The future of gaming history - theft in the workplace

We lose video games. Not only related products or documentation for their creation, but the games themselves. The solution to this problem, according to Jason Scott, is to steal from the workplace.

Scott is the archivist of the Internet Archive, IA, a non-profit library that stores more than 20 petabytes of digital information, some of which are downloaded from the web via the Wayback Machine, and some are collected from thousands of books, television shows and other historical documents.
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It is also the storage place for one of the largest collections of games and game documentation in the world. IA, and Scott in particular, helped digitize the GDC archives (Game Developers Conference) until 2003, creating the perfect treasure for learning first-hand information about how and why classic games were created.

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Why does the collection of games from IA matter? Because games are history, and history matters.

During the report this year at the GDC conference, Scott did not get tired of telling the audience about the historical value of games and that if game developers did not take measures to preserve their own history, very few people can do it for them.

"The half-life of software is ridiculously short," says Scott. - Not at the game Half-Life [half-life (English) - half-life - approx. trans.], and the event. It takes several months since the release of the game and EA already pretends not to remember it. This is madness. But we are moving in this direction. The average online game lives today for about 18 months, after which its servers are shut down. You only have a year and a half to understand whether it is useful, and then it disappears. ”

The generation of scientists, engineers and programmers who made the first computer games also disappears quickly. At the moment, you can go to the Computer History Museum of Computer History Museum to play Spacewar, one of the earliest video games. Sometimes on Saturdays there is a programmer himself, Steve "Slug" Russell.

“He’s gonna play with you and kick your ass,” Scott says, “then you’ll be more modest.” It feels like a caveman has defeated you. But they will not be with us forever and this worries me ... Because life is a lossy format. ”

Scott, who himself worked at some point in his career at Psygnosis, says that the only way to prevent games from going out is to make a box and put everything in there. At some point, the box will end, or the end of what you put there. At this point, you need to send the box to Scott. Best of all, use IA's online tools to download your information and your games.

“The future of gaming history is theft from the workplace,” says Scott with a very serious face. What games does Scott need? Everything. And for now, industry workers satisfy his needs.

“Once they called me,” says Scott. - And they said: you need a disk Infocom? I said I need. You should always say yes. [ Infocom drive is a backup of the network drive of the Infocom developer, known for its text quests. In 1989, Activision was bought. ]. This is the Infocom drive from their server just before they were sent to California. It has all the old sources, all the basic manuals, all the e-mails, all the tools for programming. ”

“In a sense, this is amazing. I sent part of the code to the programmers who wrote it. They reacted, for example, like this: “Oh God, I'm crying. I never thought I'd see my code again. " But in the mail you can find very sad stories. ”

“I don’t know if anyone thought that someday it will be stored somewhere. I gave the files to the group and said: “Never. In the next 20 years, at least. If any people are mentioned there, let them die first. " And we have to work with such material all the time. That is why the files for the Kennedy assassination were kept for 50 years. This is the other side of the coin: some of the data is not meant for us. Some of the data is for the next generation. ”



Scott hopes that in the near future the flow of games and related data will increase and that more like him, the archivists will relate to games and people who create them, just like other historical figures. Answering your question — no, he doesn't need your original copy of Pac-Man or Super Mario Brothers.

"It turns out that Namco still loves Pac-Man very much, and Nintendo loves Mario," says Scott. - We have no problems with preserving Mario. It is kept with us, okay? ”

“Aliens, who are at the highest stage of development, having flown to Earth, will find a monolith with the luminous Mario knocked on it with the help of a laser. Fine. Perfectly. I'm not worried about saving Mario. I’m worried about the game Great Giana Sisters, similar to Mario, which was already made by a dead man. People took on such things, but why did this particular person want to make this particular game? ”

The answers to such questions, though not very clear, will be lost if the gaming industry does not begin to treat its history as seriously as Scott does.