Latest news with #VideoGameHistoryFoundation
Business Mayor
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Mayor
How GOG Is Trying To Save Your Favorite Classic Video Games
'The longer we wait to restore games, the harder it might be to ever bring them back,' says GOG's senior business development manager, Marcin Paczyński. If you've ever read anything about video game preservation, chances are you've found the same alarming problem. Every entertainment industry has issues preserving its history, but video games seem to be one of the worst cases. According to the Video Game History Foundation, you can only access 13 percent of all video games released before 2010. Related A defect in Warner Bros. DVDs has brought to light a condition called disc rot, and it will get all of our classic games eventually. There are many reasons behind that low number, including copyright laws, licensing issues, the difficulty of migrating games to other formats, rights holders' hostility toward emulation, and the scarcity and costs of old hardware. However, perhaps the most relevant issue is how little work many video game companies have done to preserve their own history. This is where GOG (Good Old Games) comes in. A subsidiary of CD Projekt, the Polish company has been doing its best to restore and preserve our medium's history since 2008. The digital distribution platform presents a curated and DRM-free catalogue, which means that all your games are yours to keep, and you don't need to worry about them becoming delisted, servers going offline, or a lack of support for updates and new system compatibility. GOG now has over 8,000 video games in its library, from obscure classics that you might have never heard of to recent blockbuster releases. But how did it all start? Piracy, Pegasus, And Baldur's Gate GOG's history starts long before its official foundation. Back in the '90s, Poland had a very different relationship with piracy compared to other countries: people embraced it. It wasn't only hard to purchase original games due to how expensive they were (a PC game cost one-third of the minimum wage at the time), but it was also hard to find them. Marcin Paczyński and technical engineer Adam Ziółkowski told me about their childhood playing Pegasus, a bootleg version of the NES that was one of the only consoles affordable for most families. They didn't know this wasn't the authentic system made by Nintendo, and it would take years before they could afford their first original game. 'There were floppy parties where people would come with their [Amiga] diskettes,' explains Paczyński. 'They would just mass copy everything that everyone had, sharing the pirated software, not buying it.' Things changed when Baldur's Gate was released in Poland by CD Projekt. The game was completely translated into Polish, with real local actors from the stage and screen adding their talents to established characters in the classic RPG. Via 'For me, one of my first original games would be Baldur's Gate,' says Paczyński. 'For a lot of people in Poland, that was actually the first original game that they bought. Its incredible success kind of jumpstarted CD Projekt as a company.' After a few years of successfully publishing games, CD Projekt garnered mainstream attention in 2007 with the release of The Witcher. In 2008, it created GOG as a means to distribute games for PC and compete with Steam. Your Favorite Classic, Ready To Play Via Almost two decades later, GOG has launched the GOG Preservation Program. It's a rebranding of what it has been doing from the beginning: maintaining and preserving classic games on modern PCs. According to Paczyński, most people who use GOG don't know that the classic games are built, maintained, and curated in-house. Paczyński and his team wanted to change this. For GOG, a classic game is any game that is ten or more years old. So you can think of Fallout 4, Bloodborne, Rocket League, and Batman: Arkham Knight as classics. Sorry about that. 'The idea is for the user to be able to just push the play button, like on consoles, and not to have to bother with any settings,' explains Ziółkowski. 'All the default settings should be as optimized as possible. Controller support should be there right from the start.' Via Ziółkowski goes on to explain that the program is 'a lifetime guarantee', because if any game gets broken due to an update or they don't work in the next Windows OS, the tech team will make sure they are fixed. They are also going back through the extensive catalog and making sure that all the titles pass their current quality standards. The GOG Preservation Program has restored around 150 games, including Silent Hill 4, F.E.A.R. Platinum, Fallout 2, Deus Ex GOTY Edition, Jagged Alliance 2, the first six Ultima entries, and many more. But that isn't enough for Paczyński. He tells me about the company's goal to raise the number to 500 by the end of 2025, although he knows this is overly ambitious. Do Your Part With The Dreamlist Via The technical aspect of restoring and maintaining games is only one side of the Preservation Program. GOG also introduced the Dreamlist, a wishlist that lets you vote for the games that you want to see restored. It works as a community-driven tool where you can also add comments about why a specific game is so special to you. 