Just a heads-up: This is a long read. Bring some popcorn.
Intro
It's no secret gaming history has a preservation problem. Just as the film industry viewed movies as disposable until the VCR and the business of video sales suddenly made those backlogs profitable again, game studios have rarely been interested in what happened to individual titles once they were packaged and shipped. After all, the Super Nintendo hardware was superior to the NES hardware, so in a Nintendo executive's mind, why would anybody want to play Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda when they could instead play Super Mario World or The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past? Arcade manufacturers of the late 1970s and early 1980s knew that even their most successful games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders would invariably give way to newer, bigger titles. The gaming industry, after all, relies upon pushing new product out the door to meet consumer demand. The release of Mortal Kombat II would inevitably overshadow Mortal Kombat, just as Super Street Fighter II would overshadow the original. That's just how things are. The idea that more than a handful of people in 2003, or 2013, or 2023 would want to play a game released in 1993 was absurd; the thought of companies caring enough to preserve the materials that went into creating those games even more so. There are a freakishly enormous number of gaps in gaming history's fossil record.
Source: GamesHub.com
Fortunately the last decade has seen a resurgence in the idea of preservation at a corporate level. GOG.com, for instance, provides a storefront of thousands of titles, updated to run on modern hardware, DRM-free, with the notion that you should actually own the games you buy, even if you aren't purchasing a physical disc. What's more, the number of titles they've managed to return to market in their digital ecosystem is astounding: Silent Hill 4 on the PC is playable as the developers intended, but on modern hardware. Capcom's first two Dino Crisis games and first three Resident Evil titles, which all received PC ports in the '90s and early 2000s, are now both inexpensive to purchase and simple to play. Cold Fear, an oft-overlooked survival horror title from the PS2 era, is back and running better than ever.
Alongside platforms like GOG, you also have studios like Limited Run and Night Dive, which work to rescue older games from IP rights nightmares and re-release them for modern audiences. Titles like Clock Tower, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and Blood: Refreshed Supply are all playable due to the efforts of studios like these.
Console manufacturers have been in on the game for a while now too. Nintendo has been the leader in this, with their various e-Stores and Switch Online services offering hundreds of back-catalog titles: classics and not-so-classics you can get access to for a monthly fee. Microsoft and Sony likewise offer up older titles for sale on their respective online stores, and some forms of backwards compatibility through either digital downloads or physical discs like Rare Replay and Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. The past fifteen years have shown us a variety of HD Remaster collections for series like God of War and Metal Gear. And let's not forget the boom of mini plug-and-play consoles that came with dozens of built-in titles we had a while back either.
In many cases, it has never been easier, or less expensive, to experience older games in the modern age. I applaud that, and not for one second am I knocking the strides that have been made. But we still have a problem in that the vast majority of video games are, for all intents and purposes, unplayable by the public at large via legal means. As a study showed in 2023, 87% of all video games published in the US have essentially disappeared. And for many, returning them to a playable and accessible original state is all but impossible.
So, Why Is That?
Many of the problems video game preservation has run into are the same ones faced by companies attempting to preserve television shows: copyright and trademark restrictions. EA, for example, has a long history with professional and collegiate sports. Every year, EA pays associations like the NFL, the NBA, and the PGA money to license trademarks, player names and likenesses, stadium and course designs, and other aspects of the real-life games so they can appear in EA's virtual incarnations. But these licenses are not granted in perpetuity. Since EA knows they're going to release a new Madden game every year, they contract for limited-time usage rights and those contracts are regularly re-negotiated. Once a contract stops covering a specific player, team, stadium, uniform design, announcer/commentator voice, or other aspect of the real-life deal, the developer and publisher no longer have the right to use that element in a product they are selling, even if they did own the right when that game was first developed.
