It's Just Emulation!
July 15, 2016 7:02 AM   Subscribe

Keeping classic games in print is a surprisingly risky and difficult business... [The] truth is that we've also done a pretty terrible job of maintaining our legacy. We've cheapened our games, to the point where anything older than a decade is assumed free. [...] If we can't keep our history alive, we risk forgetting our roots and losing a part of what made games great. But don't despair! If music can survive MP3s, games can survive this.
"It's Just Emulation!" - The Challenge of Selling Old Games (YouTube)
posted by griphus (74 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
Did you come across this in another MeFi thread? I found it somewhere this morning (I don't remember where), and watched the first two-thirds. It's pretty interesting, and worth watching.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:17 AM on July 15, 2016


I posted it in the other thread and then figured it could stand as a post on its own.
posted by griphus at 7:20 AM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Interesting that Frank is with Digital Eclipse, as that company was the pioneer in arcade emulation back in the day.

In the mid-90s, you had the very first homebrew emulator projects popping up -- Dave Spicer's Sparcade, which started with three games and worked its way up to a reasonable suite, MultiPac, which evolved into MAME, console emulators like Nesticle and Genecyst, and all of a sudden here was this commercially available software that wasn't a shoddily written port! It looked and played just like the original and I bought it about six seconds after it hit the shelf. It was a trailblazer for projects like Namco Museum that I also bought even though I had the games themselves in MAME, simply because they existed and were packaged with tons of background info and history.

Early emulation was fascinating in that it really stretched both the hardware and the imaginations. For instance, the Williams Arcade Classics package I mention above had an unusual side effect -- Sinistar used a weird video mode that caused my monitor to emit frequencies that triggered the ultrasonic remote on an ancient TV I had nearby. I'm shooting things and all of a sudden my TV starts changing channels and the volume shot up! I wrote to one of the designers and said "I knew this game was supposed to be intense, but..." and he got a huge kick out of it.

Or there was the Activision Action Pack, another early commercial experiment with emulation that had 15 Atari 2600 games packaged with an emulator. That one led to Atari ROMs being handed around the net to figure out which ones could be repackaged to work with the Action Pack, followed by a bizarre experiment with the Starpath Supercharger, a tape recorder interface for the 2600 for its own specific games. Someone wrote a utility to convert ROM binaries to .wav files to be played through the Supercharger, so that you could use the real hardware with games never before loaded in that manner. The irony of my using my $2000 PC as a file server for a $20 Atari 2600 was not lost on me.
posted by delfin at 7:33 AM on July 15, 2016 [26 favorites]


Sinistar used a weird video mode that caused my monitor to emit frequencies that triggered the ultrasonic remote on an ancient TV I had nearby. I'm shooting things and all of a sudden my TV starts changing channels and the volume shot up!

Thread is officially worth it.

Also one of my most interesting takeaways from the video, and I think it's toward the end, is to start thinking emulators as less "pirate_console.exe" and more of a software wrapper around around the ROM image (game code.) Which is exactly what Nintendo did in their Wii store. The emulator-and-ROM(-and-BIOS) complex becomes completely sublimated under the game itself.
posted by griphus at 7:39 AM on July 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'll be a jerk and not watch an hour long documentary and just ask here: who's the market? 30-40 year old people who have some level of nostalgia for old games? I ask because games have changed significantly in the decades from the first video games were huge pixels moving on a monitor.

I realize that Megaman isn't Pong, and that the gameplay and story remain engaging, but what do younger gamers think of the old pixelated or low polygon games?
posted by filthy light thief at 7:39 AM on July 15, 2016


but what do younger gamers think of the old pixelated or low polygon games?

As one data point, my kids (9 and 7) love playing old games on my old computers, MAME arcade emulator, and their original GameBoy Colors, but almost all of their friends don't want to have anything to do with games that "have pixels" because they are old and not cool.
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:44 AM on July 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


Probably depends on when they started gaming on their cell phones. Until recently good graphics at the full screen resolution on mobile wasn't really doable. Early mobile was either had little action, was laggy, or was low resolution. Lack of RAM and CPU made it difficult to impossible to have all three at native screen resolution.
posted by wierdo at 7:45 AM on July 15, 2016


My friend Howard used to enjoy pretending that Sinistar was speaking to him. "Run, Howard! I hunger!"

It was oddly charming somehow.
posted by Naberius at 7:45 AM on July 15, 2016 [9 favorites]


Retro games have been popular with the kids for several years now. Google "8 bit games" for a sampling of the trend.
posted by notyou at 7:45 AM on July 15, 2016


I think, and I am saying this as a dude with no kids and who is never really around kids, that pixel/low-poly games (whether original or contemporary games chasing that aesthetic) are going to be the Black and White movies for these kids. Some will realize the fact that a movie without color might be missing something but maybe not as extreme a "something" to complete write it off, and some will never go near it because it's boring and old because of the way it looks. I mean we probably all know some adults who don't want to watch black and white movies simply on those grounds.
posted by griphus at 7:47 AM on July 15, 2016 [8 favorites]


Judging by how popular Minecraft is with Kids These Days, I feel like pixels and a low polygon count per se aren't necessarily problems for today's young gamers. Simplistic gameplay doesn't seem like an issue either, as there are a lot of casual and kid-focused games being made right now that have very simple mechanics, and they seem wildly popular.

