Companies Don't Want You Playing Classic Games 

A game series I’d like to see comeback in some form is the Infinity Blade trilogy. The first installment came out in late 2010 so it just barely misses the mark to be considered classic. It was an iOS exclusive that had players control a knight exploring and dueling various warrior and monsters across a fantasy setting. There was an overarching narrative that although not very deep was proof of concept that the mobile gaming could’ve been so much more than all the pay-to-win crap we’ve been getting since Infinity Blade 3 released back in 2013. It may not be a classic but this trilogy of games deserves to be so much more than a easter egg in Fortnite.

Their are two a game sires I hope will have a comeback which are american magees alice and soul reaver

@@jaw3021 R.I.P. Alice: Asylum. American deserved so much better, and EA deserves so, so, so much worse.

Something I think needs to be given more attention in all this is the preservation of game manuals as well, as older games often lack basic story context, tutorials, and even - in final fantasy 1’s case - information necessary to play the game, such as weapon stats. Nintendo’s virtual console system came with manuals built in, but these almost never made any meaningful attempts to bring over the charm of story elements of the original manuals, using sterile and clinical explanations of game mechanics. NSO doesn’t even offer manuals. Most of those older manuals can’t even be found legitimately online. Even really good rereleases, like the Megaman legacy collection, don’t include manuals, despite trying to include adequate bonus materials. Manuals just aren’t being taken very seriously.

​@@9seed.are you aware of if anyone is attempting anything to preserve that kind of a thing? I agree wholeheartedly with your points and I'd like to make what I have available, even if it's not much.

Quitblamingafake virus

Same. I used to snag SNES games at a hardware shop by my vacation cabin for $5. Those days are long gone.

Same dude, sold most of my collection as well. Sold all retro systems and only kept games that I really care about. Emulation is great 🙏

Your decision to sail instead of collect "classic games" says a lot about how stupid expensive it's gotten

Agreed wtf

If they don't know of the buccaneer cove.

They can experience it if they know what to do

@@BlueflagAlpha You missed the entire point of the video.

Ya, its tough to see. Another thing I worry about is modern games disappearing forever. One of my favorite games ever is Battleborn, a game mismanaged and stuffed by coming out a week before overwatch. Because it was an early adopter of the “always online” system, it is no longer playable. I can’t go back and play the campaign of one of my favorite games, and it breaks my heart. There is so much great art out there completely lost to time.

JRPGs are one of the mostly affected since their prints are limited

Fuck yes! I agree 100%!

​@Jaegar19Ultima clearly you're sending this message from communist North Korea due to them being just so free.

Mein Kampf, Manos 'Hands of Fate', and Superman on N64, all treasures!

And music deserves to be heard.

THIS

I mean, you used the word "industry" already. Maybe this is too broad strokes and/or a fundamental "we don't own the means of production" thing, but still- my purchase or your purchase of a video game, or lack thereof, will not monetarily impact anyone or anything. The COD devs are on Activision's payroll and Activision has several Scrooge McDuck money pools. (Hence, never pirate indie games- smaller studios don't necessarily get to walk away when no one buys their game).

dont try to bring the greedy actors and writers into this. They all have gotten paid for their work and signed contracts for said work.

@@Waywardbiscuit you have no reason to defend large corporations because they will screw you over too lmao.

The video game market was super fragmented for its first 40 years. Tons of small companies created arcade games and since went out of business and abandoned the work. Tons of games are public domain

@@FermentedGrumpyGrapeSqueezit public domain just means that their copyright licensing has expired (which is like, temporally impossible to have happen at this point for ANY video game, considering copyright lasts for the copyright holder's lifetime PLUS 70 YEARS, meaning no video game's source code can be considered "public domain" until at the bare minimum like 2085...?), it doesn't mean that a way to play them is accessible for preservation purposes. A lot of Shakespeare is at this point in the public domain, but that doesn't mean that you can read EVERY Shakespeare play ever written right now at a library- some have never been preserved. Similarly, if NES games ever fall into public domain, that doesn't just automatically mean that you'll be able to find ANY NES game ever released, as many have never been preserved. Like, 85% of the NES game library, in fact, has never been preserved. (By the way, the 2085 number was just a rough guess given my knowledge- I think the first ever "video game" was created vaguely around the late 60s or early 70s, and I would wager the person who developed it was not older than, say, 45, meaning that even assuming that, if that 45 year old were to live an average lifespan and die around the 2000s at around 85, it would then be an additional 70 years before just that first ever game would be public domain, in the year 2070.)

