87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games
New study reveals most classic video games are completely unavailable
Commercial availability specifically. Thanks to archivers and the such, there are usually options to play most things. While I personally don't care about commercially buying most of these classics, I do find it odd how little ip owners seem to want to make some of these older titles available
There's such a weird attitude around release of old material. Why can't Disney+ show the star wars theatrical release? Why won't Nintendo sell their old titles? The only possible outcome is that people get what they want and give the company cash. It's bizarre.
Disney, at least back in the VHS, and (probably early) DVD days, would purposefully keep their titles in the "vault" and only release a handful of titles at a time for a limited time window.
What it did was create artificial scarcity, and when they put out an "anniversary edition" of Cinderella or whatever, they cashed in.
Well most of the comments here don't have an insight into this. The reason they don't re-release video games or old movies is because they don't want you enjoying old things. It's capitalism, but it's not arbitrary like the scarcity. Because it's not just video games, no company wants to re-release anything. Not a tractor, not a movie, not a dishwasher, nothing.
Why? Because then you don't buy the new thing with higher margins. Then you don't watch the new movie and they can't sell the new ads with the new character designs promoting it. Or you don't get locked in to their new cartridge system. Or subscription plan. Whatever. The song is different, the story is the same, new stuff make line go up faster. With tons of waste involved as well.
I think one of the exceptions to this is music. Of course there's top 40 and whatnot, but it's one of the areas where older hits either don't go away, or get repackaged algorithmically into let's say "stuff from that decade you like that you've never heard before."
Of course it's still being selected from a much larger sample. But I think there's something different about music.
Thankfully, most companies kinda turn a blind eye to piracy of their back catalog. It's really mostly Nintendo that gets all bent out of shape about it, and, honestly, they bring it on themselves for essentially vaulting many of their classics(like most of their GameCube games, for example). It really doesn't help they they slow drip the releases so that only the same old few games are available at launch(I don't want to play Clu Clu Land or Urban Champion, Nintendo... and I'm someone who likes those black box NES games more than most). Hopefully Nintendo Online solved that issue, but I doubt it.
Anyway, it's not like anyone is going to miss, say, Major Minor's Majestic March for Wii. I would like to encourage companies to release more of their stuff, but realistically, it's out there for anyone savvy enough to get it. We need to fix this stupid broken copyright system.
I think it’s a fun coincidence you brought that game up as something obscure nobody will care about, because I just learned about it because of your post and will probably emulate it for myself lol. Thanks for bringing it to my attention! 😊
Their definition of "classic" is rather contrived in my opinion. "Classic" means both old and influential. They ditched the influential part. From their in-depth article:
It’s hard to define exactly what a “classic game” is, but for the sake of this study, we looked at all games released before 2010, which is roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off.
Our random list of 1,500 games was taken from MobyGames, a huge community-run database of video games.
I can’t feel sorry for the slow disappearance of some Wii Shovelware from 15 years ago. Time is ruthless to all mediocre media.
Well, except the Atari E.T. game, people are still making jokes about that.
Thank god LostWinds didn’t die with WiiWare. (Though playing it with a mouse isn’t really the same, admittedly.) I was so glad when I saw it pop up on Steam.
A lot of trash doesn’t have a reason to be rereleased, for sure, but I think you’re maybe underestimating how many genuinely cool titles get neglected for a heap of dumb, business-related reasons.
Yes you are right, many relevant titles are at risk and they need to be specifically curated and brought to attention.
One mans trash is another's treasure.
For every crappy shovelware game at least on person will have fond memories and see it as a classic.
Because I guess only mediocre games end up not becoming influential? Besides, even the shovelware crap can be important to researchers. ~Strawberry
more than possibly any other industry, gaming companies don't really see their video games as "art."
nintendo doesn't want you to buy their old games because they want you to buy their new ones. that's all they give a shit about.
Legitimately, right?
Or are 87% of classic games not able to be found even as ROMs through piracy? 🤔
I mean, there's a lot of other media that is the same... Like books unavailable to be purchased, but out there at a library or as a PDF online somewhere.
There is a paper book I wanted to buy, but it’s not an option. I can only find a paper version used that is being sold for like $200.
The book is called “Parasite Eve”.
Yes, the game was kind of a loose sequel to the book.
I wanted to see about finding copies of super old books from like medieval times and shit. Just copies, mind you. I could really only find authentic style reproductions done by hand that cost thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I just wanted the contents of the books. To read. Not as, like, a piece of friggin' art. 😩
Man, we'd really be screwed without piracy and emulators. This number only counts legal availability.
I've always thought we should have some sort of standard emulator format for games. I get that cutting edge graphics are always going to be too much to run through a virtual machine, but a lot of indie titles in particular could do it without problem.
We might need a few generations of emulators but it would still let us preserve games by just porting the VM instead of every game.
Video game companies don’t want you to enjoy games you already paid for. They want you to buy the rereremaster for full price again & again every time you want to launch it which is why this will, unfortunately, never happen.
Sadly we’ll continue with the current route, bruteforcing through the emulation once the hardware gets good enough to do it.
It would have to be motivated by the indie scene. Ideally with support from like Godot so people can just build games for the VM and have "native" support.
So one comparison they make is "What if Titanic was only available on VHS and you had to go buy it off eBay!" I feel like it's a very silly way to compare video games and movies. Like what? That's fine. There are thousands of movies that are only available in their given home release format. Video games are already digitized for the most part but it's like asking "What if you could only play a really specific pinball machine by buying the pinball machine?"
I'm all for preserving games. As a game developer, that's my work and I do want it to live on forever. That said it's insane to expect any developer or publisher to fund a failed game's port to newer hardware or still sell it for older hardware. It's simply not worth the hassle. Make it profitable, give grants for selling older titles. If this is something gamehistory.org wants to see, offer the money to make it happen. Otherwise be happy with old formats and ROM dumps.
That's not how I understood the analogy. What I thought it meant was vhs is an outdated format. Having it only available on home release is fine, but if it was only on VHS, and not say, DVD or Blu-ray, then it is less accessible and not easily obtainable. Titanic has released on DVD and Blu-ray, so you don't have to scrounge around reselling sites to find an old VHS copy
According to the study:
In release - For the purposes of this study, a game is considered to be “in release” if the game, or a version of the game derived from its original release including emulated, modified, or reimplemented versions of the original game is reasonably, readily, and legally available from the game's rightsholder, either in physical or digital format, for a currently produced or supported game platform.
They are expecting copyright holders of a game to indefinitely sell the game. It's not that easy. Something like the 1999 movie Dogma would not qualify as "in release" since you can't buy it or watch it from the copyright holder. You can however buy a DVD version on amazon from mediamaniasales legally.
Overall, the study is expecting studios to support and release classic games for current or supported game platforms. It's a lot of work and it's not reasonable to expect a studio to do. If people want supported classic games then they should create a system that gives money to people trying to do that. We live in a society that requires money and people work to get that money. Expecting people to put in that work for free is pretty silly.
Cloanto, the company that owns the rights to the Commodore Amiga line, have a legal emulator that they sell called Amiga Forever. It's about half the price of one modern AAA game, and when you download it, it comes with about fifty games of varying notability, and there's many times more you can just install and play. And it's all legal.
I would love this to be the industry norm, imagine being able to download a NES! It's annoying that if we want future generations to be able to experience games of the past (whether to learn from them, or just for pleasure) we need to teach our children about piracy.