The Coming Game Preservation Crisis
You know what Fortnite is. Even if you haven’t played it, you know what Fortnite is. It’s a cultural juggernaut. With more than 500 million players, it’s arguably the most successful, era-defining game of the late 2010s and early 2020s.
In N minutes, no one will be able to play it. Let N be a natural number that’s smaller than you think.
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Preserving art is hard. Preserving a video game is even harder. To archive a book for future generations, all you need to do is transcribe the words and make it available in a safe library or some permanent storage mechanism like the internet. Film is slightly more difficult, but it’s not that difficult to digitize old film prints. Plus, once it’s been preserved, there’s no special requirements needed to view it. The movie plays just fine on any screen you want to watch it on.
Games are different because, as software, they’re so tightly linked with the hardware they’re meant to execute on. It’s not as simple as translating it to a new media format or making the contents available in a different medium. Video games, particularly console games, and especially old console games, are designed to run on a specific piece of hardware and only that piece of hardware.
The original Legend of Zelda or Metroid are hugely important games in the history of the medium, but they were only designed to be played on an original NES. There was a limited number of Zelda cartridges produced in the world, not to mention the notorious unreliability of the NES systems themselves. Theoretically, there will come a point where we run out of functional cartridges or systems and the game becomes completely unplayable.
I imagine most mathNEWS readers are aware of what the solution for this problem has been thus far: emulation. While Nintendo might give me a glare for saying this, emulator developers are some of the most important people in the industry. With the advent of modern emulation software that runs cleanly and easily across all kinds of hardware, playing a game from the 80s is a lot more like watching an old film: find a copy (LEGALLY!), download it (LEGALLY!!), and play it on the screen you already own (LEGALLY!!!).
We can do this reliably for almost any console older than 15 years, and game preservationists have grown accustomed to this ease of access. Putting aside the purist nerd arguments (are you really playing the same game if you’re playing it with a keyboard instead of the N64’s terrible controller?), most people assume we’ll eventually have access to every game ever made via emulation.
That complacency makes me worried. We’re hurtling towards a crisis in the field of game preservation and everyone seems to be looking the other way.
The basic problem is the same: games require special hardware and software to play, the two of which are so tightly linked that losing the hardware usually means you lose the software, too. The problem now is that the hardware isn’t a game console, it’s the server you need to connect to in order to boot the game at all.
Almost every culturally significant game from the last decade locks a significant portion of the game, if not the entire thing- behind a connection to some kind of server. To be clear, I’m not talking about the trend of games using the internet to deliver new content; I’m a Destiny player, if I complained about that I’d be the biggest hypocrite at prod night.
We’re putting so much of gaming history on death’s row by tying it to services that will all one day shut off. By making so much of the cultural output of the 2010’s and beyond tied to these servers, we’re setting ourselves up for a gargantuan chunk of our own artistic history as a culture to become completely inaccessible.
And these are just the games that are tied to fragile online services once you download them. What about the games that require server connections to download? Such digital-only games are especially vulnerable to this, being only available through digital marketplaces. But even physical games are at risk here. These days, most big AAA releases are too large to fit on disks. Only part of the game is loaded off the disk, and the rest is downloaded from that damned server.
By the way, one day, Steam will shut down. Your mortgage-sized collection of games will become completely inaccessible. You’re on a time limit to get through your backlog. Sleep well tonight!
Think about when these online stores eventually go down. When this has happened in the past (RIP Wii Shop Channel, 2006 - 2019), it’s happened with consoles that don’t have such a codependent relationship with their shops. We haven’t really felt how bad this is going to be yet.
But the worst culprit is a menace that lurks just over the horizon- cloud-based gaming. Big companies have been threatening to make fetch happen with cloud gaming for a decade now. Imagine- the dream of a gaming platform that is one hundred percent reliant on a company deciding to keep their servers up!
This nightmare scenario has already happened with Google Stadia when it shut down in early 2023. Fortunately, there were no historically significant exclusive games on Stadia, so we’re cool for now.
I honestly don’t know what we can do about this. If I know society at all, we won’t change anything until the crisis actually starts. Find me in a decade so I can say I told you so.
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Fortnite is not just a game, it’s a critical cultural artifact of our time. Its impact on art and youth culture is immeasurable, and its influence on design in the medium will be felt for decades.
In N minutes, no one will be able to play it. Let N be a natural number that’s smaller than when you started reading this article.