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school video games are in danger

1:00

of mass extinction. From

1:03

American Public Media, this is Marketplace

1:05

Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

1:16

For the most part, it's not too hard

1:18

to get access to movies from the

1:20

last decade or even the last century.

1:24

But if you want to experience a video game from

1:26

before, say, the ancient history

1:28

of 2010, good luck. A

1:31

new report from the Video Game History Foundation

1:34

and Software Preservation Network finds 87

1:37

percent of those older games are

1:39

what they call critically endangered,

1:42

meaning they're not commercially available

1:44

to the public unless

1:46

someone's got dozens of different

1:48

old systems or wants

1:50

to travel to an archive in person

1:53

and play it there. Which means the

1:55

roots of this hugely influential

1:58

artistic and cultural music...

1:59

medium, or in danger of being lost,

2:02

says Phil Salvador. He's the library

2:05

director for the Video Game History Foundation.

2:08

Video games for a long time had been treated

2:10

as being sort of toys or being treated

2:13

disposably. You see this happened with other

2:15

mediums as well. It happened with early

2:17

film, how films would just kind of get

2:19

thrown out once they were used. The video

2:21

game industry never really had this notion of

2:24

we're going to resell these games 20

2:26

years later. So there's a combination

2:28

of long term rights issues that just

2:30

kind of weren't hammered out back then licensing

2:33

issues. If you're making, like, you know, let's say a game

2:35

based on a Marvel comic, you know, that's kind of a thing

2:37

you have to hammer out long term, but also

2:39

a lot of technical issues where, you know,

2:41

you can't just automatically put an

2:44

older game on a new platform. It's kind of a complicated,

2:47

expensive process that only just now is starting to

2:49

get a little more manageable. And we're

2:51

kind of feeling the effects of

2:53

that now in terms of their availability. In

2:56

your report, you sort of translate this

2:58

into another context that I think

3:00

really brings it home. You know, what would be

3:02

a similar scenario if we're talking about

3:05

films or movies? What would this look like?

3:07

Well, our founder, Frank Sifaldi,

3:09

at the Video Game History Foundation, raised a really

3:11

good comparison point where he looked at video

3:14

games from the 80s versus movies from the 80s. And

3:16

it's kind of bizarre that you can get most

3:18

of the top selling, you know, cop grossing

3:20

movies from the 80s through Amazon

3:22

or DVD copy or what have you. But

3:25

when it comes to video games, most of those still

3:27

tend to be inaccessible. Our point of

3:29

comparison in the study was that the

3:31

availability rate for these classic

3:33

video games kind of falls somewhere

3:35

around pre-World War II

3:38

audio recordings and and the

3:40

survival rate of American silent films.

3:42

Obviously, for games, you know, they're not completely

3:45

gone. You can still track down one of these, you know,

3:47

used copies. But it's a case where it's like

3:49

we shouldn't be talking about these numbers in the same

3:51

context, you know, mediums that are over

3:53

a century old versus things that came out 30

3:56

years ago.

3:57

Downloading games digitally.

4:00

has sort of become the norm in

4:02

the industry in recent years. I mean, how has this

4:05

trend contributed to

4:07

this issue that you're talking about? Well,

4:08

on the one hand, it's been positive in the

4:11

sense that it's easier,

4:11

I should say, to re-release

4:13

games than it ever has been before. You

4:16

don't have to remanufacture cartridges or CDs.

4:18

But the downside is that, you know, digital distribution

4:21

is inherently volatile. At some

4:23

point, these stores will shut down. At some point,

4:25

this isn't going to be available. And we're already

4:27

seeing signs for some older generations of game

4:30

consoles, like the Xbox 360, that

4:32

the stores are going to shut down sometime in the near future.

4:35

And that's going to represent, we've been

4:37

saying, a mass extinction event for a lot of these

4:39

games. There was a recent example where

4:42

Nintendo shut down their old e-shops

4:44

for the Nintendo 3DS and Wii

4:46

U consoles. And it was estimated that

4:49

about 1,000 games that were

4:51

unique to those platforms were taken out of circulation.

4:53

So you can't even go to eBay and get

4:55

the used copies of those anymore.

