/ 14 July 2007

Preserving old games is a service to humanity

Last week, Microsoft announced a joint initiative with the British National Archives. There is concern that billions of public documents will soon be obsolete. Microsoft has stepped in to offer its "software virtualisation" solution, Virtual PC 2007, as well as a bunch of old operating systems. Isn't it about time we had a similar endeavour for video games?

Last week, Microsoft took some time out from repairing Xbox 360s to announce a joint initiative with the British National Archives. There is concern that billions of public documents will soon be obsolete. Microsoft has stepped in to offer its “software virtualisation” solution, Virtual PC 2007, as well as a bunch of old operating systems.

Isn’t it about time we had a similar endeavour for video games? They are, after all, catastrophically prone to obsolescence — most consoles are dead and buried within five years. All right, so PlayStation 1 and 2 are probably safe from extinction and few gamers will lob out their Xboxes because of the super-human strength required to lift one into a skip. But what of the Amiga CD32, Pioneer LaserActive or Bandai Playdia?

Emulation is one solution — it’s possible to download digital recreations of just about any video-game system you could think of. But emulated games are rarely perfect. Emulation is also useless when it comes to preserving physical media. Future generations need to understand that games were once delivered on cassettes, floppy discs and bulky cartridges.

Games packaging, too, has a fine aesthetic heritage. From the minimalist perfection of the early Atari 2600 boxes to today’s lavish special editions, it has often been more fun to look at a game case than play what’s inside. And what hope has an emulator of recreating, say, the scratch-and-sniff card that came with 1986 PC adventure title Leather Goddesses of Phobos?

There are also plenty of consoles that simply cannot be effectively emulated. GCE’s 1982 machine, the Vectrex, employed sparse vector graphics, which are impossible to recreate on a standard PC screen, while Nintendo’s Virtual Boy resembled a Fisher Price View-Master fastened to a camera tripod.

There are one or two notable game archives. The University of Texas has just set one up, taking in donations of early titles from legends such as Richard Garriott (Ultima) and Warren Spector (Deus Ex). Elsewhere, Berlin’s Computerspiele Museum and California’s Computer History Museum house excellent collections of vintage hardware.

But there should be an industry initiative to rescue as many games and machines as possible. Movie directors consider it a tragedy when some old flick disintegrates, but game publishers don’t seem to care about their heritage.

Perhaps Microsoft should now turn its attention towards interactive entertainment. The Virtual PC thing is worthy, but are you really telling me that the preservation of obscure census data is more important than saving the software catalogue of the Sega Dreamcast? — Guardian Unlimited Â