It’s perhaps shocking only to me that the larger gaming public seems to have forgotten what “GOG” stands for, and what the original purpose of their website was. They forget (or worse, never really knew) that it meant “Good Old Games,” and that it was the first successful legitimate attempt to preserve old computer games. When I say “legitimate,” I mean actually legit. Not the Pirate Bay, not the murky gray “abandonware” sites gamers of a certain age once haunted, but a fully funded and supported organization which made titles from previous decades available once more. And, once more, we’re having to go through the same rigamarole we went through twenty years earlier.
In the wake of the U.S. Copyright Office’s recent decision not to allow libraries to lend out video games (even for scholastic purposes), Blizzard has decided that they will be removing WarCraft: Orcs & Humans and WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness from GOG.com. In response, GOG.com modified their “Good Old Games Preservation” policy with a new filip: if you buy a title and it gets delisted, it’s still in your personal library and available to download for offline play. It’s a battle cry which I think a lot of us can get behind. I just hate that we’re having to fight this whole thing all over again.
Damnatio Memoria
There’s a number floating around the topic of games preservation lately, that almost 90% of all video game titles made before 2010 are at risk of disappearing forever. And honestly, I can absolutely believe it. Think about all the games that were on floppy discs, on magnetic media that slowly degrades over time. And that’s before realizing, “Oh shit, there’s nobody making floppy drives anymore!” Think about all the “gold masters” and “glass masters” that must be stashed away somewhere, but the regular CD-ROMs are slowly deteriorating, as well as the scarcity of optical disk drives (seriously, those went from being a high-end niche option to a mandatory bit of any PC configuration and back to a niche option again). Think about the number of design documents, source code files, concept art pieces, and shudder how much of that has been lost or destroyed. A few years back, tabletop publisher Steve Jackson Games put out a call to gamers with intact copies of Autoduel (based off their game Car Wars, and designed by Richard “Lord British” Garriot himself) because they wanted to try and preserve it. So far as I know, their efforts have not been successful.
For me, it’s deeply screwed up. I know my own future descendants won’t ever be able to play the original version of The Oregon Trail. They might get a remastered or remade version, one consistent with contemporary systems of the time, but they won’t be able to fathom the notion that its original iteration was wildly different: monochrome pixel visuals and a lot of text. They’ll never be able to play the original version of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? because it will be a virtual impossibility to have a copy of the 1984 edition of The World Almanac & Book of Facts which the game used for information and as a crude form of DRM. And that’s just the popular stuff.
Consider this: The original Wizardry came out in late 1981. A remake came out in Early Access last year, and it’s full release was this past May. Forty-two years for a game which has long been regarded as one of the foundational titles of the CRPG genre. I don’t see Electronic Arts trying to redo Ultima, nor do I see anybody trying to pick up Temple of Apshai and bring it back for a new audience. Hell, it feels like a miracle inXile managed to bring back remasters of the first three titles in The Bard’s Tale series (still working my way through the first one). Yet other EA RPGs of that era like Hard Nova are nowhere to be found. Microsoft will probably be releasing new versions of Flight Simulator from now till the heat death of the Universe, right alongside EA and Madden. But other EA flight sims like LHX Attack Helicopter or Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer, forget it.
There’s countless numbers of games which I wasn’t able to play as a kid. How many of them are still around in one form or another? Even with emulation, there’s a lot of titles out there which don’t make the cut in different collections. For every Sonic The Hedgehog, there’s only a vanishingly small chance of titles like Chakan: The Forever Man being included. For every Super Mario Brothers or The Legend of Zelda, there’s no presence for The Guardian Legend or Codename: Viper. And that doesn’t even consider titles on platforms which are now defunct such as the 3DO, the Atari Jaguar, or the Sega Dreamcast. They’re as much of part of the corpus of gaming history as the big names and it’s important from a cultural perspective that these titles be preserved by every means necessary. Not simply put behind glass cases, but made available to experience. These are games and they are meant to be played, not simply looked at.
But that’s not profitable for the suits who currently lord over the industry and treat their own products with a bizarre dissonance. On the one hand, they clearly perceive value and are willing to try and extract that value by any means they feel is necessary, and frankly some of those means are beyond abhorrent. At the same time, they clearly have no use for game preservation that isn’t conducted outside of their particular silos. I have no objection to a company making money. But I have serious objections about how a lot of the major (and even a couple smaller) companies in the games industry make their money these days. They’re still stuck in the mindset that video games are somehow disposable, the toilet paper they use to wipe their asses with which somehow miraculously becomes money.
Playing For Keeps
In the last fifteen years or so, no company has exemplified this contemptible attitude more than Blizzard Entertainment. From their insistence on logging into Battle.net for every one of their titles (even if you’re not planning to play multiplayer) to their atrocious efforts with remastering WarCraft III (along with the equally outrageous claim of ownership for every “custom game” made with the map editor), Blizzard has done damned near everything short of physical violence against their customers to antagonize and infuriate them. And yet, people still buy their games.
You might argue that EA has been worse with the mass grave of studios they’ve killed over the last decade or so. You could maybe make a case that Ubisoft is worse, what with their half-assed efforts to chase every techbro trend that manages to have a buzzword mentioned more than twice in a news article. And truly, my scorn for those publishers is fell and terrible to behold. But Blizzard holds a special place of dishonor in my heart. Once, I held Blizzard to be a model of how to make good games. And can you blame me? StarCraft, WarCraft, Diablo, The Lost Vikings, even the early iterations of World of WarCraft, all these titles were of a certain quality. Buying a Blizzard game used to be a sure thing. I would lay down my money, confident that I would be obtaining an excellent game, something with replay value. Something which I could talk about with my nerdy gamer friends in deep detail and enjoy in their company.