I feel that would only be case if the studios were the ones holding the content. right now we could only have about 4 services (nintendo, xbox, playstation, and PC), thought technically 3 and a half cuz xbox/pc same shit really. now if we had game streaming from EA, activistion, ubisoft, nintendo, gamefreak, naughty dogg, etc....... (you see where im going with this)

Yeah, anything to do with streaming immediately crosses into the realm of “you don’t actually own this game” give me a physical disc or gtfo

​@@Time-yo5mwno dude, your take is a bit extreme, while I agree that streaming is crap for owning things, that's because they generally don't let you download content. If you made a cloud service for classic games like steam, but with the extra step of letting you download the .exe or .iso for the games you purchase at any moment you want and let them stand alone IS the way to go, but greedy companies won't ever give that kind of freedom to us so, yeah, we're fuxked

​@@Time-yo5mwI take it you're never going to be a PC gamer then. They're literally aren't any physical PC games these days.

@@MrGamelover23I got out of gaming for reasons like that.

@@NoshikiYT even supposed "bad" games will have a bit of merit for SOMEONE out there, someone woke up on christmas and it was the game that DEFINED them (ok that might be a bit much but even shit has taste....wait)

​@@NoshikiYT I'd argue that even worse ones can give valuable historical perspective on gaming

Yes but theirs kind of a lack of OLD anime for DVD/Blue ray disc English dubs as well.

True

@@NoshikiYTthere’s video games that are anime themed

Hopefully in my lifetime; we can see a Senate, Congress, or Presidential candidate that wants to create a National Congress Library Preservation for video games, like what already exists for movies and TV shows, run for office.

@@kpegcyou would think such a thing would exist, but alas… Gaming being the newest media form historically speaking, and being disregarded by many for some valid (but mostly misunderstood or not valid) reasons, I think are the two reasons video games are so behind other mediums preservation wise. Oh, and obviously that they require more than a file or disc to experience.

@@kpegc It's amazing how we have Museums containing old bones, bits of old wood, metal, whatever, Art Museums with questionable quality "Art", all preserved. Yet we don't have one for Videogames. There are a few Hardware museums for computers, consoles, old mainframes, CRTs, etc...but I know of no known software museum.

@@DKTronics70I’ve been to two: the Computerspiele Museum in Berlin, and Vigamus in Rome. They are only a very small snapshot of historical items and games from the history of gaming, however.

Its sad because he talks as if the "data" can preserve videogames yet never touches the legality of what these companies can and will do with their legal ownership. If there was a classic game preservation donation it would be taken down by the companies that are associated with it for money.

There are so many games from my childhood that I'd like to boot once in a while. And I'd pay a reasonable price on Steam or similar to play them digitally, if I could. But either these games are only available for absolute fantasy prices of 500$ (Nintendo) or not available to purchase at all (the rest of the industry). So what choice do I have but to emulate?

@@slickdrickit’s why media piracy exists.

The problem is that music is pre-rendered, just like movies and e-books, anything can play them. A service like GamePass only works if you either have a great internet connection or powerful enough computer / the right console hardware. And the rights holders to those games aren't going to make emulators to let you access them, so you're going to have to get used to streaming only for that to work.

@@slickdrick That's different when it's their own hardware. When I hear something like iTunes or Spotify, I think not tied to any hardware platform.

Emulation is usually ass, though. The actual hard copy is always better

Yeah, flashpoint is amazing! I never thought that I would be able to play all of these flash games again!

Meerca chase will always have a place in my heart 💖

Remember that coke dj social game? It was a bit like habbo hotel but better

​@@RetroSmooCoke Music! I lost so many hours to that game when I was a kid.

I want to do my part by downloading every single Flashpoint archive in case for backup, but my computer says no (my laptop only has 512GB storage and entire Flashpoint archive is almost 3TB so far) Even if I have enough storage, it would take weeks to complete because of internet connection

About the legality side, the majority of players say as long as you own physical copies and rip the code, it fine. But honestly, nowadays it's impossible to own/find any physical copies to rip, and not everyone know how, or have the requirements to rip their own copies. Emulation is just the best option, plain and simple. When they announced the Steam deck, and showed its emulation potential, I started saving up for one. Best decision ever. I got the middle option for the case and extra space. It's perfect for me. I can replay all my favourite old games again finally. ♥ The games that made my childhood and helped me gro was Chibi Robo, OoT/MM, Banjo Kazooie and Tooie, Perfect Dark, Willow on the NES, games from NES/GB/GBC/GBA/N64/GC Just so much good memories. I will pass on my childhood experience to my kids. Classic games and movies/series

They are accessible. I can literally go into a local retro gaming store and find most games. No emulation needed.

@@firstnamelastname956 Not everywhere unfortunately.. There aren't any retro stores where I live. I wish. I'm happy for you though. I'm in the middle of nowhere. The only town that's near, only has essential stores. Grocery, bank, post.. Sucks for me

​​@@leozar69Pokemon is a perfect example Fuck Em. Pokemon Co. Is sitting on a literal gold mine of games they can easily port to every Nintendo console using emulator engines for the cheap 100% get rich quick and THEY DONT DO IT. Why? To protect the Executive Board's jobs. If a port of let's say Fire Red, makes more profits than Scarlet and Violet, those broken messes of games, the investors will come for the executive Board's heads. There's no motivation for companies to port old games when their new games are garbage.

