The Vergecast - The fight to save old games

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

In episode two of our gaming mini series, The Verge's David Pierce chats with Polygon's Russ Frushtick and Chris Plante about the obstacles around both preserving and emulating video games from discontinued hardware. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Horizontal Scan Lines. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the second episode in our three-part mini-series

about the future of gaming. And today, to talk about the future of gaming, we're going to talk about the past of gaming. Specifically, these decades of video games on old consoles and old media systems, Like remember the cartridges you had to blow in? What happens to those games as the companies that make them disappear and the consoles that they worked on disappear and the CRT TV you plugged it into disappears?

How do we save those games? Do we want to save those games? What does it mean to save those games? That's what we're going to get into today. My colleagues from Polygon, Chris Plant and Russ Freshstick are both back with me today to get into all of this. I'm going to consult with them and then go out, try to find some answers, and then present them with my findings.

Let's get into it. it. Russ, hello, welcome back. Hello. Chris, hello. I'm back, baby. We're doing this again. I'm excited.

For our second topic in this series, we picked something, I think, if I remember correctly, I brought this up when we were talking about what we wanted to cover on this series, and you immediately were like, David, you know nothing. Let's explain how this actually works, which makes me very excited about this, because this is a subject I find very interesting and know very little about, and I'm excited to dig into the weeds of it, which is essentially how we adapt and change. very old games to be able to play them now. Some of that is old hardware.

Some of that is you can play old and 64 games on your phone. There are like people who exist in the world to try and preserve these games. I guess it's, would we call it, emulation and preservation as a topic? Is that a good way to look at it? I think there are two separate concepts there. Okay. Emulation and preservation are like two obviously related, but there are a lot of people that are focused on preservation that aren't using emulation and vice versa.

but they are both equally important when it comes to preserving the history of video games overall. Catch me up just really quickly. Again, this is truly a world I know very little about except that it's very popular, and it's the kind of thing that a lot of people like to buy an Android phone just to do. One of the things I hear over and over is people like to buy Android phones just to play old video games on them. And I'm like, sure, that's a reason. How big a thing is this? Like, you guys are in the day-to-day of covering games.

Like, is this kind of emulation world something you spend much time thinking about? Yeah, honestly, I mean, it's not just people just downloading like a ROM online to play Contra on their PC. Nintendo uses emulation on their official switch online service to allow their games to run on modern hardware. So everyone is using emulation at that point to play older games, but emulation is not perfect when it comes to recreating every aspect of how the game originally ran. And some of those aspects are bad. like the game ran at 10 frames a second when they were 30 bullets on the screen. But that is like the true experience

that developers kind of created when they originally made the game. So a lot of people are really focused on recreating those experiences as authentically as possible on as many platforms as possible. And I think that's where Frasch mentioned the difference

between emulation and preservation. Preservation is trying to either recreate that perfectly, which we will get into with things like the mister device or system, or making it so that you can just still play your original hardware, right? Like, can you find an old-school CRTV and an original Super Nintendo and the original game? They all kind of can blend together. You know, you can get emulation that is close to preservation perfect, but it gets really nitty-gritty, really fast.

And we thought after last week's episode, you didn't kick the kind of purest nest hard enough. So this week, you would really go for it and awaken the beast within. Yeah, I'm partly fascinated by this because I think I have always struggled with this idea that you should preserve something exactly as it was in the time in which it existed, right? Like, the idea that a video game from 25 years ago deserves to be played on a crappy console and a crappy TV that only has three channels and rabbit ears is like, I've always had a hard time with that because part of me is like, well, most things are better now. Right? It's like we don't eat like cavemen because we have better diets now because we figured out how to not die. And a lot of the same stuff is true. I think like this stuff gets better. And I think a lot of these ideas about how do we preserve what these games were sort of in the essence of them so that they don't go away. Separating that from TVs were worse 30 years ago and they're better now and maybe that's okay. It has always been hard for me even just like emotionally.

I'm about to blow your mind even further. The problem is all of these games and all the art in these games. was made for those shitty TVs. That is true. I play like the old, old, old versions of some of these games, and they just look like crap on new TVs. Yeah, because they were designed for CRT TVs. Like, it's really wild. Yeah.

