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[Last Hearth]

Why shouldn't they be?

It's become much easier since then to store that much media.

Also, people's minds and means (i. e. money) change regarding what they want to check out all the time.

Have you been to a hoarder’s house. That’s why.

 

[Last Hearth]

I conpletely disagree.
I enjoy going through the full catalogue of a system. See what was released, play a few. You can always find something interesting in less popular games.

Games are knowledge. It is great to have access to all of them.

If it’s that important to you, you can undertake one of the”travelling to a library, maintaining vintage gaming hardware, using an emulator, or piracy” methods.

 

[the_master]

If it’s that important to you, you can undertake one of the”travelling to a library, maintaining vintage gaming hardware, using an emulator, or piracy” methods.

I already collect games, but I can’t have them all and games will degrade as well.
In any case, digital and online games may be impossible to play.

Edit: also, what about all the people who can’t collect. More over, people born 100 years, 1000 years or further from now? They should have the chance to investigate the origin of videogames, and I see no reason why they should not have all games of our time available.

 

[thismeinteil]

I bought this.

So...

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

I'm a total asshole because I have my collection of games I wanted. The hell with everyone else. If you wanted them, you should have bought them when you could.

 

[cartman414]

Have you been to a hoarder’s house. That’s why.

Two words: Digital. Downloads.

 

[chaseroni]

This tweet says it better than I can.
I just want people to have more options.

 

[Rawbutt Jellybean]

This tweet says it better than I can.
I just want people to have more options.

I wish old games had more accessibility too but that guy sounds a little ridiculous.

You don't need a CS degree to emulate games. Millions of people who know fuck-all about emulation have gotten up to speed pretty quickly on smart phones, retro portables, steam decks, etc.

 

[chaseroni]

I wish old games had more accessibility too but that guy sounds a little ridiculous.

You don't need a CS degree to emulate games. Millions of people who know fuck-all about emulation have gotten up to speed pretty quickly on smart phones, retro portables, steam decks, etc.

I really don't think he implied you need a degree to do those things.
Also think of the kids man, my buddy has a five year old that adores retro games, his dad of course set up a bunch of emulation for him.

Btw as a guy who's been doing IT work for 15+ years, people actually still don't know fuck-all about tech.

 

[BennyBlanco]

Thank god for archive.org

 

[ResurrectedContrarian]

Thank god for archive.org

I hope someone is prepping an archive of the archive, in case it ever does get shut down. It's amazing that they even have complete Nintendo romsets and haven't been nuked... something no dedicated ROM site seems to have sustained.

I guess their officially registered non-profit status helps, and their positioning as a form of library.

 

[BennyBlanco]

I hope someone is prepping an archive of the archive, in case it ever does get shut down. It's amazing that they even have complete Nintendo romsets and haven't been nuked... something no dedicated ROM site seems to have sustained.

I guess their officially registered non-profit status helps, and their positioning as a form of library.

Yea it’s mindblowing just how much they have going on there. Wanna play dragonball for the wonderswan color? It’s like 3 clicks away and running perfectly in a browser or available for download. Also BIOS files which I have no idea how they can host.

 

[Rawbutt Jellybean]

I really don't think he implied you need a degree to do those things.

I was being a little sarcastic.

Also think of the kids man, my buddy has a five year old that adores retro games, his dad of course set up a bunch of emulation for him.

Btw as a guy who's been doing IT work for 15+ years, people actually still don't know fuck-all about tech.

If a kid's young then their parents are probably familiar with youtube and can set it up for them.

Outside of potential issues with legality, access to old games has never been better and emulation is always improving.

 

[genesisblock]

Thankfully, online archivists, ROM dumpers, and emulation programmers are doing the hard work to keep everything alive.

And while I'm against any kind of piracy of currently-available games, keeping ROMs for things like abandoned retro titles that have no legitimate way to purchase anymore is a perfectly good thing.

Indeed. Bless the emulator community.

 

[game boy kid]

pEAce

 

[TheInfamousKira]

So who's gonna start the GAF Preservation Force?

 

[LRKD]

Copyright laws need to be updated. If a product isn't on sale for over 15 years, it should instantly be considered abandoned and become public domain. After 35 years even if still sold, public domain, if they haven't made enough money after 35 years, they'll never make 'enough' money.

Tbh could easily benefit corps too, imagine if Nintendo could slap all the old, abandoned games on their online service today, it would bolster their library an insane amount. As well as pressure them into ensuring all of their own library is still available to players today.

 

[Soodanim]

I'm a total asshole because I have my collection of games I wanted. The hell with everyone else. If you wanted them, you should have bought them when you could.

Here's where fire/tornado/burglars/natural degradation comes in and kills your collection. I hope you've got second copies stored somewhere everything-proof

 

[YeulEmeralda]

People don't care about this and it's a god damned shame.

Pirates do. I have no problem with illegally acquiring an old game from a studio that long went bankrupt.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

Thank God for preservation with things like emulation. I don't really care anything much about moral standing when it comes to potentially not being able to find any game at some point. Especially after certain amount of years have passed and finding legacy titles from 30 years ago is becoming harder and harder.

She don't have a way to catalog and preserve these games, then we might as well just erase history. I certainly hope that 100 years you will still be able to find pretty much any game ever somewhere online.

