Writing an article last week about the importance of personal media had me going down a path of research into the preservation of video games both during and after the process. As I suspected, “hackers” and pirates are fighting the good fight with keeping games playable in some form, mostly emulation. However there’s one issue that I don’t see them being able to fix.
Day one patches. They’re everywhere for almost every AAA release. Sometimes it’s little tweaks but they often make massive changes to the game that take them from barely playable to the form they should have been in on release. Try playing ANY Bethesda game without the early patches. Try playing Dark Souls without the early patches. Try playing Gothic, a 25-year-old game remade for modern hardware, it’s literally unplayable if you only have the disc and no internet. Now let’s think forward.
Ten years from now you’re feeling nostalgic for a game that really captured your attention a while ago and you want to share it with your kids or grandkids. So you go into the garage and pull out the overstuffed tote of retro games and random hardware to pull out your Playstation 3. You set it up to your TV and put in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. To your horror you remember how bad the game ran at launch. The servers are down. You can’t patch the game. Guess you’re out of luck.
Now of course most games now have PC ports that are of various qualities and those typically will either have first party support or solid community-based support to keep them alive. Revengeance in particular is one of my favorite games of all time and it’s barely playable if you just boot it up on Steam. Players stepped in where Konami failed and made the game run far better. Console doesn’t have that. Devs get pressured by their studios to hit impossible release dates all the time and one of the ways that the devs can “cut corners” in a way is to release what amounts to a very late beta version of a game and fix it after the discs ship with a day one patch. It has become so common that outside of the indie space it’s just plain expected.
I guess what I’m saying is that some console games come with an expiration date now due to the shifts of game development culture. If Playstation or Xbox or whatever other company decides that they are going to shut down the servers that patch your game, that game is going to be substandard forever.
There is hope. If you remember Konami decided to get out of video games and dive headfirst into pachinko for a few years before realizing how stupid that was for various reasons. They tortured Kojima into resigning from his position, which is a normalized way of circumventing firing people in Japan. By all accounts Kojima was awful to work for and to employ but that’s irrelevant. Part of cutting ties with Kojima was shutting down development of Silent Hills and, for whatever reason, it also included taking down PT from the PSN Store. And then they took it a step further and made it undownloadable from your collection. Well some incredible, intelligent people figured out that you could set up a proxy that circumvented the block and redownload the game.
Maybe, just maybe there will be private servers in the future that allow you to patch your games properly. It would be a lot to maintain but bigger projects have been undertaken for the sake of history and art preservation before. I can only hope.
I’m still collecting physical media as long as it’s an option. I hope it somehow always is but I see the writing on the wall. Once we hit that point I will throw hands with the void and screech, as is my nature.
Ethan Rodgers