This is why you can easily play Nintendo's original generic Baseball and Tennis NES titles, and the Genesis/Mega Drive version of EA's Mutant League Football via Switch Online, but you can't find Jaleco's Bases Loaded or EA's NHL '94. The amount of money and time that would have to go into satisfying the rights holders for all those official likenesses eclipses any amount the company paying for those rights could possibly recoup. For the same reason, it's unlikely we'll ever see driving games like Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed or NASCAR '99 returned to life in a playable state either: the amount of money required to re-license all those makes, models, and drivers is greater than any expected revenue such a project could generate.
Could you pay a studio like Night Dive to go through a game like Forza Horizon and remake all the car models, touch up the logos, and replace the in-game soundtracks with royalty-free music? Sure... but if you're going to do that, why not just pay them to make a game similar to Forza Horizon with completely fictional car models and brands instead? The major selling point of most modern driving titles is the fantasy of owning and controlling something you'd never be able to afford in real life. If I want to play Gran Turismo, I want to play Gran Turismo, not Gran Temu-rismo with all the cars edited to avoid trademark infringement.
The same is true for virtually any game based on a licensed property. We're not going to see the Superman arcade game re-released any time soon. Neither will we see Justice League Heroes, Batman: Revenge of the Joker, X-Men Legends, or the film tie-in Spider-Man 2 re-released either. Even if the original developer is still around and wanted to publish an updated version, that license has to be re-negotiated. Limited Run's Marvel MaXimum Collection that came out this past March is a major exception here, not the rule.
Sometimes the concessions required to get an older game back into a playable state in modern times are small enough that the developers are willing to make them, and the public is willing to accept them. The survival horror title ObsCure released on the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC in 2005. Developer Hydravision paid to license music from the bands Sum 41 and Span, and the box touts the inclusion of this music as a selling point. However, when the game was released on Steam, these licensed tracks had been replaced with generic sound-alike songs. The change is only noticeable to people who played the original, the songs themselves aren't relevant to the experience (outside of grounding it in an era where early 2000s butt rock was a thing), and nothing gameplay-wise was impacted by their replacement. If that's what it takes to make a game easily accessible to a modern audience, as opposed to paying borderline obscene prices for physical copies on eBay, I'm okay with that.
The Problem
Nevertheless, there's a crisis in gaming preservation where the laws that exist to protect intellectual property and the drive to preserve access to our history smash head-on. Yes, it's phenomenal that games like Silent Hill 4, The Thing, and Heroes of Might & Magic II have been archived, resurrected from the dead, and patched to ensure compatibility with modern systems. But for every game which has been rescued, there are thousands which haven't.
Source: InstantGaming.com
A common argument you'll hear runs like this:
"You're acting like these games aren't available, when they totally are. You can go on eBay right now and buy them. You can go to a game store and buy the original hardware. You can even buy new hardware that mimics the old hardware, so you can hook it up to your new television, plug in the cartridge, and play it. There's no such thing as a 'lost' game, because even if you don't have the hardware or the software, it's there to buy."
And, sure, if you want to look at it that pedantically, you're right. Yes, anyone can go on eBay, buy a PlayStation 2, buy a PS2 controller, buy a PS2 memory card, buy a copy of Kuon, buy an HDMI upscaler, and play that game today. You are correct. But you're correct in a way that ignores basic economics. For people with nothing better to do with a thousand bucks, you are absolutely, 100% right. I don't know what tax bracket you live in, but I know I don't reside there.
Here's the thing though: Kuon is an interesting experience from a game company that went from obscurity to a household name in the twenty years since they released it, but nobody in their right mind believes it's an experience worth paying a thousand dollars for. It's expensive for reasons of physical scarcity combined with a fan base that went wild over anything with the FromSoftware name on it after the release of Dark Souls; critical consensus from back in the day was, basically, "Meh." It's the literal definition of a 6/10 game, something you'd expect to find on the PlayStation store as a digital download for $9.99.
Meanwhile I can go on GOG, pay $60, and get a bundle with four classic Resident Evil games (and Resident Evil Zero), every one of which offers an objectively better experience than Kuon. In what universe does this make logical sense? To legally own and play Kuon you need to skip a house payment or two, but to legally own and play Resident Evil HD you can skip a trip to McDonalds?
Gaming shouldn't work like this.
