Old Videogames are Dying, but Trash will live on
I've had a blog post sitting in my "Read Later" inbox for almost a full month now. That's really nothing. I have stuff in there from the days of the Clinton Admin. But today I decided to look at the date and, sure enough. It was exactly a month ago that this blog post went up.
I saw it, and I think many other people, saw it hit HackerNews and since Retro PC Games are kind of my thing, the blog's headline caught my attention:
Why old games never die (but new ones do)
I read through it and I think I have a new line for the ole' RSS Feed...wait did I enable RSS on my site? Damn...chalk that up to the ole' Todo...which I'll forget...anywho.
I got through this fun read and decided to check out the rest of "Pawlickers" Blog. If you're into a cynical take on modern gaming, they have a fun writing style that I enjoy! I'll be dropping their page on the ole' Webring too.
Reading through it gave me lots of thinkin' thoughts. Lots of thoughts. I thought about it on the drive to the grocery store with the kiddos. I thought about it while they ate their Ice Cream samples a nice uncle put out for paying customers to enjoy (those kids are bums!) and I wanted to dump my thoughts out.
This is not going to be a drama style reaction/response blog. But rather, I want to focus in on the key points and just talk about them.
So the author, whom I'm just going to refer to as Pawlicker is upset. They're upset at bad video games and I feel it. I really, really do. Funnily enough they talk a lot about Call of Duty games, I'm still nostalgic for the series, although I have not played one in a while. I did try Call of Duty 28: Modern Warfare 3: 2 and it's prequel, Call of Duty 26: Modern Warfare: 2. Because I, like many other people, loved those games on their classic White Red-Ringed Xbox 360s. I would make a stupid remark like "nyuuuh y nawt just pley sum endieees uuuuh bucket kniiiight" but I'm sure they have lots of fun playing lots of things, but I want to get in to the real center of thinks.
The primary statement of the article is that...
[Old Videogames]...work on literally anything
Absolute Bullshit.
Old Videogames are dying, rapidly.
I'm not saying this to be combative. Not in any way shape or form. But I need you, my reader, to understand that old videogames are in danger, real danger.
Pawlicker talks a little bit about old games, specifically old PC Games;
"Back in the 80s and 90s with home computers (C64, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, PC-8801, MSX, etc.) and other proprietary computers that were handled in a similar way (Macs, PC-98s, etc.), there was one thing you had to do to make sure that anyone and everyone could run your game. You had to make sure it would run on the biggest shitbox around or the “base specs” of said computer line. I’m talking stuff like the normal C64 and not the C128, the Amiga 500 and other OCS models (and not the AGA-based 1200), the PC-8801mkIISR, the PC-9801VM, etc. "
Unfortunately, this is absolutely false. I just today got my copy of Mean Streets in...for MS-DOS.
See, Mean Streets came out on Four platforms. You could get it on DOS, Commodore 64, Amiga or the Atari ST. Each version only works on their respective platform (duh). For the most part, the different versions of the game are mostly the same. However some games do have...light variations between different platforms.
On top of that, you have to deal with the degradation of the disks or media itself. I would reckon that most Floppy Disks simply do not work anymore. Most of mine don't. But also, do you happen to have an Atari ST hanging around in working condition? What about a C64? Those fukkin' things barely worked new, let alone after 30+ years. As time ticks by, these games become rarer and harder to play.
To be a gamer who enjoys games from the 80's means to be a masochist.
To be a gamer who enjoys games from the 80s and whom thinks emulation is heresy means to be a very, very depressed person.
The 80's and 90's for PC games sucks the root, man. You had games that required specific hardware to run. Not just "A GPU" like today. As an example: a lot of old PC games will advertise that they're "Sound Blaster Compatible". You know what was before it? Adlib. Adlib sucks, but also, you had Gravis Cards, they made their own sound cards that some games would only support
Now we can talk about Graphics. You had cards for 2D, these are still pretty abundant. These were basically Display Drivers and just existed to make stuff appear on screen. You'd get a few megs of RAM on the card and it would render your games, whatever. But oh man you want to play games that require "3D Acceleration"? Well hold on to your taint because THAT is where shit gets real.
