Warning: this might get a little rambly in places. Also the above collection of big boxes in the header image is sadly not my collection, although I dearly wish it was – image swiped from http://www.retrocollect.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8408.

I have just taken a week off that’s somehow left me more exhausted than if I’d spent it at work. For once the reasons behind this are pretty obvious: instead of spending my free time zoning out in front of my computer – whether it be playing games or watching Netflix — I actually had a couple of concrete hobby projects to be getting on with. The first of these involved building a Hadoop cluster out of five Raspberry Pis (beware data engineer-types with an overabundance of free time and spare cash) and was suitably gruelling¹; I might even write something about it on here if I can both get my thoughts in order and deem them sufficiently interesting. It’s the second project I want to spend a little time talking about today, though, since it involved culling certain segments of my childhood and got me thinking once again about the slow, creeping obsolescence that eventually overtakes all PC games.

I’ve built up quite the collection of stuff over the two decades I’ve been a serious gamer. No more so than most people who have taken up a hobby for that period of time, I’m sure, but the difference is that, like a particularly compulsive magpie, I usually can’t stand to get rid of any of it. This is why I still have an ancient CRT television, amongst other things; it’s old enough to have SCART and aerial inputs and so still works with my array of old consoles. Unfortunately the amount of stuff I owned had comfortably outstripped the amount of storage space available for some years, and so I decided to trek back to the family home over the latter half of the week and have a long overdue clearout of the more obsolete items in the collection.

When it comes to consoles, though, nothing is truly obsolete. As long as the machine turns on and you can find something that’ll display the image both they and the games that run on them will run perfectly, even if they’re decades old. I ummed and aahed over my Playstation and N64, wondering whether it was really worth keeping them around when I haven’t played them in probably seven or eight years, but ultimately the utility argument won out: they still work, and there’s some part of me recoils at getting rid of things that are still in full working order.

The same cannot be said of my PC game collection, however.

Now, this might have gone differently if I still owned a significant number of the ‘90s-style big box PC games. If nothing else those things usually came with hefty manuals, and I really really like hefty manuals. Sadly a temporary loss of sanity about ten years back meant that while I still have most of the manuals I no longer have the boxes, and so most of the collection consists of CD jewel cases and the newer style of DVD box². These I have no problem whatsoever getting rid of if there’s a good reason.

And it has to be said, looking through the collection, I found a *lot* of good reasons. Games tossed onto the funeral pyre include:

• Games that once worked, but which I now knew to be completely incompatible with modern systems.  The Thief games are good examples of this; I think the GOG rereleases have been touched up so that they work, but the disc copies I owned were utterly useless.

• Games that didn’t even work when I bought them. I have no idea why the hell Evolva refused to boot on a perfectly good Windows XP system, but it did. Guess it had some bad code that made it particularly susceptible to the gradual entropy that claims all physical copies of PC games. That I was still hanging onto it despite this is a good sign of how just how hoard-y I’d become.

• Games that I’ve since acquired through digital distribution. This turned out to be a surprisingly long list; it’s not like I’ve gone out of my way to rebuy things that I already own, but there’s a lot to be said for the convenience of a service like GOG, especially since GOG copies have a significantly higher chance of actually running on a modern machine.

• Nearly every single copy of a PC game bought post-2010, which is roughly the point where Steam/Origin integration became standard. I used to labour under the constraints of capped internet, which meant it was always useful to cut down on bandwidth usage by buying a copy of a Steam game on physical media. (Also physical copies were — and often still are — cheaper.) Now, of course, that physical media is totally redundant.

I ended up getting rid of roughly half the collection for the above reasons – a good 40-50 titles. When you compare that to the number of Playstation, N64, Xbox and Gamecube games I spiked (zero, zero, zero and zero respectively) it’s a particularly telling sign of both PC gaming’s biggest weakness and its biggest strength.

