Publishers are absolutely terrified "preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes," so the US copyright office has struck down a major effort for game preservation

Imagine if you weren't allowed to watch your favorite movies from the 80's or earlier unless you managed to have a still working VCR and VHS copy from your childhood. No Goonies, no Godfather, no Star Wars original trilogy. They decided to wipe these films from the face of the earth so that you could no longer enjoy them and had to go buy their new movies, exclusively, if you wanted entertainment from a film. That's what games publishers are trying to do, so they don't have to compete for you attention with older classics.

Not The Onion version: "'People might actually have fun': Publishers squash video game preservation movement"

If folks today learned that games existed which could be played offline, had no dlc, no microtransactions, no skinner boxes. And those games were actually fun, clearly the whole industry would collapse lol.

The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of art to enrich society. Making money for copyright holders is a means to an end, not the end itself.

We need a new copyright law that shifts media to public domain if the copyright holder no longer makes it available.

More proof that if they were a new idea, libraries would be fought tooth and nail by book publishers

Patent law is 20 years. Copyright should be no different.

Steal everything that isn't nailed down while you've still got a chance.

preserved games might be used for entertainment

Umm, yeah, that's what a lot of preserved media is used for. You think publishers are losing their shit over people enjoying Shakespeare?

Americans are so obsessed with money, they forgot about actually living.

My dudes. Money is just a means to an end. It is not the end goal. Wake the fuck up.

Damn right that old video games would be used for entertainment. I have old books, which predate me by decades, that I still read. I watch old movies on DVD's. I see no reason why games should be any different.

I'm lucky that ever since I've been a gamer, I had a PC. Hardware is thus not a problem, and in my case, so is emulation, via VirtualBox. I kept the install disks and license keys (if applicable) for all operating systems I've used, so now I have several virtual images I spin up when I want to play a certain game. And I'm finding that I'm still spending most of my time with the older titles...

This will not help anyone who'd like to play their old favorite from the NES or Dreamcast era. And it's too late to advise only buying games that are platform independent. So kerp up the good fight. In the past you purchased games to own, not a "limited license". You are entitled to kerp using your entertainment product as you see fit.

The library shouldn’t preserve books because people might read them.

Video games always used to be an economic way of entertainment. With an amount equal to a restaurant dinner you could be entertained for hundreds of hours.

Nowadays, video games follow the trend of enshitification. Low quality, repeated material, bad gaming experience, data hoarding, the need to be always online even for a single player game and of course, the "you don't own, we can take it away anytime we want" mentality.

According to the court rulling, if you essentially want to play retro games, you should find a way to access the original hardware and run the software in mostly proprietary mediums like cartridges that could be damaged or corrupted. And the reason you can't do it is because you may actually have fun!

This ruling is so bongers it blows my mind.

So you should never, ever ever

Use emulators like Retroarch
Find the ROMs of various systems you like in various "archives" through the interwebs for research purposes ofcourse
Use a frontend like ES-DE or launchbox to make things look beautiful.
Scrape content through screenscraper or something similar to make your frontends even more beautiful. 5.Keep in mind that this combo ( Retroarch + frontend) works in mostly cross platform (windows, Linux, android etc.)

After all, as a researcher you have to be able to tinker a little bit.

Enjoy your research ;)

Fuck this, fuck these guys, and fuck them to hell.

I said this many years ago and I will say it again on here to be brief: Emulation and amateur game preservation by moving them from their original media (such as floppy disks, tapes, CDs, and other physical media) onto newer stuff and be able to move it around better is an act of historical defiance.

You see, throughout history, especially in the past 150 years or so, almost all early iterations of recorded media are just gone. Whether it is cylinder recordings from the late 19th century that preserved human voices, to the first music records, to the first silent film, and even the early talkies. 90% of all silent movies from all over the world are lost. What we have available is only a small sample of what existed. Even 75% of all early sound film from the first half of the 1930s are gone. For non-Western countries the number can be higher. The first ever South Asian language sound film is lost, and practically all films made in Indonesia from 1945 and back are also gone. Have you ever noticed how in terms of music, almost all the Christmas jingles are from the late 40s to 50s? There were a lot made before then, and it isn't just because the newer stuff is more relatable... a lot of the older stuff just doesn't exist anymore.

