Old Game Matter Too…

One of the things I am most passionate about is game preservation. I am one of those people who cannot just jump into the middle of a series. I have to play it from the very first entry. I love seeing how a series evolves, both mechanically and story-wise. I want to see how the characters grow and how the design philosophy changes over time.

You could tell me that some games are self-contained. Story-wise, yes, this is sometimes true. For example, many Zelda titles are not directly connected to each other. But gameplay-wise, not true. Game mechanics build on what came before. I remember one summer when I played through all the Ratchet & Clank games that were out at the time. It was incredible to see how Insomniac Games kept evolving their design. Ratchet feels very different in the first game compared to now, and even just between the first and second entries you can see major changes.

However, video games face a unique challenge that no other form of entertainment faces: they lose accessibility. There is currently no official way to play most of the Ratchet & Clank games from before the PS4 era on modern consoles. Because games require specific hardware to run, once those machines are discarded, the games often become unplayable. But games are art. They are history, just as much as music and film.

In the early days of film and television, much media was lost because people did not think it was important enough to save and archive. The same thing is happening with video games. The architectures and storage mediums that contained these games have been changed without ensuring older titles remain accessible. Backwards compatibility sometimes happened, but not consistently. Only recently have console makers begun to take it seriously, likely because they finally realized how important people’s existing libraries are to them.

And hardware is not the only issue. Licensing is another huge barrier. Games are often delisted because of expired licenses. A good example is The Legend of Korra video game, which was delisted only three years after its release. Hearing about a film being delisted is almost unheard of. Imagine Universal delisting Back to the Future because it lost the rights to “The Power of Love.” Disney has been relatively good about making older films accessible, but where are the Simpsons games? Disney completely owns The Simpsons, and yet beloved titles remain unavailable, likely caught up in licensing limbo.

Emulation is another complicated issue. There are unofficial ways to play old games, and sometimes these are the only ways. However, they are not always perfect. Without access to the source code or detailed hardware documentation, some games simply do not run well. For instance, Factor 5 rewrote large parts of the GameCube API specifically for their Rogue Squadron games, which is why those titles run poorly on Dolphin, the leading GameCube emulator. Sometimes official emulation is required. Resistance: Retribution had a special “Infected Mode” that unlocked dialogue, abilities, and intel when connected to a PS3 running Resistance 2. Unofficial emulators cannot activate this mode, but the official PS5 emulator does.

Remakes are not replacements. They are companion pieces. They are not meant to erase history but to show how the industry has grown and to allow people to re-experience games they love in new ways. Capcom is a good example of doing this right. The Resident Evil 2 Remake is available on Steam, while the original Resident Evil 2 is still available on GOG.

PC releases are the saving grace. More and more games are being released on PC, which greatly improves their longevity. Licensing issues aside, PC games can last decades. Many titles from the 1990s and even the 1980s are still playable on modern hardware, sometimes with community patches. I cannot say whether the PS4 version of God of War (2018) will be playable on a PS8, but the PC version will almost certainly still be around. Meanwhile, who knows if God of War: Ascension will ever be playable again, or if it will remain stuck on the PS3 forever.