'The Dreamlist is something that really helps us to prioritize certain titles,' explains Paczyński. 'There are a lot of games that are right now not available, and there are only four of us in the business department. It's something that the publishers are also noticing.' 'It really helps with our talks with the publishers and with the rights holders,' adds Ziółkowski. 'These testimonies by the fans further motivate them to release those games and to spend the time and effort that is needed to bring those games back.' But How Does The Restoration Start? Via The restoration of an old game usually starts with the Dreamlist. This helps the team prioritize which games to focus on. Then there is a research phase where they have to find out who owns the rights to the game. When that's finished, the business department reaches the company and tries to settle an agreement. This can take time, since the larger studios and publishers are usually focusing resources on current or upcoming games, and they might not see the benefits in restoring decades-old games for a low price. Paczyński also tells me that restoring video games is a constant race against time. The longer GOG waits in working with specific titles, the harder it gets to bring them back. Via 'There was even a situation in which I was fighting for one game for a couple of years,' explains Paczyński. 'I was not able to get it. All the responses that I got weren't very clear on the reason. 'After a couple of years, I'm in GDC. I'm talking to a guy who was working at that company at the time, and he tells me that there was a huge fire within the company in the storage department. Most of the files from that era are gone.' On the bright side, Paczyński assures me that his team has found many people in the big companies who care about game preservation, and that they have made efforts and facilitated all the hard work that the initial steps of the process require. For a specific example of this, you can read our story on how GOG worked with Capcom to restore the original Resident Evil Trilogy. Via When an agreement is reached by all the parties involved, it's time for the technical work to begin. Ziółkowski's team starts evaluating the title, what they can do with it, and what places could receive enhancements. Their priorities are to make sure that it runs in modern resolutions, enable window mode, and add widescreen and modern controller support, among other quality of life improvements. Will Video Game Preservation Ever Get Better? Via GOG is doing the work that should be done by all the studios in the industry. However, when I ask Paczyński about the future of game preservation, he's optimistic. 'I think it will get better with what we see and what we have heard from certain partners,' explains Paczyński. There seems to be a much bigger focus on game preservation nowadays. This topic is becoming more and more mainstream. 'With the right incentive from the consumer, those companies will do everything. There's still a lot to be done, but with the growing interest of the gamers in game preservation, this will only get better.'
CBC
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
A trip back through video game history
Social Sharing With shelves full of classic games and consoles, a visit to Thunder Bay's Retro North Games is like taking a trip back through video game history. The store, located on Algoma Street, has accumulated thousands of classic gaming items, including games and consoles. And they're selling much better than owner Matt Carr expected. "We originally were gonna do this just for our website, just online," Carr says. "We started putting some stuff out, and I'd say now, our online is probably matched, or even in-store, I'd say, is maybe higher than online." Carr said the business finds its retro gaming products in various places, including auctions. The stock includes various classic consoles — those include the Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Nintendo 64, PSP, 3DO, a Sega Genesis-Sega CD combo, even a Virtual Boy — and shelves of controllers, and games. The rise of retro gaming 3 hours ago Duration 1:55 And while the store does have in-the-box collectors' items — like an unopened Game Boy and Virtual Boy — most people that purchase from Retro North Games do so to play, Carr said. "We'll usually see three different reasons," he said. "The first reason is childhood memories, nostalgia, somebody wants to play a game they used to play when they were a kid." "The other one is forcing their kids to play the games they used to play, that happens all the time," Carr said. "And for younger kids, it is easier to pick up a game with a controller that only has a couple of buttons versus like a PS5 controller." "And then the third one would be collectors, people that just want to have it on display, or show it off." Frank Cifaldi, founder and director of the Video Game History Foundation in Okaland, Calif., said the interest in retro gaming is "50-50 nostalgia and, honestly, new people discovering old games." I've actually been around video game