Recently, there has been a rumor that has attracted more attention, that is, Sony may gradually close the PS3, PSV and PSP game stores within the year. Players are worried that they will never be able to buy games on these platforms in the future, and second, they are afraid that the digital version in their hands will be scrapped directly.
While there is no definitive official word yet, number games do have some unavoidable risks. Proponents of the physical version will think that the platform side can not smash the discs and cassettes in your hand anyway, but it can make the digital content disappear in an instant.
In fact, there have been many such examples in the past. In 2012, Silicon Knights lost a lawsuit with Epic Games for leaking trade secrets and violating Unreal Engine's licensing agreement. The court ruled at the time that they had to recall and destroy five games developed by Unreal Engine, and the digital version was certainly not immune. In particular, "Too Human" is exclusive to Xbox 360, and later only a few wallpapers can be found in the digital store, and the only way to get started before was to see if it can be used, and it was only opened for free last year.
"God of War" was postponed for many years before its release, which can be described as a fateful fate
In 2014, "Crooked Boy Scott vs. the World" was removed from various platforms because the copyright expired, and it was not until six years later that Ubisoft remembered to give it a new life, re-releasing the full version of PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC and Stadia.
Mobile games are the hardest hit area, and in 2017 Apple ended support for 32-bit applications on the AppStore, which at one point led to the deprecation of 200,000 pieces of digital software. At that time, there were also game designers who wrote on VentureBeat and denounced Apple for creating a "cultural black hole".
There are also some particularly funny cases, such as a game called Abstractism, which was found to be sneaking to download mining programs in the background of the computer, resulting in a particularly high CPU and GPU usage, which was later completely erased from Steam by Valve.
Abstraction is his own death, and the developers once acknowledged game mining in the Steam community
As you can imagine, when preserving the history of games became an increasingly important concept, enthusiasts who buried themselves in discs and cassette boxes also began to notice the importance of digital games. However, this is a matter of being in a "gray area".
Founded in 2006, The Hidden Palace community is a small group with a special focus on digital games. Most of these members feel that data stored on physical media can sometimes be easily damaged and lost, so keeping any medium as possible is king.
As an inappropriate example, some cartridge batteries such as Pokémon Gold/Silver last for about 15 years at most, while bare circuit boards and memories cannot withstand the wind and sun, and environments with too high humidity can corrode magnetic media.
So in addition to floppy disks, CDs, and cassettes, The Hidden Palace is no exception to source code, art, and design files. This group hopes to be able to record and save classic content, so that people can feel the highlights of the older generation of games.
The Hidden Palace's "Rainstorm Project" intends to preserve a large number of game prototypes
Back in 2008, their researchers paid a lot of money to buy a portion of the backups from Sega's U.S. QA division. It took about a week to straighten out the various encrypted files and finally upload more than 1,000 game prototypes for the Sega console platform.
A few days ago, at the same time as the rumors of Sony's closure of the digital store appeared, the community announced its latest milestone: uploading more than 700 prototypes and technical demos of PS2 games, with a total of more than 860GB of data.
Some people may take it for granted that saving number games is particularly simple, and it is enough to buy it and copy and paste it with the "banknote ability". But most of the time, the information you collect is not a packaged consumer version, and many files need to be reorganized and repaired.
The whole thing started when an employee of the Internet Archive took the lead in introducing a living Lei Feng who had a lot of information in his hands and was willing to share it. The Hidden Palace naturally saw the light of day, and three of them developed a set of scripting tools to sift through useful data, such as collecting ROM-related Redump sets and then creating databases and the like.
The Internet Archive is probably best known for WaybackMachine, who can browse old web pages, but they're also keen to save games
It wasn't until the fall of 2020 that they found they couldn't get enough of a rush and gathered a team to analyze the rest of the files to determine if the stuff was a prototype of the game, what unique features they had, and whether they could run on the emulator or actual hardware.
Because some master discs have inherent problems, the developers did not consider long-term preservation when burning, and the repair work could only be carried out at the same time, and some games even created separate patches. Until now, almost a year later, The Hidden Palace can only admit that there may be many errors in these hundreds of gigabytes of data, which shows how much work is done.
Frank Cifaldi, the founder of the Video Game History Foundation, also believes that digital games need to be preserved, and he is in a situation where the physical medium of some physical games has begun to deteriorate and need to convert data into an easy-to-read, playable format for archiving.
Forced to crack the game sometimes, Byuu, a software developer from Japan, does this in his spare time – allowing old games to run on new computers.
He used a special hardware device with the goal of analyzing the board layout of recording 2700 SFC cartridges. This sometimes led him to discover little secrets that weren't known, such as when Working on Mega Man X, Capcom solved a problem by soldering wires. This kind of detail is very important both for game simulations and for understanding history itself.
Frank Cifaldi scanning the picture
Of course, in addition to saving the number game, the printed materials that can be found in the matching must also be digitally archived. When Carly Kocurek, an associate professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was working on '90s "girls' games" a few years ago, he would go through the pages of game magazines: "I upload them to Dropbox and then take the time to categorize them in ways that make sense to me." ”
Sifaldi also works with Game Informer magazine to archive press releases and photos over the years, totaling about 20TB of content.