I could see the insane and often unfair-seeming difficulty of many older games being a turn-off though, or just the fact that many of those games have been superseded by later, more polished games within the same genre. Many games which were innovative standouts In their day and which introduced new-at-the-time ideas have seen those ideas become mainstream and unremarkable as later game developers have built off of that work. Today's designers have a wealth of older games to look to for inspiration and ideas, which arcade and early console-era designers lacked, and older games might suffer by comparison to newer ones for that reason alone.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:48 AM on July 15, 2016 [12 favorites]


Data point: my son wanted a Game Boy Advance for his 12th birthday this year. There's definitely a subset of younger folk who are willing and interested in playing older games. For him, I think it's more franchise oriented at this point (Sonic, Kirby, and Pokemon), but he does play some non-franchise older games as well via emulation. I figure, for some kids, it's just part of growing up in the Long Now. And I do suspect that Minecraft had something to do with accepting more pixelated graphics, but don't discount the impact of game-oriented Youtubers making videos about old games and sparking an interest in them.
posted by mollweide at 7:56 AM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


but what do younger gamers think of the old pixelated or low polygon games?

They will play them and like it if waxpancake is their Dad
posted by thelonius at 7:56 AM on July 15, 2016 [7 favorites]


Retro games have been popular with the kids for several years now. Google "8 bit games" for a sampling of the trend.

Anecdata: My sixteen year old daughter just played thru the Scott Pilgrim PS3 video game, which is deliberately retro (and a mashup of the movie and the old Nintendo game River City Ransom, which more or less inspired the comic in the first place).
posted by Gelatin at 7:56 AM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


In a just world, copyright in the US would be much shorter, and these old, obviously outdated games would be public domain.

The paradox here is that while copyright allows companies to monetize them, so many are not monetizable, and games will be forgotten and lost to time as so many old movies were. If games were released to the public domain sooner, we could have actual, legal archives.
posted by explosion at 7:57 AM on July 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


[The] truth is that we've also done a pretty terrible job of maintaining our legacy.

The truth is that the majority of the heavy lifting to keep old games alive hasn't been done by the commercial games industry at all. Almost every emulator or VM or whatever, consoles, dosbox, SCUMM (Lucasgames), Inform and others (Infocom) has been created and actively maintained by the amateur enthusiast communities. Enthusiasts have fixed long standing bugs, written total conversions by hacking the original game assets. I could name a dozen or more games here as examples: the Black Isle RPGs, Civilization, Jagged Alliance 2, X-Com are a few.

We've cheapened our games, to the point where anything older than a decade is assumed free.

No splah: the amateur communities have more time and effort in than many of the original programmers. It's no wonder they feel betrayed when some kid in short pants sees dollar signs in old IP they "own"* and have left abandoned for decades.

*meaning they bought the company that bought the company that bought the original IP when the developers went bankrupt.
posted by bonehead at 8:00 AM on July 15, 2016 [21 favorites]


Gaming demographics are really complicated and fuzzy, but in general the people who seem most focused on AAA graphics-heavy titles are older, wealthier men. So it may actually be the inverse of what you suspect.

Regardless, the actual financial outlay for putting one of these games out digitally is tiny compared to building a new game, even one with similar production values. Most of the 16-bit games out there that aren't available everywhere are down to I think one of three reasons:

1. The rights holder has no idea anyone would want to buy it.
2. The rights holder has institutional resistance to the idea of selling retro games through some kind of emulation process or weird ideas about how it should work
3. The rights to the game are somewhere in the bowels of ownership hell

The third one, amazingly, may be the most common issue.
posted by selfnoise at 8:03 AM on July 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


I think, and I am saying this as a dude with no kids and who is never really around kids, that pixel/low-poly games (whether original or contemporary games chasing that aesthetic) are going to be the Black and White movies for these kids.

I am expecting a kid this year. I fully intend to raise the kid on a healthy diet of NES era SMB games and pretend the wider world of more modern games don't even exist until the inevitable seeping in of the outside world gets to him.
posted by Karaage at 8:03 AM on July 15, 2016


I realize that Megaman isn't Pong, and that the gameplay and story remain engaging, but what do younger gamers think of the old pixelated or low polygon games?

