Digital Preservatives

Bottling up and preserving aged and lost video games.

By Joe Buchholz with images by Jude Buffum.

The outside of Summit Amusement is just as weathered as the damaged arcade cabinets that it houses inside. A line of powered down game machines peer out at the sidewalk through a pane of glass held together by clear tape. A neon sign rimmed with dust reads OPEN, though no electricity runs through it. Each time I pass by the store, I wonder if it’s abandoned. So the first time I saw the door open a jolt of surprise pivoted me to walk inside. The store was dark and dank like an unfinished basement. It smelled a little bit like the hot blacktop of a basketball court mixed with a bookstore run by an unkempt guy who lets his cat rub up against the shelves: yellowed pages, matted fur, and maybe raisins? The low sounds of arcade machines hummed their chiptune serenades like distant blips of EKG machines. The presence of a man behind the counter broke my trance.

He looked down at me through glasses that slightly magnified his eyes. His hair was slicked into a comb over that had the same professional stylings as his stained T-shirt tucked into navy blue jeans. He set down his screwdriver and whatever piece of an arcade board he happened to be modifying. “We’re not actually open,” he said.

I was never able to get back into Summit Amusement. It remained locked every time I tried. But the interaction seemed to be a good enough metaphor for the state of video game preservation. A lot of games are not “actually open,” and what I mean by that is you don’t actually own them, in a sense. Buried deep in End User License Agreements is literature that describe some games as more of a service than a product that you legally own forever. Once their servers go down permanently, you can’t access them legally. This bars you from playing large swaths of content if an online service ever disappears.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a preservationist’s nightmare. This major revision of the US copyright act redefined a lot of the rules relating to video games. Whether you’re restoring games back to working order physically or digitally, the DMCA creates a legal barrier that poses a threat to the restoration of old games. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and the Entertainment Frontier Foundation (EFF) are currently playing out a dispute that has faced the industry for decades: where is the line drawn between preservation and piracy?

    Despite this looming threat, small groups are still dedicating their free time and energy to preserving a medium that is starting to show its age. Summit Amusement’s doors are always closed because the owners are traveling between various locations to repair hardly functioning machines. The preservation of historical information, experiences, and the games themselves are being defended by passionate enclaves of collectors, writers and programmers. An uncoordinated mass of people find themselves drawn to preservation, even though the financial benefits are practically nonexistent. This unsorted crowd of preservationists doesn’t have a clear cut reason why they sacrifice time and money, but they are always at work. With major gaming companies aligning with the ESA, they could potentially undermine the future work of these groups. It’s a tug-of-war for who gets to preserve these properties that are fading away: the corporations or the people?

    The preservation of gaming’s past is much more diverse and nuanced than the preservationist at Summit. Unseen64, a collective dedicated to cataloging documentation about lost and canceled games, started in 2001 with a small group of friends in Italy. Their passion for games eventually blossomed into a robust archive of gaming’s lost treasures.

“We would like to remember lost games out of curiosity, for historic and artistic preservation,” said Luca Taborelli, the editor-in-chief of Unseen64, known on the site as Monokoma. The group has accumulated thousands of images and videos from cancelled games as well as games in early beta states. What breathes life into these lost pieces of gaming history is the extensive research that Unseen64 does to explain how these artifacts relate to the development process. It’s an enormous undertaking. The group has outsourced their archiving to outside contributors but it still hasn’t found enough hands to cover the enormous work load. The project has been scaled back to exclude any games released after last generation’s console hardware.

“There are too many cancelled projects to be preserved and we don’t have enough time to add them all in the Unseen64 archive. Most of us have full time jobs, families and other real-life commitments, so it’s not easy to find free time to archive unseen games. Unfortunately it seems that only a few smaller websites care about archiving lost video games for now,” Taborelli said.

    The brunt of video game preservation is carried out by small groups, and sometimes one person can have an enormous impact on the community. Frank Cifaldi got his start in video game preservation with his piracy group FEFEA. The rom group’s name stood for “F–k ‘Em, F–k ‘Em All.” He was quick to remind me that he was young.

    “The reason for the angry acronym was that when I started getting into this in ‘99ish, I sort of recognized that private collectors were, in some ways, the enemy of preservation. That was my perspective as a 17 year old person by the way, I no longer really think that,” Cifaldi said.

    Danger comes when only a limited amount of copies have been made, and they’re just sitting in someone’s attic, especially with an unreleased game. Games are susceptible to the passage of time just like anything physical is. Disc rot is a phenomena that degrades DVDs and CDs through oxidation or light damage, and a cartridge or disc left in an attic could have all of its data erased just by sitting there.

    It’s hard to envision a video game completely blipping out of existence, but Cifaldi recalls a time when a game did just that. The rights holder acquired playable code for an unreleased sequel to a popular point and click adventure game (which could not be named). Because the game was on a floppy disc he figured nobody had a computer old enough to run it, so he threw the disc in the garbage. As far as Cifaldi knows, this was the only copy of the game. “I think that speaks to the need for video game preservation to be something that is discussed a lot more openly, and vocally, and loudly,” Cifaldi said.  