The PC is unique amongst gaming formats. The average lifetime of a console generation is around 5-7 years. The average lifetime of a gaming PC is far shorter; even a machine that is bought while it is at the cutting edge of technology will start to seriously struggle with new releases within a half-decade. On the flipside PCs are flexible enough to upgrade, and unless you’re doing a big component like the graphics card the upgrades are even reasonably priced, which leads to a culture of incremental improvements to a gaming machine that ends up being a smooshed-together combination of the old and the new. My GTX 970 shares the same case as the 500GB hard drive I bought eight years ago and which I now use for bulk storage; the case itself is the same ATX-standard one I bought all the way back in 2003. Since a partial upgrade is comparatively cheap it’s extremely rare that I purchase a whole new machine³, and even then the old machines tend not to stick around for too long, instead inevitably being scavenged for parts to augment or fix PCs belonging to friends and family.

Long story short, I still have all of the consoles I’ve bought over the last two decades but I have none of the PCs, and because the technology used to run PC games isn’t trapped in amber like it is for the consoles this gradual upgrade process can also be viewed as an encroaching erosion of the bedrock on which older games stand. The PC is a living, evolving platform, which means that sooner or later I’m going to replace something — usually the OS, but it can also be something as fundamental as a media format since these days a lot of new PCs don’t even bother with the optical media drive, preferring to do everything via USB and the internet — that causes one or more of my precious collection of games to become extinct. And once that happens, well, that version of the game pretty much gone for good barring the ruinous expense of recreating an old system exactly as it was at the time of the game’s release.  No other format has this problem – and while it’s lessened over the years thanks to increasingly standardised programming libraries I don’t think it’s going to go away. Steam will still be around in fifteen years barring some horrifying financial catastrophe for Valve, but I strongly suspect that many of the new games it’s selling now will have trouble running on whatever the PC has evolved into by then.

Still, if this is an issue that’s caused by the sheer flexibility of the PC platform, it’s that very flexibility that allows for a solution. For example, DOSbox has been around for so long now that we take it a little for granted; the first few versions were a little rocky, but it quickly became the best way to play all of those old DOS games even when you were using a copy of Windows that still had access to the old MS-DOS prompt, since it circumvented all of the awful DOS hardware configuration that people prefer not to remember⁴. It’d be literally impossible to play any DOS-based game without it as DOS hasn’t been part of the Windows architecture for decades now — that’s a category that includes nearly every single PC game coded before 1995, and quite a few that were released afterwards. DOSbox does a lot of heavy lifting, and is so convenient that it’s been baked into every digital rerelease of those games on GOG and Steam.

Which brings me not-so-neatly onto GOG itself. GOG plays a very important role where older PC games are concerned, and it’s one that goes somewhat deeper than the simple fact that they sell them. GOG are a catalyst for two things:

• They go to the trouble of resolving all those gnarly licensing issues preventing the sale of the game and (usually) provide updated copies of games that have a much higher chance of actually running on a modern system. A lot of the time this just involves packaging it inside a DOSBox wrapper, as above, but recently they’ve started to do rereleases of early Windows-era games that historically have been extremely awkward customers as far as making them play nice with Windows 7 / 8 is concerned.

• That latter initiative enables – and is enabled by – the existence of studios like Night Dive who specialise in resurrecting hitherto dead PC games. DOSbox is fantastic for everything pre-1995, but for a lot of games released into the no-man’s land of Windows 95 the only way to make a working copy is to get somebody like Night Dive involved. It’s a non-trivial piece of work to port something like System Shock 2, and not something you’d do if you weren’t sure of a market in which you could sell the resulting product. GOG provide that market.

So you can forget their noble anti-DRM stance and their gradual attempts to metamorphose into a serious competitor to Steam⁵; for my money by far the most valuable service GOG provides is that they simply exist as a place in which increasingly-large swathes of PC gaming history are being preserved. Without them we’d still be stuck in the morally-grey world of abandonware and homebrewed hacks – and as somebody who experienced that world first-hand, I can confidently say that GOG’s service is so much better.

