Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)
Anyone with a passing interest in retro games knows the bulk of classic video game history is effectively “out of print,” with legitimate copies limited to defunct hardware platforms and secondhand physical copies (if you’re lucky). Now, in a first-of-its-kind study, the Video Game History Foundation has determined the full extent of this issue, finding that a full 87 percent of games released in the US before 2010 are no longer commercially available.
This vast expanse of out-of-print games isn’t exactly “lost,” of course; libraries, archives, and even software pirates have helped ensure the games will continue to be accessible in some form. But the VGHF argues persuasively that the poor market availability of reissued games highlights how the game industry is not doing a sufficient job of preserving access to its own history.
“The industry has done a great job re-commercializing a wide catalog of [popular] titles, but for the vast majority of games, we can’t rely on the commercial market to solve this,” VGHF Library Director and study author Phil Salvador told Ars in a recent interview. “We need to give libraries and archives more tools to get the job done.”
What’s available?
The VGHF study analyzed a random sample of 1,500 titles pulled from MobyGames’ extensive, crowdsourced database of over 27,000 games released in the US before 2010 (roughly when increasing digital releases and backward compatibility changed the modern continuing access equation). The study also took a more in-depth look at a handful of classic platforms, from the Commodore 64 (95.5 percent of titles currently out of print) to the PlayStation 2 (88 percent out of print).
The 13 percent of legacy games that are currently in print is comparable to the availability of much older, pre-World War II music recordings (10 percent or less in print), a comparison that Salvador says shows just how behind the gaming market is on this score. “Video games have historically been treated as disposable toys,” he told Ars. “Commercial game emulation has been underdeveloped as long as games have been falling through the cracks legally. We’re all still playing catch-up taking this medium seriously, and unfortunately, these are the long-term effects we’re dealing with.”
Beyond the headline numbers, the availability of legacy games varies greatly across different eras of gaming’s short history. A paltry 2.6 percent of games released in or before 1984 are in print, compared to 16.5 percent of games released since then.
That reflects the limited market value of the industry’s oldest games, which Salvador acknowledges are “a little archaic and not especially exciting from a commercial perspective.” But these 30-plus-year-old titles are also more likely to interest game researchers and developers looking into the influences that have driven the industry’s evolution over time.
“It’s not the obligation of game publishers to keep games in print,” Salvador told Ars. “But it also means we shouldn’t expect the commercial market to solve that problem [of access].”
Why is this a problem?
To an average gamer, the fact that most classic games are no longer for sale might not be a practical concern. Piracy groups have gone to great lengths to ensure that entire platform catalogs have been ripped and preserved, with only a few unemulated exceptions. Apart from that, many games are available relatively cheaply on the secondhand market (if you have working hardware) or through institutional archives like Standford University’s Cabrinety Collection.
For researchers, though, these solutions are imperfect. A professor assigning students a game to study, for instance, might find their university department is uncomfortable leaning on the “fair use” legal argument that would be needed to distribute a pirated copy. For these kinds of reasons, Salvador acknowledges piracy in the study as “often a last resort and necessity for proper study.”
And beyond academia, piracy isn’t necessarily a mainstream-ready access solution. “Those of us already ‘in the know’ are set for life. My ROMs are never going away,” VGHF founder and Executive Director Frank Cifaldi tweeted. “But I love video game history and I want it to be for everyone, not just the software-literate nerds. I want to see old games inspiring the weird artists of the future.”
As for trawling eBay for samples of classic games, Salvador told Ars that “we’re starting to exit the period where they’re easy or accessible for the average person to play. Between the rising price of games and hardware as collectible items and the specialized skills needed to set up and maintain obsolete hardware, you could be looking at hundreds of dollars and a serious time investment to get access to, for instance, a single Nintendo 64 game if you don’t already have those.”
“I think we take for granted in the retrogaming world that not everyone speaks the same language we all do about retro systems, upscalers, and so on,” he continued. “It’s the same way that a 35 mm film isn’t a substitute for a DVD or video-on-demand in terms of accessibility.”
Legal hurdles
While some archives have the resources to purchase and maintain collections of old games, restrictive copyright laws mean researchers can only play those titles in person on the archive’s physical premises. That can be a big ask for games that could take dozens of hours for a complete playthrough.
“If a researcher wants to play through an entire game held by a library or archive, they may need to prepare for days or even weeks of travel, lodging, childcare, and other accommodations needed to visit a research collection,” Salvador wrote in the study.
Games are set apart in this regard from media like movies, music, and even other software, which libraries can share digitally with researchers through a copyright office exemption. The game industry has argued to the US Copyright Office that a similar exemption for video games would damage the “vibrant and growing market for authorized ‘retro’ or ‘legacy’ games and consoles.”
But the data in the VGHF study shows that the market only represents a small sliver of the games a researcher might want to look at. “While a healthy market for certain game reissues does exist, it is overshadowed by the volume of games that remain unavailable,” as Salvador wrote.
An evolving technical landscape
Regarding continued commercial availability, games face specific challenges relative to other media. Chief among them is the fact that console gaming platforms tend to change over every six to seven years, transitioning to a new hardware format that has historically been completely incompatible with what came before. “There wasn’t an easy way to republish a Super Nintendo game for the Nintendo 64, for example,” Salvador pointed out.
That has begun to change in recent years. Services like Steam and GOG make it relatively easy to release older PC titles in a format palatable to modern gamers, and Microsoft’s focus on long-term backward compatibility means new Xbox consoles can play many discs and downloadable titles released over 20 years ago.
But while things are improving, Salvador thinks that “it is troubling how load-bearing some individual storefronts are right now.” The recent closure of the 3DS and Wii U eShops, for instance, removed market access to hundreds of classic titles that were only legally available via Nintendo’s Virtual Console. Similar digital storefronts on the PS3 and Vita are still technically operating but seem to no longer work with newly created PSN accounts, vastly limiting market access to hundreds of reissued early PlayStation titles.
These kinds of storefront shutdowns highlight how players and researchers can’t even rely on commercial rereleases remaining available for long-term access to these games. “Microsoft is a business, and I’m sure there will come a point where it might not make economic sense to keep digital stores backward-compatible across so many generations,” Salvador said.
And even if a rerelease is technically feasible, questions over who actually owns the rights to a game (and assets like included music) can often make a rerelease challenging. “I think game companies would love to keep commercializing everything they’ve ever put out, but it’s not an automatic process, and between technical challenges and rights issues, it simply doesn’t happen as much as we’d expect,” Salvador told Ars.
The VGHF and other interested parties will take the data in this study into next year’s arguments over new DMCA exemptions at the US Copyright Office. There, these groups will argue that more permissive access options (such as remote streaming of library archives) are necessary to cover the vast majority of gaming history that is no longer even being offered for sale to gamers or researchers.
“Ultimately, like any media business, the game industry has its own commercial priorities, and they cannot be expected to carry the responsibility for preserving every video game,” Salvador wrote in the study. “Instead, the commercial industry and cultural institutions must work together to fix the future of game preservation.”