@@ZeroX7649 Amen to that. You right though. Old classics are just better.. The new pkm games keeps getting bugier and bugier. And also bad graphics. It's easy to see how people would prefer to play the classics over the new ones.

@@slickdrick Read his comment more slowly, then YOU won't look such a clown.

​@@slickdrickdoes it have the ability to allow researchers remote access to play games in their collection? If not, OP's comment still stands, as all libraries currently cannot buckle 'industry' norms for preservation.

Count me in! I want future generations to remember the games we used to play as kids. 👍

Vimm's Lair, baby 💜

Library science? That actually sounds pretty sick. Best of luck with your degree!

@@Discoh Thanks! It's definitely a shift from my undergrad program, but graduating into a global crisis has a way of changing some things. Going this route lets me use both!

Yeah, one thing I'd point it is a big problem is the lack of CRT manufacturers. Games before the late 2000's were NOT meant to be played on LCDs. No matter what you think of the tech, CRTs were how the art was all designed to be viewed. It doesn't matter that we can emulate the software if we have no CRT monitors left after a certain point to display it on.

Fortunately, some of the oldest games (if on cartridge format) are likely to endure around 100 years due to the durability of their memory. Floppy disk, CD and cassette games on the other hand, are in a whole different arena and are at serious risk of vanishing forever due to their fragility

Starfox Zero immediately comes to mind. It's just a worse version of Starfox 64 with prettier graphics. I've already got 64 on my N64 and my 3DS, why would I want a worse version that costs $60?

It not they don't want you to buy it, it just not profitable because of piracy.

​@@TheBaldrPiracy isn't the problem, it's the solution.

@@TheBaldr No, piracy is because they won't make it easily accessable for people to purchase. Remember how the "mini" classic consoles from Nintendo and Sony sold out near instantly? If that's not "profitable despite piracy" then I don't know what is.

Speaking as someone who may on occasion run emulators, I check regularly for stuff like the mini classic consoles. I would totally be snapping up retro systems if they were available and cheap enough. However, stuff like that is often only released in limited runs and because of that, it's cheaper to get a refurbished original system. The problem with that, as mentioned in this video, is the cost for games on old systems is on average doubling in price every couple years. It comes down to the companies and aftermarket make retro gaming expensive and difficult to get into, when piracy is easy and free.

​@@slickdrickthey meant unavailable to purchase the hard copies

@@slickdrick why r u being a dick? I was explaining what OP meant...

stop caring about legal and illegal. The emulation police are not out there searching for us

@@slickdrick Americans fear downloading Dig Dug 2 to play on MAME will have the alphabet agencies knocking on their doors on the following day for that. Either that or those clowns that say "if you can't buy then that's your problem, not every game should be available to you", man, clowns defending big companies are hilarious.

@@slickdrick I say, pirates and emulator devs are doing more to preserve games than most people.

Her brother good to see a fellow na player from smt imagine.

I don't remember much about it, but I used to play Everquest online adventures for the ps2 a ton, I would love to give that a go again.

you are talking about the same thing. digital art, being gone after no physical/digital distributors are left and servers hosting it are shut down. you are widening the view on the video. great contribution on the same topic!

mmo experience is different and is not something that can be recreate again because it requires bunch of actual people playing it at the same time that starts together, unlike single player story be it games or manga or anime that can be relive without relying on other human beings. it's a token of the past, if its gone its gone. classic games on the other way it can still be played today again and again and in the future, because the content doesn't rely on many many actual human beings.

@@aKiSeraphic okay, so what? Should old MMOs be erased and forgotten after the servers are shut down? Don't tell me that it's impossible to preserve MMOS, I know of a few where the fans got private servers going. Only shut down because of ignorant corporate heads.

I tell you, with paying for DLC, we are taking steps backward now. We have to pay for the full price of a game, then pay even more just to play the game to its full extent. And if that isn't enough, Little Jimmy 2099 can't download a title from the Switch because it's a 76 year old title. Nintendo ended support for the Switch 66 years ago. Now Little Jimmy 2099 can't play Splatoon 3 like we currently can because there would be no online access to it.

​@@joeygamer5387Look, everyone knows Jimmy 2099 is a cynical attempt to reboot the original Jimmy, but he doesn't have any of the charm or depth of backstory that surrounds Jimmy classic.

Where?! I've literally never heard of this.

i think they stopped doing that a while ago

​@@nousername191you can buy it from Square

holy crap thats insane

On a related note, Microsoft actually provides support for a good chunk of OG Xbox games and Xbox 360 games built right into the current Xbox line of consoles (the disc one at least), don't need a subscription either. Games even run better like Sonic Unleashed (which is funny cause it's the only way to play Adabat daytime on console without getting a powerpoint presentation).

The song "winter wonderland" with the lyrics "walkin in a winter wonderland" is from a movie. There are only 2 copies left. It has not been digitized. It is on film at the library of Congress, and the owner of the movie actively denies that it holds the license to it.

@@runed0s86 holy crap that's rough.

