Are games to be lost in time?

[Morpheus Kitami]

Christ, the overdramaticization in this thread. How many of you have actually played something in the last year that has a realistic chance of disappearing? I'm not talking about games like Baldur's Gate or anything else you can buy in a store now. Those aren't disappearing anytime soon, not now, not in the near future, and not in the future it's public domain and everyone has a hard drive in which having Baldur's Gate on it is the same as having a text file today. The games like Baldur's Gate which are on platforms which are frequently distributed as part of a set are not disappearing. Most 20th century games are not disappearing unless we have a massive technological fault. They're simply too small, too easily redistributed and frequently too pointless for developers to really care about. Nintendo may go after their stuff, but they're the exception, not the rule. Even for systems like the Apple II and C64, people are dumping random floppies they get and we're finding games that people weren't even aware were lost to begin with. How many of you can say you're in a position like that? That you're genuine want to play some game that's currently lost?

MMOs are interesting in this, since it's not really the game itself people pine after, but the experience. In an era before everyone would view looking up the information of every game beforehand as a matter of course, since actually playing a game is secondary to the experience. But I admit I could be discounting them since I never really played any. This does tie into something that might be lost to time though, secondary information on games. We enjoy playing games blind, but we never think about games that need some of that secondary stuff to be more enjoyable. Bethesda games with mods, patches for games with awful bugs, like Myth II, or walkthroughs for games with particularly obnoxious things in them. No one really thinks to archive a lot of this stuff, I know that one of my favorite modders for Morrowind has a lot of stuff lost over the shift between sites because he stopped making mods after a while and never moved his stuff elsewhere. That is the more concerning issue, since everyone assumes places like GameFAQs or NexusMods, which seem on shaky ground, will exist forever.

 

[mondblut]

How many of you can say you're in a position like that? That you're genuine want to play some game that's currently lost?

I still fucking miss the AOL NWN. And no, the offline beta without saving (sic!) doesn't cut it.

I'm sure there's a fair amount of late 90s games that are next to impossible to run now. Like that Braveheart game. Not even WinXP VM did the job.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

An emulator cannot replicate the soft glow of a CRT monitor.
Or having to wait for something to load for 5 minutes (ok, it can, but who would put up with this nowadays?).
Or having no internet with all the answers in the world.

Or being 16 again.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Honestly, I would dare say that the situation now is less dire than before.
Late 90s/early 2000s, things were FAR more dire. There was a serious threat of games being lost around that time. I think what saved A LOT of games were efforts like Home of the Underdogs.
HotU and similar sites, not only helped preserve games, but also showed people that there is money in preserving and selling old games in accessible forms on modern systems.

In the case of Nintendo, yeah they're massive cunts. The only solution there is piracy.

 

[Beastro]

Lots of LPs and the like lost to the ages as well. It's fucking criminal that some awesome stuff was lost off twitch when they decided to start purging VODs. Footage from tourneys, speedruns, world first achievements in various things... The suits obviously give zero fucks. If anything, they prefer if people couldn't even access information about older games, because the more perspective you have, the harder you are to scam with a shitty product. We certainly see the same shit going on in the real world, with tons of consumerist garbage being sold to people only due to ignorance of cheaper, more effective products, services or techniques.

The only saving grace is that information storage is so damned cheap that it's entirely plausible for dozens of weirdos out there to have entire libraries of game roms and the like. There's torrents of entire NES libraries out there, including super weird crap like beta versions and bootleg games. Though it's hard to imagine us getting to that point with games once you get to the DVD era and games are multiple gigs a piece.

Steam is going to go down someday too, and take with it literally thousands of games that were never popular enough to bother cracking, so they won't be on a torrent anywhere. To be fair, plenty of that will be literal scam games and the like, but there's tons of awesome indie games out there with probably less than 10,000 copies sold. It's doubtful anyone has a library holding all of them.

It's ok if we lose Sex with Hitler to the sands of time.

Seriously.

Think about history books centuries from now being like:

"Hitler and the Nazi regime were also responsible for the deliberate killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war. In addition, 28.7 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of military action in the European theatre. The number of civilians killed during World War II was unprecedented in warfare, and the casualties constitute the deadliest conflict in history. By the early 21st Century, however, Hitler had become an integral part of "Meme Culture" with many interactive electronic "video games" being made about him where people could do a variety of things involving Hitler, from having intercourse with him to becoming a sniper and shooting him in his testicle."