If you had a game that required a Voodoo card for it's 3dfx Glide mode, you are in for some financial pain.
Voodoo cards, on Ebay, as of this writing, range between
"You're shitting me"
and
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
Now, many games worked fine if you didn't have the features they were built around. Sometimes it was a decidedly worse experience but you had options.
Moving past Y2k, we see fewer standards and games now run on common APIs and leads us to
Modern Games will work Forever...until they don't.
From 2000 until...I would say around 2006, maybe up to 2008, PC Gaming hit a Golden Age. This was when most games being released...just worked. For the first time, really, in PC Gaming, you could buy a game and be pretty confident that so long as you met the Minimum Requirements, your game would run. Besides a few exceptions a game that you could buy, anywhere, would just work.
To Pawlicker's point. PC Hardware began evolving, rapidly. Moore's Law was still relevant and even the cheapest of desktops could run games only a few years old perfectly at great resolutions and frame rates. GPUs were getting better and games became bigger and evolving with the times.
I sometimes argue the release of the 7th Generation of Consoles, that is, the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii created a sort of "Dark Ages" for PC gaming. As the console market exploded in popularity, more and more people owned consoles and they became the...target for many AAA Games.
It was usually easier to make a game work on the consoles and just...port that version over to the PC. So the PC got a LOT of lackluster ports, when it even got them. But I'm rambling.
DOS, Amiga, C64, all of those platforms are easily emulated (which we'll get to, for sure). Games released for Vista or newer will generally work fine, even on Modern systems. Modern Windows isn't too different from Vista...or 7, or 8 or 10. Most games will work fine out of the box, and even more with some poking and prodding.
Those games? Those are fine. You can, right now, load up DOSBOX via your web browser and play Mean Streets, literally, right this second.
You can dig out that old copy of F.E.A.R and throw it at a Windows 11 Gaming PC and it will run.
THESE games will be fine. To the author's point. It's this generation of games that you'll see stand the test of time. They're plentiful, cheap, easy to mod in 3rd party clients and multiplayer logic. I am not worried about F.E.A.R or Crysis becoming lost media.
The reason I bring most of this up, is that there's a strange time between Windows 95/98 and Windows XP era of Operating systems that creates the
The 95-XP Game Gap
But there's a gap...You see. A Game Gap.
This generation of games doesn't work on older hardware, nor does it work on newer harder...
So what do you do?
Personally, I have an actual Windows 98 PC sitting next to me. I play it on Streams and that's the best way I've found to play these games. I've used 86Box in the past which works a treat for some games. But you need something beefy to run anything around a Pentium 3, and there's no way to emulate the Pentium 4 with decent performance...so far.
These are the games that are dying, these games are rapidly becoming lost media. Most of them are on CDs, they'll probably last for another decade after this post. But eventually, they're going to turn in to goo. The PCs they rely on will see the last motherboard crumble away in to dust soon.
But...maybe there is a way. What if you could make a digital copy of these games and simply re-create the environment that they need to run? Well son, that would be
Piracy
Or at least, that's what the Fat Cats want to call it.
Copyright laws are the single biggest problem for preserving human heritage. In a hundred years, we're going to look back and say "AAAAA MY SKIIIN-glurgleblurgebleeeegh" because the planet will be on fire and flooded.
But if we pretend that didn't happen, we're going to look back and just...wonder why?
Why did we let those dicks at Nintendo dictate how we play games released 30 years ago? Why did we let billionaires decide what was saved, and what wasn't?
Remember, preserving old games is completely antithetical to modern game publishers. If you're playing old shit, than you're not buying the new shit and the garbage that it comes with....and that's a problem.
EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Bethesda. These companies sue your favorite ROM and Game sites and bring them down because they want to take a game they released 25 or 30 years ago and maybe some day make it available...maaaybe.