As someone who brazenly pirates games, I would be glad to pay for the majority of the games that I pirate. But... they're just not available. Also, personal problem but having basically every single 3ds title at my fingertips gives me severe choice paralysis, and having to actually think about the games I wanna buy and spend my time playing (because I'm still a kid y'know) makes me appreciate them so much more.

This is very true. Given the opportunity to pay and just have the game be available and working I think most people would. Stuff like steam achievements are also a big draw for a lot of people over just emulating.

​@@spankowitzmusicI have a solution to that choice paralysis. Just randomly select a game to play. Like, pick a random number, and choose the game based off that number

At this point Piracy is freaking SELF DEFENSE.

piracy is only a "problem" because we dont pay the artists for doing art, but merely for their labor or the actual items they produce (most of the people working on a game are what i would call artists) artists should be funded by the state, not by capitalists

If your playing old games, that means your not spending money on their new games. A press conference like a year or two spoke exactly why they do this. Name a game you love, how many hours did you play it for? 100? 200? 500? 2,000 hours? What gives you the right to pay 60$ and spend that much time playing that game. you should be paying 60$ playing the game beat it, then destroy/throw the disc in the trash and go and get a new game. We lose money if people play a game for more than 10-40 hours, it's why mtx (microtransactions) have become popular and gaming quality has plummeted. We need games to be always online so you can pay 75$ for the game and every few hours or every 10 spend another 10-20$ on the game on purchases or skins, that's how we make money when people play games longer than they should be allowed to. FIFA manager is the golden pinnicle of what gaming should be, spend 75$ get the game spend another 3k on card packs, buy the next edition a year later repeat - 75$, and 1-3k on card packs. I myself fell on hard times 20 years ago and had to sell my 150 SNES game collection and system, i will never be able to get that collection log back physically. i still have most of my N64/PS1 games though badly worn from use and just from test of time. Same with PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, and Dreamcast i have all of my games but their worn out and gets harder to maintain and get them to read anymore. I firmly believe once you show proof of purchase you should be allowed to enjoy said game to your hearts content. We could get to a point companies can log how long you've played a game and just "blink" gone from your library, your done, you played it enough, move on OR pay us again to regain permission to play it again :). This is why companies are against emulators or preserving games, they lose money if you do this, they lose an estimate 13.4 billion a year due to piracy and roms. This figure is hyper inflated to make it seem like their in dire need of help, in reality they lose 0$ because THEY don't even offer said games as a purchasable option so therefore they can't "lose" money on something their not even bothering to sell/market to begin with.

@@Darkness5423 It's really nonsense though, 10,000 intractable Steam Account backlogs says that people will buy new games, even when they have old ones which they have never opened.

all of your old games are still playable. just get retroarch and all your roms and you're set.

It's not that hard to understand, if you were around for the Atari collapse. A flood of shit titles, diluting focus on what should have been those years system blockbusters. All the money Atari was hoping to make on their first party titles was lost to a deluge of imitation shovelware. Not to mention the confidence lost in the industry as a whole for half a decade. What does this have to do with historical preservation of video games? EVERYTHING. Instead of a deluge of crap, image all those titles replaced with the ghosts of releases past, AAA titles fondly remembered by fans of old, all taking focus and profit away from those few titles the industry hopes to funnel the masses into. It's the Atari disaster, but worse, and forever, since the steady stream of new releases they must release to make money and continue this business model only adds to the problem in the long run! It's like yeast in a fermenting vat, eventually their own waste product (alcohol) poisons them to death. The only viable counter strategy, long term, is to remove old alcohol from the vat. To the content distributors, this means erasing gaming's past, to ensure its (marketable) future. It's the same folly of "we had to burn the village to save it".

@@DisgaeaYomawari-mf2bz No one cares about your blind loyalty to greedy multi billion dollar companies who dont give two sh*ts about you. It's thanks to "pirates" that went to the trouble of dumping the roms and sharing them for free that we have all these thousands of game roms especially from arcades of which most don't even exist in physical form anymore.

Agreed

History is important for gaming. There's many awesome games that I grew up playing years ago (DS-WIIU) like Sonic Colors DS, New Super Mario Bros-U, Sonic Classic Collection (ds), Rio (ds), Super Mario 64 DS, Nintendoland, Super Mario 3d Land/World, Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon, Rayman Legends, Skylanders Trap Team-Imaginators, Splatoon, Mario Party 9/10, Mario And Luigi Bowser's Inside Story, Pikmin 3, and Yoshi's Wooly World.

In a world where Fahrenheit 451 was released, censorship should be flatly illegal. Did that book teach us nothing? Stop censorship.

Yeah, no kidding. If you want to get a wired Xplorer controller for the XBOX 360, one of the only few controllers that work with PC without hassle, it's upwards of like, $90 controller only, and I would expect the price to go higher, especially because of the fact that they aren't being produced anymore, and have lots of wear-and-tear because it is a rhythm game where you end up getting a bunch of buttons.

