The "keepers" of video games, step by step, preserve the gaming culture

Games are the key to understanding modern culture, but creating game archives can be a surprisingly difficult task.

How much is the story? In May, we received an answer to this question - at least for the world of video games: $ 14,000.

That was the winning bid for the prototype of the canceled game developed for the Famicom console - this is how the Nintendo Entertainment System with pixel graphics released in the eighties was called in Japan. Indy: The Magical Kid was based on the Japanese Choose Your Adventure series. The game had a few preliminary reviews in magazines, but in the end it was abandoned, and again it appeared only at auction - a noticeable event for the community of guardians of the history of video games.
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But there was a problem. One of the community leaders was the Nintendo history conservation team - Forest of Illusion ; they hoped to get the game for $ 7,000 collected by joint efforts, but the winning bid was suddenly made by a private collector who was not going to save Indy for posterity.

Co-founder of Forest of Illusion, known under the pseudonym togemet2 (he asked not to use his real name, because in preserving games for history sometimes you have to slightly transgress the law - because of copyright and other problems), told OneZero magazine that the loss of the game was for them by surprise. (Those who study history and create archives do not necessarily seek to sell or at least distribute versions of games saved by them on the Internet, but they create unauthorized reproduction, which often technically violates copyright law.)

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Source: The Strong

“This is our culture. Losing what allowed us to become who we are, we condemn ourselves to repeat the mistakes made. ”

“Unfortunately, our bid was interrupted in the last minutes of the auction,” says togemet2. According to him, in an anonymous message sent to a Japanese fan site, the buyer said that he had bought the game in order to prevent the distribution of reproductions, and that he would protect it as a treasure from Japan. Togemet2 added that if this is true, then there is a high probability that the game will be lost forever.


The game preservation movement seeks to document the past and save video games for future generations as an art form. Experts in the history of games are constantly forced to look for new ways to store materials and switch to new media as technology develops. In a sense, it is much more difficult than the preservation of books and works of art. For old games, a painstaking digitization process may be required - to convert information stored on cartridges into files readable by modern computers; New games on platforms such as Steam can do without physical media.

“We finally realized that video games are not just passive entertainment projects,” says Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Video Game History Foundation (a non-profit organization dedicated to the cataloging and digitization of games). “This is our culture.” Losing what allowed us to become who we are, we condemn ourselves to repeat the mistakes made. If we don’t understand well enough how we ended up where we are now, we miss a lot. ”


John-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at The Strong National Museum in Rochester (New York), explains that such archival work provides an opportunity to track the actual act of the game. He believes that the study and preservation of such acts is an important way to understand the development of culture.

“The game is a universal occupation. People play throughout their lives, says Dyson. - Therefore, the game penetrates almost all aspects of our existence. Video games are, in a sense, the newest form of games. ”

Of course, unlike, for example, artwork, in the archives of video games you need to retain full interactive functionality - as a rule, this means the possibility of pressing buttons to launch certain actions on the screen that the game responds to. And it is not always enough for this to hide somewhere an old cartridge with the Super Nintendo attachment and a TV set. It may seem to us that electronic data is a constant phenomenon, but certain physical media, as Cifaldi explains, “literally rot”: the materials and chemicals used for data recording deteriorate, which partially destroys the stored information. Therefore, to save games, it is important to archive files on such media by copying them into easily readable playable formats.

Depending on what they are trying to preserve, different actions are taken. There are devices and systems that can perform digital copying of games. “We usually transfer data from one format to another,” says Cifaldi. - This is a simple, simple process that is hardly surprising: there is a data DVD; I insert it into the drive on the computer and take a picture that will be stored on the hard disk later. ”


Cifaldi has to work with a variety of physical media, including old cartridges and magazines. Source: Frank Cifaldi

The Tokyo-based software developer Byuu (a pseudonym used for privacy reasons), dedicated to preserving old video games, uses specially designed programs to analyze and reverse engineer old gaming machines so that old games can be run on modern computers. (And again: such an exercise is not always legal.) Byuu is working on documenting printed circuit boards for Super Nintendo game cartridges; He told the authors of OneZero that at the moment he has 1,200 documented games, and he plans to have 1,500 more.

Byuu uses a special device that allows you to "analyze all the memory circuits on the printed circuit boards of games for SNES" - this allows you to save more information. Thanks to this approach, it was possible to discover interesting facts from the history of video games, which otherwise would have remained unknown - for example, the important features of the Rockman X cartridge (in the US market, this game was released in 1993 under the name Mega Man X ).

