Video Game Preservation

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scotland
Posts: 2561
Joined: April 7th, 2015, 7:33 pm

Video Game Preservation

Postby scotland » February 22nd, 2017, 8:17 am

With time and changing membership, I think we can talk about preserving video games without dividing up into Pirates vs Royal Marines clans anymore.

While the laws in the US seem to heavily tilt toward copyright holders, preservation gets a lot of exemptions. A few years ago the DMCA was amended for preservation for things like modifying games to remain playable when corporate servers go dark, exemptions for libraries and archives, and abandonware preservation. This probably lets even hobbyists like us legally enjoy free not-for-profit online archives of old magazine scans too.

Here is a mainstream article on preserving games, game related material, and preserving games as playable things.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/02/how_should_we_preserve_video_games.html

The Library of Congress is trying to preserve games as physical things, along with associated material that even includes message board threads about the game at the time of its release. That's neat, but the game is held more as a relic than a playable game.

A different group, The Learning Games Initiative, has a different approach, as seen here:
https://www.academia.edu/3695640/Computer_Game_Archiving_and_the_Serious_Work_of_Silliness
At their several locations, things are *playable*. They cite an example of whether to preserve a C64 datasette, or to use it, they opt to use it.

Another avenue is emulation, such as the Intenet Arcade at Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/internetarcade
It may not be always be close to the original arcade experience, but its accessible and some of these machines are rare or possibly extinct. Its also neat information - for instance, I did not know Willow was an arcade game. How about that?

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MoarRipter
Posts: 192
Joined: July 12th, 2015, 2:38 pm

Re: Video Game Preservation

Postby MoarRipter » February 22nd, 2017, 10:25 am

I came across this article on NintendoLife a few days ago, about disc rot.

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/0 ... or_the_n64

Amazingly, people talked about this happening to their retail Playstation and PS2 discs. I've never seen this happen to a retail pressed disc, only to cheap quality CD-Rs. Kind of concerning to think that this could happen to some of those rare disc games we hold onto.


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