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Comment by krzrak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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.

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