Old Games DonÆt Matter?

While more and more new releases jostle for position in an increasingly competitive and buoyant marketplace, the sad truth is that videogames are disappearing. 
 

At least part of the reason is systemic and has to do with the way we have become used to thinking about videogames. When I wrote my last book on the cultures of videogame fans, I did a little experiment. Counting the pages of some of the best–selling official and unofficial games magazines, I found that somewhere between 75-90% of non-advertising pages were dedicated to forthcoming, as–yet–unreleased titles. Previews and teasers written under headings like ‘The Next Best Game in The World Ever is…’, and the ‘Anticip–O–Meter™’ all help focus our attentions on the near horizon and contribute to making us vaguely unsatisfied with what we have. 
 

I’m not pointing the finger at magazine culture here. Videogames marketing and advertising carries a similar message. Just as Office 2008 supersedes 2004, so too do the next instalments of Resident Evil, Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid. Each new iteration of the hardware these games run on consigns its forebears to the bargain bin of history. Where classic games remain revered, like the original Half-Life’s appearance in the HL2 release, they often have to be reinvented to counter the ravaging effects of time. Like faded movie stars trying to recapture their former beauty under the plastic surgeon’s knife, graphics engines are updated, games are given HD, surround sound facelifts, and the old is rendered palatable for a modern audience. The language of progress is all around us. Let’s not forget that before it went all inclusive and joined the touchy-feely generation, the Wii was a ‘Revolution’. Elsewhere, backwards compatibility is broken or absent altogether.

The message is clear. Old games don’t matter. The best game is always the next game. 
 

The problem is that while new games will doubtless be brilliant, (well, some of them), we can’t just sit back and let all these old games fade away. What are we doing to save the games that time – and retail – forgot? 

As the growing roster of PS3, 360 and Wii titles vie for our attentions, Horace Goes Skiing and slips off-piste never to be seen again. As we contemplate our next DS, PSP or iPhone purchase, Dizzy (the adventuring egg) disappears into a world of sepia-tinted nostalgia. As we flick through the preview pages of Official console magazines and read about manufacturers’ plans for revolutionary new hardware that will change the face of gaming, another Manic Miner fails to come to the surface. 

Every time somebody buys a PS3, Mr Do! dies – just a little bit more. Let’s be clear. This may seem trivial, even in these days of taking videogames seriously. But, Thing on a Spring, Mr. Do!, Horace Goes Skiing, Manic Miner and the Dizzy series are important games. They are important because in them we see the seeds of genres, modes of representation and address that remain constant today. They are important as games because they demonstrate unexplored avenues, and they are important because they defined and shaped the childhood of a huge number of people. They are important because they are games, because games are an intrinsic part of popular culture and the nation’s heritage. 

Yes, there are retro packs but how many games does this cover really? Where can you buy old games? You can torrent hundreds of thousands of ROMs illegally, but where do you legitimately buy games. It’s easy to find old music online and offline. Easy to find classic movies. But where can we buy GoldenEye? And if we could find the cartridge, what could we play it on? Surely the entire cultural history of a medium can’t be consigned to eBay and car boot sales? 

We don’t want Lorne Spicer to be the curator for this industry. That’s why we’re starting The National Videogame Archive. Preserving videogames for the nation, The National Videogame Archive is a partnership between Nottingham Trent University’s Centre for Contemporary Play and the National Media Museum. The underlying remit of the archive is to collect and preserve videogames for future generations. This is our nation’s cultural heritage, after all. But it’s more than just the games themselves. Videogames are living, breathing things, not just code (though code is good, too). So, we want to make sure that we collect and record all the ephemera of videogame culture – all the boxart, instruction manuals, fanart, walkthroughs, cosplay, superplay performances, speedruns, mods…all the things that players do with games and all the ways in which games pervade, influence and define contemporary popular culture.

Over the coming years, we’re going to be building the collection and mounting a series of exhibitions to help demonstrate the development of videogames as a form and educate the general public about the nuances, intricacies and importance of this vital part of our national cultural wealth. We’ve got our work cut out. How do you meaningfully exhibit games that take 150-hours+ to play through in a gallery setting? How can you communicate the experience of massively multiplayer experience to a group of school children on a day trip to the museum? How do you stop plastics corroding away and literally disappearing? We don’t have the answers. Nobody does. But we’re determined to find them. 

We’ll be officially launching the National Videogame Archive project at GameCity 3 and we’d love it if you could come and join us. And because we think this is really important, we’re also launching a campaign to raise public awareness of the plight of videogames. It’s an ambitious project but the stakes are high. 

We’ve been busy talking to some of the world’s most important and influential game developers each of whom has pledged their support for the cause. In addition, developers, studios and publishers are all donating items of immense value and significance to the Archive while the splendid Mr Keita Takahashi has designed a wonderful campaign T-shirt. 

Ultimately, we want gamers from all walks of life to help us shape the collecting policy of the Archive and we’ll be inviting everybody who cares to save the nation’s cultural heritage to vote, write stories and reviews, sing songs, draw pictures, and record videos to show us what should go into – and what should stay out of – the Archive.