It depends on who you're talking about and just how far back you're going. I would imagine that many people who didn't grow up with early console/arcade games would be dismissive of them as unbearably primitive. And they were -- your average Atari/Intellivision port was nowhere near the original but the miracle was that it existed and was recognizable at all. But there are an awful lot of people out there who grew up in the 80s, have nostalgia, and have spending cash to burn today that they never had back then. I know that's what motivated my own classic console collecting -- hunting down stuff like the Vectrex and the Bally Astrocade and the Atari 5200 that I admired back then but couldn't come close to affording.

Which brings up a second point regarding commercialization of emulation. There are two very important pieces of the puzzle. One is the emulator itself -- accuracy, surrounding detail, etc. When people have been writing homebrew console and arcade emulators for this long, what you put out there commercially had better be spot-on or you're going to be dismissed out of hand just for that. The other is just as important -- the controller. Are you creating something that (a) is true to the original and (b) can be played on hardware that the typical potential consumer has?

A good chunk of the classics are pretty simple -- four-or-eight-direction joystick, one or more buttons, easy peasy for your standard gamepad or even on keyboard. Games like Robotron: 2084 were beyond challenging on a keyboard but with modern Dual Shocks, that's no longer an obstacle. But what about the systems with many more inputs to consider? Or those with various forms of rotation to consider? Or downright unusual control schemes? If you have to buy extra hardware to play it, you'll turn off 95% of your potential audience, but if you're not delivering the authentic controls, you'll turn off an equal amount of nostalgia seekers.
posted by delfin at 8:05 AM on July 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


Judging by how popular Minecraft is with Kids These Days, I feel like pixels and a low polygon count per se aren't necessarily problems for today's young gamers.

Minecraft is a good talking point here in fact. By some accounts more than half of all players (of the PC version) are still playing six years on because of community and enthusiast modifications. There are whole communities built up around particular modification packs, in fact. Arguably, it's the mods that are keeping Minecraft sales figures as healthy as they continue to be.

Microsoft seems to be wanting to transition the community to their own C# version, which will seemingly allow a much, much reduced capacity to change the game, compared to the near complete access the Java version allows. At least that's what their trial balloons seem to imply.

MS is walking a tightrope here, and I strongly suspect they know that. They're risking a pretty big investment if they cripple the golden goose and their audience looses interest as a result. So it's in their best interest to continue to adapt and mod the game, to allow others to do so as well, in perpetuity. Can they transition the community to MC 2.0 in C#, or should they continue to support MC 1.x in Java? That's a multi-billion dollar question.
posted by bonehead at 8:16 AM on July 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


I haven't watched the video yet, and I'll grant that he's talking about legal access to games, but the premise in the description seems pretty backwards to me.

We've lost an enormously greater percentage of movies, TV, music, and books than we have of video games. Even if you just go back as far as Pong, I'll bet we've lost a greater percentage of TV shows and music, and maybe even movies and books, since 1972 than we have of video games. It's a lot easier to find an Atari or arcade ROM from the 80's online than a lot of TV shows from that decade.

If anything, it's the modern games we have right now that we're most in danger of losing. Games that are tied to remote servers or app stores are a lot harder to preserve than games. And it's going to get harder and harder to emulate games and the hardware and operating systems that run them.
posted by straight at 8:19 AM on July 15, 2016 [10 favorites]


That was interesting...though I kinda want to hear the Ms. Pacman talk, too.

Also, is there a way I can play Heaven and Earth on my phone? I would really like that.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:26 AM on July 15, 2016


We've lost an enormously greater percentage of movies, TV, music, and books than we have of video games....If anything, it's the modern games we have right now that we're most in danger of losing. Games that are tied to remote servers or app stores are a lot harder to preserve than games.

He says both of these things. He says his interesting in game preservation started when he learned that 80% of movies from before 19xx are now lost. And at the end someone asks him about what games are most at risk now (he says in the talks that games that never shipped to stores from the 80s were most at risk) and he answers with the example of Farmville. He says that preserving these games might be less like preserving movies and more like preserving the history of baseball -- we can save the stories and save videos of the games being played, art etc. but might not necessarily be able to preserve the playable games.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:29 AM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Also, is there a way I can play Heaven and Earth on my phone? I would really like that.


There's at least a couple of forks of DOSBox in the Android store. For iOS you'd probably need a jailbreak.
posted by griphus at 8:30 AM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Also, is there a way I can play Heaven and Earth on my phone? I would really like that.


Oddly enough, that page loads on my iPhone fine. I can see input is the issue though. I bet that site could update to accommodate.
posted by OwlBoy at 8:30 AM on July 15, 2016


Delfin - I figure one Steel Battalion controller has enough button, knobs, and sticks to handle all of your examples.
posted by thecjm at 8:37 AM on July 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


I realize that Megaman isn't Pong, and that the gameplay and story remain engaging, but what do younger gamers think of the old pixelated or low polygon games?

