Sega reportedly lost the source code for one of its most celebrated and difficult-to-find Saturn games, Panzer Dragoon Saga, leaving anyone who wants to play the game to slink off to eBay, where, grief-stricken, they will have to pay a minimum of £500 for the privilege. And, while some major game companies like EA have archivists dedicated to collecting their teams’ art materials and source code, the video game industry has always failed to properly recognise and celebrate its past.
There may be question of expired licenses (both the Xbox’s joyous OutRun 2 and the Dreamcast’s solemn Ferrari 355 Challenge were based on expensive and time-limited authorisations from the Italian carmaker). By contrast, every video game system is different, so bringing, say, a Spectrum game to a PlayStation 5 requires various acts of technological reshaping. The technology for distributing books and films is straightforward and mostly unchanging. The reasons for the vacuum are myriad – and slightly tedious. It’s practically guaranteed that something you grew up with is gone, for ever.” As the foundation’s co-director Frank Cifaldi tweeted: “Nine out of 10 classic video games are no longer available to consumers, and that number is unlikely to get any better. The 13% availability rate of classic video games is one percentage point less than that of American silent films. According to the report, less than 5% of games from the Commodore 64 are still available today. The void is not unique to video games – there are books that are no longer published even in digital form, some films can only be watched on defunct formats, others disappear from streaming services mere months after release – but the scale of the video game void is unmatched in other media. It’s an excruciating loss of source material for the people who worked on these games, as well as for historians and archivists, for gem-hunters and for any younger player who might wish to enjoy interactive works created in different socio-political circumstances, against different technological constraints and fashions or within different market conditions. This equates to a lacuna of tens of thousands of works, many of which represent key moments in the medium’s evolution. Grim news heralded in a report published this week by the Video Game History Foundation, which claims that 87% of video games released before 2010 are no longer commercially available.
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