The Press Box - Ep. 250: 'Achievement Oriented' on Preserving Video Games

Episode Date: February 3, 2017

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion talk to Frank Cifaldi, founder of The Video Game History Foundation, about his desire to salvage old video games (6:10), the difference between porting and emulating (9:35), whether online communities can be recreated (14:00), his greatest discoveries (38:05), his efforts to finish unfinished games (42:15), and eight-bit NES porn (50:05). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, my name is Chris Ryan. My name's Andy Greenwald. And we are the co-host of The Watch, a pop culture podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network. We are on Mondays and Thursdays. We mostly talk about TV, movies, music, pop culture, Jeremy Renner, House Flipping, The Papacy, Reese Weatherspoon dancing at wedding videos. We used to talk about Kanye West.

He's in the, like, timeout corner right now. Never ever talk about Christine Bransky. You can listen to The Watch on Mondays and Thursdays on SoundCloud, iTunes. Anywhere you get podcasts, subscribe now. And thanks for listening. It's a good hang. Hello and welcome to Achievement-oriented, the gaming podcast from Channel 33. I am Ben Lindberg, a writer for the ringer.com. And on the other line, Blizzard hasn't banned him for hacking, so he must just be that good.

Jason Concepcion. Hello, Jason. It's high noon, fellas. Have you played? Wait, have you done it yet? Have you gotten into the Overwatch update of the week? Let's go. Okay, so last week I promised that this would be the week that I removed that. little strip of adhesive from the side of the box that prevents you from opening the case. I did do that. I went one further.

I took the disc out. I put it into the drive. Wow. I installed Overwatch. So there is now evidence of Overwatch on my Xbox One. And then just as I was about to play, I got hit with a 13 gigabyte update. And that was just one bridge too far for me to cross this week. Yeah, next week.

I'm sorry to hear that. Instead, I played Papers Please belatedly, which was good preparation for our current predicament. Yeah, I'm doing a kind of like a retrospective look at Papers Please for the Ringer. Oh, cool. It's exciting. I look forward to that. Oh, I was just going to talk to you about Dungeons and Dragons, Ben, something that you hate. Oh, yeah.

Okay, tell me about this. I probably shouldn't say I hate Dungeons and Dragons on a video game. podcast. It probably doesn't play well. You would prefer not to play it. Is that is more accurate? I think what it is is that I was spoiled by video games and my imagination has atrophied so that when I was a kid, I would play board games and tabletop games and I thought it was fun and I got into it. And now I have some friends and family who play and they congregate sometimes at my house. And it's always like there was an onion article just this past week. And the headline was explanation of board game rules peppered with reassurances that it will be fun,

which was very accurate in my experience of watching people play complex board games. And I think it really is just that I have been spoiled by video games that create. entire worlds for me and let me just jump into them fully formed. And so maybe my life of the mind is not quite what it once was. And so you have just played for the first time. For the first time ever. Why have you just gotten into it? Well, because it just seemed so daunting, you know, like all the time.

It was one of those things where, well, first of all, it is daunting. Any game that has like a 200-page book that comes with it is going to be complex. And so it was always like just seemed like just too much to get into. and it just never happened and it kept on not happening and then video games, you know, like didn't take over for a while. But then I had some friends who were just like, hey, you know, we're getting into D&D and do you want to get into it? I said, sure, we can play what we played over Skype.

I kind of like half built my character. He's his name is Vintricks. He's a forest gnome wizard, solitary scholar, I think, is like the kind of like subclass. So he's, my backstory is, you know, like I'm a forest gnome and I'd like to wander around. And one of these, some time in the past, I kind of wandered into a library where they put me to work. And I discovered some magic books and learned how to be a wizard. And now I'm questing for knowledge.

Okay. And long story short, I killed a couple of goblins. And I got a bear helmet. A helmet made out of a bear skull. And it was fun. You enjoy it? You felt the flow? Yeah, I did enjoy it.

I got to say, I enjoyed it. It's, you know, it's like if you've played an RPG, you know, like if you played the Witcher, or you played Fallout, then you get the hang of it once it's going. It's really the hardest part is just putting your character together because it's all this terminology that doesn't really make sense to you. But one thing that's interesting is you don't realize how many tropes of RPGs are because of the design of Dungeons and Dragons. Like pretty much like every RPG you're going to play,

you start out with a 5% critical hit rate, and that's because of the 20-sided die of Dungeons and Dragons. So is this a weekly Skype session? How often? We're going to try and do it weekly. Okay. I will update you. Yeah, you've invited it.

You invited me to join. Is this? Can I join mid-campaign? Yeah, just like I'll share you on the Google documents. Okay. It's extremely thick file of Google documents and you can try and make your person. Okay. If you want to play, you can play.

You're really trying to expand my horizons. The role of the dungeon master, I guess I didn't really appreciate. like how important it is. Oh yeah. My soon-to-be brother-in-law is just like a big-time dungeon master and he takes it extremely seriously. Yeah, it's like it's like a, they're very serious about their craft. Like we had, our guy was very cool and he did multiple voices and stuff.

