Where the games go: the problem of preserving old video games. Part 3

[In the last part of the article, "Where the games go," Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, and other leading video game companies answer the questionnaire on saving games and talk about how they keep their video game history. Developers and publishers talk about what resources they have lost, and how they saved and preserved the building blocks of their games until it was too late.]

Any explorer of video games can find sarcastic remarks or unconfirmed rumors about how the game industry lost its material on the Internet, in paper magazines or in books. In the first and second parts of this article, there are some of these stories told in an interview: from the source code of Atari Corporation, sold on the sale of office furniture, to the lost source codes of Sega, which were found in the garage of a former employee.
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I decided to directly contact the representatives of the video game industry and ask them a question: is it important for them to preserve video games? How does their organization, being a developer or publisher, save their video games for the future?

I sent a four-question questionnaire to developers and publishers around the world. In addition, developers and publishers had the opportunity, instead of answering questions, to submit a statement defining their attitude to the preservation of video games.

Parts of the companies I asked additional questions regarding their re-released games. In early 2009, I contacted 61 developers and publishers via paper mail, and again e-mailed them during 2009-2010. I answered only 14 companies. In the last part of this article, 14 video game companies talk about how they keep their games developed and published, which have become an important part of the entertainment industry over the past three decades.

The last part of the article summarizes their answers and statements. Fully answers can be read here .

Some employees of the video game industry were very happy to take part in the survey, others refused outright, referring to the corporate policy of non-disclosure of information about the development. Of course, in some cases, our questionnaire could get lost in the mail, get into spam or be ignored due to lack of time.

As I mentioned in the first part of the article, this topic is difficult to discuss. This became apparent after receiving final responses and statements. In some of them, the frightening reality of what was lost to the video game industry has opened up. In addition, they shared amazing stories about stored information with me.

It has been a great honor for me to receive company responses — I really appreciate the time and effort spent on responses and statements. Those who were missed during the distribution of the questionnaire, I ask you to send the answers and statements to the author himself.

Console manufacturers Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony have kindly expressed their views on the topic of saving games. Capcom, Digital Leisure, Gearbox Software, Intellivision Productions, Irem Software Engineering, Jaleco, Mitchell Corporation, Namco Bandai Games, Sega Corporation, Taito and Throwback Entertainment (majority owners of Acclaim Entertainment library) provided me with answers and statements about their position on maintaining arcade games. and console games.


The original machine " Puck Man " ( Pac-Man ), exhibited in a shop window in the reception office of the Tokyo office of Namco Bandai Games. The author thanks Izumi Wada (Izumi Wada) from the corporate communications department of Namco Bandai Games for his invaluable help and time spent on shooting.

Ken Lobb from Microsoft Game Studios said that the company has special departments for storing all the software and hardware of games. Multiple copies (consisting of source code and production materials) of each game published by Microsoft are stored in rooms with humidity and temperature control, both in the company's offices and beyond. Microsoft plans to transfer games published before 2000 and stored on older media to more reliable media.

“The source code and all materials used to create products for games released after 2000 are already stored on highly reliable, modern storage media in protected premises with humidity and temperature control. Restoring the source code and even rebuilding games have become part of the tasks of the program, part of the program for sustainability and business recovery (BCDR), ”Lobb says.

Many of the tools used to save the source code of Microsoft Game Studio were developed internally. Microsoft is eager to provide "general recommendations" on how to save video games to organizations involved in creating video games. However, it cannot share “specific encryption / decryption algorithms”.

Marc Franklin (Marc Franklin), director of public relations for Nintendo, emphasizes in the statement that the legacy plays an important role in the release of modern games: “The history of our games was laid a decade ago, and they use characters that are still popular. In addition, some of these old games became the basis of genres, styles and technological breakthroughs, which are now mundane. ”

“As we explain in the Iwata Asks interview series, Nintendo keeps the real treasure from materials related to the company's past games, including even original sketches and design documents. Saving these games allows you to introduce them to new generations of players, while at the same time giving a chance to old players to experience everything anew. ”

Representatives from Sony Computer Entertainment of America told how IT and quality control departments play their part in archiving source code and resources. They constantly transfer data to modern media. Sony's policies and storage methods vary by region. Terms of archiving games created by external developers, depend on the signed agreements.

Sony Computer Entertainment identified three important problems with archiving finished products that it faces when changing generations of equipment and development tools:

• We need to find a way to archive computer hardware and software products associated with hardware. Obsolescence BIOS can cause problems with long-term storage of equipment, and hence the development tools. We need to find a way to save or flashing BIOS versions for old chipsets. EPROMs often fail after 10 years.
• Inherited music and video can be stored in versions of files that require specific equipment (maps or other peripherals) that can no longer be found. We need to find out how media companies managing archives do it.
• Development kits and hardware tools should be stored with the data of games in rooms protected from natural disasters.