For TV, the majority of the first broadcasts were never recorded. Even as late as the 1960s some TV stars from Canada will never have their work shown because they were broadcast live and never recorded.

The list goes on and on... except for video games.

For video games that rule was broken. We have early computer adventure games from the 1970s that we can still play, ditto for console games and arcade games. The original Pong and Computer Space are still playable by anyone. The Atari 2600's original game library is almost 100% preserved, with even the destruction of E.T. the video game en masse anyone can play it (I have it on emulation, because every single Atari game ever made so small that they take no space).

All legal attacks on emulation have failed ever since the 90s. Look up the history of MAME to see how hard amateurs have fought to allow us to revisit the classics and allow people for generations to come to see what things were like before they were born.

It feels like companies are worried about people not wanting to play new stuff if they have decades of old stuff available. Just like movies right guys?

Stupid thing is, if they sold it, people would still buy it, even if it was easy to pirate.

TFW when your entire 1000+ game library of roms fits in a tiny corner of storage on my phone

Classic USA

Note that this really only affects researchers/historians who were hoping to have a copyright exemption for controlled digital lending. This would let them virtually borrow a copyrighted retro game ROM file (from an archive such as the Internet Archive) and play it via emulation through the browser. I have actually played a few retro games on IA using their browser emulator and while it is playable it wouldn’t be my first choice.

For retro game enthusiasts who weren’t aware of these browser emulators not much will change. You still have the same exemptions covering abandonware for personal use and for playing multiplayer games where the publisher has shut down the servers. No, you’re not entitled to the publisher helping you run those games but you are protected if your goal is to reverse engineer the game code in order to create your own fan-made server. Several old multiplayer games have open source servers for this!

Also if you’re playing on original hardware then of course you’re still fully in the clear to buy used cartridges, make backups of them, play them all you want. Yes, some rare are super expensive but a lot of that stuff is due to people collecting sealed and graded games which really has nothing to with actually playing games. You’re not going to spend thousands on a sealed game and then crack it open to play it when you could just buy an open copy for far cheaper or even download a ROM for free.

Anyway, yes, these publishers are idiots pushing out crap games we don’t want to play. That’s fine. If their goal was to kill retro gaming to try to force us to buy new games then they’re still a thousand miles away from that!

k I guess everyone will continue to dump roms and make emulators.

Of course they'll be used for "recreational purposes". How do they think museums are supposed to work?

What good is preserving old cultural products if you can't use them the way they were intended? Oh yeah, we've got that old record of a book/piece of music/movie in our archive. No, nobody can access it, it's not fair for people selling newer ones!

games being used for recreational purposes? the horror

Cool. Guess I'll leave you and them in the past.

All the best games are cool about providing software resources to players, mod abilities, self-hosting, so on. It's kind of like the Steam license thing. I love Steam but there's no way I'm starting Helldivers 2 or Destiny 2 up in ten years to play nostalgia. But Shattered Pixel Dungeon? Deep Rock Galactic? Valheim? Minecraft. I'll still be rocking those.

Which is why I bought a ~~16 bit~~ [8 bit] Nintendo system a year ago with Super Mario / Duck Hunt and Tetris .... I also bought a little 14" CRT TV that I can plug in to play everything like I did when I was ten years old.

I spent hours and hours having fun with it back then ... I'm having hours and hours of fun with it now.

Correction: I have an 8bit not a 16bit game system

Just use it for llm training and it'll be OK!

You're not allowed to have fun without paying for the privilege.

Yeah corporations are terrified of you having fun without paying money to them.

When the programmers of these old titles are saying they’d rather have people keep playing them even if they’re only available on archive site, I say screw the publishers.