Yeah. I guess the big question that I have for you is the mix of legality and purpose of emulation and preservation. I was just about to ask, am I in for like, do I have to go talk to a bunch of lawyers about the rules around this stuff? I think you might. Okay. I think you will because, yeah,

Pirating ROMs and playing them on your emulated handheld is illegal. Like, that's just like a hard truth of it, right? Whether or not it is, like, morally okay, or you personally can justify it, or you own the game, and then you feel that that is comfortable enough. That's all, I think, very valuable. But then when we get to the question of preservation, a lot of these companies are not preserving their games and either are actively or passively creating blockades that would allow people to preserve the games for them.

So by that I mean, why can libraries not allow you to emulate video games, right? Like, that seems fine. That seems like a good and reasonable thing. You know, there are video libraries where you can see Broadway plays that were films, right? Like, there are libraries that allow for things that are legally tricky and you make that kind of carve out. And I think what has kind of led to this emulation boom is publishers being so protective of their stuff, so unwilling to make it more widely available, or their own, I think, legal murkiness when they look back at their old paperwork, they might not even know

who owns certain things, or they might not even have the original source code. So there's just a lot of problems that I think are getting in the way of preservation and emulation has been able to answer those while kind of creating its own. Yeah, that's really interesting. Okay, two more things I'm curious about, and then I'm going to go chase a bunch of people down and see what I can figure out. The first thing, Chris, you mentioned the mister. I had never heard of the mister until you mentioned it.

Tell me about the mister. I'm not going to. I said it's your turn to kick the hornets. That's not my turn. Oh, crap. Okay. But the basic idea is what if you could virtually recreate the physical boards that powered video games in the past? So you are not creating an idea, an emulated version of the Super Nintendo.

You are digitally recreating the Super Nintendo. So it should run one for one. I think that's right. I think. There's a real chance that you play that tapeback for him. and he's like, I think I need to go fire somebody, and his name's Chris Plant. But it confuses me. I can say that I have one right behind me, and it plays Simpsons Arcade or whatever really, really

well, and that's pretty cool. That's the dream. And then the other thing is, Russ, when we're planning this, you mentioned games that are, for one reason or another, unemulatable and the challenge that comes with that. What's on your mind when you think about that? I don't think there's a game that is 100% unemulatable, but there are. games that are surprisingly resource-heavy for when they came out. The example that springs to my mind is Yoshi's Island, the original Yoshi's Island, which

came out on Super Nintendo. People use the start menu of Yoshi's Island as a benchmark for whether a device can handle an intense handheld emulation experience because it uses this wild mode 7 3D art thing that doesn't exist anywhere else in the game. but like that's an example of something that is like that's what people look at when they're testing like an emuation handheld for example and there are a number of those examples i'm sure that pros can point you to but that was the one that jumped in my mind i'd give two other types of emulation where you are going to have trouble uh anything that required specialized physical hardware so like warriorware twisted i think had a special cartridge i'm curious about how people emulate things like that and they preserve those things yeah we're We games, for example. Yeah, and also online games. As we get more and more to always online video games, Fortnite, like, what does it mean

to emulate or preserve Fortnite in its many manifestations, right? Because Fortnite today might as well be Fortnite 12. It is not the same game that came out or was even out a year ago. And I don't know. I don't know the answer there. Okay. Yeah. So I think I need to go figure out basically what does it look like to preserve this stuff?

Is it allowed? And then like how are we as people supposed to interact with it? Right? Because I think there's a version of this that it's like, it's cool that this stuff exists for sort of purely archival purposes, right? Like put Fortnite 1.0 in a museum. It's cool that we can see what that looked like at the time. That's one version of it. But there's also a version of it that it's like, what if we as people who like to play games

had access to every game that has ever existed in something like the form of. in which it was intended to be consumed. That's very cool and very exciting and super, super complicated for a thousand reasons. So I think I'm going to run both of those things down and see what I can come back with. Does that sound good? Mark and roll.

I love it. All right. We're going to take a break. I'm going to go explore a bunch of stuff. We're going to come back in a couple of weeks. But for you, thanks to editing, it's going to be much faster. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer.

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Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. All right. Welcome back. It's been a few weeks. I've gone all the way across the country. We're recording these I've discovered where I'm in a different place every single time we record. This is like a fun game we're playing for an audio podcast that no one will get anything out of. How are your lives?