As good as GOG is, though, it still has some way to go. Just as interesting as the games I got rid of during my cull were the games I elected to keep. A good number of these were because of personal sentiment⁶, but there was a sizeable subset that were saved from the purge for one simple reason: while the code may or may not run on a modern system, they still represented the only possible legal way I was going to be able to play the game in question for the foreseeable future. There are sizeable holes in GOG’s catalogue, and they crop up in some rather unexpected places. For example, I can take a pretty good guess as to why, while you can totally buy Call to Power 2 from GOG if you’re in the mood to experience one of 2000’s more mediocre titles, Call to Power 1 is nowhere to be seen on the site⁷, but I was very surprised to learn that you can’t buy Civilization II on there either. (Or the original Civilization, for that matter.) Another conspicuous omission is Freelancer, which received lukewarm reviews at the time of its release but which has become a well-regarded cult classic in the interim.

Like Freelancer, I also happen to think there are several games in that pile that, while they might not have done too well at the time, would be pretty well-regarded if they were to experience a rerelease on GOG today. Bruce Campbell-fronted Tachyon was otherwise decidedly mediocre no matter which way you look at it, but I think Starlancer would be well-received if people were to come to it in 2015, when the space sim is experiencing a long-overdue resurgence, rather than sinking without trace about six months after the genre suffered a sudden and tragic heart attack with the release of Freespace 2. Abomination was a good, if deeply flawed game, but it too had the misfortune to be released into a period when its putative audience had temporarily lost interest in the XCOM mix of tactical squad strategy and strategic base building. I’ve written about my love for Mechcommander before, and it was even released as freeware several years ago so it’s not like it’s totally unavailable, but you have to jump through several hoops to get it up and running on Windows 7 (god knows what I’ll have to do on Windows 10) and it’d be nice to have a version I can run without the hassle.

So GOG’s service, while good, is more than a little uneven in places. I’m sure that if a big game doesn’t exist on GOG it’s hardly because GOG doesn’t want it there (they’re not allergic to money, after all) and it’s more likely to be because of some arcane licensing issue that the current copyright holder can’t or won’t resolve. The flexibility of the PC platform means that code incompatibility can usually be resolved if you invest enough time and effort, but no amount of reasoning will shift a publisher’s legal department if they don’t want to budge, and it’s this that’s now the biggest blocker towards having complete libraries of functioning software online. It even occasionally claims games that have already cleared that hurdle; the older Fallout titles were withdrawn from sale on GOG a year or two back after their licensing ran out. It’s not the end of the world where those particular games are concerned as they’re still available on Steam, but it’s a disturbing occurrence that indicates GOG’s solution might not be an altogether permanent one.  Indeed, I don’t know if there *is* a permanent solution; that point I made about Steam’s games being incompatible in fifteen years’ time is also true for anything GOG sells now, and even for DOSBox (if it ever stops being updated, that is). If there’s one immutable law of the universe it’s that entropy always wins, and so while GOG is successfully holding back that tide for now they won’t be able to do it forever. If nothing else, though, being able to get rid of so many of my older games with a clear conscience has given me a new appreciation for just how good things are at the moment when it comes to experiencing previously-lost moments in PC gaming history. I’m going to enjoy it while I can.

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The post Entro-PC appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Shifting paradigms in gaming are hard to see coming, even when they’re already underway. Ideas often crop up ahead of their time before the technology or infrastructure exists to support them; CDs are a good example of this, being used mainly to store awfully digitised voice samples and full-motion video for a good couple of years after their introduction as a storage medium, and it wasn’t until the Playstation that they began to be filled with the art assets required to render 3D games. Graphics cards were another distinct shift in the market, and I can hazily remember after the first 3dfx Voodoo card came out that it was considered unthinkable that one day in the near future PC games would not only make use of them, they’d require them in order to run. And now we have fibre-optic broadband connections and digital distribution making physical media obsolete. If I want to play a certain game from the last 15-odd years of PC gaming history the chances are there’s a digital distribution channel somewhere which will provide me with the goods almost instantly. It’s gotten to the point where buying a game that comes on a disc inside a box feels distinctly dated.