collectors for a very long time, since it was new," said Cifaldi. "I started collecting games when you could find them in thrift stores, and yeah, a lot of people are nostalgic for their past, and are sort of trying to maybe fill in the gaps, right?" "There's a lot of people who, let's say, collect old games like they're baseball cards or something, where they identify with a specific console they like," he said. "Maybe you like the 8 bit Nintendo. And they think it might be fun to figure out what all the games are and collect them as a full set. That's one type of collector." But younger gamers who are discovering classic gaming play a big role, too, Cifaldi said. "There is sort of a culture online around not only playing but also watching people play old games," he said. "They're a lot more, let's say, easily accessible in terms of immediately-gratifying entertainment." "You turn it on and you press start and you just start playing, and it's easy to sort of grasp the might be easier to immediately understand and be entertained by, than maybe a more-modern game that might have a little bit more of a learning curve, or you know, cutscenes with stories in them." "I think a lot of people are discovering that you can get a $5 game from two Xboxes ago and be just about as entertained as something you get for $60.00 new now," he said. "I expect a lot of people are just looking for cheap fun games to buy from that sort of era, like the early-to-mid-2000s tends to be a big chunk of what I've I've seen from retro game stores." Cifaldi, who's worked in the video game industry, has been interested in preserving video since his high school days. "I always felt that it was difficult to get the information one might need to explain video game history," he said. "For example, libraries didn't hold on to magazines that reported on games." "They tended to throw them away once they were done, and so there was no backtracking and seeing what people thought about games in their time, or how games were marketed back in the old days," he said. "I founded the Video Game History Foundation that actually exactly nine years ago this Friday." The foundation includes an archive of informational material for researchers, including a digital library with magazines, business records, and other game-related documentation. "It's gratifying to me to see that there is an active interest in discovering where we came from in terms of the art of video game creation," Cifaldi said. "I think that video games are the best form of entertainment to be invented in the last like 50 years, and and it's something that I feel that we've barely scratched the surface on, what games are capable of even like socially, let alone entertainment-wise." "It's like when we were in school, and we were asking our parents and teachers to justify why we need to learn history," he said. "It's to learn where we came from to, to not make the same mistakes that we made in the past. It's to sort of build something new and better by understanding how we did things before." "I feel very strongly that video games are the entertainment of the future, and that they only get better the more we understand where they came from, and so it's been really nice for me to to see that there's still an active interest in looking backward and understanding it."
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
EA is "releasing the fully recovered source code" for 4 classic Command & Conquer titles, and it's the best thing a major publisher can do for game preservation
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Back in 2020, alongside the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, EA released a portion of the source code for Red Alert and the original game. Now, five years later, that code has been "fully recovered" and made public alongside the source code for Renegade and Generals. "Over the past year I have been working alongside the amazing C&C stakeholders here at EA to restore the Perforce source code archives for the C&C games back to buildable states, which now provides us with the ability to patch these classic games in a deeper way going forward," community veteran Luke "CCHyper" Feenan, who also worked with EA on the release of the Remastered Collection, says in today's announcement. "As a long time modder, it was amazing to finally get a chance to deep dive into the source code for these games and see how they work!" The full source code for all four games is now available on the EA GitHub page. Feenan notes that "for those of you in the community who know me, you will be familiar with my strong advocacy for video game preservation and my support for the video game open-source community." Indeed, the release of code like this is perhaps the best gesture a major publisher like EA can make toward game preservation. Remasters - like the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection itself - can help keep a game available to modern audiences, but technology is going to keep marching on, and someday the official versions C&C will almost certainly be left behind again. The release of source code like this gives the community incredible options to keep these games in working shape