I think it really depends on the game and why the kid is playing it. I have a home-built MAME cabinet, an Atari 2600, and a 14 year old boy. For the most part, the Atari doesn't get used. Honestly, those games were great when there was nothing else but they are very, very primitive by today's standards. Everything moves slowly, things flicker, and they're just not very good. Once in a while my son will play Missile Command on the Atari (even though it's also on the MAME cabinet, and better...) but it's almost like he's playing it ironically. "Ha! Look, I'm playing an old-timey game!" He once fired up E.T. just to have the experience of playing "the worst game ever made" but after stumbling around for a couple minutes, he gave up.

On the MAME cabinet, despite my attempts to get him into Pac Man or Donkey Kong, he only ever plays Bubble Bobble and the occasional game of Golden Tee, and only when friends are over.

I am of the generation that saw video games go from Pinball and other electro-mechanical games, to Space Invaders, to Pac Man, to Atari, all the way through what we have today. I can get nostalgic for those old games and enjoy them, but for a kid it's like trying to convince them that Hula Hoops are just as fun as a game of Counter Strike Go.
posted by bondcliff at 8:39 AM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


I totally agree that it's the modern browser-based online games that are the endangered species. One example, Leap Day by Sparkypants / Spry Fox - it was a great "supply-chain" resource management game, but they never profited, so the servers are gone and the whole game has disappeared. Pity - it was fun, cute, and gorgeous. I'm sure there are hundreds of other similar cases, just in the past five years or so.
posted by dylanjames at 8:51 AM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


The silly thing is that these libraries could have been ridiculously good as a Netflix like service. But instead we get piecemeal Virtual Console and Genesis Collection crap.
posted by Talez at 9:00 AM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Browser games are a funny one. If they're server light, they're pretty inherently open source, and preservation should mostly come down to downloading the JavaScript and then updating it for any big changes in the language (which I think is pretty stable at this point). Hell, a lot of the upkeep might be removing browser hacks...
posted by kaibutsu at 9:03 AM on July 15, 2016


Old iOS games are disappearing too. There was one account of a popular maze game being abandoned by it's developer until a mysterious benefactor stepped in to pay the $99/year app store fee (betcha it was Hipster Whale since they ripped off some elements for Pac-Man 256). Plenty of other games have been removed because of incompatibility with newer OS releases.

I wonder if the easiest way to emulate these will be to reanimate and jailbreak old discarded iPhones.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:07 AM on July 15, 2016


Weren't people selling iPhones with Flappy Bird installed for ridiculous sums or was that just made up?
posted by griphus at 9:17 AM on July 15, 2016


I played a shitload of emulated NES and SNES games as a 13-yo in the early 2000s. To some extent that only happened because they were free (while a new console was not). But also pixel art and game design from that era (pre-NES is too early for me) ages pretty well.

I have to agree with bonehead 10x over though. I'll say right here I haven't had a chance to watch the video yet but that description rubs me the wrong way because the emulation people were already preserving games, and they should be cheap so people like Young Me will play them. Yeah, accessibility through mainstream platforms is good but still.
posted by atoxyl at 9:18 AM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


So I downloaded dosbox to my android phone. I downloaded the zip file of heaven and earth. And now I have no idea what to do. I get a dos prompt saying it mounted storage/emulated/0/downloaded as drive c: so I thought maybe I could move the Heaven and Earth zip file there, but my file explorer doesn't show that folder (i.e not even "storage" as existing.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:30 AM on July 15, 2016


try mounting a folder that does exist as drive D
posted by griphus at 9:43 AM on July 15, 2016


Another anecdote for the "what do kids think of old games" question:

We have an XBox360, a Wii, and a NES/SNES emulation box in our living room. Our 6 year old daughter gets access to any and all of them in her allotted video game time. Her preferences stretch the entire gamut of video game history pretty much without any discernible pattern. She loves Skyrim (a.k.a "Super 3D Flower Picker w/ Occasional Wolf Attacks") with the same fervor that she loves Kirby's Adventure for the NES. She loves Mariokart Wii and she loves Battletoads (little masochist that she is).

I honestly don't think it's really occurred to her that there is a material difference between NES games and XBox360 games.
posted by 256 at 9:56 AM on July 15, 2016


Though I guess I grew up playing DOS games and Game Boy games so the NES was just a step back to a style I was familiar with.
posted by atoxyl at 10:01 AM on July 15, 2016


Another data point. I just offered her some video game time while her little sister is napping, and she chose the original Harvest Moon.
posted by 256 at 10:33 AM on July 15, 2016


filthy light thief: what do younger gamers think of the old pixelated or low polygon games?

thelonius: They will play them and like it if waxpancake is their Dad
Playing With My Son
An experiment in forced nostalgia and questionable parenting
...
What happens when a 21st-century kid plays through video game history in chronological order?
My wife and I had similar thoughts on raising our boys through the generations of video games, because she still has her old consoles and games, plus old computer games. We even talked about getting an Atari, you know, to be authentic to the experience.

