[HN Gopher] Frank Gasking on preserving <<lost>> games
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Frank Gasking on preserving <<lost>> games
Author : doener
Score : 73 points
Date : 2025-10-28 13:32 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spillhistorie.no)
(TXT) w3m dump (spillhistorie.no)
| gxd wrote:
| 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.
| reddalo wrote:
| I don't see why Pac-Man should be valued less than the statue
| of David. Of course they're different, but they both
| contributed to the culture heritage of the human species.
| kator wrote:
| 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.
| tremon wrote:
| _old MMO from 2011_
|
| It makes me very angry to realize that the same people who
| decided to completely destroy that game still get to obstruct
| and/or receive benefits from any third-party effort for 61 more
| years.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > or receive benefits from any third-party effort for 61 more
| years.
|
| ...do they?
|
| Like let's say I make a modified version of this game.
| Technically my modification is illegal to distribute since it
| contains assets I don't own the rights to. However, the
| creators of the original game don't own the rights to my
| modifications either.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| If you post a video about it on YouTube, they can and will
| demonetize it and send any revenue to the IP holder
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| You are a hero. Thank you for your work.
|
| I hope the corporation has moved on and doesn't bother you. And
| if they do, we'll remember. I'll never forgive EA for C&Ding
| the attempts to revive Battlefield 2. Just one of their many
| atrocities.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| 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
| estimator7292 wrote:
| That's a very different (but still interesting) story.
|
| Mainly it's down to the materials technology of the time, and
| the fact that cellulose was need for war purposes
| shawn_w wrote:
| And at least one fire destroying a studios film archives.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_MGM_vault_fire
|
| (That article says that many other film studios destroyed old
| film prints, so it's not just fires (explosions really, since
| nitrocellulose film tends to go boom, plus even in the best
| case it degrades into an unusable mess with time))
| quuxplusone wrote:
| 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.)
| thelok wrote:
| There are lost games as well in there:
| https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/general-preservation-work/
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| 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-...
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(page generated 2025-11-01 23:00 UTC)