Right?
Like, I don't think that's a particularly bold take. There are an awful lot of games that vanished into the ether because their publisher or developer went belly-up, but FromSoftware does not fall into this category. They've made no attempt to hide the fact they made Kuon, or any of their other older games. Like many developers, FromSoft keeps an active catalog of their history. You can see their page for Kuon right here. It's not much, but it's there, along with every other game they've made going back to the original King's Field on the PS1.
But maybe Kuon is a bad example. After all, that's a PS2 exclusive with low sales numbers, which never got a PC port. Doesn't rule out a PlayStation Store download if Sony ever gets their emulation system figured out under the PS5, but let's say for the sake of argument that Kuon's not a great choice. It's not a household name. It doesn't have that 'oomph' factor a studio like Night Dive would need to take it on as a project. Okay then.
How about Silent Hill 3?
Source: Collider.com
Konami's premiere horror franchise is absolutely a household name. Silent Hill 2 just got a successful remake. There's talk of them remaking the original. You can already play Silent Hill 4 on modern hardware. And unlike Kuon, Silent Hill 3 got a PC release back in 2003. So what's the problem?
ModernZorker, everybody knows Konami lost the source code to Silent Hill 3 years ago, you complete dildo!
Uh-huh. And we're back to that earlier issue. When developers finished a game, standard practice was to wipe the hard drives, shred the design documents, bin the artwork, and get ready for the next project. "Preservation" wasn't on anyone's mind. The game was done, so who cared if you kept the source code? What was the public going to do, want to play it again twenty-five years later? Why would they want that, and even if they did, why wouldn't they just use the old hardware?
Look, not to cross the streams here, but Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction television show in history. It's been around longer than The Simpsons. Its cultural impact is unprecedented, and for years, the BBC has taken steps to preserve the show's history and legacy. Yet, despite a globe-spanning fanbase, there are still episodes of that show which were seen exactly once when they were first broadcast and then lost, because the BBC at the time not only didn't care, but assumed no one else ever would either. Discovery of elements of these lost episodes makes international news. And yet, if something so culturally relevant, spanning multiple generations of fandom, has gaps in its history, it's unreasonable to expect video games couldn't and wouldn't suffer the same fate.
There are a lot of collectors who cite not just ownership of physical media but "preservation" as part of the reason why they collect what they do. This is absolutely a good reason to collect things that interest you, and it's important (at least from a historical standpoint) that as many copies of these materials as possible survive for as long as they can. If you're doing your part, whether it's with games, or movies, or comics, or whatever you like, then take some pride in your work. But also, don't kid yourself that what you're doing is actually "preservation", at least not in the grander sense, because...
Preservation Without Access Isn't Really Preservation
Let's say you were a huge fan of the TV show Seinfeld in the '90s, and let's also say you either didn't own a VCR, or you weren't good at programming it. In order to watch a given episode of the show, you had to be somewhere with a functioning television set at the specific day and time that episode aired. If you missed it, you had to wait until the summer, where it was likely to be broadcast as a re-run. If you missed that though, there was a third option: you could visit the Moving Images Research Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. where, with several weeks' advance notice, you could request a screening of that specific episode in one of their viewing rooms. For copyright and archival purposes, a copy of every episode of Seinfeld was filed with the Library of Congress, and available for viewing upon request.
By that technical definition, every episode of Seinfeld is "preserved" by the Library of Congress. And yet, if someone in 1998 told you the Library of Congress had a copy of every episode of Seinfeld, so there was no need to worry about never being able to watch it again, you'd instinctively know there was a fault in their logic. The fact something exists does not equate to that thing being accessible. Not everyone can just make a pilgrimage to Washington, and even if they could, they couldn't tell anyone the real reason they went, because they'd get laughed off the nearest building. For the majority of humanity, the fact the Library of Congress has a print of every Seinfeld episode is nothing more than an interesting factoid for bar trivia night.
