Where Games Go to Sleep: The Game Preservation Crisis (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Where Games Go to Sleep: The Game Preservation Crisis (2011)

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92 pointskorethr59 comments

A lot of it is due to companies centralizing games and putting up huge barriers to even make games functional without their black box servers. After many of these games die off population wise, the companies just drop them instead of giving back to the community to preserve it.

Look at TF2--it could foreseeably be modified and anyone can run a server for it. It may be possible to preserve it. Blizzard's Overwatch on the other hand, which is somewhat of a successor to it, they won't let the game to work at all without their servers since it's a gigantic, centralized black box. Those servers might go away.

The only reason WoW is preserved for the future at all with third party vanilla servers is because during the beta they made a mistake and leaked a ton of debugging info and world data early on. Ideally (from the company's perspective), we wouldn't even had that and one of the biggest blockbuster MMOs in history would simply be lost.

Not picking on Blizzard in particular, but they've gone from a decentralized model in the Diablo 1, War 2 BNE, and Starcraft 1 days to massively centralized. If there isn't a profit to be had, I think they'll be very happy to let the history die there, which is very unfortunate and seems to be a model many AAA game companies are taking at this point, not just Blizz.

The irony is that a lot of games before the era of centralisation have active preservation communities and will probably live on - but a lot of newer games likely won't, for the reasons you described.

I think it's very likely people will still play Tetris, Final Fantasy IV and Star Craft in 50 years. Star Craft II and Final Fantasy XV? Not so much.

Exactly right, we're looking at a hole in modern video game archival history with the way the industry models their games these days. The older games aren't nearly as hard to preserve.

And that's just single-player games. Will MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV still be playable?

Life, uh, finds a way. As long as you have talented people that love a game, they will find some way to preserve it. Even though Blizzard is still running Battle.net to this day (bless them for that) -- people have created spin-off servers for Starcraft by analyzing the netcode and mimicking the servers:

https://freeablo.org/ (diablo)

https://shieldbattery.net/splash (starcraft broodwar)

http://www.openwow.com/ (world of warcraft)

If Blizzard ever shut down battle.net 2.0 there will be a group of people putting their heads together to mimic the server. Or, if needed, recreate the entire game engine from decompiled code or scratch. Look at OpenRA and OpenBW for these examples:

http://www.openra.net/about/

http://www.openbw.com/

And if that's not good enough, game preservation might become a new industry just like art preservation. We already have GoG releasing classic titles by working with publishers and digital rights holders to re-release classic games; this model can be extended to those "black box" games where the server code is saved in a repository for years but never released until someone like GoG comes along and revives the game the legal way:

https://www.gog.com/

So, if a game is loved by enough people it will live on.

Anyone can run a server for TF2. In fact, official servers for it are a new thing.

Yes. And if they can patch out the connecting to steam requirement for TF2, it can be preserved even if Steam dies eventually.

Unfortunately for Overwatch, a battle.net account / connection and their centralized servers makes it a far harder task. They've moved toward a model where the reverse engineering and ingenuity involved to get it to work outside of their control is increasingly prohibitive.

These things often take volunteers hundreds of hours to figure out and are illegal according to terms of service agreements (followed by lawsuits no less--if you look into "bnetd" and "fsgs" starcraft alt servers, and WoW bots, Blizzard is not afraid to go this route). If it's just too much work for said hackers, it likely will not get done, especially if legal action against the volunteers is a probability.

I like to imagine that if Battle.net ever died, they would release a patch for overwatch that would remove the battle.net connectivity.

That's one strong imagination.

Never said it was likely, just hoped for.

I like to imagine good things too, but I suspect if that happened it would be because company would be in bankruptcy proceedings. The trustee appointed will have a mandate to extract the most money from the carcass of the company, and arranging for work to be done to release a DRM-free patch is definitely not part of that, and I doubt he could legally do it even if he wanted to.

There is also quite some history showing that DRM-content providers do go under, and people do lose access to their "purchased" (rented) items.

