How do you preserve a video game? Yes, saving a physical, no-internet-required copy and trying to get Lady Justice on your side to force publishers to keep games playable no matter what are all well and good, but how do you really ensure a title can survive long-term and beyond?
That’s the question the GOG team set out to answer, recently pushing video game preservation to the next level by storing the iconic TBS Heroes of Might and Magic III on a 5D crystal – the most durable data storage medium humanity has ever created.
In layman’s terms, 5D optical data storage – also known as Superman memory crystal – is a type of nanostructured glass that allows digital data to be permanently recorded using laser writing. First conceived in the 1990s and demonstrated to be possible in 2009, the technology can create discs capable of storing up to 360 terabytes of data, depending on their size.
Aside from looking much sleeker than your run-of-the-mill CDs, 5D discs can survive extreme temperatures over 1000°C, don’t care about cosmic radiation, are nearly impervious to physical impact, and resist most chemicals. In other words, they’re pretty durable – and if one ends up destroyed, chances are someone went out of their way to make it happen.
Combining the tech with their goal of preserving video games, GOG has etched Heroes III onto one of these discs, demonstrating it in a recent video shared on the GOG Classics Vault YouTube channel. Created in collaboration with SPhotonix, the disc turns the game into “an artifact designed to outlive us all,” and considering those discs can last for billions of years, unless we find a way to leave the Solar System, Heroes III now indeed has a chance to outlast mankind and vanish only when the Sun consumes the Earth in its final days.
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