Tell me everything. What have you been up to? It's been such a thrilling time. Fresh actually solved a cold case, 30 years in the making. Huge. Yeah. It turns out it was me. time. I just didn't want to admit it. So it was actually a pretty easy case to solve.

It's open and shut when you get to it. Well, okay, emulation and preservation. This turned into kind of a strange, like, philosophical rabbit hole for me of talking to folks about what it means to keep video games around. And what we did last time was I had sort of five pieces of evidence for a theory that I developed in the course of talking to people. And we talked about why handheld gaming is the future. This time I have come to you with, I would say, five ideas about how we can make game emulation and preservation work for everybody. Okay. Some of these, I think, are very good ideas.

Some of these, I think are very bad, impossible ideas. But they are ideas that I have heard from people over and over. So I'm going to throw them all at you. And we're just going to, we're going to litigate what happens to old games. How does that sound? I love it. Why am I afraid that you're going to throw five very good ideas at us? And all of them are going to end with.

Unfortunately, that requires legal changes. is, and there will never be any movement on this for at least 10 years. I have really great news for you. Idea number two is change all the laws. So we're going to get to that. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. We talked a little bit about the subtop, but I just to reset the scene here a bit, question I found myself asking everybody is basically like, why do we want to preserve old games?

And I got a lot of good answers from smart people, but I just have a couple that I want to play for you right now. One thing a couple of people told me was that they compared the video games. industry now to like the early days of the film industry, which I think is a fairly common thing in this space. It's a useful metaphor for how we think about how long things live and the formats of them. And a thing that people told me that I had not realized, but is very true, is there's a huge amount of stuff from like the 20s and 30s in Hollywood that is just gone, like fully gone, does not exist. No one will ever see it again because it was made once. It was put on one thing.

It was shown in theaters because that was the only way to watch movies. And then it just died. And those things are gone. And there's this real sadness in that industry. about how we lost what turned out to be these crucial parts of film history. But at that time, it wasn't history. It was just like this weird lark that people were doing. So there was no feeling that this is a thing we need to preserve. And there are a lot of people who feel like the early days of the video game industry in particular has really run into that.

One of the people I talked to for this was a guy named Frank Sefaldi, who I'm sure you guys know. He runs the Video Game History Foundation. And he told me a bunch about the idea of the old film industry. and he made that same comparison. But he did this really great thing where he was like, let me explain to you what it's like to have a video game right now. And I just really enjoyed the way he explained it.

So let me just play this for you real fast. We often compare it to like if movies were only released on like VHS ever. And you want to watch Back to the Future. All right, well, you have to go on eBay and you have to like find an antique VHS copy that's degraded a little bit from use of Back to the Future. You have to find a VCR that works a TV that it plugs into, or you have to find the external

scalers that make it look correct on your modern TV. You might need a time-based corrector, and those are really expensive, because the magnetic flux signal is like out of sync or whatever. You know what I mean? Like that's where video games are in the legal world. That's literally the same thing. I love this explanation, and it makes it seem like a mess. Does this feel right to you?

Like, does his way of thinking about it track? Yeah. So in other words, what he's saying is because games are specifically designed for very specific hardware in order to experience them now the way they were intended, you need to have the hardware itself. So in his example, you need a VHS player to play VHS tape. And that's the case with so many games, which I think is fair, especially for the games from like the 80s, 90s, absolutely.

I think it's gotten a little better, but it's still definitely true. I think there's another way of kind of hearing what Frank said that I had not considered, which is with an original movie, you would have the original elements, like the actual film that you shot, right, before it then gets like transferred over and over and over again. And the comparison to VHS tape is really interesting because we don't have the source code for so, so many games. The original code of most games is lost, even very big games. And with the VHS tape, there's a way of hearing that as we are not even getting the best version of it. We're just getting a version of like how they could print it at the time.