 

[Beastro]

My first games were a DOS port of Bomberman, Warcraft 1 and Doom.

And look at you now. You wish doom upon quarter of the world, Ukraine to be bombed, and are generally a(n internet) warmonger.

Uncanny, especially when you consider the next batch of games I played which were command and conquer, red alert, sim city 2000, civilization 2, master of orion and age of empires. Truly the games we play in our formative years form us.

I seriously so not understand why people play cooperative games like Settlers of Catan.

What is the point of a non-competitive game?

I remember playing Banished years ago and was pissed when it got boring that I couldn't kill people, especially given how population growth could get out of hand if you didn't obsessively manage your housing construction from the start. It prevented you from pruning back your people to allow for better growth. At least Sim City allows you to build up a city and then unleash hell on it.

 

[Damned Registrations]

How many of you can say you're in a position like that? That you're genuine want to play some game that's currently lost?

There are custom maps for Broodwar and WC3 that I played which I'll never be able to play again, because nobody gave enough of a fuck to create an archive of them. There's one for WC3 in particular I'd really, really love to see again- it was an incredibly detailed RPG free for all inside a dungeon, with really creative custom classes that each had their own unique goals and victory conditions. I've never seen anything quite like it before or since. I think only me, the author, and maybe about 200 other people ever played it more than once; it was one of those games that was too complex for people to be comfortable with on the first try and was too original for people to shift over to it from something similar. I can't even recall the name of the thing because it was something extremely generic like 'dungeon arena.' I'd spend 1000$ to play that again.

20-30 years from now, I expect the same will be true of some of the games currently in my steam library. Probably something like Transcendence or Golden Treasure, some game with less than 600 reviews despite being an absolute gem. There's a torrent for Golden Treasure on pirate bay with a single seed listed, and a copy of it uploaded 5 days after with 0. The one with a seed doesn't seem to actually have a seed though, maybe he's online for an hour each week or hosts 30000 torrents and allows 3 uploads at a time. And what happens when that guy never seeds it again? He's uploaded torrents for Legends of Amberland too, a whole bunch of different versions of it. He's the only one. There's 1800 PAGES of torrents uploaded by that user. A ton of the oldest ones aren't being seeded any more already. I doubt he'll still be around in 30 years.

After Gaben dies, there's a good chance steam gets sold to some asshole that decides games older than 3 years old shouldn't be on the platform any more unless someone pays them a fee to keep it there, or some similar scheme. Some kid will ask me about games where they can play as a dragon, I'll remember that game, and it won't exist anymore.

 

[DemonKing]

What is the point of a non-competitive game?

My brother is a complete asshat constantly accusing you of cheating, misinterpreting rules and being generally obnoxious if you play competitive boardgames with him, so I now only play co-op games with him because as long as you're on his side he's at least tolerable.

Back to the topic, I agree that many games even if playable won't be able to summon the feeling of what it was like to experience a full MMORPG server, or fire up Wolfenstein for the first time and jump in fright when a Nazi ambushed you around a corner, or put in a 3DFX card into your PC and marvel at the difference etc but it's the same when I try to explain to my kids how awesome it was when I was 7 and that Star Destroyer emerged from the top of the screen in the cinema and my jaw hit the ground whereas they have only seen it on the small screen at home.

On that note, even if emulators don't exist for certain titles in the future, there will still likely be video recordings of people playing (and reacting) to titles accessible going forwards which may be the only way to "access" a lot of titles in the future.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Seriously.

Think about history books centuries from now being like:

"Hitler and the Nazi regime were also responsible for the deliberate killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war. In addition, 28.7 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of military action in the European theatre. The number of civilians killed during World War II was unprecedented in warfare, and the casualties constitute the deadliest conflict in history. By the early 21st Century, however, Hitler had become an integral part of "Meme Culture" with many interactive electronic "video games" being made about him where people could do a variety of things involving Hitler, from having intercourse with him to becoming a sniper and shooting him in his testicle."

Shameful for that history book to have neglected both Springtime for Hitler and Hitler on Ice.

 

[None]

There are custom maps for Broodwar and WC3 that I played which I'll never be able to play again, because nobody gave enough of a fuck to create an archive of them.