Developers and publishers from Japan also reaffirmed the importance of preserving the data and production materials of their games in protected places. Jaleco has defined the fundamental parameters for the protection of game data in storages protected from fires, natural disasters, dangerous climatic influences and other security threats. Jaleco and Taito ensure that their preservation processes meet standards. (Jaleco indicated compliance with a specific ISO27001 standard.)

Taito said that saving video games is "vital," and that the company follows a policy of "protection" and "care." By “protection” is meant protecting games against copyright infringement, and “leaving” is the company's intention to create a “solid video game culture.” Taito considers the preservation and "protection" of the same process, involving the re-release of games in collections for consoles and mobile platforms, as well as on other non-traditional platforms and media.

Taito said that in the "era of early video games" conservation policies did not exist: "We have problems with the collection of game data and their proper storage."

However, Taito, in particular, has created a policy for the preservation of arcade games, which includes the preservation of the equipment itself along with the ROM and printed circuit boards.

Taito also acknowledges that while the company uses the schemes and other development materials needed for enhanced user / customer support, many of the games' promotional materials have been lost over time.

Like Taito, who described the absence of such conservation policies in the company's early history, former Capcom producer Ben Judd (Ben Judd) found out the same thing: he learned that many Japanese video game developers had no storage and archiving procedures before the early 1990s:

“Capcom has a procedure for saving source code. However, such procedures, like many other Japanese publishers, did not apply until about the 16-bit era. I personally saw huge heaps of printouts of dot-matrix printers with games source code. ”

“By the way, I heard about incidents with old gaming ROMs of other publishers who were lost and lost forever. At first, I was very surprised, but I was even more shocked that this is quite a common situation for many 8-bit games from other publishers, ”Judd says.

Irem is one of the Japanese developers who openly admits that it does not have the source code of the games developed and published in the 1980s. Irem expressed the fear that the ROMs themselves are also under threat:

“Although we keep almost all ROMs from the 1980s, some of the equipment for these ROMs has already broken. Since the equipment has changed a lot, it is very difficult to repair the broken one (due to the lack of not only spare parts, but also repairmen), ”said Kenta Sakai of Irem Software Engineering.


The 1991 JAMMA arcade game Drift Out PCB is housed in the repository of the Mitchell Corporation’s Tokyo offices. Developed by Visco Drift Out was sold through a Visco sales agent - Mitchell Corporation.

Japanese video game developers Namco Bandai Games, Sega and Mitchell Corporation (along with Capcom and Irem) also answered the questionnaire questions. Each of the companies expressed the opinion that saving games is an important task, and stated that it transferred many of its old games to modern media and stores them in a safe and secure climate-controlled room.

North American developers Digital Leisure, Intellivision, Throwback and Gearbox Software told about the difficulties of saving their games due to many technical problems.

Digital Leisure to store the Laserdisc format with games like Dragon's Lair and Mad Dog McCree had to carefully collect games from various sources. Producer of Digitial Leisure Paul Gold (Paul Gold) tells:

“Most of the original source code of our classic Dragon's Lair and Mad Dog McCree was either lost or inaccessible due to the obsolescence of the carriers. We collaborated with many professionals and fans of the series to recreate the original gameplay of genuine arcade games. ”

“However, although the source code of these games is not outdated, the video can be easily transferred to any digital format. The hero of Dirk the Daring does not need normal maps or vertex shaders to hit the audience, as he did in the 80s. ”

Digital Leisure not only worked with the source code, but also sought to create for the new releases of the game an HD version of the Dragon's Lair animation using original negatives from film stores. The efforts of Digital Leisure in the process of remastering and preservation will provide future developers and publishers with the opportunity to reuse the material:

“When we decided that the Dragon's Lair series should be released in HD, we contacted Don Bluth Films, which, like many studios, had been keeping original negative films for more than 20 years in storage. Negatives have not been touched since 1983 and they were in such a fragile state that we decided that it would be better to create an intermediate positive from the original negative. Therefore, if someone wants to republish the game in a modern format in 20 years, then they will succeed. ”

“It was also incredibly important that the colors of each of the games were correctly adjusted, so that there were no discrepancies. In fact, after the release of the HD version, the fans could not believe how rich the colors were, because the video looked better than in the original arcade machine! ”

Gold also said that Digital Leisure was not able to obtain the right to re-release games on Laserdisc. Firstly, because the original source material no longer exists. Secondly, it is not known who owns the rights of ownership of other materials.

