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Thinking I Do With Words - The need to preserve video games

This past week I’ve been playing the game Illusion of Gaia. It’s a great game. It’s a strange game, at one point the main character gets scurvy of all things, but it’s quite fun and is not like very much else you can play.
Devin

This past week I’ve been playing the game Illusion of Gaia. It’s a great game. It’s a strange game, at one point the main character gets scurvy of all things, but it’s quite fun and is not like very much else you can play.

The problem with the game is that while I’d very much recommend others play it, they’re not going to have an easy time finding a legal copy. It was released once, on the Super Nintendo, in November of 1993. It has never been re-released on modern hardware.

The game is part of a larger series, developed by the Japanese company Quintet and published by Enix, which has now become Square Enix. The series includes the game Soul Blazer – also not available to modern consumers – and Terranigma – which is was never actually sold in North America.

The easiest way to play all three games is through alternate means like emulation, which many people avoid because they’re unsure of the legality of it. But, because nobody is actually making the games available to purchase anywhere, that’s going to be it. Super Nintendo consoles around the world will fail, and at the end of the day a ROM file on a dusty hard drive is the only way we’re going to have these games.

I pick Illusion of Gaia as an illustration of this problem because I like it, but it’s a pervasive problem with video games. Older stuff can be run on modern hardware, through emulation. The only roadblock is getting the files available for people to actually buy and play. The games are actually made, after all, and while there is definitely difficulty porting them to different hardware, people working in their spare time have made working emulators that can handle any Super Nintendo game, for example.

There are hundreds, thousands of games that are not currently available. Some because the people who hold the rights aren’t interested in keeping them available, some because nobody knows who owns the rights. Some of these games are excellent, some of these games are not, but all had a ton of work put into them and should be available in some form, whether on their own or as part of a larger compilation.

The situation is not as dire as it was in the case of silent movies - the games will be available in some form, even if it’s not strictly legal form, because of mass duplication and what was decried as online piracy - but without availability the games could be lost. There are Oscar winning films you can’t watch today, the majority of silent films - over 75% according to the Library of Congress - are lost.

Sometimes you get some glimmers of hope. Digital Eclipse is a company at the forefront of this, and their recently released SNK Legacy Collection is a showcase of how the history of games can be collected, compiled and presented to the world. Is every game in the set good? No, it has the NES Ikari Warriors in there, but it’s also important to preserve even the bad games, like the NES Ikari Warriors, to explain how games were developed and evolved over the years. Like a calmly narrated introduction to a silent film on a movie network, it gives you the context you need to understand what you’re about to experience.

I don’t know if you need that much context for the Quintet games, they hold up great today. But you do need a way to play them, and a way to share them with your friends, and talk about them in print. They still look good - Soul Blazer is a bit simple, but Illusion of Gaia is extremely well animated and holds up well today, while Terranigma was a high water mark for the console. I’d love them to get the Digital Eclipse treatment, however, because they’re good games that deserve to be played.

But really, all games deserve to be played, and preserved, because they are documents of history. How we entertain ourselves is as much an important part of human past as anything else. And we need to make that history available.