I think you're right: Too often, people underestimate the power of creditors in industry. If there's any potentially valuable IP, no matter how outdated, it becomes increasingly unlikely older releases will be supported or patched. I suspect you're also correct regarding the legal issues: In many cases, licensing agreements were made between the now defunct company, and others, which may or may not carry over. Often, even the licensors themselves may have been acquired, and discovering who actually owns what becomes expensive or prohibitive. Worse, on rare occasion, the parties involved are dead.

Nevertheless, there are sometimes happy endings, and I'm reminded of this comment [1] by Don Hopkins just over a week ago highlighting the importance of equal parts archivists' duties, detective work, and persistence (very much worth reading) with a healthy dose of luck. Unfortunately, this is probably more an exception than the rule, though older/niche games are perhaps more likely to survive through such efforts than popular ones (Carmageddon's resurrection with the new Stainless comes to mind) given that there's less at stake.

If a much more popular franchise goes belly-up, I would be exceedingly surprised if independently playable versions were ever released. More likely, you'll see new installments based on the same IP with the same shortcomings, thus repeating the cycle. Tribes is a curious, if complicated example (failure, resurrection, failure, resurrection), but it's also a case where an interested third party was able to circumvent the authentication server code (Tribes 2 via TribesNext).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13693675

The appeal is obvious though. These games are actually impossible to pirate.

I feel any game is possible to pirate given enough resources. However, point taken, there's definitely a certain drop off point where the resources required to do it aren't very likely to be marshaled when it becomes sufficiently prohibitive.

It's preferable to a company trying to squeeze all the profits possible out of their games, but certainly not for preserving gaming history many years later when profits aren't much of a factor.

I mean, I guess it's possible to reverse engineer and implement the entire server side. But it wouldn't really be different from implementing a clone of a game as a way of "pirating" it at that point.

Not sure if there's a game that does this already but if I ever made an MMO, I'd try a business model of open source server and client and compete on paid hosting. Minecraft sort of has that going with realms but closed source and centralized accounts. Both of those have been circumvented with the Java code but the C++ based version is the future and the Java code with eventual get feature freeze.

Edit: Now that I think about it, this is pretty much the same as the current business model for many development platforms, open source tools and cross platform support, compete on hosting.

Isn't the hosting the commodity part of the equation and the creation of the game where the valuable IP is?

How many of these newer games though, frankly deserve to be kept around? Most of them are just the nth iteration of the original which made their name, and bring little or nothing to the table. If .1% of today's games survive, you'll have a really good idea about the other 99.8% with .1% left to surprise you.

That is irrelevant. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Everything should be preserved. And given that games are a digital medium, it's probably one of the easiest to preserve.

"Everything should be preserved."

In what perfect world? In the real world, triage is a thing.

Except that doesn't really apply here. If these servers weren't black-boxed, it'd be trivial to preserve them.

But I understand why companies don't want this, however. Why would you want people playing your game for free on private servers instead of your own?

Or, once they stop making money on a game, why would they want people playing it for free instead of playing their new games?

Because newer games are usually better in every way except one: nostalgia. Even though diablo 3 is available the only game I play regularly is diablo 2 despite its horrible graphics, simply because it brings back fond memories of childhood.

Well D3 was terrible at release, so I disagree. Ok game, but you where zoomed in way to much.

I finally bought the ultra Komplete GOTY whateverthefuckedition on sale for about $20. Now that it's a complete game, patched and fixed, I'm really enjoying it for that price point.

Frankly, that is the secret to modern gaming... wait.

> In what perfect world? In the real world, triage is a thing.

And SD cards pretty come come in cracker jack boxes.

Storage is cheap. :)

You still have to pay... and who's going to do that? I don't care about saving most of today's game for posterity, and most of the more notable and unique examples are not tied to something like Battlenet.

"The only reason WoW is preserved for the future at all with third party vanilla servers is because during the beta they made a mistake and leaked a ton of debugging info and world data early on. Ideally (from the company's perspective), we wouldn't even had that and one of the biggest blockbuster MMOs in history would simply be lost"

I'll disagree with this one right here. I've been part of the wow emulation community at its very early stages and it was in fact some inside info that a few people got. (Angry employees etc you name it) The earliest wow emulator is from late vanilla. The world data also exist on the client side making its easier to use them. Blizzard has found more ways of countering decrypting actual packets from the server to the client but of course as always at some point the c3-c4 packet algorithms are leaked by an unknown source.

