(Translated by https://www.hiragana.jp/)
The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever - Ars Technica
Skip to content
Gaming

The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever

Changes in digital distribution, rights management increasingly make preservation tough.

Kyle Orland | 116
Credit: Aurich vs Sierra
Credit: Aurich vs Sierra

"The very nature of digital [history] is that it's both inherently easy to save and inherently easy to utterly destroy forever."

Jason Scott knows what he's talking about when it comes to the preservation of digital software. At the Internet Archive, he's collected thousands of classic games, pieces of software, and bits of digital ephemera. His sole goal is making those things widely available through the magic of browser-based emulation.

Compared to other types of archaeology, this kind of preservation is still relatively easy for now. While the magnetic and optical disks and ROM cartridges that hold classic games and software will eventually be rendered unusable by time, it’s currently pretty simple to copy their digital bits to a form that can be preserved and emulated well into the future.

But paradoxically, an Atari 2600 cartridge that’s nearly 40 years old is much easier to preserve at this point than many games released in the last decade. Thanks to changes in the way games are being distributed, protected, and played in the Internet era, large parts of what will become tomorrow's video game history could be lost forever. If we're not careful, that is.

Throwing away the layers

In an industry with a nearly constant focus on the latest and greatest, it may seem silly to want to preserve old, outdated versions of today's games for posterity. But the current nostalgic and research interest in games from the ’70s and ’80s shows just how important it is to try to save a complete record of today’s titles, as ephemeral as they sometimes are.

"I totally get that people look at this and say all of this game history stuff is navel-gazing bullshit... an irrelevant, wasteful, trivial topic,” Scott told Ars. “[But] mankind is poorer when you don't know your history, all of your history, and the culture is poorer for it. It doesn't matter if it's games or civil wars or highways or government machinations. If you don't have that historical context, you make poorer decisions, you make the same mistakes again and again, and you end up with an eternal present. You don't understand where things are and where they're going, because you're constantly in the now."

For players, this kind of automatic updating is a convenience. For historians, it's a disaster.
For players, this kind of automatic updating is a convenience. For historians, it's a disaster. Credit: reddit

And in today's game industry, being "constantly in the now" often means throwing out masses of current history without a thought. "I use FarmVille often as my go-to example of this because, like it or not, that game is historically significant and will be studied," gaming historian and Lost Levels creator Frank Cifaldi told Ars. "Keeping an offline game safe is pretty easy, but what do you do for FarmVille, a game that is constantly updated, to the point where Zynga manipulates it server-side? Do you try to take one daily snapshot of it? Is the FarmVille you can play right now actually FarmVille? What about the FarmVille that existed a month ago? What about the very first build of it? Is it even possible to preserve enough playable code to say that the entire experience that was FarmVille is safe?"

These days, it's not just Facebook games that are having their internal history slowly peeled away. "I was just talking to someone about Diablo, [and] he was saying how he kept Diablo II going, how the original version is his favorite to play," Jon-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, told Ars. "With Diablo III the game is very different [now] than the first version with all the updates that have been made to it. From a preservation point of view, are you collecting every version that's been created?"

"An analogy here is maybe to a piece of architecture," Dyson continued. "When you're seeking to preserve a historic house, there may be layers, it may have been lived in by many different people. Mount Vernon had been lived in by George Washington's descendants, so they made a decision to restore it to George Washington’s time and erase this later history. Do you make the same kind of decision with games?"

The death of “accidental ambient archiving”

Such historical restoration may not be easy with many modern titles. When updates are automatically pushed out and applied over the Internet every time you log on to a console or PC to play, those historical layers are erased en masse without a thought. Where patches may have once gone out via FTP sites, where they could be archived and studied, now the process is hidden. That's more convenient for the players, but it's the equivalent of a constant digital purge from a historian's point of view.

"For that convenience [of automatic updating], we lose a lot of what you might call accidental ambient archiving," Scott said. That's the kind of archiving that happens when players store copies of old cartridges or discs in their attic, where they're eventually recovered as a static record of the digital times. In the near future, it's going to be difficult to find people who held on to purely digital games on their hard drives and much harder still to find unaltered launch-day versions that haven't been overwritten by these automatic patches.

