Morpheus Kitami
Liturgist
- Joined
- May 14, 2020
- Messages
- 2,695
Christ, the overdramaticization in this thread. How many of you have actually played something in the last year that has a realistic chance of disappearing? I'm not talking about games like Baldur's Gate or anything else you can buy in a store now. Those aren't disappearing anytime soon, not now, not in the near future, and not in the future it's public domain and everyone has a hard drive in which having Baldur's Gate on it is the same as having a text file today. The games like Baldur's Gate which are on platforms which are frequently distributed as part of a set are not disappearing. Most 20th century games are not disappearing unless we have a massive technological fault. They're simply too small, too easily redistributed and frequently too pointless for developers to really care about. Nintendo may go after their stuff, but they're the exception, not the rule. Even for systems like the Apple II and C64, people are dumping random floppies they get and we're finding games that people weren't even aware were lost to begin with. How many of you can say you're in a position like that? That you're genuine want to play some game that's currently lost?
MMOs are interesting in this, since it's not really the game itself people pine after, but the experience. In an era before everyone would view looking up the information of every game beforehand as a matter of course, since actually playing a game is secondary to the experience. But I admit I could be discounting them since I never really played any. This does tie into something that might be lost to time though, secondary information on games. We enjoy playing games blind, but we never think about games that need some of that secondary stuff to be more enjoyable. Bethesda games with mods, patches for games with awful bugs, like Myth II, or walkthroughs for games with particularly obnoxious things in them. No one really thinks to archive a lot of this stuff, I know that one of my favorite modders for Morrowind has a lot of stuff lost over the shift between sites because he stopped making mods after a while and never moved his stuff elsewhere. That is the more concerning issue, since everyone assumes places like GameFAQs or NexusMods, which seem on shaky ground, will exist forever.
MMOs are interesting in this, since it's not really the game itself people pine after, but the experience. In an era before everyone would view looking up the information of every game beforehand as a matter of course, since actually playing a game is secondary to the experience. But I admit I could be discounting them since I never really played any. This does tie into something that might be lost to time though, secondary information on games. We enjoy playing games blind, but we never think about games that need some of that secondary stuff to be more enjoyable. Bethesda games with mods, patches for games with awful bugs, like Myth II, or walkthroughs for games with particularly obnoxious things in them. No one really thinks to archive a lot of this stuff, I know that one of my favorite modders for Morrowind has a lot of stuff lost over the shift between sites because he stopped making mods after a while and never moved his stuff elsewhere. That is the more concerning issue, since everyone assumes places like GameFAQs or NexusMods, which seem on shaky ground, will exist forever.