Yeah, I think my memory may be inaccurate / hazy since at this point, it's been almost 13 (!!) years. Boy, I feel old now.

I think I was referring to: http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-11175.h... and similar. So not even an emulator, just a leaked, crippled version of the game earlier on. Thanks for the correction.

I wonder what'll happen with app store, even if the developer doesn't use centralized servers.

From what I understand, old unupdated games will soon be removed from app store and it won't even be possible to download them?

The last company I would worry about servers going away is Blizzard. People are still playing the first Starcraft and Diablo 1 and 2. How many years later is that? WoW has been around forever as well. All of their "worlds" are lasting.

To expand on a comment downthread: preservation is piracy and piracy is preservation. Unfortunately this is unpopular with games publishers.

Traditional archive preservation relies on preserving the media. But for many games now there is no media, or it's optical disks which aren't going to last. In order to preserve it it has to be copied. The publishers have no interest in this and the rights may become mired in uncertainty when the publisher goes bankrupt.

Conversely, many things we only have copies of because copies were made illegally. Not just games but TV programmes as well (the notorious early Dr Who episodes for example).

And if we look at some of the other "big content" industries, they find it might not be in their interest to allow their old content to compete with current content for attention. Disney don't make all their films available on the market at the same time ("disney vault") for this reason.

I am often thinking this: we put lots of effort into preserving pieces of art, architecture, writing, etc. from the past (which is, of course, good and desired).

On the other hand we often don't treat modern creations as an equally valuable artifacts (so called modern "art" or "performance", etc. is a subject for another rant on real value of art;). People put tremendous effort into creating video games, movies, etc. which are of great artistic value, but we let them slip into oblivion.

So, it's great to see that something is starting to happen in this subject.

Haven't read the article yet, but from skimming it it doesn't seem to mention The Internet Archive's work in preserving classic arcade, computer and console games (not sure if it was already underway in 2011):

https://archive.org/details/software

It is quite extensive and growing all the time.

Well, the internet archive stores the games, not the source or the development material. Maybe they could start doing so, but I guess it would cost them a lot to find storage space for that.

I've been trying to collect as much video game source code as I can at https://github.com/videogamepreservation/.

Please add Allegiance (open source space sim by Microsoft). Also Mechcommander 2.

They're pretty big repos (461MB and 785MB compressed) but I'll try to get them uploaded ASAP.

That is awesome. Thank you for doing this.

They're doing good work and I work in the preservation industry. Unfortunately, many games in the last 5-10 years and maybe even a bit earlier than that have been moving to "if the company isn't running the centralized black box server, this game simply can't work" model. I think the main reason being anti-piracy and DRM, but the side effect is those games are much harder to preserve.

I think part of the reason is we put effot into preserving valuable art, architecture, etc. Creation effort does not equate to value (of course everyone values things differently but there is a level of majority consensus on certain things).

Modern creations have a much lower barrier to entry so more gets made, which is great, but also makes preservation more difficult. There's hundreds of new games on the App store each week (don't recall the exact numbers). Preserving each one, especially the history of development (art assets, source code, design docs and discussions) would take more time than any organization has and also not be very useful to the public.

Yet there are good, worthwhile, interesting, and historically significant games in that haystack somewhere. How do we filter the noise before the stuff worth preserving is lost?

It's a good point / thought. I feel like the same question could be asked of any preserved art form or valuable cultural item.

I think it's ultimately just up to people and their feelings / how significant they feel a game is/was to put the resources in to preserve it. I also feel like some games are clearly more notable than others that a consensus would agree with.

Mario Bros 3, Zelda, WoW, Skyrim... I could go on for hours I'm sure, but certainly some games have a much larger impact and are more historically notable than others. Maybe it's partially subjective, and I'm not sure what the solution is. Do we legislate these things must be preserved?