Really hope someone could make any custom, open source version of the controller soon, as Guitar Hero community is still fairly big until this day

Maybe someone could literally remake all the hardware vs software?

Rather than partnering with corporations, I think the archive will need actual power over the corporations, like being a gov't agency. Then they could effectively mandate that companies provide their retired hardware schematics, out-of-publication game ROMs, and even old source code. Because in a capitalist system, simply asking nicely usually doesn't work.

I didn’t realise it wasn’t available at all. I remember seeing it all the time in stores years ago.

@@ToyKeeper I agree, this is a better approach.

We need to make sure this vid is shared as much as possible for that to happen

There is also an F ton of obscure systems and its games library almost lost to time. Sure, you can probably find a rom image online, but some systems don't have emulation/core options available, so you're stuck to using the original hardware.

@@PJ-sv4iw I mean in terms of the very obscure and old consoles it may be up for argument if those are preserved by the people. But from now going forward we could try to get companies to put more preservative policies for games they’ve come out with in more recent years, along with games from their consoles that aren’t as obscure like PlayStation with their PSX/PSP, Xbox, and with Nintendo they found ways to put ds games on their Wii U system, they could try to incorporate their future consoles to maybe accommodate things like that

Some companies still wont care

@@BlueflagAlpha Yep, I don’t see this making huge waves at all. It’s just the nature of console developers and going from one gen to the next-forcing you to rebuy the same game dozens of times.

Part of the issue is that games require very specific hardware (or emulation of that hardware) compared to other media, especially if you want the original intended experience and so need at least the original controller.

I disagree that movies are in a better state than games.

Wow. I thought of this EXACTLY. That game was so weird and awesome, and even more special because as far as video games go, the action-rpg genre is actually _really_ small. We all know of Legend of Zelda, some know of Ys, Secret of Mana's been dead for a long time... stuff like Alundra died, EVO was a neat single title, Square completely lost its identity with Nomura's rise so we'll never get another Dewprism/Threads of Fate, and we only got that awful sequel to Brave Fencer Musashi. It's a sad state of affairs, and thanks to hackers, the world gets to know and enjoy these titles. Dark Cloud and Steambot Chronicles didn't really scratch the itch in 2007 that Terranigma did for me in 2015, and that was a SNES title from the early-mid 90s.

I actually found out about Terranigma on a ROM site, further showing why preservation is important.

If it wasn't for emulation I would've never played Dragon Quest Monsters and discover that there's a whole world of non-Pokemon Monster battler games.

Love the sprite work in terranigma

You can tho. Everyone only looks online. Go out and find a local retro gaming store and you’ll most likely find everything.

I would love to play Chibi Robo!! Especially if I could do so legally

They stop working? I've had some of my games for over 20-30 years (Every Nintendo system) and not one single game has just mysteriously stopped working.

@@NoshikiYT Games are an art form and are equal to books in every way. Boomers just don't get it.

​@Ezionn there are some games out there with beautiful stories that tug at the heartstrings or even just make you think. Just like literature, games have themes and messages, or even complex and intricate plots. Then there's the graphics side of things, where some games have beautiful art styles that are just a feast for the eyes. And some video game soundtracks are just great.

@@NoshikiYTI’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just don’t understand

@@NoshikiYT How old are you?

typical libraries will have replace their entire lineup every decade or two so, because most titles dont get loaned after the first year and the space is limited. the number of libraries with archival purposes is a lot more limited. and most of their books are never checked out again. and mostly, the market is just entirely different. the used book and antique book market exists, but its a lot smaller. nintendo can make millions re-releasing some of their classic softwares if they want, meanwhile re-releasing even a bestseller 10 years later is gonna be lucky to recoup costs (unless the reprint is done as cheaply as possible, in which case still, it wont make much money). also, one can argue that the rise of public libraries did indeed help in continuously lowering prices for professionally published titles across the board. publishers would love to sell you a book for 60 bucks and raise the price every 6 years. they would love to sell you harry potter and hunger games for a hundred bucks per book, but they really can't. not with libraries around.

@@clydefrosch I think your comparison to the antique book market is much more accurate than you give it credit. We're turning into those "back in my day" old folk. If you look at it dispassionately, these games are niches of niches. People who didn't grow up with the stuff just won't care.

A couple years ago they discovered a way to play legally aquired backups burnt onto DVDs on PS2 without any modding. It should not have to come to sony having accidentally left an exploit in their DVD player firmware from decades ago for people to be able to go back to play classic games.

emulation

games are art and this art and its evolution as a medium deserves to be preserved.

@@linklickzemulation isn’t it. What happens when somebody nukes the platform the emulation is on? Then your entire digital library is no more while I still am holding on to physical copies of things people want. Emulation is only best for new wave young kids who never grew up without a screen in front of them. Always have to have everything digital for convenience no? Can’t save your own money and go find and buy the products you want. Noooo that’s tooo easy when I can just play any game ever for free. You’re a thief. You don’t actually own the game. Emulating should be illegal. Shouldn’t be allowed to play a game. You didn’t pay for or don’t own. It’s dishonest. If you really wanted the game. You’d find it and save up to afford it. Like a real adult. Instead of being a child with a “everything must be free because it’s obscure” mindset.