But before we could start, the older one started playing some basic tablet games and online games, thanks to PBS Kids. But now I want to get a Pac-Man plug-and-play TV game.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:46 AM on July 15, 2016


I think the reason my kids appreciate old and old-style games is because they were exposed early on to them. Their friends, on the other hand, who have no prior experience with those sort of games definitely prefer modern games with modern graphics.
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:52 AM on July 15, 2016


I'll say right here I haven't had a chance to watch the video yet but that description rubs me the wrong way because the emulation people were already preserving games, and they should be cheap so people like Young Me will play them.

I'll go to an even longer distance, and say that if it wasn't for the freeloaders 15, 20 years ago, nobody these days would give enough of a shit for these old games other than people who remember them looking for a kick. I worked with a vintage gaming store (as well as working in one that occasionally had older stock) in a medium sized town and most people looking after thise things were exactly those that either had one or most of them grew playing emulated 16-bit games. If there's a place for GoG (and hey, SimCity 3000 was just added) , it's because companies noticed people were willing to play, sometimes at hours lost just to get them right on modern systems and discuss old games at quite a length at, say Home of the Underdogs (who had a policy of not hosting games being sold by reputable outlets, even if most times it was a canadian store) or other abandonware sites that added whatever was deemed old enough.

And yes. Old games have a price (just gave €5 for SC3KU, which seems fair enough). It's just not €5 for most NES games, or €18 for Turok (and when it was added, my comment to a friend of mine was simply this). That's the equivalent of a Record Store Day €40 exclusive vinyl I could download for free or get for €5 or less from the bargain bin.
posted by lmfsilva at 11:25 AM on July 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


FWIW: I recently sold off a bunch of video post production gear and was super surprised how quickly the CRT monitors were snapped up. Both were bought by 20 something retro gamers looking to hook up old consoles.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 11:37 AM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh yeah, CRT monitors have better refresh rates so they are better for fighting games like smash brothers. Newer monitors are slower because they add post processing effects like sharpening.
posted by clockworkjoe at 11:45 AM on July 15, 2016


You guys realize he IS one of the emulator pirates who posted all those free ROMs to the internet years ago, right? He talks about how he focused on getting test cartridges (temporary media) of games that were never produced and shipped to stores.

I went googling for a transcript, because there are a lot of "I haven't watched the video yet so I'm just arguing with stuff I imagine he says" comments. And while that's normally annoying, it IS a one hour video, so a bit of a time commitment. But I couldn't find a transcript. Sorry.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:46 AM on July 15, 2016


I keep one CRT around -- an video production monitor -- for my 1981 ti-99/4a. There is a VGA board for that computer now, which not just lets you use a VGA LCD monitor, but also greatly increases the video capabilities of the computer. But... it just doesn't look right to me.
posted by fimbulvetr at 11:48 AM on July 15, 2016


I watched it over lunch, so here's my tl;dw takeaway: He's mostly arguing from the point of view of preserving console, that is to say home console, not arcade, games, and the peculiarities of dealing with that market's attitude toward preserving games and even unreleased products. In particular, he focuses on how emulation became a bad word for the console rights-holders.

He mentions dosbox mostly as an example of how to get it right. It's GPL 2, and so can be used commercially (with source distribution), and goes on to hold up GoG as an essential, legal preserver of PC-based games culture. He talks a bit about how MAME just went GPL 2 as well, which, in combination with its merge with MESS, offers similar possibilities on the console side.

His thesis: the hobbyist community has accidentally saved the game companies' collective bacon, by making the best tools (MAME+MESS) and has now given them the right licensing (GPL 2) to allow platform-neutral high-quality digital preservation of the original games*. His hope is that the game companies can be convinced of this opportunity and allow a "Criterion Collection" of old console games, fully legal and future-proofed for for any architecture.

*he talks a bit about preserving authorial intent, and about offering full fidelity for hardware glitches and even thing like screen flicker. Was that part of the original game experience? Should that be part of the emulation? Kind of a fascinating rabbit hole. What about CRT distortion? Were graphics or other game features (music?) designed with those sorts of hardware limitations in mind?
posted by bonehead at 12:30 PM on July 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yeah...it was the VGA input on the Sony PVM that one guy was looking for.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:30 PM on July 15, 2016


I'm a game designer who worked on MMOs for most of my career. One of the projects I worked on never shipped and while the company is still around, I doubt there's a running version left. Two years down the drain. That game was really fun and I wish more people could have played it. Another project's servers were shut down years ago, and the fan emulator never made it off the ground -- I spent 4+ years working on that game. It's sad to know that this stuff only exists in screenshots and stories anymore.

