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Frank Gasking on preserving «lost» games

88 points by doener

by kator

2 subcomments

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.

by 1313ed01

1 subcomments

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

by TechSquidTV

0 subcomment

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-...

by gxd

1 subcomments

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.

by quuxplusone

1 subcomments

by deepsun

1 subcomments

I'm looking for a game (like 5-10 years old?) which kinda mimicked Turing machine.
There was guy/robot, viewed from above, going along a path, and an input -- tape with blue and red dots. Player task is to create the path with tiles like "if the current tape dot is red -- turn left, otherwise turn right", and "write blue to the tape".
Advanced levels had interesting tasks like "imagine the tape represents a binary number, add 1 to it".

0 subcomment