Video game keepers keep game culture step by step

Games are the key to understanding modern culture, but creating game archives can be surprisingly difficult.

How much does the story cost? In May, we received an answer to this question - at least for the world of video games: $ 14,000.

That was the winning bid for the prototype of the canceled game developed for the Famicom console - that was the name of the Nintendo Entertainment System released in the eighties with pixel graphics in Japan. Game Indy: The Magical Kid was based on a series of Japanese books "Choose Your Adventure". The game came out a few preliminary reviews in magazines, but eventually had to give up, and again it appeared only at the auction - a significant event for the community keepers history of video games.

But there was a problem. One of the community leaders was Nintendo’s conservation team - Forest of Illusion; they hoped to get the game for a $ 7,000 total effort, but the winning bid was unexpectedly made by a private collector who was not about to save Indy for posterity.

The co-founder of Forest of Illusion, known under the pseudonym togemet2 (he asked not to use his real name, because sometimes you have to slightly violate the law in preserving games for history because of copyrights and other problems), told OneZero magazine that the loss of the game has become for them a surprise. (Those who study history and create archives do not necessarily seek to sell or at least distribute versions of games they have saved on the Internet, but they create unauthorized reproduction, which often technically violates copyright law.)

Translated toAlconost


Source: The Strong

“This is our culture. Losing what has allowed us to become who we are, we doom ourselves to repeating our mistakes. ”

“Unfortunately, our bid was killed in the last minutes of the auction,” says togemet2. According to him, in an anonymous message sent to a Japanese fan site, the buyer said that he bought the game in order to prevent the distribution of reproductions, and that he would protect it as a treasure of Japan. Togemet2 added that if this is true, then it is highly likely that the game will be lost forever.


The game preservation movement seeks to document the past and save video games for future generations - as an art form. Game history experts are constantly forced to look for new ways to store materials and switch to new media as technology develops. In a sense, it is much more complicated than preserving books and works of art. For older games, a painstaking process of digitization may be required - to convert the information stored on the cartridges into files readable by modern computers; new games on platforms such as Steam can do without physical media at all.

“We finally realized that video games are not just passive entertainment projects,” says Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Video Game History Foundation (a non-profit organization that catalogs and digitizes games). “This is our culture. Losing what has allowed us to become who we are, we doom ourselves to repeating our mistakes. If we don’t understand well enough how we ended up where we are now, we miss a lot. ”


John-Paul Dyson, director of The Strong's International Electronic Game History Center in Rochester, NY, explains that such archival work makes it possible to track the actual act of the game. He believes that the study and preservation of such acts is an important way to understand the development of culture.

“The game is a universal occupation. People play throughout life, says Dyson. - Therefore, the game penetrates almost all aspects of our existence. Video games, in a sense, are the newest form of games. ”

Of course, unlike, for example, artwork, in the archives of video games you need to keep full interactive functionality - as a rule, this means the ability to click buttons to launch certain actions on the screen that the game responds to. And it’s not always enough to hide somewhere an old cartridge with a Super Nintendo console and a TV. It may seem to us that electronic data is a constant phenomenon, but certain physical media, as Cifaldi explains, “literally rot”: the materials and chemicals used to record data deteriorate, which partially destroys the stored information. Therefore, to save games, it is important to archive files on such media by copying them into easily readable reproducible formats.

Depending on what they seek to preserve, various actions are taken. There are devices and systems that can digitally copy games. “Usually we transfer data from one format to another,” says Cifaldi. - This is an ordinary, simple process that is unlikely to surprise: there is a DVD with data; I insert it into the drive on the computer and shoot the image, which in the future will be stored already on the hard drive. "


Cifaldi has to work with many physical media, including old cartridges and magazines. Source: Frank Cifaldi

Tokyo-based software developer Byuu (a pseudonym used for privacy reasons), which preserves old video games, uses specially designed programs to analyze and reverse engineer old slot machines so that old games can run on modern computers. (And again: such an activity is not always legal.) Byuu is working on documentation of printed circuit boards for Super Nintendo gaming cartridges; he told OneZero authors that he currently has 1,200 games documented and 1,500 in his plans.

Byuu uses a special device that allows you to "analyze all the memory circuits on the printed circuit boards of games for SNES" - this makes it possible to save more information. Thanks to this approach, it was possible to discover interesting facts from the history of video games that would otherwise be unknown - for example, important features of the Rockman X cartridge (this game was released on the American market in 1993 under the name Mega Man X ).

