Game designers and enthusiasts have, for many years, faced the challenges of preserving history in a digital medium. Source code and original designs for a project get lost over time, or data storage methods change and degrade.
Gaming has a substantial history now, 40 years after Pong first went out into the wide world. Even the Smithsonian is running a detailed exhibit on the art and history of video games, opening later this month.
Preservation of any art or technology is always a tricky business, and it’s no secret that video game preservation is particularly thorny.
Video game preservation, educational robot dragons and Department of Homeland Security Sno Cones are just some of the “outlandish” federally funded projects called out in U.S. Senator Tom Coburn’s annual big book of wasteful government spending this week.
Old books are collected in libraries. Old art in art galleries. Old music on commercial FM radio. But what are we doing to hang onto our old games?
I’m an archive junkie — I consider it a side-effect of my profession, since we spend half our lives in temperature-controlled buildings with lots of old stuff. So I watch the growth of the video game archives across the globe with no small measure of excitement — not only does my little historian heart go pitter-patter at the fact that people are being so proactive in figuring out how to preserve our beloved medium for future generations, but it means a couple more places to poke my head in when I have a good excuse. The recent announcement of the UK National Video Game Archive has led to some fruitful discussion on how to preserve games — not just in terms of the hardware, but also as a culture. Which, of course, is a hell of a lot harder than making sure books don’t rot:
Preservation of ‘new media’ has gotten some attention in recent months — a lot of venerable collections are moving to figure out the best ways to preserve games and gaming media in an archival setting, while building useful collections for the future. The University of Texas at Austin was recently awarded over $US 250,000 to study the collection and preservation of MMOs. In addition to the obvious bits of preservation problems — software and the like — the project is also pretty broad in scope, including an oral history component, as the project head Megan Winget explained:
Rob Zacny has a thought provoking piece up at the Escapist: on the whole, we’re the worst genre when it comes to preserving our history, even the great classics acknowledged as ‘great.’ In a society — never mind technical area — where progress and marching forward is the name of the game, it’s not exactly surprising, but a problem nonetheless. And not just for the history buffs among us:
Is The PC Key To Preserving Our Console Gaming History?
In today’s Speak-Up on Kotaku, commenter Pixiebutt salutes Sega for making its classic console titles available on Steam, and dreams of a day when other present and former gaming hardware companies follow suit.