When eShops Close: The World of Video Game Preservation

Help promote this video by retweeting twitter.com/MRIXRT/status/1539669903803817990 Thank you so much to my patrons. Notes on this video in this comment Notes: -While I believe the interviews are valuable and help tell the story, they are always at the end of a chapter unless directly related to the subject at hand. You can safely skip to the next chapter if you do not care about interviews.

“One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

I personally think that arcade game preservation is pretty underrated. It's arguably one of the more consistent forms of preservation thanks to stuff like Arcade Archives, yet people don't talk about it that much.

When it comes to games that got multiple versions; I think all versions deserve being preserved. From the perspective of preserving history, it doesn't make sense to throw out something unique just because something somewhat different existed before or after it when you have the choice to preserve it; with that kind of thinking, you might as well not preserve history at all and just stick with what's the present.

Part of the problem with "piracy" is that we've let the definition become muddled. Originally, media "piracy" meant unauthorised and unlicensed selling of physical media. e.g. video taping a movie in a movie theater and then selling copies of the tapes. We've allowed file sharing, unauthorized and unlicensed free distribution of digital media, to become not only equivalent but definitively a part of "piracy". But morally file sharing and piracy are not the same thing. Piracy in most cases can be categorized as a type of theft because the person buying the pirated media has the money to do so. So it is likely depriving the original rights-holder a sale of the product. File sharing is different because there are a lot of completely legitimate reasons for doing so, the law be damned. Perhaps the person torrenting the files is in a country where they cannot purchase the product in any form. Or the product is not available for sale. Or the product will never be available for sale again. Or the product was never available for sale (prototypes and such). Or it's not actually a product that can be bought, but is still under copyright for some reason. Or my copy was defective and I can't get a replacement without torrenting it. Or the publisher attempted to replace all legitimate licensed copies with an inferior version. Or the current publishers come along ten years later and censor the remaster because of their political agenda. Or the current publishers just refuse to republish the product in question. And in none of these cases is money being exchanged. Alternately, we could all wait for everything to become public domain. Remind me again how long that takes? At least eighty years after the "death of the author"? So like I said: the law be damned.

Game preservation sort of fascinates me. Video games are not like other mediums, like movies or books where you can just easily keep a record of it. Games have a mixture of code and assets designed to work within certain digital environments that can become difficult to replicate as time goes on. However, I think one of the biggest misconceptions I see around game preservation is that physical media is the most effective form of preserving games. Sure, it's the easiest form of preservation, but you're really only preserving the game for yourself. Game consoles, PCs, and game discs will eventually degrade over time, stop functioning, and their only value will be as artifacts for people to look at. There's a lot of hurdles when it comes to preserving games, but I see the biggest one as being DRM. I don't think there's an industry that's as strict about copy protection as video games are. Sure, the music industry gives games a run for their money, but you can still easily access most music files and copy them. I believe that if you can't gain access to the files of something and copy that thing, you're going to have a very hard time preserving it for future generations to see. Piracy is a very nuanced issue and people's opinions on it may vary, but it cannot be denied that it is the most effective form of game preservation (please note that I'm not saying that you should go and pirate every game in existence). It gives the general public the most direct access to game files to be shared and kept around for years to come. What's required to preserve games can bring people out of their comfort zone and into more legal issues than any other medium, and that's why I think there's been so many debates over things like emulation over the years, even though it's basically necessary for game preservation. Video games are still a fairly young medium, and it should be no surprise that corporations don't see the value in preserving them as much as other mediums. This happened when film was still a young medium. There are so many films from the early years of the medium that are just lost to time because the companies that produced them never saw any value in preserving them. I think it's unfortunate that we'll never be able to see most of those movies ever again, but it just goes to show that corporate mindsets are at odds with preservation. I am not inherently against remasters and remakes either (The RE2 remake was one of my favorite games of 2019), but companies only produce these when they see value in doing so, not to preserve anything out of the goodness of their hearts. If we truly wish to preserve games, we need to take matters into our own hands to a certain degree. Video games are possibly the most challenging type of media to preserve, and for some people the struggle of preserving many games may not seem worth the time, effort and legal issues required. I believe that it's important that we preserve games for historical purposes, but I don't necessarily blame some people for turning a blind eye to it. Actual game preservation is a legally grey area and is rarely ever thankful because of that. Game preservation often lacks in easy or quick solutions, so if you think it's worth it, you may have to accept some measures that are outside of your comfort zone, and that's the main problem with it.

I'd say yes, but officially? The Games Industry has done a terrible job preserving a lot of games. Japan in particular, as they love to throw away or lose the original source codes. Recent example, Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2. Microsoft made a good attempt with their backwards compatibility system on Xbox One X and Xbox Series X, but they are no longer updating it. Sony's classic game lineup for Plus Premium is a joke. And Nintendo is well, Nintendo.

