an analysis of historical video game availability shows that only 13% of classic video games are currently commercially available across consoles and time periods, and only 3% of games prior to 1985
pirates keep culture alive ❤️
Some one game that comes to mind is one of my favourite RTS’s Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth (and it’s expansion Rise of the Witch King). It was published by EA. Unfortunately they no longer have the license for LOTR content so they can’t legally sell this game and you can’t buy it. Thankfully it’s still alive due to the piracy community and you can download a copy with all the cracks and whatnot.
Same thing happened with chronicles of riddick. The only way to play it is by piracy. Its well worth playing and the graphics still hold up!
I had the original, Escape from Butcher Bay on Xbox when it came out, but lost it to time. When the PS3 version came out, I bought it immediately. I also just recently picked up an unopened copy of the PC version of the game. Such a great game, but I shouldn’t have to cruise eBay to buy a game that’s not even 2 decades old.
That game is incredible. You should check out Unofficial 2.02, Edain mod, and Age of the Ring mod
As much as I support and endorse game preservation, this doesn’t seem like a shocking number. I wonder what percentage of those games are actually worth playing?
TONS. Think about all the games from ps3 backward. Im currently playing burnout 3 again on ps2. Its ridiculous fun, looks great on the emulator. What about Little Big Planet, chronicles of riddick, metal gear solid… The list is endless. You cant buy the game and the hardware to play it on from any store. And it depends on your definition of worth playing. Most games that arent fifa or nba will have fans that want to play it
You just named a bunch of games that have been released on other consoles/pc.
What I’m referring to are all the garbage games released. Think licensed titles, and all the crap that led to the market crash in the 80’s.
Also you most certainly can buy old consoles and games at a store. I do it all the time.
While you may be able to buy all these games at a secondhand shop I think this article is about official commercial availability. I am not paying some random 200 for Chibi Robo on GameCube because Nintendo never released it
This is the part a lot of these corpo huggers are missing. I’m rarely willing to pay the full $60 for a game, let alone the hundreds some go for because of induced scarcity. Let’s be honest, there’s rarely a real reason for a game to not be available digitally even if they don’t want to keep print discs. GoG is made specifically for this kind of thing.
One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure
Yeah for every MGS4 there are hundreds of games on the level of E.T. There was a shit ton of crap flooding the market during the Atari era, because many publishers tried to crank out as many games as possible in a short time.
Man i had E.T. On PlayStation. I was too young to realise how crap it was then but thinking back…
I’m actually a bit surprised by how high it is.
In the article it mentions emulation as the only method to play some games. I mean, that’s a good thing right? Digital Media can be copied and shared over and over. Physical media can get lost, destroyed, hoarded. More work needs to be put into perfecting emulation software, and we need to ensure there is a backup of every game ever released.
What they mean is the only way to play these games is emulation instead of being able to purchase them from the company that owns the rights. That’s bad because many people either do no know about emulation, do not know how to emulate, don’t want to figure out how to emulate, don’t want to involve themselves in legal gray areas (downloading ROMs is illegal afterall) etc… Basically, the companies that have the rights to these games are just squatting on them and not ever rereleasing them again. Those people above can never or will never experience those games. Some people want to just pay the company and play an old game that they heard about so they can’t. As far as preservation goes, the archivists have that covered but there just isn’t a solution for the average Joe to play older games that are no longer sold physically or digitally.
I’m afraid you’re right. They do make portable consoles now that are emulation focused so that would be an easy enough way to get the average Joe set up, but even then they’d still have to navigate the rom universe and figure out downloads. I’m not really sure what a solution could be.
Maybe if there was a way to exclusively release the reproduction rights to video games that haven’t been published within the past 10 years. This would at least make possession of the roms legal, and allow for a functional service to grow to provide them to the average Joe.
Can’t imagine that happening any time soon, though. But I guess here’s to hoping 🍻
Personally, I think IPs should default to public if the holder is just goblin-ing the content. Both whole IPs and individual games. That way they’d be incentivised to keep digital versions available or enjoy watching people get it for free.
@DebatableRaccoon afaik the problem is physical media and that it becomes unavailable/unplayable for several reasons.
Not entirely. It works both ways. Physical media that doesn’t have a digital version has an inherently finite supply but a digital release with no physical release vanishes the moment someone flips the switch.
If we can mandate the IP holder has to always provide a way to acquire the media legally it means there’s always going to be some sort of source. Without crappy DRM, we could make our own physical copies of digital media and the same the other way around.
@GreenCrush
I read it as them saying it’s a good thing and sort of tiptoeing around piracy, as academics do
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