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It’s actually not an absence of demand that retains “dead” video games like Black & White or the unique Civilization off the market. It’s normally purple tape and nebulous obstacles involving copyright regulation and mental property ownership-flavored complications that get in the best way. And despite the fact that GOG has a workforce engaged on its preservation program full time, senior bizdev supervisor Marcin Paczynski mentioned they discovered the method of digital necromancy “harder than we thought it would be,” on a recent episode of The Game Business Show.
He added that the unusual tales concerned have been sufficient to fill a e book, and served up some examples that make me actually need to learn that e book. One tidbit concerned somebody within the UK who had unwittingly inherited rights to a number of video games, however was “nowhere to be found.”
Paczynski told The Game Business: “He kind of fell off the grid, so we hired a guy in the UK that was supposed to find him. That was the type of person who was really, really living without any cell phone, without any online presence, just chilling. He didn’t even know that he owned the rights because this was just a package with his inheritance … we have a lot of stories like that.”
In the same interview, he mentioned a Vietnam veteran turned game developer turned business mogul behind a multimillion-dollar oil company, as well as more precarious stories like developers whose physical documentation of IP ownership was torched in a fire—the further back in time you go, the more game development relied on physical record-keeping. And notably, this is all before you get to the technical aspect of getting a game to function on modern machines and keeping it that way.
It’s a wild set of stories and a good reminder of how hard it can be to do this sort of thing on the up and up. The length of GOG’s Dreamlist, which catalogs customers’ prime picks for additions to the preservation program, in addition to the Video Game History Foundation’s declare that round 87 % of video games are largely unplayable, could make the entire job of sport preservation appear unattainable. That mentioned, gamers have made it clear the choice—letting previous video games fade into reminiscence—is not one thing they will settle for.
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