Preservation Through Piracy: The Case for Emulation
Try to imagine a future where all movies are released only once; in the theater and never again. The entire experience exists for those few fortunate enough to witness it when it came out and will soon become nothing but a dying memory. No video stores, no Blu-Ray re-releases, and no streaming services to buy from or watch at your convenience. The impact these movies would have had on our culture is now reduced to nothing.
Most people today would feel a sense of unease at such a prospect. Even now the idea of ‘lost movies’ brings a depressing realization that, at some point, a piece of entertainment someone worked hard on would be completely forgotten or otherwise inaccessible by people today, including people who would have wanted to see it. People go through extraordinary efforts to ensure that media is properly preserved for future generations. The United States Library of Congress selects certain movies to preserve based on being ‘culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. Many of us understand this initiative because we don’t want media to be lost forever.
Even if this idea seems far-fetched today, many people would be surprised to learn this hypothetical is ongoing today — not with movies, but with video games. Within the last month of the publication of this article, the video game publishing company Nintendo announced the shutdown of the eShop for the Nintendo Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS, effectively making it impossible to retrieve many games that are permanently tied to the online store through legal means. This isn’t new. Last year, their competitor, Sony, announced plans to shut down the online game stores for their PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita systems, also rendering hundreds of games inaccessible through conventional means.
All of this begs the question — why are game companies so bad at preserving games? And why is it necessary to preserve games anyway? And more importantly, what is the solution to the loss of all these games? How can they be preserved when the very publishers don’t want to do it? The only answer they have left their customers with is online piracy. Yet, the biggest force against these unorthodox preservation efforts has been the publishing companies themselves. Unless companies like Nintendo and Sony step up preservation efforts of classic games, online piracy will continue as a necessity for the preservation and accessibility of old games to ensure their survival for future generations.
The Case for Preservation
Preservation is important because media is the cornerstone of culture. Our society not only produces media for fun but self-analysis. In a certain way, this is an obvious point. There is a reason why art museums exist today to present some of the greatest pieces of art ever created. We preserve art hundreds of years old because of the impact it has had on society and culture, and the impact it continues to have. The discussion they generate, the feelings they evoke, the lessons that they teach, and the inspiration they give. All of this is why we seek to preserve all forms of media, from writings of the ancient world to paintings of even obscure painters, and mundane recordings from over one hundred years ago.
Video games in particular deserve to be preserved for the same reason. Video games are art and are no less significant because of how recent they are in comparison with books or movies. Therefore they deserve to be preserved all the same. That said, video games are not prioritized nearly as much to be preserved. The reason is not as simple as people simply unwilling to preserve them, video games are just different.
Why are Games Not Preserved?
Video games are, by design, tied to specific hardware and software limitations. They cannot exist in any other format, at least not without serious and expensive modifications. While movies can be re-released in a variety of formats and electronic devices, video games are made for a specific hardware architecture, or architecture very similar. This makes them different from any form of art ever created.
Furthermore, the justification given by the publishers themselves refers to how it becomes increasingly difficult to support old systems as they want to push new ones over time. The PlayStation 3 is turning 16 years old. The Nintendo Wii U and Nintendo 3DS are turning 11 and 10 years old respectively. Supporting their software and hardware costs a lot of money they would rather spend on current hardware like the PlayStation 4 and 5.
While it’s true that maintaining old architecture is costly, they have yet to expand on plans to preserve games that will become inaccessible with the closing of these stores Nintendo had previously had a section in their FAQ about whether or not they have a responsibility to preserve their older games upon the announcement of the closing of the eShop. Sony was silent about this, seemingly informing that they had hoped people would forget about their old games.
It is because of these difficulties that piracy is so popular today. To clarify, piracy is the act of selling unauthorized copies of an IP. In this case, it involves removing the ROM (read-only memory, the software of a game disk or cartridge that contains the game data) from the disk, making digital copies on the computer, and giving them to other people. Emulation is the act of using an emulator, a piece of software that emulates a video game console, and using it to play these ROMs for free.
Piracy is a very difficult topic because of the number of ethical nuances that exist. Like many things, piracy has positive and negative aspects. In this case, piracy is an excellent way to ensure both the preservation of games and accessibility are possible. One without the other is inadequate, for there would be no purpose in preserving film if no one could see it.
How Games Have Been Preserved (by Emulation)
Because of the uniqueness of video games being tied to the technology they were built for, they required unique methods of preservation. Books for instance could easily be scanned, page-by-page, and released on the Internet for free and seen from any device that has a screen from a small phone to a laptop computer. DVDs can be played on virtually any DVD player, even if it breaks down; another will do just fine, especially since they are cheap to obtain today.
Video games on the other hand require a lot to work. While many games may be played well on the phone, most games require larger screen devices like a television or a laptop. Furthermore, they require a video game console with a lot of moving parts, controllers, specific input wires, batteries, memory packs, and so much more to even function properly at all. While all of this comes with the console upon purchase, many consoles that are decades old begin to slowly lose these features as time goes on, as batteries die and consoles inevitably begin to rot away forever.