As Cifaldi grew up, so did his band of pirates. They eventually formed The Lost Levels, a website dedicated to purchasing unreleased games and dumping them online in the name of preservation. The Lost Levels provided context to these games by including supplemental stories along with a download of the game. This was a maturation of the FEFEA’s “F–ck ‘em” mission statement. “It was refined piracy,” Cifaldi said while laughing. Although the website currently lies dormant after over a decade of activity, it gave Cifaldi an avenue to connect with the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s “The Art of Video Games” exhibition, one of the first exhibitions to display games as pieces of art. Cifaldi was a part of the advisory group that saw the creation of the landmark exhibit.

All of Cifaldi’s contributions to video game preservation have led his career path to come full circle. He, like many involved in video game writing, eventually started working directly for a video game developer. Currently a designer at Other Ocean, a game developer and Quality Assurance company, Cifaldi is convincing a publisher to invest money into properly preserving their legacy content. He wouldn’t disclose any details about how the game is being handled, but Cifaldi’s work in preservation is now more tangible than ever. Having an advisor with a storied reputation in game development may be the best way for a company to re-release its content, but the corporations that made these games might not see the same value in their own products.

Chris Kohler, founder of Wired magazine’s Game|Life section and contributor to preservation, uses Nintendo as a representative example for how corporations handle preservation. “As far as we know, Nintendo isn’t preserving anything. Because all it does is has its games sitting around in its archives. We really have no idea what are Nintendo’s archives deep in Kyoto, Japan,” Kohler said.

Proof of Nintendo’s archives pops up every once in awhile, whether it’s Nintendo’s President Satoru Iwata showing footage from a prototype build of a game, or the re-release of an obscure title like Donkey Kong: Original Edition.

In a way, companies are preserving their own history by re-releasing and remaking old titles. Nintendo distributes remakes and re-releases of their titles multiple times a year and the PlayStation 4’s software release schedule is thoroughly padded out with games from last generation. Aspects of these titles are changed, sometimes improving on antiquated game design and other times altering major cosmetic features. When Nintendo re-released “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!” for Wii’s virtual console in 2007 they renamed it “Punch-Out! Featuring Mr. Dream” because their license to use Tyson’s likeness had lapsed. It’s for this very reason that Kohler believes that preservation is best left to outside sources.

“They are the last people, these big publishers are the last entities I would trust to preserve the game as it was when they re-release it. The re-release of these games is preserving it in some ways and not others.”

Christian Nutt blog director of Gamasutra, a site about “the art and business of making games,” adds to Kohler’s points. “If your goal is to preserve the culture and the ‘at the time’ nature of a game, then playing it on other hardware and in other contexts doesn’t do that. My advice then is for those who are preserving works as historians and academics to try to bring context to that preservation however they best can with the tools at their disposal. I’d also urge companies to consider it as well – like M2, who ports Sega arcade games to the 3DS and adds in the sound effects from the arcade cabinets’ hydraulics systems. But in the end, the important thing is that old games get saved, played, and understood in some way.”

I kept finding myself drawn to Summit Amusement’s storefront. My thoughts were clouded with the gray areas of preservation. It seems completely paradoxical: the purest form of preservation is carried out by small groups of people who have to sacrifice their own time and money in the name of their hobby. It’s illegal, but they aren’t profiting from it. Publishers sit on huge archives of intellectual property with no plans to release it, and who knows the vulnerability of that content. The EFF and ESA are locked in a legal battle over whether or not people should be able to preserve their own games.

My tires screeched as I stopped in front of Summit Amusement. The OPEN sign was on again. The owner was wheeling an arcade cabinet inside with a sign that said “SALE” on it. I pulled over. By the time I got up to the door, the sign was turned off. I pushed my way in anyways. “Are you still open?” I said.

“For you we can be,” a man with slicked back hair said. I assumed he was the owner’s son. “What can I do for you?”

    I told him I was looking for a Street Fighter II cabinet, I had seen one posted by them on Craig’s List. He grinned. “We don’t got one of those, but we got one of these.”

He walked me past a cabinet of “Time Crisis 2” with the words “insert coin” singed into the monitor. I stood in front of an arcade cabinet with unlabeled and peeling custom art. He handed me a stapled printer paper with a list of games. “This has 1000 games on it. Why buy a Street Fighter II cabinet when you could buy 1000 games for a grand?”

The machine is filled with emulated games. I immediately wondered about the legality of it all. Did he own the licenses to all 1000 games he was trying to pedal to me? I didn’t ask. Instead I told him it was out my price range. I walked out with my thoughts even more muddied with the complexities of preservation and who should be allowed to carry it forward.