That's a good point as wellWe're missing something like 91% of all films made before 1930 because no archival copies were made
That's a good point as wellWe're missing something like 91% of all films made before 1930 because no archival copies were made
Because when you have games available for the average person to easily download, play, and therefore discuss and expose even more people to them, it's the most effective way to keep older games alive in the consciousness of the gaming public and among people interested in researching the history of the medium.I don't understand how any person, with a straight face, could say that a video game library, video game museum, or video game preservation foundation would not be a more legitimate form of video game preservation than illegal distribution through ROM sites.
Good! Stealing is stealing, and it's a good thing this happened.We're missing something like 91% of all films made before 1930 because no archival copies were made
It goes to show you how good these companies are at preserving their own stuff. And that's a Mario game.Wasn't there a news story like a year or so back that Nintendo downloaded a Mario and put it up for sale? I always thought that was funny.
Good! Stealing is stealing, and it's a good thing this happened.
Imagine believing that, lol.
It goes to show you how good these companies are at preserving their own stuff. And that's a Mario game.
Tbf, those methods gave rise to different groups that created ways to preserve the different mediums in legal ways, which is what organizations like in the op are trying to do.Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't some old books survived precisely because they were illegally copied and distributed?
FTFY
A lot of the "we need to preserve games!!!" talk you hear here is a front for "I wanna play this shit and not pay any money". There is no feasible way people are rippint all these games themselves (especially these old ass games) and then play them through emulators legally. It's not a right to play any game you want, you're not owed this and to argue that it's fundamental to the hobby is honestly just some bullshit in my eyes. No one needs to play obscure Saturn RPG that sold 1000 copies. The argument of "how else would you play it" holds no weight because you don't need to play it, it's just some shit you want and are not willing to shell out the money for. No one is entitled to play games at a price they deem reasonable. That's not how it works.
Piracy hurts no one and people that complain about it are generally bootlickers.
A lot of the "we need to preserve games!!!" talk you hear here is a front for "I wanna play this shit and not pay any money". There is no feasible way people are rippint all these games themselves (especially these old ass games) and then play them through emulators legally. It's not a right to play any game you want, you're not owed this and to argue that it's fundamental to the hobby is honestly just some bullshit in my eyes. No one needs to play obscure Saturn RPG that sold 1000 copies. The argument of "how else would you play it" holds no weight because you don't need to play it, it's just some shit you want and are not willing to shell out the money for. No one is entitled to play games at a price they deem reasonable. That's not how it works.
It's the forum in general.
This is a great way for me to be able to identify what people really, really like stanning for rich people. :v
Wanting to play a video game that is out of your price range is no more of a right than wanting to own a sports car. There have been plenty of products that I've wanted to own over the years but never had the money to obtain. It sucks, sure, but you're not entitled to it.
Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation claims that "half of all American films made before 1950 and over 90% of films made before 1929 are lost forever."[4] Deutsche Kinemathek estimates that 80–90% of silent films are gone;[5] the film archive's own list contains over 3500 lost films.
We are about to repeat history with games that are only available to play using streaming technology. Many MMOs and online games have already been lost to time.
This is such a disingenuous false equivalence.
When people talk about video game preservation they are talking about the ability to play a game X years later.
Museums are preservation, but you're not going to be able to see the games be played or play it yourself. This isn't like art where it can photographed and shown. Old music and films are for the most part all available to purchase or stream legally.
A lot of old publishers are dead so they're never going to re-release the game digitally and it's a fact that every video game disk in the world today will break - piracy remains THE ONLY WAY to access some roms. You can sit on your high horses all you like, but if I can't legally obtain a game, I will pirate it
Really? This is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of video games as a medium vs traditional. Mediums.
Paintings we can take pics of and not be punished. We have them in museums to easily access the original, and yes there are many recreations of famous paintings. I myself have a few and have also recreated a few old paintings as practice when I was a painter. I was able to do so because they were not only preserved but easily accessible.
Film is absolutely pirated to preserve it. Harmy despesialized edition of the original star wars is a pretty great example. It's currently the only way to experience star wars close to how it originally was in hd, because the creator decided it wasn't worth it to keep the original preserved.
Buildings? Not a building but the statue of liberty has been recreated Ina bunch of different cities around the world.
Books? I don't even really know where to start with that as the medium is so different and IP is also handled differently. There's plenty of books I can download for free because they're in the public domain. Only capable because of tn eyre preservation.
The thing is when you're referencing a bunch of different mediums you're making like 20 arguments at once. Games are different. They're purely digital and as such, cannot simply be photographed or drawn and preserved in that way. Once the code is lost, the game is gone. Not only that but they're tied to specific hardware that only exists for a very brief period of time, then they break down and become hard to find. It's not like they're easily accessed at museums, many games from old Gen hardware are just not able to be played or experienced by the vast majority of people.
