He's sperging about Castlevania now.
View attachment 139380
"timelost" What a wordsmith.
I'm going to assume, briefly, that Chimpman here is talking about Game Preservation Initiatives. For the sake of argument, I'm going to point out why Chimpy's screaming about it.
As things stand, games are data. Programming code and hardware implementation. The bulk of a game's data can be preserved just fine with archival data, which means that Emulation works just fine, by and large. For anything else, simply having a functioning copy of the game and the hardware able to play it is sufficient. And lest one think that this means you can't do this anymore because many of these are unavailable, clone consoles exist right now and ROM cartridges are made even today that let you basically play whatever you want however you want, without much finegling needed to make it happen. Arcade Machine reproductions also exist and can be made to order.
You may need a reproduction cart or a more-expensive scratchbuild, but as things stand, you can get whatever game you want on almost any old hardware without problems. More obscure stuff is harder to find but as long as there's classicgamers out there that shit isn't going dark either. Sure,
you haven't ever fucking heard of
Catacomb 3D, but
some asshole has, and damn it, they're going to make it available for you.
This means only two things really pose a challenge for preservation: specific hardware, and virtual world preservation.
The former is more straightforward: A more obscure console with a proprietary format (such as the Vectrex or Virtual Boy) generally can't be emulated effectively, nor can arcade cabinets with more bizarre control schemes, which makes actually getting these into archive harder, but not impossible - these games, ultimately, are still data and if you can get their software into place getting their hardware available is a fucking cinch by modern standards for all but the most weedy of cabinet designs. Yeah, losing the vibrating chair from the Arcade version
Afterburner sort of sucks, but if the game still works the same that's the important part. Other Arcade games, like
Arm Champs or
Sonic Blast Man, which had a history of injuring players probably shouldn't be revived, though they've already been emulated.
It's virtual worlds that are a bit harder to codify. This covers the games that are left to rot when the servers shut down. MMOs which are no longer supported, games like Worlds Exploration which suffered a die-off, even content on Second Life that's been left behind like relics from a lost era. Hell, even Warcraft pre-expansions or the like. This is where the heart and soul of game preservation should lie: backing up and displaying examples of these old works and establishing ways for them to keep living after the servers get the plug pulled. There's entire digital ecosystems out there that deserve to be chronicled and deserve to be looked at. A really good example can actually be seen in a recent Vinesauce Stream.
I bring this up because this isn't the shit Bob cares about. Want to know what this really is about? Keep reading.
If you go to the
University of Michigan's Games Archiving program, something will jump out at you if you start digging through the site: A special section dedicated to preservation "special interest groups" or SIGs - and that this group represents the
International Games Developer Association (IGDA) - I.E. a group with a huge number of ties to Randi Harper and the Usual suspects. Gee, I wonder if Chimpman has any ties t--
Of fucking
course.
Chimpman's a major advocate of their projects, and whilst there is some legit works involved in games archiving, the IGDA's shit includes
things like forced diversity-in-games nonsense.
Don't be fooled by his context.