You'd be surprised, if you look long enough there's a good chance you'll find what you're after. I say this because I've been through the same situation with both Starcraft maps and some really obscure RPG Maker 2000 games from my youth. There are sites that serve as giant repositories, albeit not as organized as you'd like, that you can file through. Another way is to just start watching people on youtube who play, in your case, WC3 RPGs. You'll find what you need or it may help jog your memory.

 

[taxalot]

Games will not be lost in time.

Some might, possibly the online activated ones that aren't reverse enginereed.

The rest of them ? While they are harder to back up and preserve than movie, music and books, they also gather a much harder , bigger, devoted and nerdier fan base.

I remember the first wave of being worried about game preservation was when moving to Windows OSes that relied on DOS.
Nowadays, not only we have DosBOX but you can actually pretty much run anything old on a fucking web browser after a google search.

I expect similar situations to happen for today games.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

There are custom maps for Broodwar and WC3 that I played which I'll never be able to play again, because nobody gave enough of a fuck to create an archive of them. There's one for WC3 in particular I'd really, really love to see again- it was an incredibly detailed RPG free for all inside a dungeon, with really creative custom classes that each had their own unique goals and victory conditions. I've never seen anything quite like it before or since. I think only me, the author, and maybe about 200 other people ever played it more than once; it was one of those games that was too complex for people to be comfortable with on the first try and was too original for people to shift over to it from something similar. I can't even recall the name of the thing because it was something extremely generic like 'dungeon arena.' I'd spend 1000$ to play that again.

Perhaps you are referring to Angel Arena? Although it wasn't *that* complex. Still one of my favorites that I used to play over LAN with friends at an internet cafe back in the day. Good times.

 

[Beastro]

How many of you can say you're in a position like that? That you're genuine want to play some game that's currently lost?

I'd spend 1000$ to play that again.

Like great heroes, do not mourn the lost games, try to be thankful that they existed in the first place for you to enjoy.

 

[Serus]

Seriously.

Think about history books centuries from now being like:

"Hitler and the Nazi regime were also responsible for the deliberate killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war. In addition, 28.7 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of military action in the European theatre. The number of civilians killed during World War II was unprecedented in warfare, and the casualties constitute the deadliest conflict in history. By the early 21st Century, however, Hitler had become an integral part of "Meme Culture" with many interactive electronic "video games" being made about him where people could do a variety of things involving Hitler, from having intercourse with him to becoming a sniper and shooting him in his testicle."

Shameful for that history book to have neglected both Springtime for Hitler and Hitler on Ice.

and

Also WW2 "centuries from now" still being the "deadliest conflict in history" is an amusing thought.

 

[Damned Registrations]

There are custom maps for Broodwar and WC3 that I played which I'll never be able to play again, because nobody gave enough of a fuck to create an archive of them.

You'd be surprised, if you look long enough there's a good chance you'll find what you're after. I say this because I've been through the same situation with both Starcraft maps and some really obscure RPG Maker 2000 games from my youth. There are sites that serve as giant repositories, albeit not as organized as you'd like, that you can file through. Another way is to just start watching people on youtube who play, in your case, WC3 RPGs. You'll find what you need or it may help jog your memory.

I appreciate the thought, but it was way too obscure for that. I actually went to those sites like a decade ago trying to find it, no dice (though I did find some other cool shit I was feeling nostalgic for, like the old broodwar rpg maps like Lythia and the forgotten caves and one of the better open world rpg maps) Part of why I wish it were still around is just how unique a lot of it's design elements were- everyone started as a random class in a random position within the labyrinth, which itself had a lot of randomly generated stuff in it, along with some fixed stuff required for certain classes. You only had one life- when you died you were out of the game, so it had this great feeling of constant paranoia, since you never knew who else might be near you, or how strong they might be in combat. And by the same token, even injuring someone and fleeing might be enough to get them killed by another player or a wandering monster or something. It was great fun, but even back when it was being updated, I'd have to sit around for 20 minutes to get a game of it going, and pretty much never saw it being hosted except by the author.

Perhaps you are referring to Angel Arena? Although it wasn't *that* complex. Still one of my favorites that I used to play over LAN with friends at an internet cafe back in the day. Good times.

