When I was a wee lad in the early 2000s, I was big into MMOs. World of Warcraft was my family’s game; all of us played it, save my little brother. As much as we loved it, however, we still tried out plenty of other games. Including a little game called City of Heroes.
This game was everything a little kid like me could have asked for. An MMO where you can play either a super hero or villain, with a deep progression system, incredible customization options, and a small but dedicated community of players. I loved it!
And then it was shut down. This amazing experience I put dozens of hours into, gone. Poof. Now nothing more than a memory.
Luckily, I wasn’t the only one unsatisfied with this. People far more knowledgeable and intelligent than myself put this dissatisfaction to work. Private servers began to pop up in order to bring the game back to life.
Then, on January 4th, 2024, a miracle happened. NCSOFT, the original developer and rights holder to City of Heroes, gave the official license to Homecoming, one of the aforementioned private servers. They more or less gave the devs the key to the city and said, “It’s your turn now, kids.” Now not only can you play the game, but you don’t need to fear the original studio taking it down! They’re even adding new content to the game to keep it fresh and exciting!
*By the by, if you want to read more about this or play on the Homecoming server yourself, you can check it out via the link here.
This event was nothing short of a miracle. Fans who loved a property being rewarded for their passion, dedication, and hard work. A once-in-a-lifetime chance as rare and incredible as winning the lottery.
Which just goes to show how poor the current state of video game preservation is.
Like all forms of art, video games are ephemeral. Older games are bound to a limited number of cartridges and CDs, while newer games are bound to servers or online stores. With each passing year, certain games become more and more rare. Some even fall into extinction.
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at some numbers. According to this list on Wikipedia, there were a total of 1396 games released for the NES. Not a number to sneeze at. How many of those games are still around? How many are available via Nintendo’s own online services? A measly 71. Not even a tenth of the original library.
Now, sure, you could argue that most of those games were shovel-ware cash grabs or half-baked garbage. Video games were still in their younger years then; they couldn’t all be winners. Even so, both the good games and the bad hold significance simply because they exist. People worked on them, people played them, and someone somewhere may just have enjoyed them. Now they’re gone.
This same issue plagues just about every game console to ever exist. Especially for consoles that failed financially during their time. For example: the Sega Dreamcast. A console well ahead of its time, the Dreamcast had some pretty good games on it, but the console itself was such a financial failure that Sega never made another one again. Luckily, Sega has ported most of those games to Steam or other hardware, so most of the library is still playable. But not all of them survived the jump; gems such as Power Stone 1 & 2 never made the leap, and are thus unplayable without the original hardware or an emulator.
Don’t even get me started on Marvel VS Capcom 2. One of the greatest fighting games ever made, and the only way you can play it right now is either through piracy or the expensive Arcade 1UP cabinet. It’s still around, so that’s a plus, but its still difficult for a casual fan to get a hold of it.
There are plenty of recent examples, too. A good number of live-service games are no longer playable. Just look at Anthem. Say what you will about other games, like Marvel’s Avengers, but at least that one can still be played for people who might enjoy the story! If you were the one person who liked Anthem, or the devs who slaved away beneath EA’s oppressive shadow, too bad! It’s gone forever and you can never play it again!
And then there’s the greatest tragedy of all: Club Penguin. A gem of my childhood, dead and buried and utterly unplayable. The whole world got a hell of a lot worse when those servers went down, is all I’m saying.
What’s especially sad is that game preservation is so rarely taken seriously. GameStop is infamous for destroying older games because they fear they won’t sell. If you want to know more about that, check out this excellent IGN article written by Josh Smith back in 2014, titled ‘Inside the Secret World of Gamestop Dumpster Diving.’
On a final note, let’s talk about remasters and remakes. If done well, these can be a great way to preserve older games and keep them up to date. A good remaster can bring a classic into the modern eye, and a good remake can bring the original’s magic to a whole new gameplay system.
Say what you will about modern Blizzard – I sure have – but their remasters are (mostly) pretty good! Diablo II Resurrected and Starcraft Remastered are both great preservations of those classic titles, letting you play with either new visuals or the original graphics.
But when they’re bad? They can flat out ruin classic titles.
Cough cough Warcraft III Reforged.
Just look at Konami’s infamous Silent Hill remasters. Those ports not only featured worse graphics and more bugs than the PS2 versions, they also changed the voice acting, a fundamental piece of the original experience. For a long time, those were the most accessible way to play the original Silent Hill games. Now even those are gone; if you want to play Silent Hill 2 at all, you need to either wait for the upcoming remake and hope it’s good or set up the Enhanced Edition mod.
It’s honestly ridiculous how bad things are for preservation in gaming. You know something is wrong when piracy is unironically the best way to preserve these older titles. Like, imagine if the Mona Lisa was only preserved because Blackbeard stole it and made extra gold by selling duplicates! Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, guess what? That’s exactly what is happening right now in the gaming world!
Very few games will ever see the same miracle as City of Heroes. When games die, they stay dead. Countless games, from trash to hidden gems, have been lost forever.
Unfortunately, things don’t look to be improving any time soon. A good number of developers are moving away from releasing physical media entirely, going digital only. Fuck, dude, there’s a version of the PS5 that doesn’t even have a disc drive! What do you think will happen when the digital storefronts go away? We’re already seeing it happen, with Nintendo shutting down the 3DS and Wii U e-shops!
Let me put it like this: Ubisoft wants physical media to go away and for you to never actually own anything you pay for. Does that sound like a world you want to live in? It sure doesn’t to me!
*Source on that: ‘The new Ubisoft+ and getting gamers comfortable with not owning their games‘, by Christopher Dring.
In short: take care of the things you love. Sooner or later, they’ll be gone. Games die just as often as everything else does. Maybe someday the industry will take preservation more seriously. Until then, it’s up to us.
Even if it means hoisting the black flag.
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