The video game industry should kneel before the scene ofemulation. It should do it because for years the latter has been doing what no publisher or hardware manufacturer has ever done (apart from what Microsoft tried to do with the backwards compatibility program), that is to make all the video games published since the birth of the medium usable. until today. Not only that, because in addition to video games he has worked to catalog and make accessible all the culture born and raised around the video game: old books, old magazines and so on. Phil Spencer’s words on emulation are beautiful and important, but they miss the point, because they do not consider what has been done so far and relegate the problem to an industrial question. Let’s reread them:
“I believe we should learn from the creative path that has brought us this far. It’s something I love about music, movies and television, and there are good reasons why gaming might follow this trend as well. My hope, or at least I think I have to define it this way at the moment, is that we can work as an industry on a legal emulation, which allows modern hardware to run any executable of the past and therefore allows you to play with any title. I believe that ultimately if we can establish that everyone should be able to buy any game, own any game and have the ability to keep playing it, that could be a great benchmark for the industry.”
To get what Spencer wants it would be enough that most of the old games were declared free, especially those that publishers no longer exploit in any way (there are thousands … tens of thousands). It would also be enough that operations such as that of the collection of the first four Darius, sold for € 40, disappeared to exploit the nostalgic, but which have no hold on modern players, who are immediately rejected by the price. In short, it would be enough to work on the accessibility and status of something that already exists, taking it out of the gray area in which it has always operated, nostalgia market as formed by jerks to be squeezed in every possible way.
Preserving video games is not just about allowing future generations to play them, it allows for the creation of one collective memory that makes the medium in its complexity and stratification, beyond the market trends and the nostalgia conveyed by certain marketing. When it comes to emulation, the mistake that many make is always to think of it in an individualistic way, weighing it as an alternative to modern games. Asking the question whether the games of the past were better than those of the present is simply absurd, because it is impossible to give an answer without taking into account the time gap between the former and the latter. In theory, the games of the past are something that the modern enthusiast can achieve, but they certainly do not represent the alternative to the most recent titles. For the old player, on the other hand, the titles of the past are part of his being in time and what today are seen as limits for him were simply part of the best of the technology of the time. It makes no sense to compare two different times, because to evaluate the experience of the past one would first have to cancel that of the present and relive it as virgins.
Just i technological limits they hold back the discovery of the classics by many of those who have not lived through certain eras. The mistake is to look to the past hoping that those limits did not exist, when in reality an enthusiast should go to their discovery. At that point the hallucinatory interfaces of some old role-playing games would become an interesting curiosity, a document to study, as well as the terrible scrolling of some 2D platformers or the impenetrability of some text adventures. Preserving means tracing the history of the medium, which is made up of a multitude of aspects, not just what was fun then and what can still amuse today, which is actually the most ephemeral aspect of the whole thing.
Preserving means being able to understand how video games were born, who the first developers were, how they came to become such and why some phenomena, now forgotten by the masses, were fundamental to get to today. Preserving means understanding what we have achieved, but also what we have lost. It means looking at the world of video games in the mirror to understand its changes, be they productive, of public, of expectations or whatever. Preserving is, ultimately, a way to make sense of the entire industry, beyond the phenomena of the moment. Perhaps only those who are able to “preserve” in the highest sense of the term can define themselves as a true video game enthusiast, beyond the hours spent playing, because they tend towards complexity.
This is why Spencer’s words, which seem to reduce everything to selling old games to those who want them on any platform, could do more harm than good, because the risk is to create a series A emulation, the commercial one, and one of series B, the one made by fans, with the latter even more marginalized.
Parliamone is a daily opinion column that offers a starting point for discussion around the news of the day, a small editorial written by a member of the editorial team but which is not necessarily representative of the Multiplayer.it editorial line.
#Emulation #industry #realizing #importance #cash #cow