for years to come. But game preservation is also about more than just making sure everyday gamers can keep playing old classics. It's also about saving the history of how these games came to be. One of the big efforts of the Video Game History Foundation is preserving "source" - not just code, but the art and other assets used in a game's creation. Source code often offers some of the greatest insights available on a game's development, and it's equally valuable to modders and historians. For most publishers, the idea of "preservation" starts and ends with reselling old games back to you, which is why I'm so happy to see EA go the extra mile with Command & Conquer here. (If only it'd take that same step with The Sims.) Here's hoping more publishers follow that lead. Of course, the most immediate benefit of having source available is for modders, and there's more news on the modding front, too. EA is also enabling Steam Workshop support for Renegade, Generals, Tiberium Wars, Red Alert 3, and Tiberian Twilight, allowing you to easily download custom maps. The Mission Editor and World Builder tools have also been updated to let modders directly upload their creations to the Workshop. Command & Conquer remains a mainstay among the best RTS games.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Video Game History Foundation's online library is now open
The Video Game History Foundation has unveiled its digital library, a massive undertaking that makes the organization's own materials as well as some private collections available for anyone to read. This project was first announced in December 2023, and the collection is still in early access. The VGHF said it would continually be working to digitize and add more content to the library. Even though this will be an ongoing endeavor, there is already a whole lot to check out. The library includes out-of-print publications like Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power alongside industry trade magazines, which casual players might never have the chance to read otherwise. There are also materials from behind the scenes of game development, such as video recordings of developer Cyan's work on the landmark game Myst and interviews with the team. You can also find press kits, promotional materials and all sorts of other ephemera. Everything is free to browse, just like a regular public library. In short, this is amazingly cool for gaming nerds.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
What video game ephemera tells us about ourselves
I just finished writing a feature about the Video Game History Foundation in Oakland, California, and how it is preparing to share its digital archive of games magazines. From 30 January, you'll be able to visit the institute's website and explore a collection of about 1,500 publications from throughout the history of games, all scanned in high detail, all searchable for keywords. It's a magnificent resource for researchers and those who just want to find the first-ever review of Tetris or Pokémon. I can't wait to visit. While researching the article, I spoke to John O'Shea and Ann Wain from the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield, which is also collecting games mags and other printed ephemera. They said something that really fascinated me. The museum is looking for donations to build its archive, but its focus is not so much on the magazines themselves, but on who brings them in. 'We're particularly interested in fan perspectives,' O'Shea told me. 'We're not intending to develop an exhaustive collection of every video game magazine ever made – we're interested in the full suite of an individual's video game experience … in how games connect to their lives.' Wain continued: 'We're interested in the stories of why – why did they collect these particular things, what were they looking for? It's that kind of social context we're after.' Collections are about memories more than facts – and this applies to games and the cultural matter about them. I'm writing this letter to you in my little cellar office, surrounded by piles of games, game magazines and game books. There are things in here that I cherish, including a copy of Devil May Cry signed by game designer Shinji Mikami, and my father's Sega Mega Drive; there are also some endlessly useful and fascinating things, such as Steven Kent's seminal book The Ultimate History of Video Games, and an old Sony personal video monitor, for which I bought special cables allowing me to connect very old consoles. What does all this stuff mean in the end, and what does it say about me? I'm not sure. All I know is, when I happen on TikTok videos of people's games collections I watch transfixed, over and over. I look at the console formats they've bought and the magazines they read. It helps me to picture their journey through games history, which may be very different than mine. I think that's why the National Videogame Museum (VGHF) wants this sort of sociocultural context in its collections: the choices other people make are fascinating. It's such a shame that museums and academic institutions have only relatively recently been given the resources to collect material about video