Keeping the classics alive: how archivists are preserving video game history

February 29th was the last day of service for Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, a mobile game based on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy fighting game series. Since launching in the US in 2018, the game has amassed over 170 characters from across 30 years of Final Fantasy history, scattered throughout four acts composed of multiple chapters and side stories representing hundreds of hours of a game that can no longer be played. Though Opera Omnia is officially gone, one person has shouldered the task to ensure the game hasn’t completely disappeared.

“On June 6th 2021 I began to work towards my goal of recording and rendering every Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia cutscene and upload[ing] them to YouTube,” wrote Hatok, a video editor and self-described video game enthusiast. “And now, 7 hours from the end of service, I’ve reached the end of this massive project.”

In less than a week, Sony has given us two timely reminders of the tenuousness of digital “ownership” — and both reminders involve things on PlayStation.

Last week, Sony said that, because of content licensing “arrangements,” users wouldn’t be able to watch Discovery content they’ve purchased and that the content would be removed from their libraries as of December 31st, 2023. The resulting list of shows that will suddenly disappear because of corporate agreements is very long. Shows disappearing from streaming services is commonplace, but in this case, people are losing access to shows they bought to watch on demand whenever they wanted.

When I ask Frank Cifaldi, the founder and director of the Video Game History Foundation, to explain the importance of preserving and maintaining old video games, he answers with a movie analogy. Imagine, he said, “if movies were only released on, like, VHS, ever. You want to watch Back to the Future? All right, you have to go on eBay, and you have to find an antique VHS copy that’s degraded a bit from use. You have to find a VCR that works, a TV that it plugs into — or the external scalers that make it look correct on your modern TV — and you might need a time-base corrector because the magnetic flux signal is out of sync.”

For too many games, this is the state of the industry. For the most part, decades’ worth of games now exist only in their original form: on a disk or cartridge that goes into a console nobody has anymore. Many of those games are going to be hard for players to ever find again — and if we don’t do anything to save them, they might disappear altogether.

Atari is acquiring Digital Eclipse, a studio that specializes in preserving and rereleasing retro games on modern hardware. The releases are often rich in additional materials and historical content. Think the Criterion Collection but for video games. In a press release, Atari says it’s paying up to $20 million for the studio, including an initial $6.5 million paid in a combination of cash and shares and a further $13.5 million, which is due to be paid in cash over the next decade subject to Digital Eclipse’s performance. It expects to complete the deal in the coming days.

The two companies previously worked together on last year’s excellent Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, which included ports of over 90 classic games as well as unreleased prototypes and neat extras like short documentaries and old photos and magazine articles. But Digital Eclipse has also produced a number of other well-received rereleases of classic games including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection and the interactive documentary The Making of Karateka.

“Sega had their own console?”

That was a devastating comment I heard as I sat playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on a Sega Genesis Mini at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo (PRGE) this weekend. The Sonic games on Genesis were my favorites as a kid; one time, I played so much Sonic that I peed my pants. How could this person not know about Sega consoles?

Fresh off the launch of The Making of Karateka, retro game studio Digital Eclipse has announced a remaster of the original action RPG title Wizardry. Even better — it’s out now in early access on both Steam and GOG.

First released in 1981 and developed by Sir-Tech Software, the first Wizardry — or Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, to give it its very long full title — was a first-person, party-based, D&D-inspired RPG that proved incredibly influential and kicked off a long-running franchise. Here’s the official description for the uninitiated:

The first game you play in The Making of Karateka, a release about the making of the cinematic action game Karateka, is an Asteroids clone. It may seem strange, but the attempt at recreating Asteroids was a seminal moment for Karateka creator Jordan Mechner, a humble beginning for a designer who would go on to create some of the most influential action games ever made, including Prince of Persia. The clone appears early on during a long, winding, and interactive timeline, which takes you through Mechner’s early days of experimentation before getting into how Karateka was developed and released.

For studio Digital Eclipse, the team behind the interactive documentary, it’s another attempt at telling the story of classic games in a way that’s completely native to the medium. As classic games become increasingly endangered, this approach is an important tool for keeping them alive. “I think it’s the best way to tell these stories,” says Digital Eclipse president Mike Mika. “If you’re going to tell the story of an interactive experience, it better be interactive.”

With advancing console generations and the slow demise of both backward compatibility and digital game storefronts, the ability to play older games has always been tough. Through a new study from the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) and the Software Preservation Network, we now have a better understanding of just how difficult accessing older games really is.

“87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered,” wrote Kelsey Lewin, co-director of the Video Game History Foundation.

Earlier this year, Google announced that it was shutting down its game streaming service Stadia, a short three years since its launch in 2018. While it’s mostly fans of the service feeling the impact of the closure, there are a handful of developers with Stadia exclusives that will unfortunately lose their games when the service shuts down for good in January. One of those is Q-Games, makers of PixelJunk Raiders. The Verge spoke with Q-Games’ founder and CEO, Dylan Cuthbert, who explained the unique situation Q-Games is in, trying to get their exclusive off Stadia’s foundering ship and somewhere safe where people can play it.