Oh, wow. Really got into it. Okay. I will possibly have my first Overwatch experience and my first genuine D&D experience in the same week. Big week for me. I don't believe it. I might go one for two. Okay, so we are doing a one-guest show.

We're going to talk to someone who is trying to preserve video game history. So we are joined now by Frank Zafaldi, and I don't even know how to introduce you because you've done a little bit of everything. It seems like you've been a game developer, you've been an editor, you've been a writer for... An astronaut and NFL superstar. You only included the highlights in your Twitter avatar, though, the editor of gaming publication. made it over astronaut and football start. A game historian? Yeah.

Archivist. Yeah. I call myself an archivist and a historian. And by that, I mean, that's what I put on my business card. Yeah. I guess you can call yourself what you want because there aren't a lot of people doing this, right? Which maybe we'll get into. But you are most recently, I guess you have founded or you are in the process of founding

the Video Game History Foundation. And if you go to gamehistory.org and read about it, it calls itself a charitable organization dedicated to cataloging, digitizing, and preserving the history of the video game industry and the culture it spawned, which sounds like a pretty broad mandate. There's a lot included under that umbrella. So give us the mission statement, I guess, other than the one I just read. Well, my God, it hasn't been formalized yet, but I'll do my best elevator here. Really what the Video Game History Foundation is focused on. is making sure that historians and researchers have what they need

in order to be able to tell the story of video games. So I've been archiving video game history on an amateur basis, I guess you could say, since the late 90s. And I started off as a ROMs guy. I was the guy that was like taking Nintendo cartridges and taking the ROMs off of them and putting them on the Internet. I was a pirate. My video game industry career started as a pirate.

But, you know, I recognized early on that this was not, this is not just a fun pursuit. We were saving history. And I sort of formed my career around that. And as you mentioned, I used to edit video game websites. I used to be a journalist, although someone once told me you never really stopped being a journalist. And I do feel that. But, you know, I know the struggle that one has trying to piece together video game history with the limited resources that are out there. So the focus of this nonprofit is just making sure that, you know, anything that's volatile or in danger is saved somewhere that we're digitizing whatever we can, that we're, you know, collecting promotional material and so that you can contextualize a game.

and know how it was sold and presented at the time. And we're building a digital archive just to make sure that that stuff is around and available. And then our sort of secondary goal is to also make sure that museum pieces end up in museums. We're not a museum ourselves. I have zero interest in maintaining a public space or paying rent or selling tickets. I just want to make sure stories can be told. So that's sort of the short version of it. That was a little longer than an elevator pitch.

It's a tall building. Yeah. I was watching your talk at the Game Developers Conference 2016 about emulation. It's really fascinating. Thank you. Where you talk about emulation as a vehicle for saving and preserving these old games. Could you kind of, it's all right if you go on for a while. But could you just talk about that a little bit?

Because you brought up something that I had never thought about, which is that porting an old game is actually not the. best way to save the game in its original form. I believe my words were, by nature, a port is a derivative work. I had not, I had not thought about it that way, but could you explain what you mean? Well, okay, it's hard without getting too deep into the weeds, but a video game is, you know, it's coded, it's engineered for a specific platform or platforms. Let's use the Nintendo Entertainment System as our basis here.

So you make a game for the NES. You know, it's written in 6502 assembly, which is not a thing that, you know, your PlayStation 4 understands. I guess deep at its core it does, but you can't run a game that way. And the idea of taking that assembly, that code that was written specifically for a system that took advantage of its quirks, of its video timing, you know, of its graphical limitations, the idea of porting that to a new system, yeah, you can do it. And yeah, if you spend a long time on it, you're going to make it more or less like the original. But from my perspective and from our perspective at Digital Eclipse, that's not the original game. That's a port. That's a remake because it is very difficult, if not impossible, to replicate a game exactly by porting it to a different language.

And in a lot of cases, especially with these older games, you're going to introduce bugs. you're going to introduce some inconsistency with the audio is a big thing. You're going to work around limitations and not have it exactly the way that it was back then. And I feel that video games are worth republishing in their original format, warts, quote, unquote, and all. And I think that if you port a game rather than emulate it, you run the risk of introducing new bugs. If you run the risk of accidentally fixing bugs that are actually advantageous, you know, like, you know, that people rely on that play the games extensively to get through or to speedrun or whatever, you really run that risk.

And if you emulate instead of porting, what you're doing is you're not porting the game, you're basically porting the system. You're creating a digital representation of the system that this code ran on. and then you just feed it the code and the game works exactly the way it's supposed to be. If the engineers who've worked on me are listening to this, I'm sorry for simplifying that so much because you still got to get in there and tweak it and work on it. But I think emulation is the best, the safest, the most reliable tool for getting old games to run again. And I think my big takeaway at that talk at GDC last year, and thank you for watching that, I'm very proud of it,

is that we need to stop thinking of emulation as a team. as a means of piracy, which is kind of what we think of it as. You know, that's what, that's what you use to download illegal ROMs that I provided you in the 90s. As we all might have.

