Video Games – The Unpreserved Creative Medium

11 Feb

Throughout history, we have hoarded many forms of creative expression. Books, movies, paintings, music, and however else the human race has expressed its ideas has historically been preserved to a great degree. Right now, you can go and listen to a vast library of classical pieces from the likes of Beethoven or immerse yourself into the fine atmosphere crafted by Charles Dickens in his classic novels – all from the comfort of your home. At times, it really does feel as though we possess seemingly endless media – our efforts to preserve these vessels of culture have certainly not gone to waste.

Yet, one creative medium exists, slowly fading away right in front of us – video games.

It’s easy to dismiss video games as lacking in the creative expression that movies or books can convey, but there is no doubt that video games have grown to be a titan of creative expression – their accessibility and ability to cater to a wide variety of audiences has led to the video game industry being one of the fastest growing industries in our modern age. Whether you are someone who seeks the thrill of competitive gaming, or someone who just wants to sit back and indulge in an interactive narrative, there is almost certainly a genre of video game that would cater to you.

Despite this, the commercial nature of video games means preserving them is rather complicated. While other forms of media, such as books or films, can be preserved in a variety of formats, video games often require proprietary hardware or software in order to be used. With the rate at which technology advances, the hardware you would use to run a video game is likely obsolete, no longer produced, or unmaintained long before the intellectual property expires.

The difficulties are only exacerbated by the physical decay of the media formats we store these games on: CDs are vulnerable to “disc rot” (sometimes happening in as little as twenty years' time), games which are stored completely online (e.g. online games such as Club Penguin – a game lost since 2017) are only around until whatever server holds that game eventually goes offline, and the original hardware to run classic games is gradually dying. This puts more games in increasingly precarious situations regarding their preservation.

A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation found that a concerning 87% of video games released before 2010 have been lost or are at risk of becoming lost media. Financial decisions – like Nintendo shutting down the Nintendo eShop for the Wii U and 3DS in 2023 – have led to thousands of games becoming completely unavailable. While these games likely still exist on servers somewhere, the chances that the public will ever receive the opportunity to touch those games again are slim.

However, efforts to minimise these losses do exist – the most prevalent being emulation.

Emulation is effectively running a simulation of a console. These pieces of software are able to run video games otherwise designed for completely different devices by translating the machine code in a way that the device can understand it. This partially negates the issue of original console hardware becoming increasingly difficult to get your hands on, as emulators have been designed for an enormous variety of consoles over the years. Understandably, the manufacturers of the original consoles have tried many times to make emulators illegal, yet their consistent efforts have amounted to nothing, with emulators still being fully legal as long as there is no use of copyrighted code, forcing emulator developers to resort to reverse engineering the original consoles. This goes as far back as 1999, when Sony filed a lawsuit against Connectix for their Sony PlayStation emulator supposedly infringing on copyright – ultimately, the court ruled in favour of Connectix.

Emulators, however, are only half of what is required to run classic games – the other part of the equation is the video game itself.

To obtain the game itself, you have to jump through a couple of hoops. For as long as they have been around, console manufacturers have made a consistent effort to stop users from preserving games. The act is in a legal grey area, as not only would you have to copy and redistribute copyrighted material (the game itself), yet you would also have to modify or tamper with the console to make it possible in the first place, often violating the terms of service and user agreement. While there exists an argument for it being ethically correct due to these games being considered “abandonware” (i.e., software that is no longer sold anywhere), this is not legally recognised, therefore landing the practice in a severe legal grey area. Console manufacturers take major advantage of this, with Nintendo and Sega grouping together to take down a major website that had been distributing classic games for decades in 2024. As a whole, this places emulation in a rough spot – the software itself is legal, yet the other crucial part – the video games – are effectively illegal.

So, what can be done? The other major alternative is simply collecting the original consoles and copies of video games, yet that preservation only extends to physical releases of video games, which are on a constant timer until the electronics eventually cease to function. Does this make efforts to preserve video games futile? No – there are many movements that fight for the user’s right to own their games, such as the Stop Killing Games movement which carries the goal of making video game manufacturers continue to offer support for their video games once they are taken offline. This is a movement that was started after Ubisoft made their 2014 racing game, The Crew, fully unplayable (despite being largely single-player), with the creator of the movement, Ross Scott, deeming this an “assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media”, likening it to movie studios “burning their own films after they were done showing them.” While progress is slow, this movement has already managed to be debated in UK parliament, as well as making California pass a law that forces digital storefronts to disclose what the user is getting in a purchase.

Will we ever reach a point where video games are preserved and valued the same way we value books and films? Or will companies continue to favour profit over preservation? Ultimately, the ball is in our court, and we are the ones who must act.

Karol Ziolkowski

Photo by Enrique Guzmán Egas on Unsplash