I think that that gets into like real nitty gritty of preservation. Are you the person who thinks that a game should be experienced exactly was it experienced in 1996 for, you know, Nintendo 64 or whatever? or do you think it should be experienced like literally the code that they wrote? And yeah, I had never considered it like that. If you think about it as the latter, I mean, wow, that would be, that actually really messes with preservation because I can think of very, very, very few games where the code of a game is available. Yeah. So, okay, you just brought up a thing I was going to get to later, but let's just talk about this now. The single most controversial thing I talked about with all the people I talked about for this,

was this question of, is the right way to preserve a video game, to preserve it exactly as it was and exactly as it felt and like the most true to the experience at the time? Like, should the way you play a game from the 1980s be on a 1980s TV in like a shag carpet living room with fluorescent lights everywhere? Like, should it be as close to what it was when it came out as possible? Or are there ways we can like modernize and improve these things? and a lot of people use the word artist's intent, right? Like, to what extent can we infer what they wanted to do and were technically constrained from being able to do versus what was it at the time?

And which of those is actual correct preservation? And I have a bunch of theories and some answers that I got that I'm going to play for you guys. But I want to know what you guys think about this because I suspect this is a debate that's happening all over the gaming industry all the time. Yeah, I think there are people that only see what you were describing early on, the experience. You have to have an 80s TV and you have to be running on original NES hardware. And I think there are definitely people that consider that to be really the only way you can experience an NES game from that era properly. I think the fear is that if you view that as video game preservation, it really puts a box around the number of people that can then experience the thing moving into the future because so many people are not going to have that hardware, not going to have that setup. So by gatekeeping it and saying that's the only way to do it,

I think that will limit really, you know, I think the one thing we can be sure of in terms of artist intent about video games from that time and even now is people who make games want people to play them. And as many people as possible to play them, because they spent all their time and energy and soul into this thing. So if the pixels don't look quite right, even though that's not ideal, I think they would probably still rather people are playing them than not. Yeah.

I mean, why not both is kind of my approach? I think of film preservation, because it is a really useful comparison here. Most film preservation these days is like 8K, 12K, even restoration of if they can find them original elements, right? And then they go in and they can digitize that and they can, you know, actually like clean up the image and try to get the color closer to what it would have actually looked like and use AI tools to get rid of damage to the film and various things like. that. I think that, like, for most people, that is the right answer. Because, again, it does give you an experience weirdly closer to what it was like to watch back in the day. Or again, the artist's intent. That said, there's a YouTube channel that I follow from a person who uses a DIY tool that captures old film trailers, like actually off of 35 millimeter film.

Oh, wow. And those, you know, they're not putting any extra work into the preservation. It It is as it was after degrading for however many decades and everything else. And for certain movies, that's like a very appealing thing. I think there are a lot of people who like Star Wars because they saw Star Wars prints that had been screening for decades by the time it got around to them as a kid in the 80s, right? And that's their idea of Star Wars. So I think when you can have both with games, I think that is, yes, having the original S&S experience and then having one that works on your emulator, having a Nintendo set.

and now having one that up prizes to 4K on your emulator, I think those are both good. I also think that there is a middle ground in Mr. And I have a feeling that we'll talk about Mr. a lot more. And hopefully people can explain it way better than I can. But when you are able to kind of recreate the original hardware in digital form, I think that allows for what I suspect a lot of people will say, which is some of these NES games in these classic retro games, you actually, they don't really work on modern screens.

Like, you actually need the kind of like jumpiness of the frames and other things to experience them appropriately. And that is something that can be created with a tool like Mr. But I'm excited to hear more because it sounds like you've like, you've spoken to all the right people. Yeah, I think the place that I've landed, I think, is it's kind of about how you think about the goal of preserving these games, right? Like, I think there's a divide I've come to think about where it's like, and this actually informs a lot of what we're about to talk about where one way of thinking about what we do with video games is, is like as sort of historical artifacts, right? And that's where the goal is to understand them as they were when they were around, right?

And I think, like, one of the things Frank talked a lot about when he and I talked was this idea that one of the things the video game history foundation does is context, right? Like, they have this big idea of you can't understand a video game without understanding the world around the video game. So not only do we have to preserve the game as accurately as we can, We also have to like bring in these other things around it, whether it's commercials or like things going on in the world or other games that were before and after to help you understand what this game meant in the world. So there's a version of it that I think I think you're right, Chris, that is like this should be as perfectly preserved as possible for that particular use because you should understand it as a thing in space and time there. But then the other half of it is like, what if you want people to play these games?