Who knows? You know, we think, we, we think of emulation as being synonymous with amateur piracy, but I think we need to think of it as, no,

emulation is the equivalent of what a codec is for movies. It's just, a way of taking that information and playing it without like it'd be like saying like a video codec like watching a film digitally is is wrong it's piracy and you should like get a vCR and hook it up to your computer it's stupid you know and and and and emulation to me is a video codec for video games or you know vice versa a video codec is a film strip emulator for movies seems to me with there's so many interesting like dead ends in video game history

from the early days of video games, old prototypes, weird porn games, things of that nature. Is it actually getting harder to do what you do with the kind of explosion of indie games and there's so many more, the tools to make games are so much more available now to so many more

people than they were in the 80s and 70s when there's all these weird games, but there's really was only a small number of people making them. Yeah. So, you say indie games as presenting maybe a new challenge and and I don't think of indie by the way I hate that word doesn't mean anything anymore but but it's the common it's the common yeah it's the common it's the common it's a common lexicon for yeah small games but that's not what scares me what scares me more is games that have some online component that that require an internet connection more than that like require a community you know in order to to play right, like an MMO. Like Asheron's call shut down.

I think yesterday, right? And how do you preserve Asheron's call? Do you take, you know, that executable game and like hosted on a new server somewhere? Is that Asheron's call? I think Asheron's call was its player base at the time. It's an MMO. It's the people you play with. Shouts to my friend Jason Booth, who worked on Asheron's call, by the way.

Oh, right on. I hope he's got something else to do. do. But like the idea of preserving, okay, so we're talking about older stuff and that stuff's easy. You know, like if it's if it's on a ROM cartridge, just taking the ROM off of it is the game. You fully replicated that game. You can't replicate the idea of Asheran's call. That's like, that's like replicating a game of baseball. You know, like it's an event that happened and you can't, you know, all you can really do is document what happened. You can't, you can't preserve it as a game.

You have to preserve it as an event. And that's really tricky. And I'm going to go now on my Farmville rant that I usually go on. How do you preserve Farmville? You know, think what you will of Farmville. Do we must be preserved Farmville? Those who forget Farmville are doomed to repeat it. Absolutely.

Farmville is, is a big piece of video game. It is representative of, you know, the social game movement that happened and is sort of still happening. Like, Farmville is the biggest example of that time where everyone on Facebook was like, you know, sending you like game requests. Like, that was a big piece of history. How do you preserve Farmville? I have no idea. You know, again, it's like you can't, you can maybe replicate a playable game that has the features of Farmville. and, you know, like take an actual binary Farmville and make it playable forever somewhere.

But like, I don't know, which version is that? They update that game every day, you know, like which one is the true Farmville? Is it the last one? Is it the first one? Is it one randomly in the middle? And even then, it's like, like Ashteran's call, I think Farmville loses a lot without context. Like, do you replicate all of Facebook? You know, do you like, do you like make fake bots?

ants that send you requests, you know, ants with a U is what I meant there, not, you know, like do you replicate your mom in robot form, like asking you for carrots or whatever? Like, how do you preserve farm bill? I don't know the answer to that.

And that's a really big challenge. And it's something I got to be honest with you guys is that as a foundation, like, we're not even really looking at yet. That's some far-reaching stuff. And that's, And that's just a matter of scope for us right now because the foundation, I'm the employee, you know, and I have a board of directors. And we have no funding, more importantly, yet.

So that's the kind of challenge that, like, I can see us tackling one day. But as of right now, we're sort of focused on digging out the things from the early days that we feel are in danger. Well, when you read about, say, film preservation, you start hearing about cellulose and acetate and physical degradation of the actual film stock. And, you know, like you just won't be able to watch the movie anymore. It won't exist anymore. Is that a concern for video games whose history obviously doesn't go back quite as far? Is that something that you are worried about? Yeah.

I think what we were just talking about, the thought of online experience is decaying is a pretty good analogy to the. that, but even, you know, offline games that were shipped in a box that are just a game that you install and play, I think a lot of those are in danger. Like, something I'm really concerned about that I don't see a lot of people talking about is floppy disk games. And I'm not saying that there's not a lot of those that have been pirated and are around, but the problem is a lot of those games, and you guys might be old enough to remember, were cracked. You know, these were, like, piracy groups took the disc and ripped it and altered the code in order to make it work, and they would often add things to it.

Like they'd add a little intro about themselves and, you know, give shoutouts to punk boys 69 or whatever. You know, like, and those cracks, don't get me wrong, those cracks are great. Those cracks are video game history and those should be preserved too. But what I think is really unfortunate is that clean rips, you know, untainted rips of floppy disk games are extremely rare. You can download, and it's not just the cracks either.

It's a lot of these disks, when you played and saved, you were saving data directly onto the disc. So, like, the first time you play a game, you've forever tainted that disc. It is no longer a pure copy of that game. And a really, really good example of that. You know, we think of the Oregon Trail, you know, as one of the most popular games ever made,

the Apple 2 version. It was in classrooms everywhere. I played the heck out of it myself. If you download the copy of the Oregon Trail that you can get through traditional, you know, piracy means online, or if you emulate it on, you know, the internet archive or whatever, that has someone's save file in it. And I don't know, I don't know, I don't know if you guys remember the game, but like when, when someone in your party dies, they put a tombstone on the map and you type in, you know, your, what you want on the tombstone. And when players, subsequently play off that disc, they'll see the tombstones of those

who have come before them. The copy you get online of the Oregon Trail has a tombstone in it, where someone has written and misspelled both words, I believe, pepperoni and cheese on a tombstone, which is really funny. It's really cool.