Today, of course, it's easy to legally watch Seinfeld: it's currently streaming on Netflix, there are literally thousands of copies of individual seasons and the complete series available for purchase on DVD and Blu-Ray both second-hand or brand new, and it's almost certainly being broadcast on one of your local television stations if you live anywhere in North America.
It's impossible to say the same thing about Silent Hill 3. Just because I own both the PC and PS2 versions of the game doesn't mean it's been preserved. My PS2 isn't going to last forever. Neither is my backup PS2. The only reason the game is playable on my PC today is due to the work of the fan community, who have been patching and updating it to keep it working two decades later. And anybody who's played the Silent Hill HD Collection knows the version of SH3 included on that is a buggy, choppy, re-voiced mess that comes nowhere close to capturing the feel of the original.
This is not preservation.
Source: MobyGames
The Elephant in the Room
So we come to emulation. Companies like Nintendo tend to look at it as something that costs the industry billions of dollars a year in lost revenue. Pirates and data hoarders look at it as a godsend, allowing them to own every game on the planet without paying a cent.
But the truth, as usual, sits somewhere in the middle. Most people who seek out emulators aren't doing so because they yearn to defraud game publishers, they're doing so because, as Gabe Newell famously put it, piracy is often the result of a service issue, not a pricing issue, and there's no service offering them the option to pay a reasonable amount for what they want.
I'm a nerd with a colossal retro video game library I've been assembling and collecting for forty years. If I want to play Super Mario Bros., I've got any number of ways I can do so, everything from hooking up the original NES hardware and popping in the game cart, to using my Super NES and the Super Mario All-Stars cart, to plugging in my NES Classic and playing it that way.
But what about someone who remembers playing Super Mario Bros. as a kid, yet didn't keep their games and systems, or who discovered they no longer work after forty years in the attic? Right now, the easiest way to play Super Mario Bros. legally is to buy a Switch (around $200 second-hand) and pay $20 for a single year's access to Nintendo's Classic Games Library. Two hundred and twenty bucks is a big ask of someone who just wants to play their favorite childhood game for an hour to see if they still remember where the first Warp Zone is and how to navigate Bowser's castle in World 8-4.
This is the sort of problem emulation solves: you might not get the "authentic" experience of playing on original hardware with an original two-button controller, but what you get is close enough, and if there was a way for this hypothetical nostalgic user to have that experience for a few bucks, they'd be happy to pay it. As it stands though, this just isn't possible.
And if that's the case for Super Mario Bros., one of the most important, most influential, and most historically significant games of all time, what does that mean for a game like, say, Vanark on the PS1? Oh, you've never heard of Vanark?
That's my whole point. So much of gaming history is so lost that most people don't even realize what's gone.
A (Virtual) Language Barrier
To people who are largely computer literate, emulation feels like the perfect solution to the problem of accessibility (not to mention price). But just because emulation is available doesn't mean the average person with a PC knows how to use or configure an emulator. After all, the emulator is just a piece of software. The end user still needs to supply necessary elements, like a game controller, the ROM files, and possibly a BIOS or two depending on what system they want to emulate. The user needs to tell the emulator how to run the sound, how to display the video output, how to configure the controller or keyboard to mimic the inputs from the original hardware, where to store the save files, point it to the directory where the ROMs are located, and so on. They don't just "work" automatically.
This applies doubly where personal computer emulation is concerned. It's all well and good that a program like DOSBox exists, but DOSBox assumes its users have a familiarity with DOS commands, like how to navigate its text-based directory structure, how to identify and execute the file used to run the game you want to play, what all the various graphical display modes are, and what sound card emulation works best for a given game. That's fine for someone like me, who grew up navigating operating systems like DOS and early versions of Windows. I did my time in the mines of the IRQ conflict, thank you very much. But someone born in 2000, whose earliest experiences with home operating systems was Windows XP, is far less likely to possess that knowledge. You can show them DOSBox, but it's like handing someone a book in a language they don't understand and telling them, "Have fun!"
Sometimes, even access itself doesn't equate to preservation.
How Do We Fix This?
Image related, I promise.