You cannot see why games are harder to rerelease than movies, music and books are? Much more technologically vast.

Nah, games are not harder than music or movies at all. Both games and movies are just a stream of information. What separates the two is the interpreter that changes that information into something we humans can put value to. An old movie DVD is useless without a DVD player, and the PS2 DVD is useless without a PS2.

​@@encapturerGames are much harder than music and movies. Every song ever recorded can be saved as an MP3 file and played back by anything that can play MP3 files. The same is not true for games. Even emulators that play ROMs don't necessarily support all games for a given platform.

@@NetConsole gamepass xcloud and geforce now proved otherwise

@@karlhendrikse once again it's the problem with the interpreter, as I said. There is a standard for MP3 files, and you can use that to interpret it. There's a standard for each console too, it's just that only one company can make the interpreters, as opposed to others being more universally available by design. Besides, there are some retro devices that run completely on hardware; no software emulation in sight. As such, when it comes to games preservation, we will need to preserve the console specifications as well and allow reproduction of them - we need to preserve the method to interpret MP3's, too, it's just that at the moment is trivially easy. I just wouldn't take it for granted in the long term.

I still have all my games from the past, but all my consoles were lost when my family moved from house to house... Do you have Chibi Robo? That game is special to me. It's the best GC exclusive game. imho. Lots of love for that game.

I just pirate at this point and play them on an emulator at high resolutions through HDMI without having to modify my GameCube. I even use my original controller too

There's a place in texas that sells a bunch of GameCube games for cheap

@@cjrstudios4100 do you remember the name?

@@ariner19 yeah its called Culture shock/gamebros laporte

Thousand-Year Door…

Agreed! These exact two games were the first thing that came to mind as well

For games that don't work on modern pc anymore, for me, it's Chessmaster 10th edition. I played it nonstop when I got it, because of the fantasy character animations. It was so fun. But overtime, my favourite fantasy board became unplayable, because the game became obsolete, and new windows versions kept coming.. Same with Black and White 1 and 2..

​@@leozar69i love black and white. I hate i cannot play it on newer computers.

@@rowantic6539 I found an old video that showed how to play it. Look up "how to play black and white 2" and you should find some results. Next I'm gonna get Black and white 1 to work

​@@leozar69word. Can't you emulate old OSes on newer ones?

@@Virjunior01 I never heard of OSes. What is it?

This is going to be a long post. Sorry. But I just have to say. Those games aren't stuck on old consoles. The Dolphin emulator plays almost all the Gamecube and Wii games close to flawlessly. It's one of the finest emulators around. I feel this is a very important distinction because there ARE console games that are stuck on consoles. These are games on consoles for which there don't exist emulators on the level of Dolphin, PCSX2 (PS2) , Duckstation (PS1) or the gold standard, BSNES (SNES emulator that in terms of being hardware accurate is greater than 99.99% perfect), etc. I'm talking about consoles like the original Xbox, the XBox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 (although RPCS3 has been making great strides the past few years), and a few others. Those are the console games that you and everyone should be worried about. Because of the absolutely incredible work put forth by the Dolphin team, and because we can be sure that at least one of the numerous platforms on which Dolphin runs will have emulators for them (Windows for example), the entire Gamecube and Wii library are safely preserved forever. I'm curious why you didn't consider emulators when it comes to the preservation of the games you mentioned. Emulators on open platforms like the PC have done almost all the heavy lifting for game preservation for the past 25 or so years. Even if you combine all the work by all the console manufactures with regards to their backwards compatibility programs and mini-consoles and what not, they still pale in comparison to the work done by the passionate, extraordinarily skilled community on the PC. Backwards compatible hardware like the Fat PS3 or Nintendo DS won't last forever. At some point in the far future, the last working example of those consoles will fail. Those consoles would need to have close-to-perfect emulators well before that happens. Backwards compatibility programs like what's on the Switch or Xbox Series X emulate only a small fraction of the game library of the emulated consoles. Compare that to PC emulators whose goal is to emulate the entire console library. If we are to have any hope of preserving all the future games going forward, it's going to be on the back of emulators built on open platforms.

There are music that is not being preserved that well either I am sure, Beatles will be, because they still make money on it.

@@slickdrickplenty of the early wax cylinder records have not been preserved.

@@slickdrick my dude, the top comment here you replied to was comparing video game preservation to that of preserving the music of the Beatles. My comment was in reply to the reality that much music from the earliest phases of music being commercialized was not preserved. I'm grateful that games are preserved.