4:57

What is the role of

4:59

public policy, like copyright law

5:02

here? Well, copyright law, we

5:04

like to say, was not designed with video games

5:06

in mind. There was the Digital

5:08

Millennium Copyright Act passed over 20 years

5:11

ago that made an attempt at modernizing copyright

5:13

law to deal with things like digital

5:16

copies, with digital rights management,

5:18

which, you know, preventing tampering with

5:20

or copying games, that kind of technology. But

5:23

I don't think they were designed with something like game preservation

5:25

in mind. So we end up in scenarios where

5:28

the kind of preservation activities

5:30

that libraries and archives can do around

5:32

other mediums, it's harder to do that

5:34

for video games. I think we live in a world

5:36

where, you know, you could scan

5:38

pages of a book and make them available to researchers.

5:41

Doing that for games, there's just various

5:44

copyright obstacles we still need to work

5:46

around to do that sort of thing.

5:47

And what has the role of the

5:50

actual video game industry been

5:52

in this? Well, very broadly

5:54

speaking, the video game industry has supported the

5:56

idea of game preservation. But when

5:58

it comes to copyright reform,

5:59

consistently we've received

6:02

pushback from the video game industry and its lobbying

6:04

groups for even modest changes to copyright

6:06

law to make it easier for libraries to do their jobs.

6:09

These groups have raised concerns that I think aren't

6:11

unreasonable that if libraries were

6:14

able to expand access to their collection, they've

6:16

kind of had this specter of, you know, online

6:18

digital arcades they've been referring to that, you know,

6:21

we would be effectively competing with

6:23

the video game industry.

6:25

The reason we did the study

6:26

was to show that we're not talking about

6:28

the same thing here. The industry is concerned

6:30

with this 13% of games that

6:32

are still in print that they've decided are

6:35

commercially viable still. I'm not worried

6:37

about a world where, you know, Mario or

6:39

Sonic or Final Fantasy aren't

6:41

available anymore. What we're worried about is that

6:43

other 87% of games that the industry

6:46

can't or won't get to. You know,

6:48

if the only option to get those is spending

6:51

hundreds of dollars or piracy, we have

6:53

to look at, okay, what other options could

6:55

be on the table?

6:56

What can we do to make it easier

6:58

for libraries and archives to do their job sharing

7:00

this with the people who need it? So what kinds

7:02

of solutions does your organization

7:04

recommend to address this? The one that's been

7:07

on the table recently is the idea of remote

7:09

digital access. There's technology called emulation

7:12

that lets us effectively mimic

7:14

how old game systems work on modern

7:16

platforms. There's ways we can provide that access

7:18

in a secure, responsible manner. But

7:20

it's been difficult to get the exemption

7:23

we need in the digital millennium, a copyright

7:25

act to make that happen. Because the game industry

7:27

raised these concerns about, you know,

7:29

whether this is going to impact their bottom line.

7:32

So again, that's why we dug into these statistics.

7:35

It's like rather than arguing anecdotes about,

7:37

you know, these games aren't available,

7:39

these ones aren't, we have hard data

7:41

now to say like, this, these are the games

7:43

we are actually concerned about, we're not, you

7:45

know, this isn't going to impact what

7:47

the game industry is doing. And if anything, our

7:49

efforts are complementing each other.

7:53

What's really at stake here?

7:55

What do we lose if we lose

7:57

these older games?

8:01

I think this is timely what we're seeing

8:03

happening in the digital media landscape right now,

8:05

where titles are being removed from services.

8:08

You see things like Turner Classic Movies

8:11

facing this existential threat

8:13

as Warner Bros. is cutting costs. There's

8:16

a concern about the same thing happening to video games.

8:18

We're worried about a world where the historical

8:20

record for games is only what's

8:22

immediately commercially accessible. Video

8:25

games like any other medium like music

8:27

or movies or books, it's a medium

8:30

of creative expression.

8:31

To understand the history of it, we

8:33

want to have access to the broad

8:36

spectrum of what video games means. One

8:38

of the really concerning things we found in our study

8:41

is for the oldest video games, and

8:43

we're talking games pre-1985,

8:46

we sort of compared that to being like the silent film

8:48

era of video games, because that was when we were

8:51

establishing the language of what video games

8:53

are. Where we were kind of working out what this medium is.