games. Although classic games are now being carefully archived, the VGHF estimates that 87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered – I'm sure the situation is the same elsewhere in the world. Games discs and tapes deteriorate and become unplayable; the machines they ran on break down. Games magazines were considered ephemeral and throwaway, and are only now being seen as cultural artefacts in the same way as music and movie publications. There's a lot of history to catch up on. If we really want to remember the youth culture of the 1980s, we need to think just as much about Jet Set Willy and Crash magazine as we do about the Smiths and NME. As O'Shea said in our chat, cultural memory exists in the detritus of our lived lives. Last year, a good friend and I went to the Naomi Campbell exhibition at the V&A. In one area, the curators recreated the model's dressing room – a chaotic explosion of discarded clothes, wet wipes and makeup. It told us as much about her as anything else on display. We are what we surround ourselves with, and what we're passionate about. All my books and games are, in the end, me. Perhaps this is why I felt emotional when O'Shea and Wain talked about how games mags are important for their social and personal context: I had a very recent experience of their intimate value. A couple of weekends ago, I help my mum clear out a few old things at her house. In a dusty corner, we found a plastic bag that had obviously been safely stored away by my dad, who died in 2003. I discovered it contained a pile of games magazines that I had worked on – Edge, DC-UK and others, as well as some copies of my first stories for the Guardian. I used to post him these things because he was interested in games and cool new gadgets. I thought he'd have a quick flick through and chuck them out. But there it all was: my career in a plastic bag, as collated and archived by my dad. Those magazines are in my collection now – once they were about me, now they're about him. We all have a natural ability to share and ascribe cultural meaning and emotional value. As well as bringing us joy, the things we collect are a message to others. This was important once; take care of it and you'll understand why. When is a news article not a news article? Um … when it's a game? Reuters has just run a lovely introductory article about cosy games such as Spiritfarer and Animal Crossing, which have proven mental health benefits for stressed or anxious players. The Reutuers feature is also an interactive role-playing game, Cosy Comfort, which allows you to guide a cutesy anthropomorphic Radish around the teeny village of Rootersville as you read, customising its clothes and house en route. This is such a lovely, relevant way to present a positive story. Available on: PC, Mac and smartphone Estimated playtime: 10 minutes There are rumours that Electronic Arts is preparing to rerelease The Sims and Sims 2 to celebrate the game's forthcoming 25th anniversary. Kotaku reports on teases from the publisher and I hope they've got it right: the origins of this 200m-selling life sim haven't been available to download and play for many years. I wonder if my old saves will work? Alice Bell has written a beautiful article for Eurogamer about how video game spaces have become memorials to friends we have lost. This makes complete sense in the digital era when so many relationships play out online and in virtual worlds. Yet more games industry job losses this week as Ubisoft announced it is closing its Leamington studio and downsizing Ubisoft Reflections in Newcastle, Ubisoft Düsseldorf and Ubisoft Stockholm. According to 185 staff will lose their jobs. Scans for the memories: why old games magazines are a vital source of cultural history – and nostalgia The 15 best Xbox Series S/X games to play in 2025 Bundle of Joy, a game about the frantic monotony of early parenthood Can Assassin's Creed Shadows save Ubisoft? Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders – fun ski-run challenge has a few bumps along the way | ★★★★☆ This week's question comes from Martha, who asks: 'My friend and I live together and we are avid gamers. Not into sport or platformers but we love all the modern greats; GTA, Last of Us, Uncharted, Days Gone, Horizon ZD and FW, Spider-Man (and Stardew Valley). You get the picture! A friend of ours – who hasn't gamed since the 90s – wants us to help get her into gaming again. So it needs to be something we enjoy with a good learning arc. What would you recommend? We are PlayStation gamers.' Of the games you've mentioned, Spider-Man, Uncharted and Horizon are all excellent introductions to modern games – and they all have good easy modes. If they were playing in the 1990s, they might recognise a few of the franchises still going today, so Rise of the Tomb Raider and Resident Evil Village might be a good idea. I also love Stellar Blade and The Quarry, which have quite a 90s gaming vibe to them. Also, as you mentioned, Stardew Valley, which has a real Super Nintendo look and feel, I'd recommend Tunic and Roots of Pacha, which both look as if they've come from that wonderful era. If you've got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@