Emulation removes almost all of these limitations by being built for the computer to be able to play virtually any video game ever made. Not just that — but making them even better with modifications, screen hacks, save states, and so many other features that enhance the experience.
Game ROMs are typically hosted on websites called ROM sites and they can be used to download ROMS and play them on emulators for free, with no cost barrier. Emulators are built to work on just about any computer, any operating system, and even phones, thus allowing games to be played almost anywhere at almost any time, solving the problem of being both preserved and accessible.
Preservation and Accessibility
A quick note on accessibility. Accessibility here is used to describe the ability of anyone to be able to play a game without significant legal or technical barriers, such as a large paywall, expensive hardware to purchase, etc. However, it can also be used to describe allowing players with physical disabilities to play games they could not otherwise play on the original hardware.
Emulators, as mentioned above, can be played on virtually any device with a screen, and this includes devices like phones and, yes, even other video game consoles. There have been emulators that can play on other consoles. This is only possible by hacking the console to run such software. With this amount of modification, games can be changed to be made more accessible by mapping to different controllers for users with special needs or allowing users to change brightness/screen settings in case it’s too bright to see or allowing users to use cheats to bypass certain parts of the game too demanding for them. Emulators have opened a world of accessibility to games by being free and allowing extra features that increase a game’s playability beyond the developers originally intended.
No one expects gamers to hold hundreds upon hundreds of consoles, computers, controllers, and more in their houses, especially since they break down with time. Eventually, games will have to be emulated to exist at all, and digital websites can store thousands of games for users to use at their convenience. Thus gaming history has so far been well preserved only by those committed enough.
The Role of Companies to Preserve
Despite all of the advantages of online preservation through piracy and emulation, there has been considerable resistance to shutting down all unofficial emulation efforts by many of these companies, particularly Nintendo, arguably the company with the most games in need of preservation. Nintendo has fought a long battle in destroying or suing people millions of dollars to destroy the preservation efforts of their games. They had previously attempted to destroy video game emulators by declaring them illegal until a court order forced them against it. If this continues, we can expect a large portion of gaming history to be permanently lost forever.
That said, it is worth noting that Nintendo hasn’t done anything about preservation. They have recently chosen to release a dedicated service called Nintendo Switch Online which provides several classic titles playable on their Nintendo Switch hardware that is possible via (in-house) emulation. The only problem is how they have been releasing titles at a snail’s pace and only released around 5–10% of all original titles from their respective consoles. While this grows every day, the vast majority of titles remain lost.
Even worse however is the quality of many of these games released. The fact of the matter is, emulation is an extremely difficult and expensive process. Most of the top-performing Nintendo console emulators like Project64, Dolphin, and more have been in development for decades and still have a lot of work to do. Nintendo’s emulators have received substantial amounts of criticism for being relatively low quality, lacking basic features like enhancements, and featuring major graphical glitches that harm the experience of the original game. Most, if not all, of these problems, are non-existent on unofficial fan emulators.
The Licensing Issues
Arguably an even greater problem lies in the fact that even if Nintendo wanted to release all of its games it still couldn't partly because many games are held back by complicated licensing issues. A notable game is GoldenEye 007, released in 1997 and considered one of the most important games of all time. Because of the licensing, this game will more than likely never be re-released, and therefore games such as this will have to be emulated to exist at all. If the game is never going to be re-released, there will never be profit generation for the companies that made it, which in this case implies there should be no problem with pirating such a game since there is no loss in profit if they never planned on doing anything with it, to begin with.
Even stranger is the fact that many games exist that have been released and remains accessible only in Japan and nowhere else. Multiple games have, for one reason or another, experienced a release in Japan that many Western fans wanted to play but never got the chance to. This brings about an interesting question of whether it’s ethical to pirate a game you don’t even have a chance to buy.
Code of Ethics for Information
In Ethics after the Information Revolution, Luciano Floridi argued that the information revolution was such a dramatic moment in history that, like many moments, implies a rapidly evolving environment where our understanding of ethics has to be reworked to compensate for this new world. As a culture, we agree that preservation is a necessary and even fundamental part of producing art, but it isn’t as simple as putting art in a museum, art that is created through technology can be preserved forever, transcending all other sorts and providing an extreme level of accessibility that’s important for society because appreciating art that moved our ancestors helps us understand our very cultural identities. Our task is to formulate a new ethical framework that addresses the challenges of how digital media can easily be forgotten forever, such as retro games from a bygone era, and it’s not immoral to want them to be played and remembered for what they once were.
Conclusion
In conclusion, preserving media is something all societies must do, but above all companies have a responsibility to preserve their work for future generations to enjoy and witness, and if they cannot, the only option would be for the pirates to continue what they do in the absence of any other means of preserving media. Companies have so far shown they cannot be trusted with releasing their work the best way possible, but fans aren’t limited by budgets or deadlines and will work as hard as possible to make sure these games are released in the best possible way. Unless companies choose to take preservation far more seriously, piracy will be necessary for ensuring both preservation and accessibility is possible for video games.