As an example of why this kind of early version archiving might be necessary, Scott came up with a theoretical case of a game featuring an enemy group logo that looks similar to that of a real-life terrorist group. After an outcry, the developer issues an automatic patch to replace the original logo with something more benign. That would be a PR win in the present, but a major loss from a future historian's perspective. "Now we have a revisioning of what happened in the world, and [it becomes] extremely difficult to point to this as an example of anything from cultural imperialism to the nature of politics," Scott said.

That problem will only become more common as games continue their seemingly unstoppable transition from static physical objects to ongoing services provided through a centralized server. "Eventually it's going to be… Skyrim 10 as an environment and you pay $14 a month for everything, and then Skyrim slowly changes over its lifetime,” Scott said. “How do you capture the earlier states? Preserving any idea of that is going to be very tough."

To an archivist like Jason Scott, this pile of CD-ROMs is a treasure trove. But what happens when software doesn't come on discs anymore?
To an archivist like Jason Scott, this pile of CD-ROMs is a treasure trove. But what happens when software doesn't come on discs anymore? Credit: Jason Scott

The original developers and publishers themselves may save copies of those “obsolete” versions of games, but most companies don't have the resources or the wherewithal to keep track of this kind of internal history in an exhaustive way. "There's no downside to them in destroying work product on the way to the next project," Scott said. He's heard stories at conferences of developers who, "when they finished the game, they just wiped the hard drive of the work machine and set it up for the next project. That's all that intermediate work, gone."

Convincing companies that this stuff is worth saving for posterity or sharing with an outside historian can be difficult. "Often when working with companies, it comes down to finding a passionate individual in a company who will work with you," Dag Spicer of the Computer History Museum said. He recalled efforts to track down early versions and source code for Mac Paint inside Apple. After he hit a dead end with the “official” channels, Spicer finally broke through when a friend of Steve Jobs put him in touch with the late Apple founder and CEO. "[Jobs] sent a one line e-mail saying it was a good idea, and it was done the next day," Spicer recalled. "Having an internal advocate is key."

Outside of that, Spicer said we may be reliant on lucky breaks to save these pieces of computer history from a "digital dark age." Researchers have already stumbled on old computers that have original versions of Windows that were just never updated and historically valuable prototypes that went home with engineers when companies went under. In a few decades, historians may end up searching for someone with an ancient iPhone who never bothered to click the "update" button on that launch-day version of FarmVille.

Breaking out of the hard drive prison

The inexorable transition away from physical media is also leading to situations where games end up trapped on a specific piece of hardware, where they can be hard to archive in the long term. A prominent example of this popped up quite recently, when Konami removed horror title P.T. from the PlayStation Store. That “playable teaser” is now only playable on PS4 units that previously downloaded the title, leading such systems to command heavily inflated prices in the secondhand market.

Having P.T. locked to a set number of specific hardware units is an untenable situation for preservationists, given the game's strange history and obvious historical interest. Archivists could try to obtain that original hardware and keep it in working order, but that becomes harder to do as time goes on.

"The NES is only about 30 years old. We’re talking about 100 years out—how many of them will be operating?" said Dr. Henry Lowood, curator for the History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. "Personally... I think the hardware super-specific solutions are dead ends for preservation. The kinds of equipment/hardware we have, the way they’re manufactured, just have a very small likelihood of surviving for super long periods of time.”

The only people who can play P.T. today are the ones who downloaded it before it was purged from Sony's servers.
The only people who can play P.T. today are the ones who downloaded it before it was purged from Sony's servers.

The problem of trapped games is only going to become more common as time goes on. Microsoft and Sony will eventually shut down the online stores for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, meaning the only copies of hundreds of download-only games on those services will be stuck on aging hard drives inside specific consoles. The entire catalog of Xbox Live Indie Games may become totally unplayable if Microsoft doesn’t remove those titles’ required online authentication check before shutting down those servers.

From a technical standpoint, hackers and tinkerers will probably eventually figure out a way to transfer these games off of their hard drive prisons and onto a form that can be more easily preserved and emulated on other hardware. "Historically, when something like this comes along, there is someone somewhere that has figured out a workaround, or downloaded something themselves, or thought of this before the system was brought down, or has a private server or something like that," Lowood said.

