Preservation – Video Game Canon

Hit Save! Launches Press Materials Archive for Video Games

Hit Save!, an organization dedicated to the preservation of video games, is back with another excellent resource for anyone interested in exploring how games were promoted to the public. The newly-launched Hit Save! Press Materials Archive includes hundreds of examples of promotional material for a wide variety of games:

The collection includes press kits, promotional material, concept art, trailers, and more, providing invaluable insights into the development and marketing processes behind many classic, well-known, and sometimes obscure video games. A big thank you goes out to Stephen Keating for donating a large portion of digital press material that he has collected over the years.

By sharing these materials and providing public access, we aim to enable new research and scholarship in game studies. The materials reveal rarely seen details about both popular franchises and forgotten gems. We hope they will lead to new discoveries that expand our knowledge of your favorite games and franchises 🙂

Hit Save! has said that the archive will be growing quite a bit in the coming weeks and months, and you can share your own discoveries by joining their Discord server.

Noclip Game History Archive is Digitizing a Decade of Videotapes to Preserve Lost Game History

Danny O’Dwyer has been creating video game documentaries under the Noclip banner since 2016, but he and his team are about to take on their biggest project yet.

Noclip has come into possession of hundreds of videotapes containing over a decade of lost video game history, including trailers, behind-the-scenes featurettes, B-roll footage, news reports, and a whole lot more. The collection likely includes a lot of the same videos that Hit Save! is currently streaming as part of their Always On project.

But as O’Dwyer stressed in the Patreon announcement (which is embedded above), no one knows exactly what’s on these tapes, and some of the ones they’ve viewed contain some really interesting stuff. There’s a previously-unavailable Behind Closed Doors Demo for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic from E3 2001, a tour of Nintendo’s Nintendo of America’s Employee-Only Museum, a newly-remastered Reveal Trailer for Uncharted, and a lot more.

You can see everything Noclip has digitized so far at the dedicated Noclip Game History Archive channel on both YouTube and the Internet Archive.

Good luck to O’Dwyer and his team as they work with all the temperamental video equipment needed to digitize these tapes.

New Study by Video Game History Foundation Finds 87% of Games Released Before 2010 Are Out of Print

Thousands of games for the Wii, Wii U, DS, 3DS, and PSP became permanently unavailable after Nintendo and Sony shuttered the digital storefronts on their previous-generation platforms over the last few years. And while they remain available for now, similar closures are on the docket for the Xbox 360 Marketplace and the PlayStation Store for the PS3 and Vita.

These are just the most visible examples of a problem that has always plagued the video game industry, but it’s getting worse. A new study by the Video Game History Foundation has found that 87% of all games released in the United States before 2010 are now unavailable to purchase.

How does something like this even happen? And is there anything we can we do about it?

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“Hit Save! Always On” Delivers a Neverending Stream of Trailers, Interviews, Behind-The-Scenes Footage, and More

Hit Save! is an organization dedicated to the preservation of video games, and last month they launched Hit Save! Always On, a new initiative to help make their vast archive of trailers, interviews, and behind-the-scenes footage a bit more accessible:

We at Hit Save! are thrilled to announce the launch of our 24/7 stream dedicated to preserving video game history. This initiative will showcase promotional videos, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, and other valuable material from our extensive physical archive. Come join us as we embark on a journey to celebrate the heritage of gaming and ensure its preservation in the digital age.

Our physical archive is a treasure trove of gaming artifacts that spans decades. Through our 24/7 stream, we aim to showcase the information we are preserving, offering viewers an interesting and fun view into the evolution of gaming.

The livestream currently lives on Hit Save!’s YouTube channel and it’s been running continuously since May 30. The selection of videos is very impressive, and having it on in the background while writing this article meant I was also able to hear Mark Hamill, Tom Wilson, and Ginger Allen talk about their involvement in Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger in a vintage behind-the-scenes featurette from the early 1990s.

I can’t wait to see what pops up next.

Lists From the Past: The Library of Congress’s “Game Canon”

Henry Lowood has served as the Curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University since 1983. Thanks to this role, he’s been part of the growing field of Game Studies practically since its very beginning, and in 2006 he used his position to pitch a proposal to the Library of Congress about the importance of the academic study of games.

Partly inspired by the National Film Preservation Board’s National Film Registry and his own efforts to preserve important game-related artifacts since 1998, Lowood asked for the Library’s assistance in creating a “Game Canon,” a group of titles that would best represent the cultural and historical significance of video games. He got his wish a year later, and a committee (comprised of Lowood, his Stanford colleague Matteo Bittanti, game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky, and Joystiq’s Christopher Grant) was formed to decide on the canon’s initial composition.

After a lot of debate, the committee delivered ten recommendations for the “Game Canon,” ultimately highlighting 15 titles in total. Civilization and Civilization II were grouped together as part of this initial batch of games, as were the four games in the Warcraft series (Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and World of Warcraft). The rest of the eight selections covered a wide range of genres from the first three decades of game history, starting with 1962’s Spacewar! and moving forward through time to the aforementioned Warcraft series.

In between you’ll find 1985’s Tetris, 1989’s SimCity, 1993’s Doom, and a few other foundational games…

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Embracer Group is Starting a Games Archive

Embracer Group, the many-tentacled parent company of THQ Nordic, Deep Silver, Gearbox, and a half-dozen other publishing labels, has announced plans to open a video game archive in Karlstad, Sweden.

While lots of publishers are extremely thorough about preserving production assets, prototypes, and source code for the games they create, what Embracer is doing with their archive is fairly unique.

