Quality doesn't ensure preservation. The library of Alexandria was burned down. Episodes of Dr. Who were lost. The source code to Homeworld Cataclysm was misplaced, and legal sale is no longer possible. Not all good things get the attention that they deserve, consigning them to the dustbin of history.

Saying "It can't happen", is naive at best.

That's true. I've had a tough time trying to get old versions of DirectX to run in a VM.

I intend to get all worked up about a handful of crusty, dusty old games nobody actually wants to legitimately play anymore mouldering into ash in the dustbin of history.

Right after I finish watching Marco Polo.

While we're on the subject - everyone should buy Sacrifice.

Clearly, these are all of equal historical import. >.>

Basically, something along the lines of the Internet Archive.

Good thing no one is saying that then. Right?

Because saying: "If it happens, well, it happens." =/= "I don't care at all."


Thanks for the implied personal insult re: naïve. How I wish for a rolleyes emoji...

Is it naïve to point out how digitalization makes the kind of nightmare scenario you seem to be considering much less likely than in the past?


By the way, nothing is capable of ensuring preservation. This need to be sure, be feel certain and safe of outcomes is something I find worrisome.

Yup. Despite our best effort, everything comes to an end - digitization might allow for a far easier and faster method of preservation we've ever had, but data corruption happens and sooner or later, just about everything will vanish. The best we can strive for is keeping significant works of art around for as long as possible for the next generations of artists to be able to learn from them and carry their heritage trough derivative works so that even if originals disappear eventually, what they achieved won't be forgotten.

It's all for naught tho. As we all know, in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. And no Ultima 7.

Same feeling here. Even if the hardware gets outdated. People will just keep on making remakes and remakes or remastered versions of great classics.

Nothing good will really be forgotten.

Remakes are not the same as the original. And they're not that common.

I think "classics as of now" will survive through emulation. But what about the DRM-locked potential future classics of today?

I really don't share your optimism. Do you know how many books got lost through the ages (a lot of which we only know about because they were cross-referenced elsewhere? How many early movies are lost? What about the first seasons of Dr Who?

Also considering the amount of consumable data increasing every year, I don't expect everything to remain preserved for generations to come, like each and every reality TV-show episode ever created, every failed Early Access indie game etc.

Still, it is a good idea that obstacles preventing preservation would be abolished. Too bad if e.g. Denuvo really is as powerful as they say, it could mean a whole generation of games not being preservable at all. The only way someone in the future can re-experience them is if the rights holder decides to re-release it, providing they still have access to the Denuvo-free version themselves (which is not certain, considering how many times IP rights holders seem to say they don't have access to source codes either anymore; things tend to get lost when they change owners etc.).

For people who consider games only as throwaway consumables, this is not a problem. They just play whatever interesting is available at the time. A bit like not caring if the old Chaplin movies are lost forever, just watch something else that comes today from the TV or cinema.

I on the other hand, see games partly as an artform that needs to be preserved just as much as movies or music does. (Music has the beneift though that "remaking" it is quite much simpler, that's what covers are for, if it doesn't matter that much to you who is performing it.)

I don't know. I didn't watch Dr. Who. Maybe it wasn't that good (probably heresy to even think that :))? Did really nobody keep it?

What I meant was that good ideas will be copied over and over again and even if they are not exactly the same you probably keep a good selection of games that kind of come close to the original. That's probably the way you have to do it anyway.

For example: Preserving Day of Tentacle means that you have to implement the ScummVM machine over and over again on every new hardware/software plattform. While World of Warcraft as an online multiplayer game - it constantly evolves and will never be the same, if only because the players who play it are not the same. No chance of preserving that. The only thing you can preserve is the feeling and the setting. Customers could just buy all the new games that look and feel like the old games, so there is financial interest in constantly reinventing the wheel.

Programming games on virtual machines which then get ported more easily might be a step towards longer lifecycles. All the Unity based games have probably good chances, if only because someone might produce a Unity emulator at some point.

As for DRM: As long as you have the sources you can just remove the DRM. If not, well then that's it in this case. Then one can only hope that reverse engineering technology (aka piracy) does not become forgotten.

Someone in that reddit discussion was insisting it is not a major problem because the good and important games will be preserved anyway by people while the chaff that no one even wants to play will not (he e.g. seemed to consider a large part of the 8bit NES game base as such chaff that doesn't need to be preserved). No problem.

While there may be some truth to that, I also think it is pretty shortsighted. Many games, as well as e.g. movies, may become cult classics long after they were originally available, and maybe even failed back then. It we go by the popularity, then I guess e.g. "Plan 9 from the outer space" movie should have never been preserved, yet nowadays it is considered and important piece of movie history in its own way.

And it may even go beyond cult classics. It may be e.g. just me getting an urge to see and experience a game like "Ring II: Twilight of the Gods", just because I have read some interesting tidbits about its obscurity that I want the see myself, regardless that apparently that game was not that well received in 2003.

For this game in particular, even though it is only little over 10 years old, I don't find any used copies here, and it doesn't exist on p2p networks either as far as I can tell (I saw glimpses of one of its CD images on one less popular p2p network at some point, but even that disappeared). I can see a couple of used copies sold on American ebay, maybe I'd need to check if they are willing to ship overseas. I bet in 10 years I'd have even harder time trying to locate this game.

This is why I always say "hogwash" to those who imply that everything you'd ever want will certainly always be available on pirate sites and p2p networks, so nothing will be lost, don't worry be happy. Those still depend on people like you and me having any interest in keeping preserving and sharing it to the world. Am I sharing obscure stuff I have and someone in the world might want to have too? No, due to various reasons.

So who exactly will make the decision whether certain piece of art(?) is worth preserving or not, and do that in time while it is still preservable?

Or alternatively, emulate a platform which can run some existing version of ScummVM. Or DOSBox, I am pretty sure Day of the Tentacle runs fine on it too, albeit I haven't tried it.

Who even said that? Piracy does a hell of a lot better job with preserving videogames than the industry itself does, that's the point, of course it won't preserve everything ever, that thought alone is just silly and taking that argument completely out of proportion.

As for who decides what's worth preserving, majority, naturally.

I see that data corruption as a thing mainly if your intention is to preserve e.g. some digital data only on one certain media, for years or decades to come. E.g. burn a CD-R disc and then expect it to still work perfectly 20 years from now.

But in reality the data will be moved to newer and newer media over and over again. I have files from decades ago on brand new hard drives, not the original floppy disks in the early 90s. I simply copied them over and over again, and as far as I can tell they are still fine (e.g. at least old zip files and such still uncompress without errors etc.).

It is of course possible data corruption might happen anyway, even when copying the software over. That's why I am very much for more advanced file systems like Btrfs, and tools which check checksums while copying, that prevent data corruption.

So I don't take data corruption as some kind of law of nature that will eventually destroy all the old data that we have, no matter how much we fight it. There are ways to fight it, and make it very very improbable of happening (unless you destroy the data by negligence or purposely).

Not referring to this discussion, but certain earlier discussions where it was e.g. suggested that DRM in games doesn't matter because someone somewhere will crack it anyway for you, and keep sharing a copy so that you can download it if you need it. As in, "internet is my backup".

That goes only so far, and then what you'd want to find might not be the same that the "majority" deemed worth preserving, maybe most of them never even heard about it for a reason or another.
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