How Enthusiasts Preserve Classic Video Games

Great works of art from the past are carefully preserved in museums and archives. The situation with classic games is much worse: many of them have already disappeared without a trace. Dozens of volunteers around the world are working to save the rest. We tell you how these enthusiasts are fighting for the gaming past.

Almost half of the world's population today—3.7 billion people— plays in games (in Russia even more – 60% population). In 2023, the global gaming industry market size reached $257 billion and almost equaled the film and video industry, which is being evaluated at $285 billion.

By various metrics, from finances to language presence, video games occupy an important place in culture. They have been an integral part of the cultural memory of at least three generations: Generation X, millennials, and Generation Z. They are quoted and made into memes, their heroes are used as userpics, and posters and figures from the games are used to decorate homes.

In any other art form, the preservation of cultural heritage is the responsibility of large, often state or even global organizations. UNESCO, for example, takes care of ancient buildings and monuments. Artists' canvases are in world-famous museums. Old films recorded on fragile and unreliable film are restored in well-equipped laboratories.

People started thinking about video games being part of culture and history not so long ago, and that's why we lost many classic “titles”. calculations According to the Video Game History Foundation, 87% of games released before 2010 are considered lost.

Games created before 1985 have almost completely disappeared, with less than 5% of them still available. Things aren't much better for games from relatively new consoles either. For example, the PlayStation 2 was released in 2000 and became one of the most successful consoles of all time, but only 12% of the games released for it are playable today.

Researchers consider games that cannot be legally purchased and run on modern consoles and computers to be lost. The key problem with preserving games is their connection to the hardware they were developed for. In their original form, their code can only work on a specific platform, and the graphics can be designed for older generation TVs: without upscaling, they look terrible on modern screens. Some games use unique features of the consoles they were released on: for example, in Metal Gear Solid, one of the bosses can look into the console's memory card and ask the player questions about other games.

Imagine if a classic movie, say, Battleship Potemkin, could only be viewed on a 1940s film projector. That's exactly the case with the vast majority of classic games: to play them, gamers have to fork out for used classic consoles and storage media. For example, a classic Super Nintendo SNES console in good condition will cost around 10,000 rubles or more, and game cartridges for it can cost several times more depending on their rarity. Plus, all trade takes place exclusively on the secondary market – officially, gaming companies have not released retro products for a long time.

The fate of old games depends not only on the hardware, but also on the decisions of the manufacturers. Thus, most classic works of art have long since passed into the public domain – in most countries this happens after 70 years from the death of the author.

Games are “fresh” intellectual property, and corporations continue to actively protect them. Fans can wait years for even popular older games to be re-released on next-gen consoles, and they often come as part of expensive and very poorly performing collections (Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid).

A unique case for the gaming world is the online format. At its peak, a game can gather a community of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, but when user interest fades, the official servers are turned off and it disappears forever.

However, re-release on modern platforms is the most reliable way to preserve a classic game and introduce it to a wider audience. Cartridges and discs from the 2000s will not run on new-generation machines. But as soon as the game code is adapted to new consoles and Windows versions, it can be considered “saved” – thanks to backward compatibility, the game will be available on all future versions of this platform.

It's a hot market, so re-release projects for older games are available on all platforms: Nintendo offers NES and SNES classics on the Nintendo Switch Online subscription platform, PC retro gamers can officially buy them on platforms like GOG.com and Steam, and all versions of Xbox have a vast catalog of older games available through backward compatibility.

However, this process still has many problem areas. Often, copyright holders do not see the financial prospects in re-releasing games – they usually focus only on a few of the most popular titles that are guaranteed to bring in big sales.

Sometimes companies don't have access to the original code of old games. For example, Konami lost the code for the version of Silent Hill 2 that fans consider perfect. That's why the game is only released on modern consoles as part of a collection and not in the best condition.

It also happens that old video games have no active copyright holder. Many game companies went bankrupt and their intellectual property was never bought out – few could have expected what a profitable business it could become.

All these problems lead to the fact that the vast majority of old games are forced to be saved by fans. Programs for the preservation of game cultural heritage exist all over the world, and most often these are volunteers and enthusiasts who work at their own expense and donations.

One of the largest such organizations is Video Game History Foundation. Its employees are engaged in the digitization of classic games, the preservation of program code, and the archiving of accompanying materials: books with illustrations, guides, marketing materials. VGHF also works with gaming companies – the organization's experts help them restore damaged or lost game code for re-releases.

Another outstanding organization is Computer History Center in the UK. Since 2008, the museum has restored and preserved over 13,000 physical games and archived the code for thousands of games.

There are similar organizations in Japan, Hong Kong, Germany and many other countries. The founders of the Japanese center Game Preservation Society believe that preserving video games is as important as preserving the works of Hokusai and other 17th-century woodblock printmakers. Back then, woodblock prints were a popular and utilitarian art form, often used in advertising, decorations, and even packaging. Today, these works are considered some of Japan’s most valuable cultural artifacts, and the same will be true for games, the center’s staff believe.

The most common way to restore classic games is emulation. An emulator is a program that creates the illusion of a familiar environment for another program or hardware. It is a kind of adapter that converts commands and data to ensure compatibility of systems. The power of old gaming machines was so small that it is not difficult for a modern computer to recreate their ecosystem within a single program. The most classic of classic games, Doom, has been a joke for many years launch on anything from an iPod to a calculator connected to several potatoes.

Many in the enthusiast community believe that emulation is not the best way to preserve classic games, as adapting to a new platform changes the game (for example, upscaling the graphics to fit modern screens). To preserve games in their original form and get the same experience as in the past, they need to be played in their original form – on the platform intended for them and from the media they were released on.

However, old hardware has a limited shelf life, and many classic consoles and computers have not had spare parts for a long time. Emulation comes to the rescue again, but this time it is hardware emulation. The most advanced solution in this area is considered to be MiSTerdeveloped by Russian programmer Alexey Melnikov. MiSTer uses FPGA technology – a specialized microcircuit with a variable internal structure that can “pretend” to be any digital microcircuit. With simple settings, MiSTer can be “transformed” into dozens of old computers and consoles and play old games through it in the form in which they were released.

Today, enthusiasts can even “resurrect” online games that seemed to have been completely lost after the official servers were shut down. Fans of these games became so attached to their characters that at some point they launched a private server and gathered larger communities than on the original servers. Warhammer Online, City of Heroes, Age of Empires Online, EverQuest and dozens of other online games have found a second life thanks to such projects.

Copyright remains the main obstacle to preserving classic games. Even if companies have no plans to re-release them, they still actively protect their intellectual property. Thus, emulators themselves do not violate the law, but you can legally play only rips of cartridges and discs that you made from copies that belong to you.

The game restoration community is calling for legislation to be changed so that classics can be borrowed from online archives and old game museums in the same way that books and old films can be borrowed from libraries and film archives.

Fans of games often care about them far more than the companies that own them. For them, they are an integral part of their childhood and cultural memories, not just a minor intellectual property asset.

Enthusiasts who restore games do a tremendous job for next to nothing to preserve memories and share them with future generations. One can only hope that the game companies themselves will embrace this idea and at least stop interfering with promising projects.