I think this is why, in my personal life, I love to craft and make things with my hands. I have something physical to show for my work, and nobody can take it away from me. (Well, my cats are pretty hard on textiles, but that's another topic.)

Now I'll go watch the video -- sorry!
posted by liet at 12:32 PM on July 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


His hope is that the game companies can be convinced of this opportunity and allow a "Criterion Collection" of old console games, fully legal and future-proofed for for any architecture.

And to be clear, Mega Man Legacy Collection, which he worked on, is exactly that: the original games, emulated (ugh, sort-of emulated; it's more complicated than I can understand much less explain), with numerous "just like the real thing!" features (display modes that are crisp, distorted, etc.), as well as remixed gameplay not found in the originals (boss rushes and so on), lots of unearthed media extras, etc.
posted by griphus at 12:37 PM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


What about CRT distortion? Were graphics or other game features (music?) designed with those sorts of hardware limitations in mind?

I can tell you a lot of game look far worse on later and much crisper CRT screens with SCART or RCA connectors than your regular, blurry as fuck early 90s cheap TV set via aerial. Color blending using CRT artifacts was surely a thing.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:10 PM on July 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


The CRT aspect is tricky territory. In the US, our game consoles were limited to RF modulators, then RCA composite, then (more rarely; typically optional) s-video, before the HD era. However, other continents had SCART which often provided a nice high bandwidth (for the time) signal. Also, CRT arcade games were similarly not limited by RF, Composite, etc. Also, the CRT monitors used by arcade cabinets were often higher quality, as well. In short, I don't think we can assume that games were 'meant' to be played on the worst possible existing setup, by default.

I recently purchased an old Sony broadcast video monitor and a PC Engine (Japanese Turbografx-16) to go with it. Of course, as it only provided composite out, I had to modify it internally to provide a nice direct RGB+sync signal to the monitor. I could never go back.
posted by destructive cactus at 1:21 PM on July 15, 2016


Oh hey if an hour long conference talk wasn't stultifying enough for y'all how about a 2-hr long episode of the podcast Retronauts (feat. Frank Cifaldi) about video issues, CRTs, converters, etc. in the context of retrogaming.

i live for this shit
posted by griphus at 1:33 PM on July 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


Speaking of web-based games, I had a desire to play the old Pop-Cap game Mummy Maze. It's a take on Theseus and the Minotaur puzzle game and a rather well done one at that. It's been offline for years, but I found the "deluxe" downloadable version after some hunting. After trying and failing to register it multiple ways, I decided to just pirate it and looked up a registration code.

I'm glad I was able to find it, but I wonder if any of their other early games are around at all. (They seem to do Plants vs. Zombies almost exclusively now.)
posted by Hactar at 2:16 PM on July 15, 2016


Yeah, web-based games are the real challenge — Kongai was this great sort of meta-game on Kongregate, and trying to play it today is like trying to order steel from Allentown. It'd be nice to be able to play it again, but the lack of site integration and especially the lack of players really stymie any attempts I might make.
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:43 PM on July 15, 2016


For years I had set up emulators for my favorite consoles to have the most realistic looking CRT style video, and built USB converter boxes for all the original controllers. Now I play them on a little Sony TV from 1988 that I found on the sidewalk, with only RF input. Looks fuzzy and nice in all the right ways. I found myself playing old games more often because I wasn't getting distracted by all the other stuff I could be doing when sitting at my computer instead. Also I can play Duck Hunt.

I did get a copy of Megaman Legacy Collection for 3DS though, because it's hard to bring the CRT on the subway.
posted by helicomatic at 2:51 PM on July 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


My son will play what we call retro games in our house, but he's more annoyed by their really crappy scripting and stories more than by the quality of the graphics. "Why do SO MANY of these games start with someone getting out of bed?"
posted by Mo Nickels at 3:22 PM on July 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


If we think archiving games from the 80s and 90s is hard, we're going to have a hell of a time archiving current games. I thought about this recently because of the following situation:

I decided that I wanted to replay Portal, which I hadn't done in some time. I installed and launched it on my PC, then started the game. Immediately, I heard the 'muzak' version of the ending theme playing nearby. It was coming from a radio, added as part of an ARG to promote the sequel, Portal 2 (which came out years ago), and was never removed. Every level has one of these radios, and you're supposed to do some little side game with them to 'solve' a mystery (which is really just advertising) that has already been solved, years ago. Essentially, in the official, current version of Portal, your entire playthrough of the game is accompanied by this elevator music.

In researching how to remove it (and finding a bunch of people trying to do similar), I found two main methods. The first: replace the 'muzak' sound file with a sound file of pure silence. The second, and more interesting: use the archived, earlier version of Portal that speedrunners use. They use a 'frozen' version, to prevent updates from changing the game and invalidating their speedrun records, to have a controlled environment for their helper tools, and similar.