And if they do, they'll make sure it's at a hefty price tag and they might even strip out features or content.
Now, some GoG releases are missing expansions or other content. But some releases are censored after the fact. A practice I oppose vehemently. (let's just pretend we were never racist/sexist/anyphobic! Just as good as owning it, right?). That's not including games that are released in other countries and have all of those pesky human rights removed (Blizzard, whom has removed any and all evidence of their gay characters so they can sell their games in China proudly displays a pride flag for June).
Older games are rapidly becoming lost. If the corporate executives at Nintendo had their way, the only way you'd get to play the original NES Super Mario Bros. is via the Switch Store. It will be Emulated poorly and cost you 40 dollars. Emulation is a legitimate competitor to shit like this.
I had to go look it up and it looks like you have to pay 35 dollars a year to maintain access to a library of badly emulated NES games.
I have a better idea! Go to Vimms Lair or archive.org, get a ROM of Super Mario Bros. and load it up on your ANYTHING and play it, for free, right now. Shoot you can play it in your web browser better than you can play it on the Switch and I don't even need a Nintendo account.
I'm not here to focus on Nintendo (although I really love shitting on Nintendo!)
I want to be clear. If you want to play a game, and the developers or publishers have made it available for a reasonable cost without hassle, buy the game. If you want them to re-release and remaster more games that you liked...than buy the damn games. Good Old Games is great for this sort of thing.
So, why am I upset that Nintendo has basically done this? I can go buy a copy of Blade Runner on Gog.com right now for 10 bucks. That copy is mine. If I download it and keep it safe, it's mine forever. I can play it anywhere I want so long as I have the hardware for it.
The Switch? Well if I pay 35 dollars a year. Hopefully Nintendo will continue to let me play the games I want...unless they want to pull them to release a physical box (with a code to download and a lock-out cart to prevent reselling) for $79.99.
The last piece of the legendary "Forever Games"...
Modding and Community Clients
Modding games is soon to become a felony. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or the DMCA) says that if you have to break some kind of encryption or protection of a piece of software, that's a HEFTY fine and a few years in Federal Prison.
Bethesda let's you mod their games, on their terms (to let the community finish their shit games, for free). But very, very soon...that's not going to happen. I'm actually astonished the likes of EA and Ubisoft haven't already started doing this.
Simply ship the games in a client that lightly encrypts the data. Doesn't matter with what, technically it doesn't even have to be encrypted. You can just bit shift over by 1, and if you, the modder who bought your copy of the game but want to add your own mod? You technically broke a digital lock, ergo, enjoy that fine and jail time, sucker!
EA and Ubisoft want to sell you microtransactions. If you're just opening up the game all willy nilly, creating community servers and clients that just unlock everything, than you could possibly lure a small child away, dollars in hand and they could experience the content without paying!!! Shock, gasp, horror.
One day, The Crew 8: The Crewiest is going to release for 63 seconds, not make 8.16 Quintillion dollars as the AI Observant declared, then get pulled from the shelves and all of the servers were shut off.
You were really excited for the game, so you break open the client in hopes of making your own lobbies for you and your friends. You make your way to the door to die from a hail of gunfire, blindly fired through your sliding paper door by the Ubisoft Peacekeepers who caught you committing terrorism against their shareholders.
Conclusion
I got real rambly at the end.
Anyway, lots of games are becoming lost media. The best way to fight Game-Rot is to avoid the Nintendo 64 effect and maybe start playing some other games. Preserve games other than the ones that have been emulated to death. See some old Floppies or cassettes of old games? If they're cheap. Grab 'em, rip 'em if they still work and throw them on the archive. Every version counts.
Anywho, I'll be reading this guy's blog some more. I like it a lot. What do you think? Do you think games are in danger? Send me an email and let's chat.
I wrote this all in basically one sitting while a little drowsy so...sorry about that. Maybe you enjoyed it?
This is Dad, off to read more Tex Murphy!
