Why There Is No Future For Old Games

[Shamus Young]

Why There Is No Future For Old Games

The games we played years ago on PC don't age very well, and Shamus explains why it is getting harder and harder to play old games.

Read Full Article

 

[ForumSafari]

Virtualisation helps to mitigate a lot of these issues, though it does still fall down at licensing currently. Providing a game in a ready made minimal VM would be a solution to at least some of the problems listed here.

 

[BlackBark]

I agree that it has become a bit harder to play old games. Ever since I got a 64 bit operating system, it's been a pain to play old pc games. In the case of Tetris (I only play Tetris for Windows, 95, I think), I ended up installing a virtual machine to play it.

Other old games like LBA 2 had had some fans tweak it for 64 bit, although there were too many glitches to complete the game.

However, while it has become a bit harder, there still seems to be a solution to every problem. I haven't yet come across an old game that I simply cannot play. Sure, console companies don't make backwards compatible hardware, but you can get emulators on the PC that play most, if not all of the games from consoles going back many generations.

Also, even as consoles get more complex and difficult to emulate, PC technology and hardware continues to advance at a faster rate and should be able to keep up. Of course, there is always a lag before the emulator comes along, but I'm sure they will keep coming. I certainly hope so. It will be a sad sad day if we really lose access to old games. In recent times, I find myself returning to my old favourites far more often than playing new games.

 

[AT God]

What about preservation of source codes? Note: I know nothing about programming and all my guesses about source codes are based on my own interpretation of games with open ones.

If a game has its source code made public, couldn't it be made compatible with modern PCs? I know we cannot guess about how future computers will work and this entirely excludes consoles but as far as preserving old games, couldn't having access to the game's source code allow a small group of people to get many games running again on newer hardware?

If that were possible, we would just need some sort of tyrant to take over the world and make it law that games have to release their source codes after X amount of time. That shouldn't be too hard though.

 

[hentropy]

it's amazing that a publisher wouldn't take interest in this chance to keep some legacy franchise alive, especially when someone else is willing to do all the work and give them a cut of the proceeds.

It depends on who it is that owns the IP. A lot of properties formally owned by companies that went bankrupt sold their IPs to individuals and firms specifically looking to buy a bunch of IPs at a very low rate. So I own ABC company, I make 30 games, I go bankrupt even though I had a few cult hits, and let's say Mitt Romney swoops in and buys all of them for a rock-bottom price.

Many times these same people and firms don't care about games, aren't game companies. Whether it's games or assets from a completely different industry, they buy it all, and their only motivation is to sell all of the games (not just one or two IPs out of the 30) for a tidy profit. Even if "everyone else does the work" when they get the rights to re-release a certain game, unless they sell the IP outright their money is still tied up in it. They don't like that. They also might have other priorities.

As for publishers and such who just sit on old IPs, doing nothing with them, that's also because they have other priorities and projects going on, and re-releasing a game is something they have to talk about with their own investors.

It sucks but that's the industry. Unlike software you can't just update the same program and call it by a different name. The only thing we can hope for is that publishers do see the wisdom in selling re-releases, so if you want more of that 10 years from now you should probably buy up all the re-releases they're selling now.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

Virtual Machines are great for those OS-problems, Shamus...
Just INSTALL Windows XP if that's what you need.

"This has been going on for years, and it's terrifying. "
Now those driver hacks, I don't think anyone outside of making games knows about that! Whoa!!!!

 

[reverse_rpm]

There is one, very iffty, solution to dissapearing games.

Indie devs to take a look at Shoot Guy IV's design and gameplay, and make a spiritual successor that future people, suffering from nostalgia sickness, can sit down and play with a tear in their eye, reminescing about the original but joyous about their current experience.

And hell, why only indies?
It's time for AAA industries to reinvent the wheel, in shinier graphics.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

... the only way to run yesterday's games is to own yesterday's hardware.

I never got this attitude from PC gamers, as if consoles turned into dust whenever a new generation comes along.
Dude, man, Shamus: my PS2 works fine.

 

[CaitSeith]

... the only way to run yesterday's games is to own yesterday's hardware.

I never got this attitude from PC gamers, as if consoles turned into dust whenever a new generation comes along.
Dude, man, Shamus: my PS2 works fine.

Unless you don't touch your console again, in 25 years wear and tear will get the better of it.

 

[Rad Party God]

I upgraded (downgraded?) to Win 8.1 recently and I can attest that it can be a nightmare to get older games to run properly. Populous: The Beginning no longer works in hardware mode in Win8, but it used to work perfectly fine in Win 7. Granted, the game still works in software mode and that's better than nothing.

Also I'm generally a sucker for retro games, so imagine the hassle I had to go through to get Shadow Man and Clive Barker's Undying running properly on Win 8, I had to use a compatibility tool and I'm afraid this will be more common as time goes on, that's why GOG prefers to use DosBox or nGlide, it's easier to get these games running in newer systems under these emulators.

With a bit of sorcery and a bit of the good ol' necromancy, I managed to get Dungeon Keeper 2 properly running under hardware mode (not the one that GOG uses, that looks ugly as sin), so yeah, I guess the best solution is using a virtual machine with Win XP installed, or just having a dual boot.

 

[josemlopes]

... the only way to run yesterday's games is to own yesterday's hardware.

I never got this attitude from PC gamers, as if consoles turned into dust whenever a new generation comes along.
Dude, man, Shamus: my PS2 works fine.

Seriously, you know that your PS2 wont last forever, I rather know that any computer, now or in the future, can run a PS2 game using an emulator.