Nah but that was a cool series of maps. Some of the latter ones were just stuffed with secrets and weird shit that involved collecting hidden keys and fighting secret bosses and shit. Though for the hero arena stuff I preferred the ones where you made your own custom hero, and Advent of the Zenith for the dota clones was just amazing. There was a cool Fate/Stay Night arena map too that had really varied heroes, shit was fun.

 

[Vic]

I haven't read the thread but there are autists like Rincewind who will make sure you can still play your favorite DOS games in 2524.

 

[NecroLord]

Extremely relevant article:
https://gamehistory.org/87percent/

First of all, most devs and publishers do not give the slightest shit about their own creations. Case in point: Square/Capcom/Konami losing the code of their old games and then later being forced to either rework the entire thing from the ground up or release Silent Hill with comic sans on every sign.

Second, most young gamers are completely allergic to old games unlike with other mediums where you will never see someone reject Michael Jackson's music because it's ''too old''.

Third, the constant generation switching of Windows/consoles is a huge problem for the future of videogame preservation. Most companies abandoned their games form older hardware and there is absolutely no way of getting other than hoping the one brazilian guy that still has them decides to upload a torrent.

Fourth, Nintendo specifically has gone very far with trying to destroy any site or any person that is tangentially related to Nintendo stuff. Remember Emuparadise? That was a dark day for anyone who cares about videogames.

Fifth, the Stop Killing Games initiative completely and utterly failed. Most people do not care that nearly all multiplayer games are forever lost in time if they aren't ultra popular. Even worse, the industry constantly replaces the ones that already exist for a slightly different sequel.

Sixth, the entire era of live service games will one day disappear and leave a huge hole in videogame history. Regardless of whether you like them or not, this is bound to happen.

Seventh, they are trying to destroy The Internet Archive right now, another blow to gaming among many other things.

Overall: be glad that you were born just in time to experience the golden age of gaming before it is erased from the records.

Goddamn, that's quite depressing.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I'm sure there's a fair amount of late 90s games that are next to impossible to run now. Like that Braveheart game. Not even WinXP VM did the job.

Requiring an older version of an OS is different than being lost. A lot of Windows 95/98 games are finicky, but then, that was true back then too.

There are custom maps for Broodwar and WC3 that I played which I'll never be able to play again, because nobody gave enough of a fuck to create an archive of them. There's one for WC3 in particular I'd really, really love to see again- it was an incredibly detailed RPG free for all inside a dungeon, with really creative custom classes that each had their own unique goals and victory conditions. I've never seen anything quite like it before or since. I think only me, the author, and maybe about 200 other people ever played it more than once; it was one of those games that was too complex for people to be comfortable with on the first try and was too original for people to shift over to it from something similar. I can't even recall the name of the thing because it was something extremely generic like 'dungeon arena.' I'd spend 1000$ to play that again.

Like I said, mods and secondary stuff are more likely to be at risk than the games themselves. But, Starcraft and Warcraft will never be at risk themselves.

20-30 years from now, I expect the same will be true of some of the games currently in my steam library. Probably something like Transcendence or Golden Treasure, some game with less than 600 reviews despite being an absolute gem. There's a torrent for Golden Treasure on pirate bay with a single seed listed, and a copy of it uploaded 5 days after with 0. The one with a seed doesn't seem to actually have a seed though, maybe he's online for an hour each week or hosts 30000 torrents and allows 3 uploads at a time. And what happens when that guy never seeds it again? He's uploaded torrents for Legends of Amberland too, a whole bunch of different versions of it. He's the only one. There's 1800 PAGES of torrents uploaded by that user. A ton of the oldest ones aren't being seeded any more already. I doubt he'll still be around in 30 years.

Yeah, it is a shame that the only way to distribute data through the internet is a torrent. If only someone made a way of distributing stuff directly. Such a man would be very wise indeed.

After Gaben dies, there's a good chance steam gets sold to some asshole that decides games older than 3 years old shouldn't be on the platform any more unless someone pays them a fee to keep it there, or some similar scheme. Some kid will ask me about games where they can play as a dragon, I'll remember that game, and it won't exist anymore.

A predictable event and you plan on doing nothing about it. You know that you too, can contribute to saving video games, right? It's not some super secret club nobody else has access to. But I guess you would prefer to just sit in a corner, crying "woe is me, woe is me", as you let the things you love die. I'm glad that not everyone has that small-minded, defeatist attitude you have.