There's a reason why you can get Doom running on almost anything: John Carmack released the game's source code in 1997, which gave programmers everywhere the ability to port the game to platforms it was never initially intended to run on. This liberated Doom from being locked to MS-DOS, and opened the door for people to get it running on their refrigerators. iD Software did the same for Wolfenstein 3D in 1995, Quake in 1999, Quake II in 2001, and Doom 3 in 2011. This makes it orders of magnitude simpler to keep these games "updated" to whatever ordinarily stands in the way of a deprecated code base, whether that's processors moving to a 64-bit standard, RAM being measured in gigabytes instead of megabytes, or single graphics cards more powerful than a room-sized supercomputer from twenty years ago.
It is actually easier and cheaper to play Doom where you want, when you want, how you want, and with whom you want today than it was in 1993. Because of this, there are millions of people who weren't even alive when Doom released who are nevertheless fragging one another in Deathmatch right now. Heck, some of the game's original level designers are still making and releasing new maps for it this far into the 21st century. I'm sure if you told John Romero back in 1993 that he'd be working on an unofficial fifth episode for the game almost twenty-five years later, he'd have assumed your relationship with cocaine had progressed from 'recreational' to 'problematic'. Nevertheless, we got Sigil in 2019, and its sequel in 2023.
Today, you can visit GOG.com, pay $10, and get The Ultimate Doom, Doom II, Final Doom, The Master Levels, Sigil, Sigil II, the Doom II episode No Rest For the Living, an entirely new episode made specifically for this package called, Legacy of Rust, and a bonus pack of 25 new Deathmatch maps.
This, ideally, is what 'preservation' looks like. Most software developers, however, are not John Carmack. And while there are some gaming properties like Final Fantasy, Star Wars, and Tomb Raider considered so iconic that their games receive periodic updated releases and remasters, the truth is you're never going to see any company put that much care into making sure modern gamers can play Beavis & Butthead in: Virtual Stupidity.
Fortunately for us, what is arguably one of the most important, wide-ranging, and historically significant gaming preservation projects is currently underway and has been for years: Retro-eXo.
What's Retro-eXo?
If you've been skim-reading so far, this is where you can stop. Retro-eXo is one of the single largest preservation and archival gaming projects ever attempted. This is different from your typical ROM site, because Retro-eXo isn't just concerned with giving people access to game files, they are obsessed with making sure that anyone, regardless of their technical skill level, is capable of playing the games they are archiving.
Retro-eXo is currently split into a number of different mini-projects, all dealing with various aspects of personal computing history. Their primary (and largest) project is eXoDOS, a 640 gigabyte archive of over 7,500 games for the MS-DOS platform, presented using the LaunchBox interface. Every game in the collection has been pre-configured to run on its optimal settings, meaning the end user doesn't have to muck around with configuration files, setup programs, memory management, sound card selection, virtual drive mounting, or any other roadblock. Just like on Steam or GOG, you can search for the game you want to play, double-click the box art, and the game launches. Users can check out screenshots, short videos, scans of the box and media artwork, and even read the instruction manuals.
An optional 220 gigabyte media pack is also available. It's not necessary to run any of the games, but it does include a bevy of magazines, books, soundtracks, interviews, strategy guides, and other goodies to maximize your enjoyment of all the software you've just found at your fingertips. eXoDOS preserves not just the games themselves, but also the history surrounding those games so anyone interested can explore the larger context surrounding these titles in a one-stop-shop style. And eXoDOS is just the tip of the iceberg.
There's eXoAppleIIGS, an 8 gigabyte archive of software for the Apple II line of personal computers.
Or how about eXoWin3X, a 345 gigabyte archive of around 1,100 pieces of Windows software from the pre-Win95 era.
Maybe you don't give a fig for modern games and all their fancy graphics, and you'd like to go back to the text-based era, when Infocom was king, and all you needed to save the day was a brass lantern, an elvish sword, and a desire to match wits with a devious developer who wanted you to suffer. Say hello to eXoIF, a 30 gigabyte archive of over 2,000 text adventures for a whole slew of different home computers and mainframe types.