Similarly, when a paradigm shift is particularly comprehensive it can be difficult to remember what it was like before the new world order took over. I distinctly recall rubbishing Steam as a mainstream distribution channel for non-Valve games back in the winter of 2008 just before their first big Christmas sale event – a point of view that seems unthinkable four years later, but at the time they hadn’t even gotten around to introducing non-dollar currencies for unAmericans. I’m sure I had my reasons, even if the changed gaming landscape makes it impossible to see what those reasons were. When dealing with any current paradigm it is important to keep in mind that It Was Not Always Thus, and also that It Will Not Always Be Thus, no matter how permanent existing power structures may seem.

I’m straying into woolgathering territory here, so I’ll get to the point. The ubiquitous nature of digital content channels and the ease with which games can be acquired quickly and cheaply has been nothing but a boon for me as a player, but I do sometimes wonder how I would have reacted if confronted with this land of gaming plenty ten years ago. Of course, that’s absurd. Ten years ago I had no money. Ten years ago I was still accessing the internet through a 56k dial-up connection. The technology and infrastructure did not yet exist to deliver big games quickly over the internet – hell, I remember complaining about having to download a 150 megabyte mod for Unreal Tournament called Thievery, this taking longer than the two-hour cut-off time imposed by my ISP for dial-up. The having no money thing was also a hefty restriction on my gaming habits. Faced with prehistoric technology, limited funds and an overabundance of free time, necessity forced me to explore other means of getting my jollies: to be specific, it forced me to explore the emulation and abandonware scene, which were the only real way to get games digitally around the turn of the millennium.

A couple of people have commented on how I seem to have an impossible level of experience with games and systems that are either insanely obscure or simply before my time. There are two reasons for this. One is that I’m really old, and I’ve managed to cram rather a lot of gaming into my time on this planet so far. The other is emulation. Emulators for older systems fulfil a very important function: physical objects tend to succumb to the rigours of time (I have an N64 in a box somewhere that simply stopped working after a couple of years of storage, making the 20-odd game cartridges that go with it rather expensive paperweights) but data stored on the internet has a fairly good chance at existing just as long as human civilization does. While it may be a hoary old line that’s often trotted out to justify out-and-out piracy, I do genuinely believe that emulators and abandonware sites function as videogaming’s museums. Or at least that’s certainly how my experience with them turned out, as my two-year trip through this rather seedy-seeming underbelly gave me some valuable perspective on what talented developers could achieve using technology and resources that were absurdly primitive even back then.

(It also exposed me to some absolute shit, but thankfully I’ve forgotten most of that.)

Of course it wasn’t easy. There was no Good Old Games back then to repackage old games in a form that worked on modern operating systems, and no DOSBox to iron out the kinks in the awful DOS environments that were still provided by the Windows operating systems of the time. Amiga emulation was extra-tricky because you needed an image of the Amiga Kickstart ROM in order to make the emulator work, and this was not something that was easy to find as not only was it a rather niche virtual item, but it was something you’d only legally have access to if you already owned an Amiga. At least console emulation was reasonably straightforward: once you found a decent source for ROM downloads the only other thing you needed was a functioning emulator program, and the emulators for 8/16-bit systems had been pretty comprehensively bug-tested by the time I came along.

As a consequence of this, getting abandonware to run on a modern system could be a rather frustrating experience. It may have been a legal grey area but I can tell you the publishers weren’t losing any money on that deal, as the games wouldn’t have worked out of the box even if they’d still been selling them. Getting them into a playable state often required a great deal of perseverance and/or bloody-mindedness; fortunately if you were the sort of person who went looking for abandonware back then these were qualities you likely had in spades, and the rewards could be incredibly worthwhile.

