old. Maps, in-game content, in-game characters, etc. It's all short-lived and hardly static.
You can’t expect to hold on to stuff through the decades, but I do miss my old consoles and sometimes I wish I still had one or two them to experience playing a game on the original hardware versus an emulator.
Copyright, as originally envisioned, should be a temporary privilege instead of a de facto ghost racket for perpetual extortion.