Frank Gasking on preserving «lost» games

Bigger challenge is games that die because the back-end servers are turned off and the assets are discarded. I'm on a team reverse engineering an old MMO from 2011. We've spent years rebuilding the server from packet captures and disassembly because everything official got nuked. This is just one of many examples where the customer "buys" a thing in their mind only later to find out they really didn't buy anything.

The legal situation is a mess too. We're not competing with anyone (game's been dead over a decade), we're not selling anything, but we still operate in this gray area wondering what's fair use versus what crosses a line. Copyright law wasn't written with "what if the company abandons it and erases it from existence" in mind.

Meanwhile every day that passes, more of these games just vanish permanently because preservation is treated as piracy.

I have been hunting for a lost ROM for years. I even may have spoken to someone who has a copy.

https://lostpixellore.com/blog/where-in-the-world-is-static-...

I hope early digital games will be preserved better than early films:

"around 75% of original silent-era films have perished ... Of the American sound films made from 1927 to 1950, an estimated half have been lost"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film

The impression I get from TFA is that this is about "unfinished/unreleased" games more than "lost" games. A "lost" game, film, or work of literature would be one that was published or released, only to disappear again from the historical record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_media

Several lost games from the text-adventure world are listed here:

https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/in-search-of-LONG0751/2009-...

https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2923 (BlackDragon and Dor Sageth)

https://web.archive.org/web/20140528184628/http://games.wwco... (The PITS)

https://bluerenga.blog/2024/09/02/adventures-1974-1982-lost-...

https://bluerenga.blog/2024/10/27/adventures-1974-1982-lost-...

(To be fair, many of the games listed in the latter two posts seem to be known only via advertisements; it's conceivable that those advertised games might never have existed. But in many cases we know a game existed because we have testimony from people who played it at the time.)

This is really important work.

Humanity has done a decent job at preserving artifacts from our past despite wars and the effects of time on our cultural output. Throughout history, books, paintings, sculptures, music, and other forms of art were the available outlets for artistic and creative people. With the rise of computers, video games joined the set of cultural works produced by our species. While one could argue that the artistic value of David and Pac-Man is not comparable, I prefer to adopt a more open-minded view of games. It's great that some people are giving video games proper attention, considering the enormous amount of time we spend playing them and the place they occupy in our childhood memories.