“It turned out that there are doped wires on the cartridge [they were usually used to quickly make changes to the circuit], which were used to correct errors caused by the use of copy protection at the last minute,” Byuu shares his find. In fact, the Capcom developer fixed the problem by adding the necessary wires. Byuu continues: “Such details were not well known and, of course, were not described publicly in the context of SNES emulation. Such details affect the emulation of the game and are very important for understanding and recreating it. In addition, this in itself is an interesting historical fact. ”

Such attention to detail may seem excessive, but the details matter. Playing the modern editions of Mega Man X ( in the version for the iPhone , for example), you do not necessarily see an authentic representation of the original work. An analogy can be made: it is like a high-quality print of Water Lilies by Claude Monet, which may be good for the average viewer, but it has no texture, which is important for a more discriminating audience.

After receiving a digital copy of the game, the creators of the archive scan other game materials, such as boxes, manuals, and even articles in the media — all of this has to do with understanding the cultural context in which the game originated. For example, historian, associate professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Carly Kocurek, explores the phenomenon of “games for girls”: in the nineties, several developers, primarily Purple Moon and HeR Interactive, created games specifically for girls. To find out how these games were sold, Kotsurek has to dig in old gaming magazines.

“I look through page after page, look through the headlines, and then take a photo of those materials that need to be preserved,” says Kotsurek. “Then I upload them to Dropbox, after which I arrange some time in a convenient way.”

Chifaldi also had a chance to work with the Game Informer video game magazine, which has been published since 1991: Frank has been archiving documents that have been kept in publishing for years: press releases, photographs, and image slides.

“The process of placing in a physical archive is easy,” says Cifaldi. “But here's the digitization ... We had to organize in the editors of Game Informer a data storage network. We have a network storage with a capacity of 20 TB, and the day is near when there will be no space in it. ”


Video game archives hosted by The Strong International Electronic Games History Center in Rochester, NY. Source: The Strong

Digital revolution

However difficult it may be to archive materials on physical media, this is simpler than some of the tasks that we have to face today. Many of the video games now released are distributed only in digital form: no cartridges or disks. They are online only while the publisher considers it appropriate; they can have digital copyright protection, which only after contacting the server allows you to start the game. And if the server is stopped, the game can be lost forever. In addition, copyright laws make it difficult for history to save such games.

“In the case of more modern games that do not have physical copies, this is generally a nightmare,” explains Kotsurek. - A lot of different interdependencies, and the companies now have much more control over the game. And it's very difficult to get around. ”

Dyson is of the same opinion; He did not expect that there would be so many difficulties associated with online games: “The game on the phone does not have a physical carrier. Even more difficulties arise if the components of the game depend on the external server managed by the company. What if the company decides to shut down the server? ”

“Many materials related to digital archives are from pirates.”

It happens that saving the game for the archive becomes simply impossible. Many games because of problems with intellectual property cannot be legally retained. Sometimes the International Center for the History of Electronic Games manages to negotiate with the publisher, record and save gameplay - but not real game files.

This is where the “pirates” help.

“Many materials related to digital archives are from pirates,” says Cifaldi. For example, before Blizzard announced its intention to release World of Warcraft Classic in November 2017 , some enterprising users restored the old versions of the game (before the release of add-ons) on their own servers. Frank continues: “Someone makes pirated copies of files and places them on the network. However, as far as I know, the "pirates" are not very active with regard to games for smartphones. "

With smartphones - their difficulties. In 2017, Apple stopped supporting 32-bit applications in its App Store. Applications for which the developers did not release the 64-bit version disappeared from the store - and there were thousands of them. Moreover, they include a lot of games that will no longer be available as cultural artifacts - a kind of “cultural black hole” will appear, as game designer Adam Gahramani put it in the VentureBeat article in June 2017.

To combat this, there are initiatives that are aimed at bringing the work of specialists in the history of video games and archive compilers to ordinary people, without stepping on the unreliable ground of violation of copyright laws. Kotsurek is working on Save Point 's zine, which covers the history of games and their research.

On the page of her already fully funded project on Kickstarter, she writes : “Many (including me!) Explore the history of video games, but in most cases the result is journal articles or books targeted at an academic audience.” Its goal is to present the same materials to people interested in the gaming industry and to give an opportunity to look at the history of games.

“I don’t think that history necessarily influences the future, but it definitely defines the present. The history of games can tell a lot about everyday life, about the history of technology and economics, as well as about the change of ideas about childhood and productivity, ”says Kotsurek.

And be sure: there is no phrase “game over” in the dictionary of the guardians of video games.

About the translator

The article is translated in Alconost.

Alconost is engaged in the localization of games , applications and websites in 70 languages. Language translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, 24/7 project managers, any string resource formats.

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