Keith Robinson (Keith Robinson), president and co-founder of Intellivision Productions, recalls how he had to save the source code of Intellivision games, looking for traces of old equipment that the former owner of Mattel sold at auction.

“When Mattel covered the production of games in January 1984, two programmers, Mike Minkoff and Mike Breen, were given a month or two to archive all completed and developed games. This was not done for descendants: Mattel hoped to find a buyer for Intellivision. Backup copies of the source code were written on 8-inch floppy disks. ”

“When INTV Corp bought the rights, she got the disks. INTV hired another programmer, Dave Warhol, to complete some of the unfinished games. Therefore, he needed to transfer part of the source code from 8-inch disks to PC-compatible 5¼-inch floppy disks. He hired me for this job. ”

“The problem was that Mattel Electronics disk drives used a non-standard outdated format. A year after the close of Mattel Electronics, no one could count the discs. I contacted Mattel Inc. and tracked the location of the original drives: they were sold at auction to companies from the northern part of the San Fernando Valley. ”

“It turned out that the company replaced the drive controller boards to make them compatible with other 8-inch drives. But in the storerooms they have old printed circuit boards, and we wanted to shove one of them back into the drive. We did not succeed until I called the manufacturer of the drives and he did not give us the correct configuration of the jumpers on the board. ”

“So we managed to save the source code of Intellivision. When Intellivision Productions bought the rights in 1997, we had 5¼-inch Dave wheels. We transferred them to 3½-inch drives for PCs, and later to CDs. ”

Robert Maduri, CTO of Throwback Entertainment, faced the same technical problems when Throwback acquired most of the games of the bankrupt Acclaim Entertainment. The countless resources of Acclaim, accumulated in the former office of the company in Glen Cove, needed to be sorted and ordered.

“After the acquisition of Acclaim Throwback, we faced a rather daunting task of collecting information related to more than 280 games, dozens of hardware platforms and a huge amount of data stored on obsolete media. For a library that brought more than $ 3 billion in profit, each piece of data was very important. ”

“Frankly, it was a logistic nightmare. We found that, notwithstanding the creation of backups, not enough effort was made to update the technologies and files during the media change process. Until the last generation of consoles, most industry participants did not see the point. ”

“When we got this library, it was frighteningly like a real book library. We had a bunch of different file formats, disk media, and file systems. They literally stretched over 25 years of computer technology development. Having tried different versions of applications and hardware systems for importing files, we quickly realized that the best way to cope with the problem is to create a data processing center that would become the repository of the past 25 years. ”

“For us, eBay was the salvation. Everything that was considered obsolete paid for itself tenfold. Delivery of computers, network systems, development equipment and external drives from around the world has become the norm for us. The old was quickly becoming new. ”

“As soon as we were able to browse, catalog, and read data in their own environment, the rest of the process became much easier.”

Michael Athey, director of IT for Gearbox Software, says that every Gearbox employee every day contributes to the preservation of all elements of corporate culture, from marketing materials and product support materials to preliminary game designs and printed advertising materials. Gearbox uses several repositories to store game data:

“Almost everything is stored in digital form in our online storage system and copied to external and internal Gearbox storage. We even have several repositories for the physical media of our games. All this is being done both for nostalgic reasons and for preserving the business. ”

“At the moment, all Gearbox data is stored on D2D systems with redundancy in external and internal storage and with technology to get rid of D2D duplicates, so we do not need large investments. A couple of years ago we had problems with transferring old games, sources and resources from outdated tape drives, on which they were stored for many years. ”

“We spent time extracting data and checking integrity, and then moved it for permanent storage to modern media. We could leave the data on the tapes, but we felt it was better to have a strict storage and retrieval plan for all the data. ”

Many video game developers have agreed that collaboration is needed on researching ways to save at events such as GDC and sharing information through organizations related to the video game industry. At the same time, companies are concerned about the obsolescence of equipment and software for development, which is a constant threat to the safety of games.

Some companies admitted that problems with copyright rights and trademarks (search for owners of rights to the game and resolution of property disputes) are also obstacles that need to be addressed. Some publishers understand that the responsibility for saving video games ultimately lies with the developers and publishers.

Michael These of Gearbox Software presents the point of view expressed by many respondents to the question of whether the industry as a whole should work on creating a system for preserving video games:

“If we worked together, then the best gift for the industry, users and fans would be to create at least an archiving scheme for video games (resources and code) and final products. It would be good for the long life of games, the rebranding of intellectual property and the possible profits from third-party organizations. Who knows what game of the past will be able to manifest itself in a new interesting technology of the future? ”



Japanese coin machine for Xevious, developed by Masanobu Endo. Xevious - one of the first original scrolling shooters. The machine is installed in the reception office of the Namco Bandai Games Tokyo office.