Or maybe you think text adventures suck, and the best gaming era came when LucasArts was doing their thing with games like The Secret of Monkey Island and Full Throttle. If so, you'll be happy to learn eXoDREAM exists to let you relive all those classics.
Or maybe you're like me, and there are a number of games from your childhood you'd love to revisit, but they were released for the Windows 95/98/Me platforms and don't play well with modern, 64-bit operating systems. If that's the case, you're definitely going to want to keep an eye on the eXo team's latest release, eXoWin9X, which first rolled out earlier this year and offers access to over 600 games from the first three years of this particular era in gaming, with more to come as the team gets them one-click ready. Incidentally, Beavis & Butthead in: Virtual Stupidity is included, in case you were wondering.
Wait a minute: aren't you endorsing piracy and copyright infringement on a massive scale?
Who, me? (Source: Pixabay)
Believe it or not, the honest answer is 'no'. I don't want to encourage illegal activities in the slightest. If there is some other, legal way that I, or anybody else, can play any of these games or systems, then I recommend doing exactly that. Pay the ten bucks to be able to play all those Doom games on GOG. Drop $15 to own the remasters of those first three Tomb Raider games. I encourage anyone and everyone to play original games on original hardware whenever and wherever such things are possible.
But that's also easy for me to say. I'm the nerd who owns several thousand retro games and a dozen classic systems, all in working order, to play them on. Most of the rest of the world is nowhere near as lucky as I am.
So I want to remind my readers that over 80% of our gaming history is, for all intents and purposes, lost. It's inaccessible due to scarcity or price, languishing in copyright hell because the company that owns the rights doesn't even know what they own, or simply aren't interested in investing the time and money to bring it back to life. And that's just talking about normal, single-player titles without an online component. Do you want to play something like The Crew, or The Matrix Online, or some other piece of 'games-as-live-service' content where the servers were shut down, and even if you still have the physical media you bought and paid for, you can't do anything with them?
Hey, just a thought, but how about we...
...while we're at it?
Nope, say the majority of game publishers. Buy something new. Buy something different. Wait until we remake it. Give us more money for something you won't be able to use in the future, unless we think there's more money to be made in re-releasing it, and then you can buy it again. At least until we tell the storefronts to stop selling it. Because we can do that too, you know.
Want to take a few laps around the track in Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec with a friend to relive your college days? It shouldn't be that hard, right? Gran Turismo 3 was the second-highest selling PS2 title of all time, barely edged out by the franchise behemoth that is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It sold fifteen million copies, and routinely shows up on lists of the best games ever made. Surely, surely a game that huge, that popular, is easily and cheaply accessible on Sony's digital storefront.
Right...?
You already know the answer.
Buy yourself a working PS2, a controller, a memory card, a Composite-to-HDMI switch, and a copy of the game off the second-hand market. What, you don't want to spend a couple hundred bucks to play Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec? 'Sorry', shrugs Sony, 'our hands are tied. Intellectual property, licensing rights, you know the routine. Would if we could, and all that.'
These games all belong to a historical legacy. Even if they are terrible (maybe even especially if they are terrible), they are worthy of preservation, if for no other reason than so they can serve as examples to future game makers of what not to do. But unlike other forms of media, ours is not set up for preservation and access, but rather deprecation and depletion. Even the most well-cared-for PlayStation will eventually stop working. The connectors in even the most carefully-maintained Super Mario Bros. cartridge will eventually corrode. The people who worked so diligently to create the software and hardware that we hold sacred in our memories will not live forever. We do them no honor by allowing their works to degrade, to fall out of circulation, to become forgotten, to get locked behind an increasingly-expensive paywall called "supply and demand".
If the only way to be a part of the solution is to become a problem in the eyes of the people who will not or cannot do anything to mitigate the issue, then our cultural memories, our cultural history, have, in essence, become crimes waiting to happen. Emulators, ROM sites, and projects like Retro-eXo are both the past and the future of our hobby.
Whether the game publishers like it or not.