And, like, yes, that's a piece of history that should be preserved. That's neat. But, like, our copy of the Oregon Trail is impure. And that is really scary to me. And you were talking about, you know, celluloid rotting, which it does. And it's also very flammable. And there's a lot of those sort of dangers in film.

And I kind of think that data decay like that is what's scarier to me with games. Even, you know, films in a lot of ways are harder because there weren't as many copies, you know, made of the films. But with games, it's like, yeah, there were a lot out there. but the only way to get a clean copy of a lot of these games is to find a shrink-wrapped, never-used copy of it and use modern archiving tools to get it off. And I fear that for a lot of games, especially the more obscure ones,

I don't think we'll ever have a clean, untainted copy of them. So how do you prioritize as the only full-time member of the video game history foundation attempting to preserve all of video game history seems like a tall task how do you go back to decide you're going to correct you i don't i don't think it is within our our goals to preserve the entirety of video game history my god what kind of pressure are you putting on me well what we're you're right we have to prioritize and for the foundation specifically you know, first of all, I'm what I hope to be the first of many like-minded organizations, but what we are focusing on right now is just identifying projects with finite ends and

meeting those goals. So like, for example, one of my projects right now is tracking down material that was sent to the press. This is not something, and by the way, like I'm kind of quickly transitioning into a different area of preservation. So I'm going to give a little intro to this. We're talking about preservation as copying a game's data and making sure that data is available. I think a video game is more than that playable code. I think a video game is all the context that surrounds it.

I think a video game is the people who made it. I think it's the packaging. It's the ephemeral material. It's the documentation. It's the original design documents and things like that. Like, if you watch like the Casablanca Blanca Blu-ray, and I have many times, and, you know, there's, there's commentary track from Roger Ebert where he's able to reference, like, you know, cut scenes from the film and studio correspondence and like reports of the day the movie premiered and what theater premiered in and things like that. And that is really difficult to do for a lot of video games. So, you know, a big focus of ours is not necessarily like, you know, sucking ROMs off cartridges anymore, that we still do that.

I was literally doing that this morning. But getting that ephemeral material safe as well. So one of my projects, I was saying this earlier, is tracking down material that was sent to the press. So when I worked at One Up in the office formerly known as Zip Davis at the time, I'd straight up say it. I straight up stole a bunch of press discs that were. that were just um statute of limitations they were they were gonna get tossed out and when I say press

discs I mean like you know a PR person would send to you know back then it might have been EGM or whatever a CD or a DVD or a zip disc I've ripped 100 zip zip discs from Zip Davis of assets to use in the magazine or on the website or whatever of you know high resolution artwork press releases you know sometimes trailers things like that, that in a lot of cases just were never published by anyone. But even when they were, like IGN, for example, is a site that's been around forever,

and they still have, you know, all the screenshots they've ever uploaded for the most part. But like, you go back to those early days. They're compressed. You know, they've got watermarks on them. And I think this material can tell you a lot about a game that you wouldn't know otherwise, especially like screenshots of a game before it's done. you can kind of see things that were a little different and be able to piece together maybe like a narrative

of how the games development changed over time. We talked about unreleased games for a second back there, but a lot of this press material is the only record we have for games. And that stuff is really important. So one of our projects is digitizing all of these assets and making them searchable and available. and doing outreach and trying to track down as much of this as might still be out there, hoping that there were some pack rats among us who actually held on to this stuff.

Even I didn't. You know, like, even I, as someone who got in this industry, because he cared about it so much that he wanted, it's history saved. Even I, when I got pressed discs, just tossed them. Because, like, no, I didn't think, I didn't care. I didn't think anyone would care. But this stuff is really valuable in order to, you know, if you're going to piece of together a story of a game and the context surrounding it. So, you know, that's one of our projects.

Finding actual pre-release copies of games and digitizing those is another project. I maintain a fairly extensive library of periodicals related to the video game industry. Yeah, I was just going to say, I was looking at the Twitter account for the foundation at Game Historyorg, and someone was tweeting at you, hey, I have a huge stack of early 2000s Indonesian video game magazines and there's a big picture of them. And he's like, do you want them? And you're like, sure. So how do you store all this stuff? Where's it going to go? I mean, right now, it's my living room and a storage unit. But that's, I mean, that's just right now. You know, we have hopes of fundraising enough to to maintain a small office space.

So, and that's, you know, just another one of our goals, though, is maintaining a reference library out here on the West Coast, because I don't know how much you guys have looked into the museums that exist already, but there's the strong museum of play in Rochester, New York, which is, you know, it's sort of traditionally a toy museum, but they have a library with librarians on staff. And they've been focusing on video games for the last decade or so. And they've got a really extensive collection of video game magazines and books and strategy guides and things like that. That if you're on the East Coast, you can go there. The National Video Game Museum in Frisco, Texas is sort of the middle of America.

