The preservation of video games in every way is more complicated than one can imagine. From the maintenance that cartridges must receive to what companies do to preserve their own works. Earlier this year, Tim Cain, lead of the original Fallout, lamented the preservation of games, and even how the source code of the original title was almost lost, and in a new video, he talks about these kinds of responsibilities.
The responsibility of preservation
In a recent video, Cain exposes a frustrating reality: video game companies are constantly losing old development material, and to top it off, hindering their own employees’ efforts to preserve this valuable information. “If you take the authority to keep these things and tell other people not to, and they have no right to, then you also have to take the responsibility to keep them,” Cain says. “It just kind of makes me mad when repeatedly companies, and especially people high up at companies, take authority but not responsibility. People say, ‘why didn’t you keep a copy of it?’ When you’re being threatened with a lawsuit, you delete it.”
Cain lost the source code for many of his early games, but after his experience with Fallout, he made an effort to preserve the development materials for future projects. This includes titles like Arcanum and The Temple of Elemental Evil, all developed at Troika Games, the studio he co-founded with other Fallout veterans. However, having that material doesn’t mean he can make it public. “We can’t give it out,” Cain says of Troika’s code. “I’ve already talked about that. I don’t own it for the sense of being able to put it out as open source, but I owned it in terms of, this is my code, I can reuse it in other games if I want. The two publishers in this case, Sierra and Atari, they owned it only for use in that one game. Not even a remake.”
Throughout the video, Cain highlights how much development material has been lost over time – from source code to original production notes. Hard drives fail, documents are misplaced in moves, and physical digital media files can quickly deteriorate.
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