Take most of Microprose’s output – Darklands, Pirates!, Colonization and so on. I’ve spoken of my deep and abiding love for these games several times, but I never even would have known about some of them if abandonware sites hadn’t pointed me in their direction. Wargames were pretty much dead as a mainstream genre even back then, but thanks to abandonware I got to experience the Panzer General series (I still get this fuckin’ thing stuck in my head from time to time a decade later), and was very surprised to see how much it had influenced later games like Advance Wars.¹ Strategy-wise there was the ambitious and sprawling Emperor of Fading Suns and the classic Master of Magic showing me where Master of Orion got many of its best ideas. The first taste I got of the Marathon series was the abandonware version ofMarathon 2. Even the more mediocre titles often had something valuable to offer; the Crusader games I found hadn’t aged all that well, but they at least introduced me to some kickass music tracks.

Abandonware wasn’t quite the free ride it seemed at first, though. Not only was there the immense hassle of making the games work on modern systems, but they’d often also have hefty portions of the game assets which were deemed superfluous to the functional running of the game – music, videos and so on – stripped out to save on bandwidth. The largest abandonware site at the time was Home of the Underdogs (it still exists, albeit in a crippled form with no downloads available), and pretty much every single game on HotU had something missing from it that sometimes resulted in a rather underwhelming bare-bones experience. The awesomely cheesy heavy metal music was missing from Final Liberation, for example, and I’d go so far as to say the music made that game in the end².

Emulators were a slightly different matter; it was usually easier to get the games running once you found them, but finding them was an unutterable pain the ass unless the system had some devoted fan maintaining a site like Little Green Desktop. ROM sites in particular enjoyed sending you round a loop of referral links that never went anywhere, or else demanded registration on the site and the expenditure of some bizarre form of virtual currency before they’d actually let you download anything. Once I found a site that actually worked I downloaded anything and everything that looked remotely interesting for fear that it’d somehow stop working tomorrow. My time with Amiga and Atari ST emulators was spent on a massive nostalgia trip, but Genesis and SNES emulators taught me two very important things. The first is that unless your name is Sonic the Hedgehog Mega Drive games have aged terribly³. Seriously. They’re really bad.  The second is that most of the good games for the SNES weren’t even released in the UK, being either limited to America (as with Earthbound) or else never leaving Japan. This latter group led to the discovery of a bustling subculture that was producing fan translations of Japanese games and making them available to an audience that never would have played them otherwise. In particular there was a peculiar strain of tactical strategy games such as Front Mission and Fire Emblem that never made it to English-speaking shores, and which were actually really goddamn good.  Good enough that the concept was finally ported over to handhelds in the form of Advance Wars and the GBA version of Fire Emblem, where they’re still thriving today.

(And then there’s Chrono Trigger, which remains by far the best game Square has ever or will ever produce.)

Perspective is a valuable thing to have no matter what your hobbies happen to be. Films, books, board games, running – whatever it is, it’s been my experience that the more comprehensive and wide-ranging my experience with the field, the more I understand it and the more I enjoy it. Abandonware and emulation made a significant contribution towards building the perspective I have of the modern videogame market. Even today I’m often going back to play or replay older games – more often now that GoG exists – and I’m usually quite surprised at the level of sophistication they display, especially since many of these games were stored on just a few floppy disks. Just this last Monday I booted up TIE Fighter for the first time in a decade⁴ and was slightly agog to rediscover that it managed to fit this intro plus the best space combat game ever made into about ten megabytes of disk space. It’s the sort of thing I’d have taken for granted back when games that small were normal, but coming at it from a modern perspective of a “small” game being around about five thousand megabytes it’s astonishing what they managed to accomplish using computers that were dumber than your average modern mobile telephone. It’s the sort of thing that makes me question whether we’ve really progressed quite so far with videogames as a creative medium rather than just retreading the same ground over and over and over with prettier graphics and faster technology.

Of course the TIE Fighters of this world are the exception — it’s a rare game that ages quite as gracefully as it has — and I’m sure modern gaming will produce its fair share of classics that play just as well in twenty years time as TIE Fighter does today, but it’s still useful to have that information. Useful to have the proper context in which to view a modern game. And with GoG bursting onto the scene a few years back it’s easier than ever to get that context for yourself. You should try it. It’s a great learning experience, and who knows? The chances are pretty good you’ll even find something you enjoy, making it a win-win situation either way.

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The post Abandon-What? appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.