The industry as a whole too has shown plenty of times that they have no interest I preserving original games, nor making games continually available on newer hardware.
This doesn't happen with painting. It's not like a pollock painting is only viewable on a TV built in the 70s. Buildings don't just get lost because the owner misplaced a hard drive of the blueprints. The completed works of Shakespeare couldnt suddenly become inaccessible to most book readers due to a publisher not publishing it on a Kindle.
I could go on with the analogies but I hope you're getting the point. The medium is unique and the piracy argument is unique to it.
From a journalist who chronicles gaming history:
Why History Needs Software Piracy
It may seem counterintuitive, but piracy has actually saved more software than it has destroyed. Already, pirates have spared tens of thousands of programs from extinction, proving themselves the unintentional stewards of our digital culture.
...
Piracy's preserving effect, while little known, is actually nothing new. Through the centuries, the tablets, scrolls, and books that people copied most often and distributed most widely survived to the present. Libraries everywhere would be devoid of Homer, Beowulf, and even The Bible without unauthorized duplication.
...
The crux of the disappearing software problem, at present, lies with the stubborn impermanence of magnetic media. Floppy disks, which were once used as the medium du jour for personal computers, have a decidedly finite lifespan: estimates for the data retention abilities of a floppy range anywhere from one year to 30 years under optimal conditions.
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Pirating also makes foreign game libraries easily available for historians to study. Some games only appeared on writable cartridges in Japan via download methods like the Nintendo Power flash cart system and the BS-X Satellaview. Those would be entirely out of the reach of Western historians today without previous efforts to back them up illegally.
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It's possible that Nintendo will be around 200 years from now, but it is unlikely to provide all the answers. The company will only convey the history that is in their best commercial interest to show you (i.e. Super Mario Bros. 3, over and over). Historians will show you everything without restraint — even Hotel Mario, Mario Roulette, and I Am A Teacher: Super Mario Sweater. None of those games will survive 200 years without piracy, because Nintendo would rather see those embarrassingly low-quality titles rot away in a tomb sealed by copyright law.
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Imagine if a publisher of 500,000 different printed book titles suddenly ceased operation and magically rendered all sold copies of its books unreadable. Poof. The information contained in them simply vanished. It would represent a cultural catastrophe on the order of the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria in 48 B.C. In that fire, a majority of the Western world's cultural history up to that point turned to ash.
Now take a look at the iTunes App Store, a 500,000 app repository of digital culture. It's controlled by a single company, and when it closes some day (or it stops supporting older apps, like Apple already did with the classic iPod), legal access to those apps will vanish. Purchased apps locked on iDevices will meet their doom when those gadgets stop working, as they are prone to do. Even before then, older apps will fade away as developers decline to pay the $100 a year required to keep their wares listed in the store.
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By accepting restrictive DRM into our lives, we are giving not only software publishers, but all media publishers the power to erase, control, or manipulate digital cultural history if they choose. That is why DRM feels fundamentally wrong from a humanistic standpoint: it conspires, in conjunction with time, to deprive humanity of its rightfully earned cultural artifacts.
To be sure, every creator of software should be rewarded appropriately with exclusive rights of reproduction for a certain period of time, as they are now, but only in a soft legal sense, not with a virtual lock and key that stymies the preservation of history.
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Don't get me wrong: it is possible to create a legal software library, but its implementation would make it nearly useless. The best a library can hope to do, within its legal limits, is to stock physical copies of officially duplicated software media on physical shelves. That means that all the problems with decaying and obsolete media come along with it. There'd be plenty of bulk and very little guarantee that you'd be able to access what is sitting in the stacks.
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Current U.S. copyright laws have good intentions, but they ultimately jeopardize the survival of digital property because they do not take into account the rapid pace of digital media decay and obsolescence.
Our body of copyright law makes a 19th-century-style legal assumption that the works in question will stay fixed in a medium safely until the works become public domain, when they can then be copied freely. Think of paper books, for example, which can retain data for thousands of years under optimal conditions.
In the case of digital data, many programs will vanish from the face of the earth decades before the requisite protection period expires (a period of 95 years for most software published in the U.S.). Media decay and obsolescence will claim that software long before any libraries can make legal, useful backups.
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If you love software, buy it, use it, and reward the people who make it. I do it all the time, and I support the industry's right to make money from its products. But don't be afraid to stand up for your cultural rights. If you see strict DRM and copy protection that threatens the preservation of history, fight it: copy the work, keep it safe, and eventually share it so it never disappears.
StarFox 2 wouldn't be in the SNES Classic if it wasn't for leaks of the beta rom making its way onto the Internet.
Piracy inadvertently preserves games that otherwise would not be.
IIRC isn't this completely false? I thought the ROM that was included in the SNES Classic was completely new and from Nintendo's vaults and very much different from the leaked beta ROM.