But the current state of the law makes this an uncertain proposition for an archivist. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on breaking any kind of digital rights protections means that interested institutions can’t risk pursuing methods for long-term preservation of these trapped titles. There has been a limited exception to this for “obsolete” software formats since back in 2003, but that’s not much help for planning how to capture current history.

"Because of the way DMCA and also corporate decisions have handled these situations, because institutions can’t legally work on this stuff, a library can’t grab a game [off its original console] or do something at the moment,' Lowood said. "We really can’t prepare for it, we can't analyze it, see what’s needed, if we were thinking about some sort of emulation solution or what kind of hardware is needed. We can’t even address the problem, because their decision to remove the game is binding as far as any sort of cultural institution is concerned. We don’t have a legal way to sort of work around that. That's a real big problem."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is leading the effort to fix part of this legal block by asking the Copyright Office for a specific exemption to allow for researchers to circumvent protections on “abandoned” games that have to check in with defunct centralized servers. "What we're asking for is, when the publisher no longer supports the game, that the DMCA should not get in the way of people modifying their copy of the game so it will talk to a different server," said EFF Staff Attorney Mitch Stoltz.

The game industry is fighting back against these efforts, saying they would encourage piracy. But Stoltz says that a limited DMCA exemption doesn’t undo existing copyright law, which provides much harsher penalties than the DMCA. He also points out that exemptions for certain uses of DVD and Netflix film footage have yet to bring down the film industry. "Circumvention for these limited purposes, modifying your games or consoles for this particular purpose, is not going to harm [the publishers],” Stoltz said. “In fact it's going to just increase goodwill between the game publishers and the consumers.”

World of Warcraft re-enactors?

Playing an archived copy of World of Warcraft in 50 years could be a pretty lonely experience...
Playing an archived copy of World of Warcraft in 50 years could be a pretty lonely experience... Credit: Sambiglyon

Saving games that get automatically updated or trapped by DRM is one thing. Preserving the entire social context around today's online games is another entirely. In 50 years, people may still be able to play today’s "early stage" versions of World of Warcraft through some archived client installation and an emulated server. But the game they play will be quite different from the one millions have experienced over the last ten years because of changes to the underlying social context surrounding it.

"For multiplayer games, even if you can play the game, if there's no community to play it with, how are you going to experience the game as it was?" Dyson asked. "How do we play World of Warcraft 50 years from now if no one [else] is playing World of Warcraft?"

For situations like this, historians say preserving contemporary ephemera that captures the current experience of playing the game might be more important than preserving the actual client/server code itself. "There's a very important role to be played by documentation of the software that doesn’t require the software to be running," Lowood said. That means saving things like press accounts, screenshots, "Let's Play" videos, and other bits of the lived experience of players. ICHEG’s massive collection of thousands of video game magazines goes to this kind of effort.

"If you want to know how the game was played in 2014, you will need documentation about how the game was played in 2014," Lowood said. "Having the game available to you in 2064 so that you can play it yourself won't tell you anything about that. It just tells you how you, 50 years later in a completely different environment, will play that game."

Dyson said that capturing the essence of a massively multiplayer game is similar in some ways to trying to capture the history of a sport, which goes well beyond maintaining records of the rules of play. "How do you preserve a record of baseball? You might collect written reports about games, videotape of gameplay. You're not keeping alive the game itself, but you're keeping alive a record of it," he said.

But Scott has a more radical idea for truly preserving these online worlds as a sort of living history, Williamsburg-style. Maybe in a few decades, Scott said, we'll see "the colonial village model, where you hire people to walk around like 1990s assholes" in emulated versions of early MMOs.

"We might eventually see people whose job is to play older games and speak in language that is accurate to the period, and use techniques that were popular then to take you on," he said. "I don't think that's that farfetched an idea... not for something that has had such an impact... where a person could play an older version of Warcraft with people who are in their 40s and 50s as they used to play it in their teens."

Listing image: Aurich vs Sierra

Photo of Kyle Orland
Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
116 Comments