“It turned out that there were soldered wires on the cartridge [they were usually used to quickly make changes to the circuit], with the help of which, at the last minute, errors that arose due to the use of copy protection were corrected,” Byuu shares his find. In fact, the Capcom developer fixed the problem by adding the necessary wires. Byuu continues: “Such details were not generally known and, of course, were not described publicly in the context of SNES emulation. Such details affect the emulation of the game and are very important for its understanding and recreation. In addition, this in itself is an interesting historical fact. ”

Such attention to detail may seem excessive, but the details matter. Playing modern editions of Mega Man X ( version for iPhone, for example), you do not necessarily see an authentic representation of the original work. One can draw an analogy: it’s like a high-quality print of Claude Monet's Water Lilies , which may be good for the average viewer, but it has no texture, which is important for a more discriminating audience.

After receiving a digital copy of the game, the creators of the archive scan other game materials, such as boxes, manuals and even articles in the media - all this has to do with understanding the cultural context in which the game originated. For example, the historian, assistant professor of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Carly Kocurek, explores the phenomenon of “games for girls”: in the nineties, several developers, primarily Purple Moon and HeR Interactive, created games specifically for girls. To find out how these games sold, Kotsurek has to dig into old gaming magazines.

“I look through page after page, run through the headlines, and then take photos of the materials that need to be saved,” says Kotsurek. “Then I upload them to Dropbox, after which I arrange them for some time in a way that is convenient for me.”

Cifaldi also had a chance to work with Game Informer , a video game magazine that has been published since 1991: Frank archived documents that had been in the publishing house for years: press releases, photographs, and image slides.

“The process of putting it into a physical archive is easy,” says Cifaldi. - “But here is the digitization ... We had to organize a data storage network in the editorial office of Game Informer magazine . We have a network storage capacity of 20 TB, and the day is near when there will be no space left. ”


Video game archives hosted at The Strong's International Electronic Game History Center in Rochester, New York. Source: The Strong

Digital revolution

No matter how complicated the archiving of materials on physical media is, it is simpler than some of the tasks that have to be faced today. Many video games coming out now are distributed only in digital form: no cartridges or discs. They are only online as long as the publisher considers it appropriate; they may have digital copyright protection, which only after accessing the server allows you to start the game. And if the server is stopped, the game may be lost forever. In addition, copyright laws make it difficult to preserve such games for history.

“In the case of more modern games that do not have physical copies, this is generally a nightmare,” Kotsurek explains. - A lot of different interdependencies, and companies now have much more control over the game. And getting around this is very difficult. ”

Dyson holds the same view; he did not expect so many difficulties associated with online games: “The game on the phone does not have physical media. Even more difficulties arise if the components of the game depend on an external server managed by the company. What if the company decides to close the server? ”

“Many digital archives related materials come from pirates.”

It happens that saving the game for the archive becomes simply impossible. Because of intellectual property problems, many games simply cannot be saved legally. Sometimes the International Center for the History of Electronic Games manages to negotiate with the publisher, record and save the gameplay - but not real game files.

This is where the "pirates" help.

“Many digital archives related material came from pirates,” says Cifaldi. For example, before Blizzard announced in November 2017 its intention to release World of Warcraft Classic, some enterprising users restored old versions of the game (before the release of add-ons) on their own servers. Frank continues: “Someone makes pirated copies of files and places them on the network. However, as far as I know, the "pirates" are not very active in relation to games for smartphones. "

With smartphones - their difficulties. In 2017, Apple stopped supporting 32-bit applications in its App Store. Applications for which developers did not release a 64-bit version disappeared from the store - and there were thousands of them. Moreover, they include many games that will no longer be available as cultural artifacts - a kind of “cultural black hole” will appear, as the game designer Adam Gahramani put it in a VentureBeat article in June 2017.

To combat this, initiatives are emerging that are aimed at bringing the work of video game history specialists and archival architects to ordinary people, without treading on unreliable grounds for violating copyright laws. Kotsurek is working on a “zine” Save Point , which covers the history of games and their research.

On the page of her already fully funded Kickstarter project, she writes : “Many (including me!) Study the history of video games, but in most cases the result is journal articles or books aimed at an academic audience.” Its purpose is to present in an accessible way the same materials to people interested in the gaming industry and to provide an opportunity to look at the history of games.

“I don’t think that history necessarily influences the future, but it defines the present very precisely. The history of games can tell a lot about everyday life, the history of technology and economics, as well as the change of ideas about childhood and productivity, ”says Kotsurek.

And be sure: there’s no phrase “game over” in the dictionary of video game keepers.

About the translator

Translation of the article was done in Alconost.

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