100%

Exactly, in the same way as music file sharing led me to discover, purchase from and attend concerts of many bands that I’d otherwise not have known. “Piracy” spreads awareness of good product and of bad products.

facts

Piracy saved the global anime market in the early 2000's, especially it's presence here in the USA. When we come together and share what we love, it gets others to invest. It gets us to want to support products we enjoy, buy memorabilia while getting IP owners aware of markets they dismissed priorly.

piracy has done a number for EarthBound, such as giving us the EarthBound Beginnings official English translation around 5 years before nintendo released it, and MOTHER 3. I don't need to say more.

Physical media and hardware is great to have, but taking active care of it all is important too. I've found a lot of my cd based pc and console games from the 90s no longer work sadly.

Yeah, or when I recently discovered a game that looked really fun and it wasn't even that old, only to find it had been pulled off every store online (Steam,e tc.) for whatever reason...

One of the best decisions *i've* ever made was saying fuck-you to the naysayer and just downloading the old games that I want to play that aren't being sold anymore :P

@@MastaGambit that works too lol

I saved my 360 hard drive to keep it, and rebought it on Switch. My nephew loves it, and he wasn't even born when the game came out

Asteroids?

Dude, Asteroids is the shit. I played old, OLD arcade games like that and Centipede on my granpdarents old ass Windows ME with some old software on it. Can't believe some people don't know about those golden oldies.

@@Ukysseus i think it might’ve been asteroids!! but if i remember correctly it was slightly different/spin-off/clone… so i’m unsure. all i remember is this cool dial to control the game

Asteroids... I almost forgot about that classic, responsible for some of my earliest gaming memories.

I made Asteroids for a computer science class! It was a lot of fun putting my own twists on it and seeing what you can do to make things your own with some relatively simple code.

No idea you have ever had is original

Games are an interactive art form that is far more difficult to preserve than books, but that doesn't mean they aren't important.

Companies only care about the profit. And the incentive is not there to make games available

They really don't these companies make far more money not preserving. And accessibility to games spits in the face of exclusivity, which is key to the console market. Being awful is what makes the console market thrive!

Thank God for ROM hacks. im living my childhood everyday for free.

Companies never care about preservation of anything. All they care about is profit. This is why we need legal exemptions to make up for their intentional negligence

NOT PIZZA TOWER!!!

P.T was the main reason I modded my PS4. I'm glad people are still sharing games that are not available otherwise. Another game I recall not being able to get purchased anymore due to licensing is TMNT: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled. Then we also have region exclusives, Mother 3 most famously. Without emulation I doubt I would had ever played Racing Lagoon or Pokemon Tetris.

I was thinking the same. Louis. Rossman did that for right to repair. I was about to comment this.

Why? The more people who play old games instead of new ones the more likely game companies are going to go out of business and also their games will keep getting worse and worse until they go out of business because you keep playing old games instead of buying their new games which means they have less resources to make their new games great, these days with everyone asking for more money than they deserve especially due to HR practices in business it’s not that easy to actually make money especially with the majority of “gamers” actually being criminals and not gamers (pirating most games) If you want to play an old game then buy the old console and the old game and play it. If you don’t like that then tough there’s no other way to play it and that’s how it has to be. Unless you’re a criminal and you’re okay stealing/pirating which is as bad as stealing a physical copy. Also as a sidenote Louis Rossman is a scam artist just an FYI. He makes things up to make his videos seem more interesting and he is paid under the table to essentially make certain companies look bad.

​@@tbone8358 Idk about Louis Rossman getting paid under the table, it's possible. Downloading a digital game that made its money already, yeah it's not the same as stealing a physical copy. If you buy a used copy the creator of that game isn't getting money. Especially if there's never a rerelease of that game.

​@@tbone8358I mean triple AAA games have already been declining in quality even without easy access to older titles and buying old games physical will be impossible In the near future due to rapidly increasing prices and failing hardware. So, Unless something changes then privacy will literally be the only way to play most older titles since game companies seem to refuse to rerelease most of their older libraries.

@@tbone8358 AAA titles have been in decline for a long time regardless of old games being unavailable and massive gaming corporations have always made terrible financial decisions. You are basically arguing for books to go permanently out of print just because the original author won't be paid while neglecting to see that they are dead. Even resold games and consoles do not benefit the original people. Your argument is garbage.

I'm kind of scared that StarFox as a whole is slowly being lost to time, as hardly anyone knows about it these days.

@@HylianWindRideryeah if it wasn’t for smash I doubt anyone would’ve know much about it.

If you’re really that gung-ho about it, you can always get discs rebuffed. Unless you spill maple syrup on them they can always be cleaned. The sad reality though is that eventually the discs will rot. Probably not today, probably not tomorrow, maybe not even in 15 years. But eventually, that physical copy will be unplayable no matter what you do or how careful you are. My advice? Learn to dump the rom yourself or 🏴‍☠️. If no one is making money from these ROMs then 🤷‍♂️

The problem with that is that you'd no longer own the game and need to pay monthly and have internet to access it

@@DreamerSouls but it also means I could play online with friends, which I didn’t get much of a chance at

It's crazier things aren't being preserved considering it's just data and we have the internet

​@@kylespevak6781Agreed, with the caveat that especially for older games, quirks of hardware design are sometimes difficult to accurately emulate in software. As a weird example, I remember whooshing "wind" sounds always sounding strange in older SNES emulators. I'm sure this isn't the only example. But maybe we are hamstrung by the legal situation, and better emulators would be available if preservation were better supported. I'm not in a place to know for sure.