Using CEO Lars Wingefors’s personal game library as a starting point, Embracer has built a collection containing over 50,000 different games, consoles, and accessories. You can see the “secret” underground vault that houses the collection (and a portion of the games) in this new video featuring the archive’s Game Historian, Martin Lindell:

The archive’s collection currently stretches all the way back to the launch games for the Magnavox Odyssey, and Embracer’s goal is to obtain the European, American, and Japanese editions of every game ever made:

For us, games are more than just games. It is culture. It is something created by great people with creative ideas. By building a large games archive, we want to preserve and tribute the gaming culture for a long period of time.

The journey has already begun and it is time to take the next step. Our goal is clear – We want to archive and display as much of the video game industry as possible. Hopefully you will join us on our journey.

The Embracer Group Games Archive isn’t open to the public yet, but they hope to welcome researchers in the near future as the archive becomes more accessible.

Play Ball: Nintendo and the Mariners, Midway’s Lost “MLB Jam,” and Don Daglow’s Baseball Sim

Sony’s MLB: The Show franchise offers an incredible facsimile of America’s Pastime, but with Opening Day upon us, I find myself instead gravitating towards my NES and Super NES shelves to replay old favorites like Jaleco’s Bases Loaded, Konami’s Base Wars, and Nintendo’s Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball.

Nintendo didn’t have to look very far to find a spokesman for the Super NES game… Griffey and the rest of the Mariners were actually already on the payroll. Even though he didn’t care for the sport, CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi purchased the baseball team in 1992 and owned it until his death in 2013.

But Yamauchi’s tenure at the head of the Mariners organization did more than help produce a handful of great Super NES and N64 games, it also upended one of Major League Baseball’s longstanding traditions.

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National Videogame Museum Launches Preservation-Focused Videogame Heritage Society in UK

The National Videogame Museum, located in Sheffield in the United Kingdom, has launched the Videogame Heritage Society, a new video game preservation initiative that will bring together a network of libraries, museums, and collectors.

The Videogame Heritage Society is a collaborative project that aims to share knowledge with all members about the best way to preserve and exhibit video games:

The National Videogame Museum is launching a new initiative today at BFI Southbank, leading a network of museums and independent collectors who are engaged in videogame preservation. The Videogame Heritage Society (VHS) includes the Science and Media Museum, Bath Spa University, British Library and Museum of London as well as many independent collectors. It will develop best practice and share knowledge across the museum sector and beyond about preserving and exhibiting videogames.

“This group is for anyone who cares about or works in videogame preservation,” said British Games Institute Chairman Ian Livingstone. “We recognise that in the UK and around the world, the expertise in this field isn’t just locked inside museums and heritage institutions, but also inside a wide range of dedicated and passionate private collectors. The VHS will bring everyone together to preserve the important heritage of videogames in our country.”

More information about the Videogame Heritage Society can be found at The BGI‘s official website.

More Than 2,500 Playable MS-DOS Games Added to the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has made it their mission to safeguard as much of the Internet as they can, but the group is also heavily involved in preserving classic video games and making them playable for a new generation of players through in-browser emulation.

Earlier this week, they massively expanded the number of retro video games available in their collection thanks to the addition of more than 2,500 MS-DOS games from the 1980s and 1990s.

It wasn’t easy getting all of those titles to work in a browser, and Curator Jason Scott had a bit to say about the process on the Internet Archive Blog:

The update of these MS-DOS games comes from a project called eXoDOS, which has expanded over the years in the realm of collecting DOS games for easy playability on modern systems to tracking down and capturing, as best as can be done, the full context of DOS games – from the earliest simple games in the first couple years of the IBM PC to recently created independent productions that still work in the MS-DOS environment.

What makes the collection more than just a pile of old, now-playable games, is how it has to take head-on the problems of software preservation and history. Having an old executable and a scanned copy of the manual represents only the first few steps. DOS has remained consistent in some ways over the last (nearly) 40 years, but a lot has changed under the hood and programs were sometimes only written to work on very specific hardware and a very specific setup. They were released, sold some amount of copies, and then disappeared off the shelves, if not everyone’s memories.

It is all these extra steps, under the hood, of acquisition and configuration, that represents the hardest work by the eXoDOS project, and I recognize that long-time and Herculean effort. As a result, the eXoDOS project has over 7,000 titles they’ve made work dependably and consistently.

Even with 2,500 new additions, you’re not going to find every MS-DOS game ever released in the Internet Archive’s collection. But you will find a wide variety of games from the Video Game Canon, including id Software’s The Ultimate Doom (#23), LucasArts’s The Secret of Monkey Island (#86), Psygnosis’s Wipeout (#192), EA’s original The Need For Speed (#587), and many more.

Library of Congress Has Ruled Libraries and Museums Can Break DRM to Preserve Older Games

The US Copyright Office and the Library of Congress have ruled that museums and libraries may now disable digital rights management (DRM) software when attempting to preserve video games available for defunct platforms.

The rule is officially known as the “Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies,” and a very quick summary is available at Polygon:

This week the Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office revised its list of specific exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, also known as the DMCA. Their guidance reaffirms the rights of software preservationists to circumvent digital rights management (DRM) software, in some cases expanding their ability to revive older games. It also opens the door, legally speaking, to do-it-yourselfers and electronics repair outlets to break DRM in pursuit of fixing hardware.

A more thorough analysis of the ruling, specifically detailing how it’ll effect preservationists looking to bring back early versions of MMOs like EverQuest and World of Warcraft, is available at Motherboard:

Today’s news should be good for archivists and museums, who’ve long struggled with the best way to preserve video games such as Everquest or World of Warcraft. Multiplayer games like these require both software that players run on their computers locally, and software running on a company’s server—software that is much harder for historians to get their hands on and run. And when they do manage to get an independent server running, big game companies like Blizzard have taken legal action against people running unauthorized servers.

This is a great day for anyone interested in the history of games, and for all the historians and librarians working to preserve the classics for the next generation.