Comment by ido
3 years ago
The games that don't work in some way or form 20 years after creation
are in minority due to effort of community. I dunno what author is smoking.
I would say what you're seeing is biased towards popular games - there is an immense amount of games out there and most have no community to try to preserve or emulate. It also really changes after a certain point in time & with specific platforms - old, popular (but still simple compared to modern PCs) systems like the PlayStation 2 or Game Boy Advance? Not a problem. DOS games? For the most part ok, especially popular ones like Doom/Quake/etc. But choose a random not-very-popular computer game from 1996 and there's a fair chance it won't be easy to make it work properly.
An iPhone games from 2009 or a Facebook Flash game from 2010? Now there's a real chance you have no way of making it work unless the game is so popular that the developer/publisher have kept it alive and on the market all this time.
Biased toward older games too. Even on PC things are shifting toward more online based experiences, often without any sort of local server included.
Same here. Recently I saw a dvd for sale of a game I was once interested in for really cheap (it was Need for Speed released in 2015). I was interested until I saw the text on the dvd "the game requires a permanent Internet connection to play". Well, what if I want to play it in 20 years after it has been long forgotten by everyone else? Nope. It's not going to work. That's why I'd rather stick to games I can actually own rather than rent briefly.
Folks will be using gameplay video and AI to reconstruct games in 5 years. Could send a 1 hr video through an ML model and all the game assets could come out the other side.
Sure it will, with cracked binary off torrent...
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Original point was that author thinks game made now will be less long-lived than game made 20 years ago so that's all irrelevant really but...
>An iPhone games from 2009 or a Facebook Flash game from 2010? Now there's a real chance you have no way of making it work unless the game is so popular that the developer/publisher have kept it alive and on the market all this time.
Weirdly enough (not really) despise all the whining about loss of Flash games community people stepped up and wrote the emulators required for that. No idea how iphone side of that looks tho
> But choose a random not-very-popular computer game from 1996 and there's a fair chance it won't be easy to make it work properly.
In most cases it will probably be as easy as average game because it is average game and most emus carry for needs of average games of that time just fine.
You'd have to look pretty hard to find unplayable ones, and most other... wouldn't be much harder than trying to make the DOS game work back in the DOS times with various special things you needed to do and set back then so the game worked.
Sure, games nobody wanted to play in the first place when they were released will be neglected but that's not exactly that huge a loss. If game deems to be more important than it was back then someone will figure out how to run it, as long as data is preserved.
The online-only ones are a big problem, sure they can be cracked just fine but the moment they are server based that's a whole shitton to reverse-engineer, and while some popular MMOs got that done (mostly so people can play without paying but still...) it's by far rarity to see.