So, when it comes to preserving current games: what version do we preserve? Who decides that? How would we predict when an update is going to make a game not preservable, and so hopefully keep an archive of the un-updated one? Especially important for digital-only games.
posted by destructive cactus at 3:28 PM on July 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


Multiplayer games are going to be the hardest ones to preserve methinks, simply because it will be impossible to get a group of skilled-enough players together even if one could get all the necessary hardware and software in place.

Anyone up for a round of Starseige: Tribes? Preferably running the Renegade 3 mod? Me and my best friend spent pretty much all of high school playing that game, often for 12 to 14 hours straight. My friend in particular is the best Tribes player I have ever seen, easily outclassing even serious guild players. Any armor, any weapon, any environment, for four or five years there he was just unstoppable.

That game is gone now, never to return. Even if you got it going, the player base and the modding community has long since evaporated and scattered to the winds. It's still my favorite game ever—the jetpack mechanics alone have absolutely spoiled me for any other FPS to this day. But games like that aren't coming back.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:48 PM on July 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I think the hard part in the case of multiplayer games will be the servers, in the case of developer- or provider-run servers. It's doubtful that they'd release any sort of documentation on how the server even worked, let alone the source code, so sorta-black box reverse engineering and re-creation would be necessary.

To follow the example of the last commenter, Tribes 2 had a central matchmaking server that's obviously offline now, so a slightly-hacked client has been released that connects to a community-run one, now. That's honestly the best situation that can be expected as these multiplayer games age, at least the ones that don't allow for player-run servers :(
posted by destructive cactus at 4:10 PM on July 15, 2016


Essentially, in the official, current version of Portal, your entire playthrough of the game is accompanied by this elevator music.

GLaDOS SANG FIRST
posted by straight at 4:51 PM on July 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


he talks a bit about preserving authorial intent, and about offering full fidelity for hardware glitches and even thing like screen flicker. Was that part of the original game experience? Should that be part of the emulation? Kind of a fascinating rabbit hole. What about CRT distortion? Were graphics or other game features (music?) designed with those sorts of hardware limitations in mind?

Shout out to the 3ds collection of Sega classics, which have options for CRT filters, soundtracks of different releases, refresh rates etc.
posted by ersatz at 5:27 AM on July 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Rapid versioning is also an issue in this era where every update gets automatically (and mandatorily) pushed to every player. The version 3.49j or whatever that people end up with is often unrecognisable when compared against the 1.0 release, let alone the 0.1a release.

Is there a place where you can still play the original offering of World of Warcraft, for historical purposes? Does Blizzard even have the right files anymore to make that a theoretical possibility?

on non-preview: What Destructive Cactus said.
posted by 256 at 7:11 AM on July 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Does Blizzard even have the right files anymore to make that a theoretical possibility?
You could probably find used game discs being sold somewhere. I used to sell those to people that liked having a boxed, even if completely worthless version of the game.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:49 AM on July 16, 2016


Imfsilva: Sure, but the client is only one half of the game. I wonder if even Blizzard themselves would have the capability to launch a WoW 1.0 server any more?
posted by 256 at 8:22 AM on July 16, 2016


I think Blizzard has said that they'd like to do "legacy" servers running just vanilla WoW (kinda like what's been done with the original Everquest), but the problem is they actually do not have the all the original data that they went with. Its completely understandable because what even IS the original vanilla WoW experience? The game was constantly patched and updated and things like loot tables and enemy abilities and hitpoint counts were switched around from patch to patch (and sometimes hotfixed more or less silently between patches during a maintenance break).

I guess the full "original experience" of something like WoW would be to start from the very beginning and introduce every patch in the order they were originally introduced at the same sort of timeframes. The problem there of course is that you'd need to have the original server-side patch sets in the first place in addition to the client-side ones.

It doesn't matter that much anyway since what historical value WoW may have is not in how it looked or played way back in the dark ages but in the player stories.
posted by Soi-hah at 8:30 AM on July 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


I wonder if even Blizzard themselves would have the capability to launch a WoW 1.0 server any more?

Maybe trying to find an early pirate server, and removing the workarounds around the validation system? Apparently there's this, shut down earlier this year.

It used to be much simpler when a game had a handful of updates, and they were executables or zip files, both cumulative and upgrade only. This reminds me - 10 years ago, EA adopter a terrible system for patches, meaning a lot of those games of that time can't be updated. yet I can upgrade FIFA Soccer Manager (released back in 96) going through their FTP server (you can check it at ftp.ea.com/pub/easports/patches/fifasm). Or, get the extra cars for Need For Speed High Stakes / Road Challenge (/pub/ea/patches/nfs-hs). No validation required - download and install. Compare that to some DLC released now.
posted by lmfsilva at 9:06 AM on July 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


Oh hey if an hour long conference talk wasn't stultifying enough for y'all how about a 2-hr long episode of the podcast Retronauts (feat. Frank Cifaldi) about video issues, CRTs, converters, etc. in the context of retrogaming.