My Xbox worked fine untill 2 years ago, now there are plenty of games that I cant play.

 

[Kae]

Funnily enough I'm already having that problem with FUEL I got it on Steam a while ago and at first I couldn't play it because of GFWL but when I got a new PC I looked up how to crack GFWL (Hey I paid for it they're the assholes that sold me a defective product) and now it won't even run, which sucks because in my old PC I could play it's just that GFWL didn't let me save.

But anyway I was just saying that because yo mentioned that game, but even then some more popular games don't work properly either, for example GTAIV doesn't let me adjust the graphics, it just locks itself on the minimum and doesn't let me modify them which is annoying and I won't play it because of that, it also has annoying DRM that I have no idea how it works, it's called SecuROM or something.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

... the only way to run yesterday's games is to own yesterday's hardware.

I never got this attitude from PC gamers, as if consoles turned into dust whenever a new generation comes along.
Dude, man, Shamus: my PS2 works fine.

Unless you don't touch your console again, in 25 years wear and tear will get the better of it.

Seriously, you know that your PS2 wont last forever, I rather know that any computer, now or in the future, can run a PS2 game using an emulator.

My Xbox worked fine untill 2 years ago, now there are plenty of games that I cant play.

That's true of any machine.

 

[Kae]

... the only way to run yesterday's games is to own yesterday's hardware.

I never got this attitude from PC gamers, as if consoles turned into dust whenever a new generation comes along.
Dude, man, Shamus: my PS2 works fine.

I used to think that way but then my GameCube and my PS1 died, N64 is still kicking though but it's kinda hard getting it to work, never does in the first try, anyway all of the old consoles will stop working eventually and CDs and DVDs won't last forever, so even owning the old hardware isn't much of a solution not to mention that hardware takes space and that's something that not everyone has.

 

[josemlopes]

... the only way to run yesterday's games is to own yesterday's hardware.

I never got this attitude from PC gamers, as if consoles turned into dust whenever a new generation comes along.
Dude, man, Shamus: my PS2 works fine.

Unless you don't touch your console again, in 25 years wear and tear will get the better of it.

Seriously, you know that your PS2 wont last forever, I rather know that any computer, now or in the future, can run a PS2 game using an emulator.

My Xbox worked fine untill 2 years ago, now there are plenty of games that I cant play.

That's true of any machine.

Unless you make it already thinking about the future and have the proper documentation available. Its hard to emulate the Xbox because of that while the PS2 is much easier (there is also the fact that there isnt much interest from people to have the Xbox emulated but the documentation available is also much less so its kind of pointless).

There can be some effort to keep them available one way or the other instead of not giving a fuck and locking it to one system forever.
The PC certainly has a much longer longevity even if eventually things can change to something else.

 

[Magmarock]

I've been building computers for years. Recently started to get into Linux and have been using emulators both high level and low level for years too. I simply can not agree with this except the part about consoles. Backwards compatibility has only gotten better. You don't need an XP box. Hell you can do this now with a virtual machine. (I've got run that will run Windows 98)

Old games have a much more sturdy future then the new ones in all honesty. Once a game works for Direct X it stays working most of the time. I suspect that in the future Direct X will either be replaced by something different or will be sold by Microsoft as a separate toll that other operating systems can use. Think of it like Unreal Engine.

 

[remnant_phoenix]

Why There Is No Future For Old Games

The games we played years ago on PC don't age very well, and Shamus explains why it is getting harder and harder to play old games.

Read Full Article

You mentioned Jade Empire and Thief Deadly Shadows. I actually scooped up those games for $6 each after someone gave me an original Xbox that was sitting in their closet collecting dust. I never played them before, and I'm glad I have a chance to play them now.

 

[Kargathia]

What about preservation of source codes? Note: I know nothing about programming and all my guesses about source codes are based on my own interpretation of games with open ones.

If a game has its source code made public, couldn't it be made compatible with modern PCs? I know we cannot guess about how future computers will work and this entirely excludes consoles but as far as preserving old games, couldn't having access to the game's source code allow a small group of people to get many games running again on newer hardware?

If that were possible, we would just need some sort of tyrant to take over the world and make it law that games have to release their source codes after X amount of time. That shouldn't be too hard though.

That essentially is a re-release, and would be running into its own set of issues alongside with the ones named in the article.

There are a whole bunch of problems, but many of them come down to that in order for the source code to -do- anything, you need to compile it. Either you have to find a compiler of roughly the right version - and then deal with all the issues mentioned in the article, or you're rewiring every single part that was deprecated in order for it to work on a more up-to-date compiler.

IF, of course, that family tree of languages hasn't died out along the way. C and its offshoots are pretty old. They'll be good to go for quite a few more years, but there really is no guarantee whatsoever that they won't have faded to obscurity in 10-15 years.

And that's only talking under the hood. Graphically speaking you're dealing with all this, and then some, as many of the graphical gimmicks in use to day will die off in the years to come.
You can be reasonably certain that programmers in 20 years will still be using if and while statements, but things like anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, LoD? They'll be gone as soon as the problem can be solved by just blasting raw processing power at the problem.

 

[Frezzato]

If you're a hobby programmer just trying to preserve old games for purely historical reasons, you are now a criminal.

Arrrh! SNESFun, anyone? Arrh...

...ma-tey.

I do not condone illegal activities, ye scallywags.


...Arrrrh. Seriously t' be an entire website full o' ye old timey SNES retro games. Shoorley if t'were il'eegal t'woulda been taken down by now eh? Arrrh.

 

[Evil Smurf]

I still have those 90's vidja gaems on CD, now all I need is a PC with a disk drive