Frank Gasking on preserving «lost» games | Hacker News Reader

Frank Gasking on preserving «lost» games

spillhistorie.no

92 pointsdoener21 comments

Bigger challenge is games that die because the back-end servers are turned off and the assets are discarded. I'm on a team reverse engineering an old MMO from 2011. We've spent years rebuilding the server from packet captures and disassembly because everything official got nuked. This is just one of many examples where the customer "buys" a thing in their mind only later to find out they really didn't buy anything.

The legal situation is a mess too. We're not competing with anyone (game's been dead over a decade), we're not selling anything, but we still operate in this gray area wondering what's fair use versus what crosses a line. Copyright law wasn't written with "what if the company abandons it and erases it from existence" in mind.

Meanwhile every day that passes, more of these games just vanish permanently because preservation is treated as piracy.

You are a hero. Thank you for your work.

I hope the corporation has moved on and doesn't bother you. And if they do, we'll remember. I'll never forgive EA for C&Ding the attempts to revive Battlefield 2. Just one of their many atrocities.

I really wish that these corporations were forced to provide copies of source code and assets to the Library of Congress to have their copyright stay in effect for longer than a year. Servers and Clients. Our government is so far behind the times it hurts. Copyright should also require a renewal fee to prevent everything from getting locked behind it for a hundred years.

old MMO from 2011

It makes me very angry to realize that the same people who decided to completely destroy that game still get to obstruct and/or receive benefits from any third-party effort for 61 more years.

> or receive benefits from any third-party effort for 61 more years.

...do they?

Like let's say I make a modified version of this game. Technically my modification is illegal to distribute since it contains assets I don't own the rights to. However, the creators of the original game don't own the rights to my modifications either.

If you post a video about it on YouTube, they can and will demonetize it and send any revenue to the IP holder

Yes, but this has less to do with copyright law and more to do with Youtube's policies.

I hope early digital games will be preserved better than early films:

"around 75% of original silent-era films have perished ... Of the American sound films made from 1927 to 1950, an estimated half have been lost"

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

That's a very different (but still interesting) story.

Mainly it's down to the materials technology of the time, and the fact that cellulose was need for war purposes

And at least one fire destroying a studios film archives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_MGM_vault_fire

(That article says that many other film studios destroyed old film prints, so it's not just fires (explosions really, since nitrocellulose film tends to go boom, plus even in the best case it degrades into an unusable mess with time))

I have been hunting for a lost ROM for years. I even may have spoken to someone who has a copy.

https://lostpixellore.com/blog/where-in-the-world-is-static-...

The impression I get from TFA is that this is about "unfinished/unreleased" games more than "lost" games. A "lost" game, film, or work of literature would be one that was published or released, only to disappear again from the historical record.

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

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

Several lost games from the text-adventure world are listed here:

https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/in-search-of-LONG0751/2009-...

https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2923 (BlackDragon and Dor Sageth)

https://web.archive.org/web/20140528184628/http://games.wwco... (The PITS)

https://bluerenga.blog/2024/09/02/adventures-1974-1982-lost-...

https://bluerenga.blog/2024/10/27/adventures-1974-1982-lost-...

(To be fair, many of the games listed in the latter two posts seem to be known only via advertisements; it's conceivable that those advertised games might never have existed. But in many cases we know a game existed because we have testimony from people who played it at the time.)

There are lost games as well in there: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/general-preservation-work/

This is really important work.

Humanity has done a decent job at preserving artifacts from our past despite wars and the effects of time on our cultural output. Throughout history, books, paintings, sculptures, music, and other forms of art were the available outlets for artistic and creative people. With the rise of computers, video games joined the set of cultural works produced by our species. While one could argue that the artistic value of David and Pac-Man is not comparable, I prefer to adopt a more open-minded view of games. It's great that some people are giving video games proper attention, considering the enormous amount of time we spend playing them and the place they occupy in our childhood memories.

I don't see why Pac-Man should be valued less than the statue of David. Of course they're different, but they both contributed to the culture heritage of the human species.

The article focuses on games that were never released or never even completed. It could be argued that those (unlike Pac-Man) did not contribute to cultural heritage. This is obviously not to say that their preservation is unimportant; I just think it should be compared more to unfinished/unpublished works of art, not the statue of David. It's more like The Salmon of Doubt than it is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

You're right. My comparison was more about sculptures as art vs the games as art. If you don't believe them to be equivalent at some level, it would be difficult to find this preservation work worthwhile.

That said, unfinished games are similar to manuscripts of an unfinished book. Many such manuscripts have been published throughout history and are, in my opinion, part of our cultural heritage too.

I'm looking for a game (like 5-10 years old?) which kinda mimicked Turing machine.

There was guy/robot, viewed from above, going along a path, and an input -- tape with blue and red dots. Player task is to create the path with tiles like "if the current tape dot is red -- turn left, otherwise turn right", and "write blue to the tape".

Advanced levels had interesting tasks like "imagine the tape represents a binary number, add 1 to it".

RoboZZle?

I think I just found it -- Manufactoria. Hooray! Thank you.

https://ejrh.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/manufactoria/

No, it seems like player writes the instructions, given a map. In that game player writes the map, given a tape (tape had round blue/red circles). Robot could not get out of the playable area, unlike RoboZZle.

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