There is simply too much bureaucracy and red tape in the industry where rights holders and other legal aspects always get in the way. And I do understand because that's the way laws work in order to protect the IP but from a preservation standpoint, you can't simply assume that the declaration of Independence will always be pristine shape like it was when it was first drafted. You have to have a way to at least preserve it whether physical or not.

 

[MajinSweet4]

I wish old games had more accessibility too but that guy sounds a little ridiculous.

You don't need a CS degree to emulate games. Millions of people who know fuck-all about emulation have gotten up to speed pretty quickly on smart phones, retro portables, steam decks, etc.

Agreed, and his viewpoint is actively the problem, not the solution. The gaming industry has made it pretty clear that they don't value gaming history. And tons of games, many popular/good ones have already been effectively lost. The idea that emulation is out of reach of the "normies" but original hardware is not is insane. Let alone getting current platform holders to bother with proper emulation services when they are making money hand over fist with current subscription services. If anyone really cares about preserving gaming history they should know the only viable solution is emulation, so instead of treating it like its a taboo, it needs more people rallying for its support. If you think younger people really don't know how to setup an emulator, teach them. For most of them it's really not that hard.

 

[DeltaPolarBear]

I agree. There is a reason Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Twain, Shelley are still read today while all the thousands others are not. Pong, Space Invaders, Doom ... they have a place in history but preserving everything? For what? Anyone really thinks anyone from future generations should care about anything beyond the actual milestones, maybe even learn something from it?

You don't get to decide what is important 100 years from now. Many things that were lost to time were things so mundane and well known at the time that nobody bothered to write down, and it caused things that could have been preserved, be lost forever. The point isn't that we need to preserve everything important; the point is that we wouldn't know what is important until after the passage of time, so we should save as much as we can so people in the future can be free to choose what is important to them.

 

[adamosmaki]

Good think then emulation is a think and big companies like this guy Nintendo support the work that goes into emulators.

 

[Drew1440]

Compared to books or moves, gaming preservation is doing alright. There are loads of media that have been lost to time, the BBC lost most of their early Doctor Who episodes as they had to reuse the tapes/film because the storage was too expensive. Today storage is cheap and accessable.

Legal accessability is a separate issue, you can purchase music/movies from all the way back to the 40s on iTunes/Amazon and even stream it on subscription services, but gaming is a different story since its tied to the hardware the game was designed to run on, and the hardware must be emulated for it to run.
Virtual Console on the Wii was quite impressive for what it was, since they allowed titles from other platforms which were competitors to Nintendo like the Megadrive/Commodore 64.

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

Here's where fire/tornado/burglars/natural degradation comes in and kills your collection. I hope you've got second copies stored somewhere everything-proof

I have the majority of games I really like both digitally and physically, so if I suddenly lose both, I'd consider it an act of God, and then believe it was meant to be and move on, at that point.

 

[ReBurn]

I bought a couple of gaming emulation handhelds from China and I think they came with almost all of those missing games on the included SD cards. I should clone the SD card images and put the images in my cloud storage account so they're never really gone I guess. All I really wanted was to rip my some of my PS1 and Dreamcast discs so I couple play the games when I travel.

 

[ArtHands]

I have all the classic game roms I want on my PC. I am fine. If folks who doesn't care to get a PC or care to learn and download emulator and roms, well so be it.

 

[Lunarorbit]

This seems way overblown. It's just saying that these games aren't easily accessible from digital storefronts.

I'll never pay for older Nintendo games (nes, snes, gba) but that doesn't mean I can't pirate them right now.

 

[cartman414]

I'm a total asshole because I have my collection of games I wanted. The hell with everyone else. If you wanted them, you should have bought them when you could.

Assuming they could at the time.

 

[HerjansEagleFeeder]

oh no, if steam shuts down we will lose furry feet and sex with hitler 8

Come on, the bear fucking in BG3 makes more than up for it.

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

Assuming they could at the time.

Well boo hoo. During the DS and PSP era I could only afford to support one of them. Wish I could have gotten a PSP and all the amazing rpgs it has, but I'm not gonna cry about it, but maybe I should because a lot of that shit is super expensive now.

 

[SF Kosmo]

Meh, if the goal is to play the game. There are emulators.

Do you not see the problem with the fact that the only way these games continue to exist is because the laws are poorly enforced right now?

Copyright law has gotten so out of control that it's gone beyond protecting IP and is actually destroying it. The term of copyright is often 75-100 years now, longer than any modern media can be expected to survive without being copied, archived, and reproduced, all of which violated the DMCA.

There's an easy compromise here, which is to make long-term copyright (past, say, 20 or 30 years) contingent on renewal applications and continued commercial exploitation of the IP. This is how we handle other IP like trademarks, and it's perfectly adequate to provide strong IP rights to holders, but it also allows the overwhelming majority of abandoned IP to be returned to the public domain, preserved, and archived once its commercial life has ended.

 

[SHA]

Ehh. Not everything needs to stand the sands of time. It’s ok to let things die and disappear. Move on, look forward. I think over the last few years, while I live the idea of nostalgia, it’s not something that motivates my purchase habits anymore. Maybe because I have such a limited amount of time to actually play games.

Weapon: I don't know how you keep doing this.
Master Chief: I don't have a choice. Maybe it's my programming.

 

[hemo memo]

There should be a big organization powerful enough to ask the big 3 to provide what they have for archiving purposes and they continue getting copies for reservations going forward.

 

[Z O N E]

Genuine question, but is linking to where you can get these ROMs allowed here? As I would love to know.