If something important seems to be missing in my form, please send me a direct message! I am trying my best to also work on my university assignments related to this!
Google Form - Video Game Preservation
Responding the form before reading any further in this post is recommended!
I have been doing some research around this topic after the Video Game History Foundation has spoken that "87% of classic games (before 2010s) are not in release, and are considered critically endangered"
What is worse, is that The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is refusing efforts allow remote access to these old games for research and learning purposes, just like a historian would do research of events by reading and viewing any historic materials, the restrictions to access of different media because of convoluted copyright laws are a real world problem!
Availability of Video Games (originally released before 2010) is approximately 13 percent, slightly above pre-World War II audio recordings (10 percent or less) and below the survival rate of American silent films (14 percent). You would think they would take more effort but no, high revenue and profits doesn't equal to better services.
Source: https://gamehistory.org/87percent/
And then there is another can of worms like ROMs, Emulation, Recompilation and internet piracy.
I have also created a signal group if you are interested on any news related to my project.
Based off this I'd imagine it might involve backing up the game's release announcement and some sale pages with its description online, proof the game existed, before the page gets changed because the game is no longer the hottest and newest thing or stores are no longer selling the game?
I get the feeling you know more about this topic than I do and probably have strong opinions about it.
Thanks for the namedrops of where to find articles, and what I assume are people who make long-form videos on video games!
Actually, Illusory Wall's "How was the Dark Souls DLC Discovered?" video is probably the best example of what preservation of games actually IS and why "I can't play that SNES" has little to do with it.
At a high level: Dark Souls 1 was notorious for how incredibly convoluted and stupid the path to the DLC is. It involves killing a boss, reloading the area, talking to an NPC at the back of a cave you might not even see, reloading, killing a DIFFERENT enemy in a completely unrelated spot in the world, reloading, and then going back to that original spot.
And there is over a decae of discussion on how people even found that and lots of nonsense theories. And IW actually searched through a mixture of blog posts, press releases, youtube videos, and even message boards to paint a picture of what actually happened. And... it is very very different.
A friend (who actually IS a curator) watched that and immediately compared it to the idea that guns are why the concept of an armored knight went away. At a very high level... it isn't wrong. But people assume it has to do with penetration and ignore that we were sending folk into battle in what was basically plate armor all the way up to WW1 (and there are very good arguments that a modern plate carrier isn't that far off from what a conquistador would wear).
I may have lost the plot here.
What is the "what actually happened" that is different? You do not need to explain the entire story to me, what I mean is what is this "what actually happened" concerning? Is it about how people found how to unlock the DLC? Were you commenting a commonly-believed DLC unlock path in your second paragraph but it is actually something different?
And for how this ties back to game preservation… would this be preservation of video game history?
Thanks for your replies, by the way