Fight with the copyright owner
Many things are actually self-explanatory, whether it is for commercial purposes or not, cracking is cracking, piracy is piracy. It is possible that only organizations such as the International Video Game History Center are more likely to reach a consensus with some companies and obtain permission to save digital games.
Sifardi believes that many of the current archives of digital games come from piracy: "As an archivist and historian, I feel that I can't respect intellectual property, which is contrary to what I do. ”
International Video Game History Center
In 2015, ESA, the host of E3, declared that saving digital games was an illegal hack because, judging by the terms of the Millennium Digital Copyright Act, Section 1201 prohibits users (including communities, museums, archives, and researchers) from modifying games to playable versions after publishers shut down their servers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has advocated for some exemptions, one of which is that non-commercial institutions such as museums and archives can apply for exemptions once every three years, which is better than nothing.
There are other laws that may complement this, such as Section 117 of the United States Code (17 U.S. Code § 117) that makes it legal to copy and save software for "archival purposes", but how to interpret and determine archiving is still a hassle.
Everyone wants to do things with their chests up, but sometimes they are particularly helpless. The Hidden Palace's way to circumvent the regulations, from my observation, is to weed out those consumer versions and use the "game prototype" to wipe the edge ball.
Night Dive Studios is committed to re-releasing old game agents that have been sealed off, and the first thing a project often has to solve is to straighten out the copyright.
Take the millennium sci-fi shooter "No One Lives Forever" as an example, and the relationship behind it is intricate. Night Dive went to the original publisher Fox, and also found the Activision Blizzard judge who now holds the copyright, and the other party did not even know whether he had ownership. Finally, he went on a rampage and found that the decision was in the hands of Warner Bros.
As a result, Warner Bros. said that things should be related to Activision, and they had no interest in reviving the work, and it seemed impossible to play the digital version of "No One Lives Forever" through formal channels.
No One Lives Forever 2
But there are still informal channels, in 2016, a website called nolfrevival.tk uploaded "No One Immortal" and "No Man Immortal 2" for free, and they also made HD patches to make the resolution reach 3440x1440. Perhaps Activision Blizzard and Warner Bros. are not very concerned about this IP, and so far there is no sign of responsibility.
It's just that saving the digital game in this way is certainly not a long-term solution, and the copyright owner will find the face on a whim, at least Nintendo may be late, but it will never be absent.
In July 2018, they filed a lawsuit against the owners of two ROM sites, alleging that LoveROMs and LoveRETRO had violated copyright law. The couple who run the site had to agree to pay a total of $12.23 million in damages to the old ren after losing the case, in addition to removing all the games, files and simulators saved on the site.
LoveROMs
This dispute is quite big in the ROM circle, and many websites are worried about the copyright owner coming to the door and choose to stop the operation to avoid it. Players are also a bit controversial because many of the sites that share ROMs aren't for profit (although Nintendo claims that LoveROMs and LoveRETRO are profitable), and some have speculated that Nintendo is packaging these old games for re-release. Of course, from the perspective of saving the number game, it is best for the official to be able to really act.
Even if the digital game archive based on pirated copies is not malicious, it will indeed harm the interests of some people. Matthew Callis, the operator of the SFC Directory website superfamicom.org, believes that some collectors will find ways to avoid the corresponding digital version appearing online in order to maintain the high value of the physical version. In 2017, he had to crowdfund to win four long-lost "Kirby" works from an older brother in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan.
Sifaldi is also involved in crowdfunding
At present, the core problem encountered in saving digital games is probably that there are many people who are willing to do it, but a considerable number of manufacturers believe that the past things do not have much commercial value, so many collectors can only do it at the risk of breaking the law. Although the copyright owner may not be held accountable, this balance is too fragile, and in whose hands the key to solving the problem is believed to be judged by everyone.
A few years ago, the journalist Heidi Kemps found yuji Naka, the "father of Sonic", in the name of an interview, and showed him an ancient prototype of Sonic 2 through a simulator, which surprised Hiroshi Nakamitsu with an additional hidden palace area compared to the game in 1992 when consumers got their hands.
It is speculated that the ROM was leaked from the 1992 New York Toy Show, and due to the limitation of development time, Sega cut these contents that year, leaving only the images and design files. Probably inspired by this, 22 years later, in the iOS and Android versions of Sonic 2, Sega made up these things back.
At that time, people couldn't understand why the Sonic 2 scene seen in the magazine was not actually there
Some argue that Doom is also a great example of saving a digital game, and since id Software released the source code in 1997, it's possible today to appear on any device with a screen. Perhaps only through the joint efforts of the people and the government to save the issue of digital games can finally be put on the table.
Resources:
Preservationists Are Saving Video Game History, One Upload at a Time
No one will sell No One Lives Forever, so let's download it
Four Long Lost Kirby Games Found At Auction
A Quest for the Secret Origins of Lost Video-Game Levels