And then it all went wrong. StarCraft II being broken up into three pieces (and taking the better part of a decade to be fully released). Increasingly ridiculous expansions for World of WarCraft (I still believe Mists of Pandaria was a botched effort at turning a cool April Fool’s joke into something which could have been much better). But the point where the downward spiral began would have to be Diablo III. Every single failure and gaffe which Blizzard has committed in the last fifteen years can be traced to that game. The point where an always-on Internet connection became a requirement. The point where Blizzard’s increasingly unhinged monetization schemes started with the creation of the “Real Money Auction House.” The point where Blizzard was wielding possibly the biggest MMO hammer in the industry and everything under their umbrella became a nail.
The last fifteen years have shown Blizzard to be a terrible steward of its own properties and an actively hostile vendor against its own customers. All the performative platitudes and “special charity event” mounts or pets in WoW cannot erase the scorn and disdain Blizzard demonstrates on a daily basis. It’s tempting to chalk all this up to being bought up, first by Vivendi, then by Activision, and finally by Microsoft. And that may well have been a factor. But however we got here, the sad fact is Blizzard is no longer a game studio. It’s an appetite, an all-consuming tumor in the body of the games industry at large, metastasizing and merging with other tumors to the point that no amount of chemo or radiation will get rid of the damned thing, much less reduce it. With every dollar spent, it only kills the industry a little further. Cancer of the stock valuation.
Ex Libris
A lot of our younger readers don’t remember the bad old days before GOG.com came around. They don’t recall the hoarding gamers used to have to do, how they’d hang on to floppies, CDs, jewel cases, boxes, and manuals because if one of those parts was missing, there was a non-zero chance we couldn’t play an older game. And as time went on, as MS-DOS was phased out in favor of Windows, it became increasingly difficult to play older games because the compatibility wasn’t quite there no matter what Microsoft promised. There was a point, between the turn of the Millennium and the launch of Steam, where older games became almost impossible to run and impossible to replace.
It was during this time that the notion of “abandonware” grew popular in gaming circles. The logic was pretty simple: since the publishers weren’t actively selling certain titles anymore, they could not reasonably argue that distributing pirate copies of those titles were an economic hardship for them. It turned the disdainful attitude most publishers had regarding their back catalogs against them. “You didn’t care about the games enough to keep selling them, you can’t say you’re losing money on a game you don’t have on the shelves anymore.” Simplistic, perhaps, and likely to bring down a lawsuit eventually. But it was the “eventually” part that was the crux. Nintendo might have been death on Super Mario Brothers ROMs, but beyond their core properties, their outrage became curiously deadened. And there were too many people passing around old games for legal departments to track them all down.
It would be several years after Steam came out that CD Projekt RED would, as a side effect of their unexpected success with The Witcher, establish GOG.com as a means to try and get “abandonware” to a point of respectability and legal cover. It was clear to them there was a market for the old games, for the titles that were no longer available or even playable on contemporary systems. And their earlier work as translators and localization experts gave them an edge over the likes of Valve. They were already in a position to update and modernize (with lots of help from DOSBOX) older titles. Yes, they sell new release titles now, but they still sell older titles, the “good old games” that people missed playing or missed out on obtaining. There are still some titles which may never see daylight again even on GOG.com. The “interactive movie”/FMV-heavy Take-Two games Hell: A Cyberpunk Aventure and Ripper are conspicuous by their absence, particularly with other titles in the genre such Phantasmagoria and Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive present. So too are a lot of the old Infocom text-based adventures, such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Circuit’s Edge, and A Mind Forever Voyaging. But, by and large, GOG.com has done quite a bit to try and preserve older game titles, least on PC. There’s always room for more games, but the window to preserve them is getting thinner and thinner.
Unfortunately, their efforts also seem to have created an unexpected consequence. Suddenly, publishers now give a shit about their back catalogs. They suddenly see the value in updating their old games, and reselling them as entirely new SKUs. And for some, like Blizzard, they want to inflict the same miseries as their contemporary titles on to the old classics. They want to make those old games conform to the new standards of control, the sense that you’re not even renting your games from a publisher but are instead visiting a hyper-curated theme park. “Log into our launcher! Track your stats! We own these games and we own your experiences with them!” Snidely Whiplash would balk at some of these antics.
There needs to be some serious changes in the games industry if future generations are going to enjoy our common history. A lot of these changes are going to have to come from the corporate element of the industry, as well as trade groups like the ESA. The drive for revenue uber alles has to end and a refocusing of priorities towards cultural preservation needs to be encouraged. Probably the single biggest move they could make would be to abandon the use of End-User License Agreements in games as a means to evade the “first sale” doctrine. And it will likely never happen in my lifetime, because too many publishers feel they have too much to lose if they do something like that. They want perpetual revenue streams, and by damn they’ll get them because everything they produce is novel only for the fact it’s done on a computer. All we can do is keep up the fight, support efforts like the “Good Old Game Preservation” initiative, and make our displeasure with the publishers known as loudly as possible.