And they've got another library of comparable size, if not larger. So I want to build one here on the West Coast. And I've already, I think I might have one of the biggest, if not the biggest private collections of video game magazines going back to like 1979 or something with video magazine. And, you know, that stuff is just invaluable for looking back and being able to tell these stories. And so, you know, that's another one of our foundations of the foundation is building up this library. and making sure that's accessible in some way someday. Not yet. You're not allowed in my living room.

But we're going to figure that out hopefully. And we'd love to digitize them too. And that is a tremendous challenge. I don't know if anyone besides me in this room right now is ever tried to scan a magazine. But by God, that takes forever. I don't have time for that. But that's something we hope to solve too as figuring out. you know, how do we get these things digitized and OCR so you can search for this material?

You know, it's something I don't have the answer for right now, but I'm positioning myself to make it literally mine or someone else I pay's job to figure that out. And that's what we're doing. It seems to me that emulation is the best solution that we have in terms of kind of passing on games in an active way to coming generations. But how do you deal, since we're so interested in fidelity, how do you deal with changes in equipment, you know, games that were originally played on CRT screens and had, you know, different controllers and things like that.

And the second part of my question is, what's the oldest game that you've played in its original form? Yeah, that would be Space War from 1960, 62. When was Space War? They talk about that as the first video game ever, right? Yeah. So Space War ran on a PDP-1 computer and was co-coated. at MIT back in 1962. And if you go to the Computer History Museum right now,

and God knows how much longer this is possible, you can play Space War on the only functioning PDP1 left in the world with its author who volunteers on weekends. Wow. So if you're anywhere near the Computer History Museum, get over there on a weekend. And Steve Russell will demonstrate SpaceWork to you, and you can play the first video game against its creator. So that is the oldest video game.

I've played on real hardware. Beat that. That is the oldest one possible right now. You can play a replication of tennis for two, but it's not on the real hardware. It's on a replication. This is not an actual PDP one. But the other part of your question, I'm going to correct you for a second. I don't think emulation is the best way to play a game.

I think emulation is the best way to republish a game on modern video game hardware. So I think what you're asking, you were asking about graphical fidelity and like CRTs versus flat screen or whatever. So how do you deal with that in an emulation sense? In an emulation sense. Okay, got you.

So I shipped a collection called Mega Man Legacy Collection got a year before last, I guess it's been a while. We've got another one coming out soon that they're going to announce any day now. I wish I could talk about it, but it's really cool. But what we sort of landed on with Mega Man Legacy Collection in terms of graphics, fidelity, and artist intent. Okay, real quick, the systems of the time, the Famicom or the NES or whatever, the video signal it spit out, depending on which model you got was either over RF, which was the metal screw-in thing,

like that we still use actually for you still use it for antennas but like that was you know how we hook up the games or composite which was the yellow plug that goes in the TV both of those are extremely lossy formats

so internally in the guts of your Nintendo it's it's creating a perfect razor sharp pixel image or whatever but it has to get pushed through this you know all this graphical processing stuff and through this cable and that cable itself kind of destroyed that

signal in a way and by the time it got to your TV it was no longer like it looks like in an emulator or whatever it's it's like fuzzy and blurry and colors bleed and and there's dot crawl and sort of weird waviness and stuff and that's just how games looked back then I remember the first time I went from composite to S video no I think it was like yeah it really did like Like, it was like either with N64 or Dreamcast, I remember, I think I was playing crazy taxi on Dreamcast actually. My main cable broke and I didn't even really know that other cables existed, that there were other options. I didn't even pay attention to this stuff. The video game cable.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And then I brought home this S video cable and suddenly everything was so sharp and clear. And I feel like it completely made me into someone who cared about tech stuff and gadgets and like displays. I think that changed everything. Yeah, me too. It was GameCube for me specifically.

It was my first S video. But the point is that that lossy, blurry image format, I think there's a really compelling argument that the artists who worked on these games were targeting that lossiness. I think that in a lot of cases, you can make a very clear argument that some graphical decisions were made because, for example, like dithering colors, when you sort of, to do a checkerboarding pattern. Very common on the Sega Genesis,

because after you spit out that dithering pattern to a TV over a composite, you would actually, like, create a color or sometimes a transparency effect that the hardware wasn't actually capable of doing, but the video signal itself could sort of, through its lossiness, create. Like, you could make the games look like

they had more colors than they actually did. You could, you know, Sonic 1 for the Genesis, you know, the original Sonic the Hedgehog is a really good example because the waterfalls in the first stage are dithered in such a way where on a CRT television over composite, you actually get a rainbow effect. But if you actually just look at the pixels, it's just some blue checkerboarded pixels. So, you know, I think there's a really compelling argument to say that games should be presented in the way that most consumers would have seen them at the time. I think there's an equally compelling argument that games should be as clean and clear as possible, you know, sort of superseding the way they were at the time. And in a way that like, I don't know, Star Trek the next generation should have been in HD to begin with, right? Like, they had to go back and remaster that. Like, I think that's that argument.

I think both arguments are valid. So at least for our approach at digital eclipse doing these commercial products like Mega Man Legacy collection, Like, artist intent was always at the forefront of our minds. And because there's no clear answer to that, the only thing we could really do is just offer users the option. So we have an option called TV mode, which sort of simulates composite. And then we have one called monitor, which is kind of an in-between where it's like we do the scan lines of a computer monitor or like an RGB monitor like I play.