I recent caught up after a massive Retronauts archive binge and this episode was a favorite. There's so many concerns that go into it and so much aftermarket hardware and specialized gear people have come up with to make things their best.


Multiplayer games are going to be the hardest ones to preserve methinks, simply because it will be impossible to get a group of skilled-enough players together even if one could get all the necessary hardware and software in place.

I've been very gradually working on a post about the Half-Life modding scene from about 1998-2003 or so and one thing that keeps coming up is that while a lot of the mods are still out there, waiting to be played, multiplayer mods were always much simpler and quicker to make and therefore there's a TON more mp mods than singleplayer mods. I like the idea of a post that's full of free stuff for people to play but because of that dynamic it's somewhat slower going than it might be.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:09 AM on July 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm way late to this thread and haven't had a chance to watch the video, but I wanted to throw my two cents in.

One of the reasons there hasn't been that much commercial interest in preserving old video games is because there is no good business model for doing so. I happen to know this because I worked at a company (with Frank Cifaldi, actually) that attempted to do just that, and no one cared. We were designed as a Netflix-style all-you-can-play service with both classic and modern games, and I can tell you that other than a handful of big name arcade titles (Pac-man, Street Fighter 2, etc.) and Genesis games (Sonic), most of the retro stuff just didn't get played. Ever. And more broadly, people just weren't that interested at paying for older games, even from just 1-2 years prior, at least not at a $10 a month price point.

Some of this is certainly due to the fact that free emulation existed. But we also brought new emulation to the table, and that didn't much help. We had pretty good Dreamcast emulation, for example, but each title required a separate emulation effort, and some things just weren't possible. We spent months trying to get the DC Ecco the Dolphin game up and running before finally deciding that some of the transparency effects used just couldn't be replicated on PC video cards. We had a whole stack of Saturn games that we wanted to release, but just couldn't get the emulation up to production quality despite lots of dev time and effort (and cost).

The short version is that emulation, particularly of 3D systems, is *really hard*, and the interest in retro gaming just isn't as much there as you might think, at least not enough to support the effort from a commercial standpoint, as much as I might hope otherwise. Short of getting government funding to have the Library of Congress archive old games, the dedicated amateur efforts are probably the best we're going to get.
posted by tau_ceti at 12:50 PM on July 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


Just a small papsi-blue heads up: There's a 'Classic NES' being released by Nintendo in November, with 30 games and an old-school controller. I've had a few NES consoles over the years, usually playing around with them a bit and then leaving them with housemates when moving to a new city. Kinda cool to see something coming out which won't require futzing with the cartridges so much.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:38 PM on July 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


There's a lot to read in this thread, but one thing I thought I should mention....

The comment, oft quoted, "I know that Mega Man isn't Pong," is particularly interesting.

Of course Mega Man isn't Pong. Because we can emulate Mega Man, but Pong cannot be emulated, only recreated, because it has no program code. Like a number of REALLY ancient arcade games, including Sega/Gremlin's Monaco GP, it was implemented using discrete logic elements. There is no microprocessor!

And if my memory of Monaco GP serves (I only ever encountered one in the wild), its scrolling playfield was actually a sheet of plastic or paper rolling on a drum with a light behind it. How the heck do you emulate that?
posted by JHarris at 3:32 PM on July 16, 2016 [4 favorites]


I think the original Monaco GP was video-based (with TTL logic like Pong). Maybe it's one of these? There's an arcade in Colorado Springs that had a bunch of these when I visited five or so years ago.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:34 PM on July 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


I think, and I am saying this as a dude with no kids and who is never really around kids, that pixel/low-poly games (whether original or contemporary games chasing that aesthetic) are going to be the Black and White movies for these kids.

The five games that might well have the most rabid YA fanbases are Minecraft, Undertale, Five Nights at Freddy's, Pokemon, and Harvest Moon. They all have a retro aesthetic of some sort or another. That aesthetic is also a big part of the most popular kids' shows, like Adventure Time and Steven Universe, not to mention Homestuck. And chiptunes are everywhere. Pixels and low poly count are massively popular among kids.
posted by painquale at 10:19 PM on July 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


Another area where emulation is necessary is for systems that were designed for vector displays, such as the original Asteroids or Starwars. I've modified MAME to output the vectors and built hardware to turn those vectors into analog voltages that can be wired to XY monitors like dual-channel oscilloscopes or cheap NTSC vectorscopes.
posted by autopilot at 6:21 AM on July 17, 2016 [6 favorites]


A bit on a tangent, but I've mentioned color blending using CRTs, and The 8-Bit Guy has recently done a bit showing how CGA worked. Around 6 minutes in he shows a game running CGA under composite mode.
posted by lmfsilva at 6:42 PM on July 18, 2016


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