PixelJunk Raiders is a space exploration roguelike that takes advantage of Stadia’s unique “state share” feature that allows people to share instances of their game in which other players can jump into and experience for themselves. 

One of the biggest challenges in video game preservation is figuring out how to actually present old games. In 2022, there are more ways than ever to play the classics, whether it’s mini consoles, updated hardware, subscription services, retro collections, or modern rereleases. While these can make old games playable to new audiences, they aren’t always able to put them in a proper context — which is especially important for really old games like, say, Adventure on the Atari 2600.

But an expansive new release, made by Digital Eclipse to celebrate Atari’s 50th anniversary, is the best attempt at a retro collection I’ve ever experienced. It’s available on just about every console out there right now as well as the PC, letting me put my PS5 to use for its intended purpose: playing Asteroids. The collection is huge, detailed, and does an amazing job of explaining why these games are so important.

When Frank Cifaldi, founder and co-director at the Video Game History Foundation, finds an unreleased original NES game on eBay, it’s cause for celebration. Unearthing never-before-published games is his “research kink,” and according to him, such discoveries only happen “once every five years.” Yesterday, he found two.

One game, Battlefields of Napoleon, got so far along in its development process that it has finalized box art, but the game never saw the light of a retail store. The other game is even rarer. It’s a demo for the infamous Power Glove developed by Rare (yes, apparently that Rare) and is one of only five known games for the peripheral in existence (if you count the two games Nintendo announced but never released). Cifaldi is now working to raise funds to win both auctions so these never-before-seen pieces of video game history can be preserved and their contents shared with the public.

Dragalia Lost launched in 2018 as a statement of intent from Nintendo in partnership with Japanese developer Cygames. Nintendo may have first jumped into the field of mobile games in 2016 with the launch of games like Super Mario Run and Miitomo, but this was the first original property the company had produced exclusively for mobile devices. This free-to-play gacha game (a game whose content is generally free to access while charging microtransactions for loot boxes and randomized lotteries for rare and limited-time characters) had a flashy multi-region launch campaign collaborating with major Japanese musician DAOKO, banking on the game’s success at home and abroad.

And it was a hit. Less than a year after launch, the game had already earned over $100 million, with a steady stream of merchandise following soon after. Yet, as of last month, Nintendo and Cygames published the game’s final update, and this week, it was revealed that the game would shut down on November 29th after just three years of operation.

Habitat, the world’s first MMO developed for the Commodore 64 personal computer, went offline in 1992. It came back online in 2017 through the efforts of MADE, the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment.

Founded by Alex Handy in 2011, MADE “seeks to legitimize the preservation of video games as both a historic and artistic medium within the context of our time.” To that end, MADE amassed a collection of working video game consoles and a library of old games for patrons to play. 

In February, Nintendo announced it would shut down its 3DS and Wii U storefronts. While the closure is an inevitable part of the life cycle of those long since sunset consoles, the move sparked anger, disappointment, and even fear as fans lamented the loss of access to digitally exclusive 3DS and Wii U titles. With console gaming entering its ninth generation, the digital storefronts from the previous generations are slowly disappearing, taking with them thousands of digital-only games and DLC. Combined with the decline of physical media in favor of subscription services and digital distribution, it’s getting harder for people to play older games and harder still for the games of the present to be preserved for the future. 

That is, if you want a legal way to play them. As games age and as companies continue to remove the means to properly purchase and download them, people are looking at other, less than legitimate options to continue to play the games they enjoy. It’s created tension between players and companies. While it’s unrealistic to expect publishers to maintain their prolific libraries in perpetuity, it’s also not ideal that large swathes of games can, at any time, just disappear on the whims of the store operator. 

Late last year, the Slovak Design Museum released a translated collection of ’80s text adventures from the region. The games, often programmed by teenagers, capture a moment in history when the first generation of Slovak developers were learning their craft to share among their friends.

The museum didn’t always cover games. Maroš Brojo, the general manager of the Slovak Game Developers Association, pitched the multimedia collection that he now curates. “When you get the patronage of a museum… it gives you much more credibility,” he says. “Suddenly, people start to have a very different view of this actually being part of something important. Our culture and our heritage.”

If Clockwork Aquario had come out in the early ’90s, it would have cost me a lot of quarters. It’s the kind of arcade game that lures you in: big sprites, bright colors, inventive worlds, a bubbly soundtrack. You see it, and you want to play it. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to experience it in an arcade because it was never actually released. But a few decades later, it’s finally available in a new format — you can now play it on both the PS4 and Nintendo Switch.

Clockwork Aquario was initially a victim of the game industry’s shift to 3D games. Development started in 1992 at Westone Bit Entertainment, a now-defunct studio best-known for the Wonder Boy series. The game was completed after two years, but by that time, arcades had mostly moved on to 3D experiences and fighting games, and so it was shelved entirely. It stayed that way until retro-focused publisher Inin Games snapped up the rights and reworked it to run on modern devices.