8:55

Less than 3% of those games are

8:57

still commercially available. And

8:59

there's a good reason that's the case. I mean, a lot of these games

9:02

are kind of archaic. They're not the most exciting

9:04

things to resell, but it's like that's kind

9:07

of the roots of this industry. And if we want to understand

9:10

how game design evolved and where this medium

9:12

came from, we need access to that stuff,

9:14

even if it's not commercially viable.

9:17

Right. And in the film context, there

9:19

are plenty of films that sort of serve

9:21

as cultural artifacts that probably

9:24

aren't going to go into the criterion collection, but

9:26

are kind of cool to have access to.

9:28

Exactly. But they've had

9:30

a huge influence on filmmakers

9:32

and kind of developing their sensibilities. We

9:34

think about games that, yeah, might not necessarily

9:36

have been the biggest titles, but still have something

9:39

interesting you can learn from them or some unusual

9:41

perspective, because there's, again,

9:43

the sorts of rights issues or technical

9:46

issues or just the industry deciding it's

9:48

not something they can really make money off of. That

9:50

shouldn't be the deciding factor for whether they're

9:53

still available for people who want to study them.

9:55

Phil, can you give me some examples of

9:57

the type of games we might be losing?

9:59

There's a very fascinating

10:02

game which I don't think was actually released

10:04

in the United States, but is a great example of

10:06

the kind of stuff we're talking about here. It

10:08

was a game from the 1980s for

10:11

older computers like the Amiga computer. It

10:13

was a game called Freedom Rebels in

10:15

the Darkness, which depicted a slave

10:18

revolt in the French Caribbean in the 1800s. It

10:20

is an incendiary game. It is

10:23

still shocking today that this game exists, and especially

10:25

that it was made during this earlier period of

10:27

the game industry. There was a case

10:29

even before I worked for the Video Game History Foundation

10:32

where I was talking with a scholar who was studying

10:35

depictions of slave revolt in media,

10:38

and they wanted to play this game. And

10:40

our solution was, all right, well,

10:42

here's how to pirate this video game because

10:44

you can't get copies of it anymore, and here's

10:46

how to set up this cumbersome

10:49

software to mimic how to

10:51

run an Amiga on a modern computer, and

10:53

there's no real troubleshooting for this. We had

10:55

the technology to make this easier

10:58

for folks to access if they're trying to research

11:00

it, but because of some of the burdensome

11:02

restrictions that still exist in copyright, libraries

11:05

and archives are having trouble doing

11:07

their job

11:08

getting these sorts of games more widely accessible.

11:11

Phil

11:12

Salvador at the Video Game History

11:14

Foundation.

11:21

You can check out the full report from the

11:23

Video Game History Foundation at

11:26

our website, MarketplaceTech.org. It's

11:28

been a big week in the world of video games.

11:31

On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled Microsoft

11:34

could move ahead with its nearly $69 billion

11:38

acquisition of gaming giant Activision

11:40

Blizzard, denying an attempt by

11:43

the Federal Trade Commission to delay the

11:45

deal on the grounds it was anti-competitive.

11:48

The HBO adaptation of the video

11:50

game The Last of Us snagged two

11:53

dozen Emmy nominations, including

11:55

a nod for Best Drama Series. It's

11:58

the first live-action video game adaptation. adaptation

12:00

to make such a splash at an awards

12:03

show. And over on Marketplace

12:05

Morning Report, my colleague David Brancaccio

12:08

and his team released a special series,

12:10

Skin in the Game, which explores

12:13

how young and upcoming developers from

12:15

underprivileged backgrounds are

12:18

getting into the game industry and reflecting

12:20

their personal stories and their work. You

12:23

can watch Skin in the Game now on YouTube

12:26

or listen at Marketplace.org. To

12:29

help Daniel Shin produce this

12:29

episode, I'm Megan McCurdy-Corino, and

12:32

that's Marketplace Tech.

12:38

This is APM. Money is

12:40

essential, but there's so much we

12:42

aren't taught about it. In fact,

12:44

while I was in college, I racked

12:47

up $20,000 in credit card debt on top

12:49

of my student loan. That was all

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before I actually learned anything about

12:54

money. I'm Janely Espinal,

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and on my new podcast, Financially

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Inclined from Marketplace, I'll

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