Saved from Oblivion – How are old games revived and put on sale again?

Computer games are a medium that is about four decades old. Compared to several hundred-year-old books or even early movies, they are quite young. I think we still see them from the perspective of a teenager who doesn’t care how high his pension will be one day, and We don’t think much about whether these increasingly valuable titles will somehow survive for future generations or whether their impact will be lost.Digital media is not very durable, and the equipment that can read it also becomes a museum relic – does anyone today have a CD reader in their computer, let alone a floppy drive?

The future of current games looks even worse, as they are distributed exclusively digitally and require a network connection to play. Products that only offer multiplayer may be gone forever, but even single-player stories aren’t safe, as this example clearly demonstrates. the crew Ubisoft. Shutting down the servers makes this production impossible to access, and only the determination of the gaming community to work on its own will save it from oblivion. Are game creators really doomed to pirates so that the works they put so much work and effort into can be released and played by someone in the future, just as we can still do with classics like Another world Or the first Civilization?

The Crew example shows that even not very old products can be doomed to oblivion and not being able to remember how to play them, even though you bought a copy of the game.

Yes, in part, although there are notable exceptions, such as Nintendo, which still provides access to many of its old games, or the Polish Good Old Games team, i.e. the GOG store, which specializes in “hunting” old games and adapting them to run on modern computers and, above all, ensuring that you can download them to your data carrier and have them without any DRM protection.

While examining the current status of old games and their availability, I had a very interesting conversation with Marcin Paczyński, Senior Business Development Manager at GOG, who has been working at this company since its inception and is currently involved in finding and understanding old games. The legal situation. The conversation with him was very interesting and I must say that I never thought that gaming archaeology would become such an interesting subject and full of amazing stories!

The Library of Congress is the Alexandria Library of Computer Games.

The good news is that The issue of preserving games for future generations has already been addressed at the Library of Congress in Washington.serves as the national library. Its collections include over 3,000 titles for various platforms and 1,500 strategy guides. However, not all of these appear in the form of physical copies of the games, as the first archival requirements stipulated only 25 pages of source code and 10-15 minutes of recorded gameplay on VHS tape or DVD.

The library includes both newer titles, published after 2006, and hardcore classics from the 90s to 2005 – for various platforms.including Philips CDs and games downloaded from Europe. Many of the large old boxes were used and in very poor condition, so the decision was made to transfer their contents to special containers to ensure safe storage. The evidence was in turn re-covered with hard covers.

The problem is not only the accessibility of old games, but also the multiplicity of platforms they run on – they have become objects in museums or in the collections of the largest fans (Image author: Damian Krieger).

An article from 2012 talks about the very limited access to the collections for researchers. They mainly included manuals, and some games could only be viewed on video. The selected games were planned to be playable with the equipment required to run and play the games. The text also confirms the hypothesis that Preserving and sharing computer games is one of the most difficult challenges due to many obstacles, such as the multiplicity of different platforms and exclusivity of titles, as well as the unclear and confusing status of copyright and licensing, which are often divided among many entities for just one title.However, library collections are different from the widespread availability of old games for anyone who wants to play them at home, on their own devices. This is where some publishers, GOG, but also “tolerant” pirates come into play.