Or like an arcade game, for example. So you get like clean pixels, but with the scan lines. and then we have just straight up, here's the pixels looking the way they're supposed to. And quick tangent also on that note is that a lot of people, especially if they've only played these old games on emulators, don't understand that while on an emulator, you're looking at pixels that are perfectly square. These systems actually on a CRT TV would stretch to a specific resolution.

So like, NES pixels weren't perfectly square. they were like eight wide by seven tall or something like that. And so that's something that we considered extremely important for artistic intent is making sure that Mega Man looks as chubby as he's supposed to. So that's a big part of that. But, you know, I get really deep into the weeds with this stuff because I don't believe that 1080P is a high enough resolution to display these images the way they were meant to

or to simulate a composite television. I just don't think there's enough resolution there. I think if you're actually going to simulate a composite signal, you need at least 4K. So there's not enough resolution for the resolution to be bad? Yes. Absolutely. There's also not enough resolution to make the pixels exactly the width they're supposed to be

without doing some bilinear stretching that makes them not completely razor sharp. You actually need 4K to do an NES screen exactly the way it's supposed to be with zero blurriness. So there's some minor compromises you have to make to display these games in 1080P. But that said, like, that's really getting deep into it. Like, I think the effects we're able to do are a pretty good... I won't say simulation because it's not a technical simulation. It's more of a pretty good artistic representation of what it's sort of.

of look like back then. What's your greatest find or your greatest preservation? I guess maybe the one that brought you the most attention was unearthing desert bus and everything that that led to. But what's just personally the thing you're happiest about being able to either preserve or bring attention to or even just discover yourself? So Desert Bus is a really good one. Like you said, that was part of a Sega CD game that never shipped called Penn and Teller,

smoke and mirrors. obviously a game designed with Penn and Teller, the magician comedy duo. And yeah, Desert Bus went on to spawn this fundraiser where people play this intentionally terrible game forever to raise money. And that's great. And that's a really good example, too, of how you can't determine what's important to preserve, what's going to be important to people,

because who would have known that Desert Bus would have raised millions in charity? Like, you don't know, so you just got to preserve whatever's out there and make sure it's available. A find I was really proud of, more for just, like, cult classic reasons was an NES game called BioForce Ape. Bioforce Ape was a game that was previewed in Nintendo Power and only in Nintendo Power, and they had a couple screenshots, and it was a game about a monkey that gets mutated into, like, a giant wrestling gorilla wearing a diaper.

that like runs around body slamming like alligator people. It was considered a hoax or something like that, wasn't it? Well, okay, the Nintendo, like the game itself, no, no one ever thought that was a hoax. But in, I want to say like 2004 or something like that, on a collector's community forum called Digital Press, someone to sort of make an artistic statement on the nature of collectors hoarding prototypes versus archivists wanting to actually save them and make them available to people. He made a fake BIOForce ape cartridge

that was fairly convincing looking. And he created screenshots that looked pretty much like the game in Nintendo Power, enough to where it fooled people. But as he was going, he just kept making the screenshots more ridiculous, just like testing his limits. So he's like, I found a fart power

if you hold up and press B, And in his screenshot, not only is BioForce ape farting, he's like farting so hard that the graphical tiles in the background mess up and start displaying like asky values instead. And like the most famous example is he's like, I got to the last boss and it's this butter monster. And like he had he had this butter monster like, well, anyway, the BioForce ape punches the bull. Water Monster in the face and says, eat communism. And like, there's a picture of Chelsea Clinton in there, I think. Like, he just kept doing this weird stuff. And, like, there is this extensive argument between both sides where it's like, if you need

to back up this game, it's the only copy of the game. If you don't do that, this game is in danger of disappearing forever. And that's crazy. You have this responsibility. And the other side, the collector side going, you can't put this data on the internet. because your antique will be devalued and no one will want to pay you money for it and games are more special if no one can play them and like fuck those guys i don't know if i could curse here but but fuck those guys and and as this argument is happening he he smashes his fake

prototype with a hammer and breaks it apart and says that it's causing too much you know strife in this community and he has to destroy this game and everyone's like no you destroyed bioforset it can still be repaired anyway That was the hoax. It was hilarious, but there was a real game. And I managed to get a copy out of Japan. And despite everything I just said, the actual game is probably weirder than the hoax. And I'm very proud of it.

But I want to talk about something that's happening to me right now just along those lines because this is just a really interesting, weird moment in my life. So talking about unreleased NES games, and that was my focus for a long time. I found out a website called Lost Levels that a lot of people still know me from, even though I haven't really updated that site since like 2005. I've tracked down a lot of unreleased games, mostly for the NES. It's just a library.

I've always been fascinated by. I think that there are more interesting unreleased games for that system than any other because it was sort of a gold rush time for game publishers where you could just put anything on the NES and make millions of dollars. And so they would, like, they'd make 10 games and then just release five of them,

because who cares? You know, like they don't cost that much money to make, and we're going to make our money back anyway. And we're only allowed to make five a... We're only allowed to publish five a year per Nintendo's policies at the time. So this made a bunch and just whatever stuck on the wall when they threw them, they released. And so there's this weird, hidden, unreleased library of NES stuff that I've always loved. And one of the early things that I uncovered was this Robin Hood RPG for the NES that actually sort of came out.