@@ballman2010 The gaming industry is lazy and fans do all the lifting. If you need any proof just go look into how many times companies have lifted emulated content for rereleases. If the legal side of things weren't garbage and fans could be paid for work or at least not hamstrung by the law we would almost certainly see much better emulators available.

@@ballman2010 The legal situation has a minimal impact on emulation development for older hardware. The legal limitations are practically just users needing to provide their own BIOS files from Sony machines and the illegality of using decryption keys to run Nintendo games starting with the GameCube. Older SNES emulators (ZSNES and the like) didn't strive for accuracy, but rather them being able to just run on affordable hardware at the time. Nearly every early emulator for any given system relies on intentionally inaccurate speedhacks to achieve this, and it's a practice we see to this day when emulating more modern Sony and Nintendo hardware. By the time more powerful hardware becomes standard the devs usually understand the emulated hardware well enough to achieve a high accuracy that bypasses any need to consider hardware quirks. The "wind" sounding wrong, for example, could have been due to a lack of intensive (at the time) gaussian interpolation, a speedhack of some sort, a slightly mistimed framerate (because 60fps is close enough to 60.0988), or simply putting full sound chip implementation low on the priority list. Thankfully, we now have cycle accurate emulators on many platforms.

@@Gehrich_ I was going to say this, but you beat me to it, nice work in accurately posting it.

maby some games are ment to die. 2 much shovel ware

damnit... just reached the ESA part.

Movies are a way older industry and are easier to preserve overall. There have been many films from the older days that have been lost forever due to a lack of foresight or technology.

Good question!

​@@yaboil7774I suppose it's because pirates do so well for game preservation. Games don't have any great tragedies of preservation like film does, with having lost half-to-most of its earliest generations to fires. Games might not be purchasable, but any shmuck can open up firefox and get a full neogeo romset within a few minutes. Even if it's illegal, at least it didn't melt. Add to that the relative youth of games as a medium and that every film no matter how old could easily just become an h264 mp4 file, while games need specialized emulators designed to play a certain system, it makes sense that film would be easier to sell. Also, many films are part of the collections of big film distributors like Paramount or Universal, while the amount of game publishers (and therefore rightsholders) on any given system are way more numerous.

I've played Mother 3 before and I'm still waiting for a port to buy

Xenogears is on PSN store for the PS3

@@qrowthebird7496yeah, but you can’t add funds through the PS3 anymore. You have to add funds through the PS4 or website now.

I came to the comments to say this. Never had a Playstation when I was younger and I only got into Xeno with Xenoblade. I've only seen Let's Plays of Gears and Saga. I want to play them myself!

@@justjared9985 Emulation is the way to go, unless you are willing to spend a decent amount of money

And certain versions of games are unplayable thanks to their encryption or always online tethers, like Primal Rage Arcade and DarkSpore, respectively. Not even Midway, who had the LEGAL RIGHTS TO PRIMAL RAGE, ever got the the encryption code for the game, leading to the bad port on Midway Arcade Treasures 2. Granted, PR's history with Midway is its own mess

God doesn’t care about video games, kid

Oh, Dark Spore was a game that technically thwarted piracy at every turn and now it's a completely dead game. You can't ever play it again. The rise of the "live service" industry has yielded more games that, when companies no longer see the value incentive in operating them, just nuke them from existence.

Nintendo used to do that til the switch came around

sega, at least, is pretty decent about preserving classics in their original forms, they've been putting out lots of rerelease collections for awhile, even if there are of course many more games forgotten...

Yeah I'd have much preferred more faithful ports that could be launched separately with the full original UI intact. Fable Anniversary is another. The original Fable/The Lost Chapters isn't even backwards compatible on Xbox, only the Anniversary edition with the graphics update. Also the irony with those "anniversary" remasters is that a lot of the fancier rendering techniques they used don't scale properly at higher resolutions, so in many ways the original versions of those games have actually aged better. When you take Halo CE or Fable TLC and crank it up to 4k, it just looks exactly the same but with less aliasing, because everything on the screen is upscaled equally. Do that with the anniversary graphics, and suddenly you've got a bunch of effects that clearly stand out as being lower resolution than everything else around them.

It's small things like that, that make me wish I was in charge of these things. I'd want 100% faithful.

Worst part about the Master Chief Collection is no split screen so I’m forced to play halo 1 and 2 on an emulator. But actually has better performance and let’s me play with my friends.

It was only that buggy mess because the Devs were given 1/4th the time they said it would take to make it. If you look at their estimate and when the game was working, they align pretty darn well.