And I would agree.
DOSBox and GOG have been invaluable to me and the era and platform I came from, but that doesn’t cover everyone, not by a long shot.
I’ve gone a step further by keeping and maintaining most of my legacy computers going back to my first one in 1993. Admittedly, I rarely use those PCs, but it’s important for me to keep them around (and also my favorite boxed PC games) so that I have them in case my other options run out.
Newer games are a different beast. Much more complicated, many of them rely on internet connectivity. How will we play the newer Hitman games if IO Interactive disappears?
Multiplayer is yet another thing, but I can’t speak to that since I don’t play MP games. But by all accounts, many of these games have worlds that people will want to revisit.
More importantly, how many people will even care?
The prevailing consensus everywhere I go (even on these forums) seems to be that the ability to play games in the future is just not something that anyone but a select few sentimentalists care about. Heck, I am one of those sentimentalists, and I don’t play my old games nearly as much as I used to. I think there will always be solutions for the most popular games, but many of us got attached to less popular games, obscure games, or even games that others consider to be bad games.
My final thoughts: If you have games that are really, really important to you that you know you will want to play again, I think you’ve got to be your own preservationist. Keep the hardware and the physical software if you can. It’s the only way to be sure. And even then… Multiple copies may be better. :-)
The other problem is games designed for unique hardware like the DS and 3DS. I have no idea how those games can be properly preserved and played 50 years from now.
The challenge is not just playing for fun. It’s a matter of archiving. At my college we have a library of games going back several decades, many of which were donated by me and my wife actually. We also have an assortment of consoles and PCs from days of yore, and some robust emulation capabilities people are working on collating and maintaining. It’s a difficult but necessary task, because without this ability to experience the past it will be very difficult to write the story of gaming into the future.
People like to talk about how video games are art, and I’m sympathetic to that claim, but to make good on it we have to be able to do what we can do with other media, which is, experience it long after it was created. Art transcends time and place, or at least it can. For games to do so we need to be able to archive and reproduce the experiences.
I’ve never seen those two in real life. I thought you could use a stylus on one screen on some of those games? How do you emulate gameplay like that using a modern game controller for instance?
I know it’s not remotely the same as playing a game, but quite often the itch to revisit an old game is scratched by watching a Youtube walkthrough, which also alleviates all the pains of learning an arcane interface, and is more realistic for me than replaying a 10-40 hour game.
I also feel like multiplayer games can’t ever be revisited properly anyway, without a playerbase to recreate the experience.
EA doing well. Better than 2021 equivalent. That’s got to be good news for the game industry overall I hope. Though I haven’t dug into the numbers, maybe it’s all because of shady practices with FIFA Ultimate team.
I think perhaps the modern world of device-users, of which gamers are a broadening subset I suppose, is increasingly comfortable with experiences that are easily broken up into bite-size chunks, and which don’t require a significant investment of time and static engagement (like, with a console or PC sett up inn one place). In that context, the challenge for devs is not so much how to keep selling traditional games, but rather how to make games for the new reality that deliver the same level of quality and satisfaction of the traditional methods.
On June 2 a Bungie employee in the U.S. tweeted an advertisement for “Destiny 2” with two videos of a gamer who uses the online name Uhmaayyze. The ads called him a hero.
“Uhmaayyze is African-American,” Superior Court Justice Fred Myers said in his recent ruling. “He is well known among those who play and watch Destiny 2 because he performs freestyle rap on livestreaming platforms while he plays the game.”
“Shortly after, several employees of Bungie began receiving voice mails and text messages on personal, unpublished telephone numbers repeatedly using the racial slur referred to colloquially as the ‘N-word,’ ” the judge said.
“That night a person who called himself ‘Brian’ left a voice mail on the personal telephone line of the employee who posted the ads. Brian referred to the employee by name and requested that Destiny 2 provide a scene or a downloadable piece of the game (DLC) for ‘N-word killing,’ ” Myers said.
“A few minutes later he called back and identified himself as a member of a far-right-wing social network known to publish material that is censored from mainstream social media. He repeated the request for an ‘N-word killing’ DLC to be added to Destiny 2.”
The employee’s spouse, who works for Bungie, also got a text requesting the DLC.
One of them also got a voice mail saying, “Enjoy your pizza.”
“Around the same time, a person using the same telephone number as the anonymous caller ordered a pizza to the employees’ home address,” Myers said. “Not surprisingly, the use of the employees’ home address frightened them. They called the local police and made a report.”
Evidence showed a “Destiny 2” gamer with the username @Inkcel had also been making threats, the judge said.
“Inkcel tweeted a picture of the employee’s Bungie staff ID card,” Myers said. “He tweeted that he had moved to live 30 minutes from the employee.”
Inkcel also tweeted the employee’s full name and said the employee “is not safe.”
“The similarity of the name ‘Inkcel’ to the term ‘incel’ makes the threats more frightening to the (employees) as well,” the judge said. “The term ‘incel’ stands for ‘involuntary celibate’ and refers to a violent misogynist ideology espoused by some who identify themselves with that term.”
Or maybe our society is broken? Decade after decade of rampant individualism, narcissistic self-indulgence, unregulated capitalism, and hyper-commodification of all aspects of identity and personality, coupled with profiteering off of shaming people for everything from body image to relationship status, it’s a wonder any of us can even breathe.