So they, it's, it's this really ambitious RPG with like a daynight cycle and it's like, it's, it's very like computer RPG of the time as opposed to console in that it just gives you this giant open world and there's like, figure it out, idiot. And it's like, it's got like fatigue and hunger stats and stuff. And this is, and like when you talk to NBC's there's these giant sprites that make no sense that bounce on the screen. It's just this crazy ambitious RPG that they actually like. cut down to almost nothing and released as Robin Hood Prince of Thieves based on the movie.

But the original vision was this RPG not licensed by anything. It's just Robin Hood. And a long time ago, we got a copy of it and we backed it up. And it's super early and buggy. And like, it breaks. And you can't actually complete it. But I've always really liked it and wanted to like finish this unfinishable game, even though it's impossible. And I, um, I very recently, as in like three days ago, finally, after like 10 years, got a later copy of this game, like a later build that's not as broken, but it's still broken. But like I am right now in my life just having this strange experience that I don't know how to put into words where I'm playing this game that literally no one else has.

There's no information for on the internet. I can't look it up. No one else has it so I can't talk about it. it with them and the game's broken. So you can't actually beat it. And so there's the thing. Like I feel like I'm playing this weird meta game with it. Like I feel like tracking down a later copy was like part of the game.

You know, like my question. Like I'm breaking the game in weird ways. Like I'll give you an example. Like in the story of the game, I'm supposed to be gathering these ingredients for the old hag who's going to make a spell for me. So I got to get the eye of nude and the wing of bad and the, the, the, the spider eggs and something else I forget. So wing of bat, you have to kill bats to get them.

Bats are only in this dungeon. The only way to get into the dungeon is to get yourself arrested and get thrown in there. And if you do, you kill a bat right away. It's great. You have a bat wing. The problem is the exit to the dungeon just doesn't work. There's no way out of the dungeon. But that's not stopping me.

So I managed to like find a way to sort of, I don't know if I'm just buffer overflowing the game or what. but in a specific door in a castle, I managed to sort of backwards warp my way into this dungeon, get the batwing, and escape. And I'm going to beat this game. But like, I don't know, I'm having this really strange experience. Like, I actually emailed the programmer of the game. I found him and I asked him, like,

did this game ever get further than it did? Is a copy still out there? Do you maybe have one? And he had this very unhelp. cryptic reply. And I just feel like it's all part of this weird, like, meta game of me trying to beat this game. And what a unique experience. And I'm having such a weird, weird time beating this strange Robin Hood, beating this unbeatable strange Robin Hood game that only exists in my house right now. This is like a very ready player one style story. It is. Yeah. How do you get your

hands on these things then? If it's not coming from the developer, how do you find it? Who donates it? So loss levels specifically, this NES stuff, really a lot of it's just money is a short answer. But what I think we pioneered early on. So when we started, there were collectors who had games that never shipped on cartridge and they were worth a lot of money and they were unwilling to share the data from the cartridges because, and you know, this is fine, this is valid. You can take this way if you want. That if this cartridge no longer has a unique game, then its monetary value has been shot.

And it's true. This is a provable thing. If you take a one-of-a-kind game, an unreleased game, and if you take the date off it and people can now download it and play whenever they want, the monetary value of this antique just plummets. And so there was this struggle in the early days of competing with collectors, like trying to outbid them on eBay, you know, just trying to get this stuff away from them before, you know, in our minds they, like, put it in a closet and laughed at us or whatever.

But I think what we pioneered was was starting to work with the collectors and find common ground. And the biggest start to that was I basically got very lucky in 2002 and found a guy in Spain who had this giant cache of prototype NES cartridges that I think were sent to a magazine or something. And among those were three games that didn't ship. And I should clarify a little bit that a lot

of these unshipped NES games, they got close. You know, they were sent to magazines. Like, here, review this game. We're going to manufacture it in two months. Actually, never mind. We canceled it. Like, that happened. So a lot of these unreleased games just exist on these cartridges that were sent out for review.

I lucked out in that I was able to buy like five unreleased games off this one guy for not very much money. And so what we ended up doing as lost levels, you know, we pulled our money to buy that. And what we did, was we made deals with, actually it was just one collector, and specifically, his name was Jason Wilson, who had these unreleased games what we wanted. And it's like, hey, we have these cartridges. We know you like collecting these.

We will sell you these cartridges for almost no money, which is actually the almost no money that I paid the other guy. And in exchange, like, you get to keep the cartridge, but we get to copy two more of your games. And so, like, we just kept building this. this pool of unreleased games by working with collectors to get them. So that's how we built up. That's how we got most of them was just like negotiating and dealing with collectors.

This latest Robin Hood build that I got, actually, I just paid someone basically for it. I just paid for the second time in my life out of my own pocket. And I by no means am a rich man, have paid $2,000 for a broken video game. because that's the only way to do it sometimes. And by God, I'm going to beat that Robin Hood game and paying $2,000 as part of my weird meta game that I'm living right now. I had to grind to level up the game.