Thank you so much for asking me to be a part of this, i might not be the biggest gamer but you did help me realize how important games have been for me throughout my lifetime 🤗

It's a shame you don't have more subscribers. I don't think your current amount reflects the well written, long-form video essays that plenty of people like me enjoy. Hope you get the recognition you deserve

Just going off the title alone- Yes absolutely. Just discovered blue Maxima flashpoint and having a blast playing all these minigames from my childhood. I hope that's mentioned in here somewhere, that community has done an outstanding job.

Personally ran into a problem in a preservation project where a significant portion of the game I'm trying to preserve is missing due to the game I'm preserving having weekly event stages that were deleted after their week was up. The individual updates were handled in a way that despite tons of people who were cheating with a save editor needing to dump the extra data files for the game in question, being Pokemon Shuffle to use the save editor, they haven't been uploaded anywhere since the people who were doing this weren't trying to preserve the game, just cheat. I've gotten some of them found through dataminers of later updates and am trying to implement them, but having to recreate 2-3 years of stage updates isn't looking fun.

Honestly the best method is something you laid out in the video already and one that I think I might just end up making a video about myself: Piracy. The only true way to preserve games is to be a supervillian about it; take what they don't release, preserve it and let it be given to the public. Preserving means to "maintain in its existing state", which means there are multiple states some games have existed in, even old carts had different versions to them, which in turn means preserving *all and as many states of them as possible*. Of course, this also means the only way to do so is to get them all by any means necessary and since the only way to obtain them since a lot of companies don't want to then there's very little options left for preserving games. Honestly now that I think about it, this would make a pretty good plot for a movie; a supervillian somehow gets original NIB games from across the globe, plans to use his volcano island fortress as a factory to recreate carts of them to sell but a bunch of companies see it as "theft", so they send a 007 type agent to try and stop him.

Counter point to only/mostly preserving games with cultural relevance. Penn and Teller Smoke and Mirrors was an unreleased game for the Sega CD, it had little to no cultural relevance until someone found a way to preserve it and put it online. Then a group of people made an annual charity stream centered around one of the mini games in it called Desert Bus. Now they've finished their 15th year of doing thr stream and have raised over $9 million for charity since they started it.

Just stumbled upon you from getting reccomend your LRG video yesterday and now you've released a nearly 2 hour essay the day after I found you, I'm liking this luck of mine, you seem like a real hidden gem man, good work!

We're eating tonight gamers

The problem with Amiibo's has been solved, assuming you're either willing to mod your console hardware or pirate. The actual functional part of an Amiibo is just an NFC chip embedded in the toy with a unique identifier, with a modded console you can read the Amiibo's you do own and then save the identifier for use with an emulator. It's not a perfect solution, but for preserving the functionality of games that use them, it's perfectly doable.

I think also a minor part of games preservation that I'm surprised wasn't covered here is *"display technology"*. like we all know that as stated visuals of the game can often be integral part of the experience and unlike movies where any modern tv can easily scale a video, video games are interesting since it's also requires players input and modern tech can't always replicate that well resulting in problems with experiencing old games (more specifically from 1st generation to the 6th generation) that were made to utilize Tube television tech like CRT, CRT monitor , you often see many proclaim that these are as important as playing on original hardware to maintain the pure experience, specially recently with many outlets and competitive players talking about how CRT Monitors are essential to games like Counter strike and Doom with often fast refresh rate that still competes with modern tech, but as we know these products been long out of production and with every year they will grow in scarcity eventually losing potential experience of specific long gone era, it's interesting how with shift to Plasma, projector TV, LCD, LED and OED Which I believe displays a black levels that's close to an CRT's Black levels, It's why even for none retro fans Video Scaler is widely popular specially for upcoming streamers and content creators who often want to represent the original content at it's purest form as possible other than that this is was fantastic video and highlighted specially why I started to not bother getting physical goods since nowadays I feel like it's more marketed towards collectors and rich folks over really us the enthusiast who actually play those games, preservation became sad justification for a shady market that monopolized by likes of WATA and LRG sorry if this was long one but this was quite neat kickstart for interesting conversation

Monster video. You and Tim Rogers really are setting a new high bar for games journalism, and as a video game preservationist myself, I'd say that what you do is a part of video game preservation. Thanks for the time and effort you put into this. Absolutely killer.

It's why we should honestly be f**** terrified of an all streaming future for games because then the ability to preserve anything is out the window.

I’m just a random voice on the internet, so take my nothing opinion for what it is, but I think this is your best video yet. You really captured not only the importance of preservation, but also helped illustrate why games are just as important and valid as other art, if not more for some. Thank you.