 

[mondblut]

I'm sure there's a fair amount of late 90s games that are next to impossible to run now. Like that Braveheart game. Not even WinXP VM did the job.

Requiring an older version of an OS is different than being lost.

And where are you gonna install that older version of an OS, a dishwasher?

 

[Damned Registrations]

A predictable event and you plan on doing nothing about it. You know that you too, can contribute to saving video games, right?

I mean, I could download my entire steam library and hope whatever I keep it on doesn't get lost. I lost a hard drive with a ton of shit on it a few years ago. Shit happens. RIP my music library curated over the years.

Will that even work if it isn't cracked? What's the point of me having the game if I can't share it with anyone? Hell, even for my own purposes, I assume once you change hardware for your steam install it needs to do a handshake to authorize games again or some shit.

The idea that this problem is already solved because random people will archive whatever they like is retarded. We need real archives, and they need to be protected by law and funded to work properly and not vanish when some guy with the keys gets hit by a bus. That's never going to happen due to corporate interests.

 

[gurugeorge]

Time passes and some works are immemorial. That's why today we discuss Socrates etc.

Nonetheless, while many book writers released their works even (initially) in dozens of copies, they eventually survived, because it's easy to copy letters.

Music? Well, it was first copied with a simple script, then with recording technology.

Movies were kinda similar, but skipping the script tech (otherwise it was a theatre), they could be recorded and then displayed - with better or worse quality - but overall they remained the same.

Games are different though because they are made with specific OS and hardware, which could be emulated but it seems to get harder and harder nowadays.

Do you think games are the most doomed entertainment (of currently known)? Do you think Baldur's Gate or Darkands will be playable in 100 years? I have my doubts. We already struggle with them. For example, Polish version of Baldur's Gate (non-EE) you can get on GOG has alpha/beta version of TotSC and most expansion quests except main one don't work, while original CD version had all quests working just fine.

I think some games will be loved enough that people will make them work one way or another. I should think there are enough copies of things in different storage media to keep it all going with emuations or updates that keep the key experience (like the recent System Shock homage).

If you were thinking in terms of some kind of apocalypse when everything is lost then yeah, a lot of games will be lost forever (though a few may survive). But if you reckon that there will be some thread of continuity of civilization going into the future then at every stage (every few decades) people will make an effort to "refresh" the best ones.

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

The notion that there is anything like 100% preservation of any kind of media is weird. There are huge numbers of books that are lost forever. Paintings and statues get destroyed, music is forgotten. The old stuff we still remember is more the exception than the rule, and sometimes it's only remembered by happenstance. There are songs from the early 20th century I know about only because they got used in cartoons.

Video games will, at best, be similar in this regard.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Honestly, I would dare say that the situation now is less dire than before.
Late 90s/early 2000s, things were FAR more dire. There was a serious threat of games being lost around that time. I think what saved A LOT of games were efforts like Home of the Underdogs.
HotU and similar sites, not only helped preserve games, but also showed people that there is money in preserving and selling old games in accessible forms on modern systems.

In the case of Nintendo, yeah they're massive cunts. The only solution there is piracy.

Late ‘90s and early 2000s there wasn’t any threat of old games being lost. Everything was pretty readily available, the used game market hadn’t yet hit the goofy outrageous prices they would in the 2010s, arcade machines were still around, and PC gaming was still in that nice place where you could pretty easily install everything that came before without jumping through hoops to get it to run properly.

 

[Faarbaute]

They will be lost to time, for the reason that there will not be enough interest in them for what they are, as complete works, in their own right. Hipsters will not be enough to carry them forward as cultural artifacts. They will be rendered both technologically and culturally obselete, and then discarded.

It's already happening.

 

[Moonrise]

The Iliad and Odyssey exist only because of an evil D&D party whose face/bard wanted to aggrandize himself after lying his ass off to take control of Athens, and he was bffs with a crystal charlatan (in the vein of a modern hippie mystical shop owner) who sold the Greeks out, his own people, to Xerxes because, naturally, they punished him for constantly running grifts. Think about that. The oral tradition of the Greeks that we think of as foundational texts of Western society. And why do we have them? Because of dick ass thieves. The more things change, eh? We'll have games too only because of thieves. RIP Pisistratus and Onomacritus, you wonderful bastards.