That seems pretty extreme. Do we ask nicely? It seems most companies won't listen if there's no profit there. I'd be interested in hearing other people's ideas on that and how to make it happen. I think it'd be a real shame if in 20 years, given all our technology, these things were lost to history somehow still.

How do we filter the noise before the stuff worth preserving is lost?

Storage is extremely cheap now, so filtering might not be needed at all. HDDs are around $30/TB, and 1TB in the context of game sizes is already quite a lot. Historical games tend to be smaller anyway, as the storage available at the time was much smaller too.

Preservation in this case isn't about storage. It's about cracking. It's no use preserving the bits if you can't run them without a server which no longer exists, or an obsolete DRM tied to an obsolete disk format.

How much of the historically significant art, architecture, etc. that we have from the past is merely what survived, rather than the majority consensus on what was worth preserving at the time?

I think the future will be in a much better position to judge what is valuable and historically significant.

Not only that, many films that were flops both in the box office and critically have come to be considered cult films or even classics in modern times. Time changes how things are reappraised and what might be considered important. (for example many literature that was censored back then was likely considered to be offensive garbage but today we would see these works as the first attempts at subverting a culture.)

In Czech Republic (and I would assume other countries as well) there is a law requirement that you have to deposit copies of a newly published books (and perhaps other works) into a library.

This should be requirement for games, too, I think.

It's required in the US to provide a copy to the Library of Congress in order to register a copyright, but registration is no longer required for copyright to cover a work (since the Berne Convention).

I have a decent-sized personal collection of older software and games I've come across over the years. Much of it is getting hard to find online, but I hang on to it in the hopes someone someday will find it useful or entertaining.

Archive.org has a really impressive collection of old software and emulators to run it. Check out https://archive.org/details/software

They and their patrons (myself included) would likely be very interested in anything/everything you're willing to upload.

On the whole, video games aren't elevating society to the extent great literature or even mediocre performance art do.

Call of Duty - what is the grand result? Familiarity with Militarization.

Katamari Damacy - Hoarding for the King.

Pokemon - you tell me.

There's a parallel with the early film industry. In the early 1900s, when a film had completed its run at the theaters, no effort was made to preserve it. The amazing science fiction classic "Metropolis" was a famous example. We still don't quite have a complete copy of this groundbreaking visionary film, and until recent years (when missing scenes were discovered) DVD releases of the film had placeholders describing the action that was missing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film

It sounds like we are doing a better job preserving our early video game history than we did preserving our early film history.

I've got some things from old jobs in the game industry, which at least for now I'm sitting on because I don't want to get in trouble for releasing it and want more time to pass before doing so (I've already waited almost a decade).

But I care very much about game preservation and would like to see the information get out there in some form someday.

None of the games I worked on were high profile, but I do have some interesting documentation on them.

I also started keeping a personal design diary as of last November that keeps my thoughts and ideas on my game designs and how they change over time that I might one day release to the public (or a descendant might).

I also used to make and release Flash games and I'm investigating ways to keep those available once the web moves on 100% from Flash. I've got some documentation from the design of those that could be interesting as well.

I need to find the time to sit down and compile all this, though, in addition to working on new things.

This thing launched just this week: http://gamehistory.org

Many of these companies are having to choose control and the ability to continue to make profit from their intellectual property vs they're games effectively being free in a historical archive.

Wonder if any of them would be willing to partner with a company or non-profit (such as the IA) if they offered to archive the code and artifacts for safe keeping but not automatically release it unless legally allowed to do so. Some things would probably stay under wraps for a long time, but at least it wouldn't be lost that way.

I used to play Maplestory back in the day. When I came back, I was upset to find that it had undergone a huge patch that changed most of what I enjoyed about it. Luckily, there are a handful of private servers that still run legacy versions of the game. My favorite pastime would have been lost forever if a few clever people didn't update their game.

He/she probably can't. The concept is not new. Here's a flash version of the same game http://bagario.net . it is a few years old.

Part Two: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134653/where_games_go_...

I thought this was going to be about leaving older consoles, like the SNES, on overnight when you couldnt save

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