Okay, I got to ask you because this is a subject that's always fascinated me. Just the fact that there are playable pornographic games that were produced for both the Atari, I think Custer's Revenge is probably going to be the most famous. And for even more surprisingly, for the NES, games like Bubble Bath Babes and Hot Slots, how did those games get past the kind of, you know, like Nintendo's licensing system and things like that? Well, my friend, you were you were making a terribly wrong assumption that they actually were licensed. Oh, I see, I see.

Okay. Yes. So how do they market them then? Is it just like, you know, in like the back room of some like shady porn stall? Like, hey, Betty, come here. You want to check out a good game? So let's go back to Atari first. Okay.

So there actually was no concept of being an Atari licensee. So the Atari 2,600, the only official Atari 2,600 games were made by Atari, and that's it. Activision, Eye Magic, all those guys, Parker brothers, those had. no Atari bearings at all. They didn't talk to Atari. They were off the radar, unlicensed Atari games, because there was no concept of being a licensee. So Mystique, which made the adult games on the Atari, actually I think one of maybe two or three companies that did, if I'm not mistaken, they didn't have to pass any kind of certification

of any kind. All they had to do was make the product, package it, and sell it. And to answer your question, where was that sold? My understanding is mail order and actually in adult stores. Like, you go to adult stores and buy this stuff. In fact, I think that some of the games in later years were discovered in like dusty, crappy old porn shops, you know, like in the back rooms. So Bubble Bath Babes, that was... So Bubble Bath Babes, just for people so they could picture.

it's kind of like Tetris with bubbles and then there's like a naked woman at the bottom of the screen. Yeah, you're you're rotating, I think it's grids like little clusters of three bubbles and matching up the colors. That was actually a, I believe, Taiwanese game called Soap Panic that they rebranded. Soap Panic is a really great name now that I'm saying it out loud. Yeah. I don't think I've ever said soap panic out loud before, but that's amazing. So that was a company, Panesian, and they licensed these games from Taiwan, and like no, again, no Nintendo licensing at all.

They were just totally off the radar, and they just manufactured and made these things. And for the Nintendo, it was a little more complicated than the Atari. The Atari, you just put an e-prom on a circuit board, and it just kind of works. But the Nintendo had a lockout chip to prevent that. And that was very intentionally because of Atari. Nintendo, you know, when it was getting ready to launch the NES, one of the things that they recognized as having caused the great video game crash of the 1980s that made it impossible to sell video games was just a glut of product.

And they wanted to prevent that from happening by putting in place these draconian restrictions on who could release games. And, you know, really, that came down to how much money did you pay Nintendo for the pleasure of publishing on their platform. and how many games they could release a year and Nintendo had to actually put their stamp on it, the seal of approval that you still see on Nintendo products, that was a program that they invented

to make sure that any game that ran on the Nintendo met their standards for quality and content. And so they basically invented the licensing program for game consoles that everyone uses now. And they put in what's called a lockout chip in the Nintendo. So there's a, there's a chip inside the Nintendo, and there's a chip in every licensed Nintendo cartridge, and those two chips have to talk to each other before a game will boot. And so unlicensed companies, for example, Tengen, that was a division of Atari games,

they actually, uh, they got in big trouble because they, they, they, they, they sort of circumvented the law and, uh, acquired a copy of the, of the, of the schematics from the patent office or something, but companies like color dreams and maybe even Panisian someone actually reverse engineered and made a clone of that chip unlicensed NES crap is a really interesting topic of discussion that I could go on for a long time so I'm just going to stop myself yeah thanks a lot is just like absolutely fascinating we got to have you back got to have you back on yeah anytime anytime I will I will talk about the garbage on

on Nintendo I will talk about I will talk about I will talk about about my days as a high schooler in the late 90s, buying in bulk cartridges from Taiwan of pornographic Nintendo games to make sure that they were saved. I want to put this in perspective. I was in high school importing in bulk pornographic Nintendo games to save them. You had the archival impulse.

I have always been me. And I will tell you the story about how I probably cause that company to implode and die. Okay, good teaser for next time. So people can find Frank on Twitter at Frank C-I-S-Faldi, that's C-I-F-A-L-D-I, and can find out more about the foundation at gamehistory.org. There is a mailing list that you can subscribe to so that you'll know when things get started. Is there anything else that people should look at or if they want to help out in some way?

anything they should do. I mean, we really haven't even gone public. I don't even know I'm speaking to you guys. But we are officially launching as of right now, and this might change, the first Monday of GDC, which I believe is February 27th. So at that time, that website will have more than that, you know, a little teaser that I wrote and we'll be able to talk more extensively about what we're actually doing and how people can help. But for right now, just, Go to gamehistory.org, sign up for that email list, and I will tell you before anybody else what we're out to. All right. Great talking to you, Frank.

Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Okay. So we have come to the end of another episode. And I don't know if you've got the good news, but Square Enix is continuing to modify Fantasy 15. And one of the upcoming updates, you can take the car off road. Wow.

Your favorite video game vehicle of all time. You can now go anywhere you want in it. Very exciting. All right, so we are done for today. We'll be back next Friday. Talk to you then. Bye.