And this is where I really come to kind of Russ your way of thinking about this. Like, these games can be better now. And in so many ways, like, one of the things Frank was talking about was there was this little thing. Actually, you know what, let me just play it. He gave me this whole really funny speech about the NES and blinking lights. Let me just tell you about the blinking lights. I think preserving that experience often requires, you know, just fixing up little things. You know, really, really easy example is the NES, the 8-bit NES.

I worked on a few collections that had NES games in them. And one thing that was an absolute no-brainer for us was the NES has a limitation on how many sprites, like moving objects, can be on one horizontal line. And if you go over, I think the number is eight. If there's more than eight objects on one line, they start flickering because the NES can't render that ninth object, right? So what it does is in hardware, it just kind of turns one off. and, you know, like, it alternates turning them off at that point. And so a really no-brainer thing that we do is, like, no one wants this is we up that limit to, I mean, it might be infinite, I don't know, but we up the limits. So we allow more than eight sprites on a scan line.

And all that does is eliminate flicker. And it's like, did artists maybe sometimes intend for there to be flicker on this part, you know, theoretically. But I think for the most part, artistic intent was like that this. look good, you know, and we don't have to be slaves to this hardware anymore. That is a great example, quite honestly. Like, he's right. It's so rare to think of a scenario where an artist or a game developer wanted that to be flickering, but they just had to because that was the only way to pull off the game.

Yeah, this idea of like artists' intent, I think, is always sort of tricky, right? Because it's like, how do you guess what somebody was thinking about when they built these things versus what was just like a technical limitation versus, like, art comes from constraints. You know what I mean? So I think it can't get tricky, but things like that seem to me to be not all that controversial. I suspect there are people out there who will think that is like bastardizing what this game was. I increasingly don't buy that argument. I think where it gets interesting and tricky is when you talk about where that line is, right? Because you can certainly go past that line and start making changes that arguably make a game look dramatically better, but are pretty far

afield from what the original source material was. An example that jumps like, my mind, just recently, a collection of Metal Gear Solid games was released. And it's every Metal Gear Solid game, basically 1 through 3 and the original NES Metal Gear Solid games. And the original Metal Gear Solid came out on the PlayStation 1. And in this collection, the game runs at 240P. And if you push out a 240P image to a 4K screen, holy cow, that looks like jaggy and messy and not the prettiest look. Yep.

But emulators and people that work in emulators have figured out ways to upscale an image from a 240P image to look actually quite clean and quite good on a 4K image, but it looks dramatically different from what it looked like when you were playing it on a PlayStation. And is that a bridge too far? Or do we just like that people have the option to do that? That's where it gets tricky. I tend to increasingly think that is not a bridge too far. I really like, so this is ultimately like theory number one of how to make this stuff work is is make the games better. Make them work the way that they would if you were building them now, which is obviously there's a lot of like interpretation and complicated stuff in there. And I think reasonable people can disagree on whether that's the goal.

And Chris, I think that is not exclusive of the idea of we should also preserve these things as cultural artifacts, right? But I think that's not going to be a big reason for folks to do this, right? And I think one of the things I've heard a bunch in talking to people is that the problem with, emulation. And I suppose to some extent, this brings me to idea number two about how to make emulation and preservation more successful is that it's not a very good business. One of things people have said to me that I thought was surprising was that if you're Nintendo or Sony or anyone else who has been like making games for a very long time, everybody brings up Nintendo just because it's sort of the best example of like they've had a million different consoles over a million

years and figuring out what to do with those things over time, Nintendo kind of has that challenge more neatly than anybody. So everybody talks about Nintendo. when you ask about this, they also just have the longest history of great games that people love. But if you're a Nintendo, I always sort of thought there was just like a database of games sitting somewhere and you just like click eight buttons and it becomes available again. And I have been aggressively disabused of that idea that actually it is more work than people give it credit for to make that stuff available. And if you're Nintendo, you can probably resell some of those games and that's cool and

exciting. But the case a couple of people made to me that I can't stop thinking about is that if you're Nintendo or any other game maker, you can spend your finite resources and energy bringing these old games forward, which will sell to some people. There's a cool nostalgia factor. You can help some people encounter new kinds of games. Or you can spend that time and money and energy building new stuff that is going to make you lots of money and sell more consoles and be good for your bottom line over time. I would clarify a little bit on that. I think, which is, it is very, very easy for Nintendo or anybody else to take a bunch of ROMs, put them into an emulator and put it on the switch.

That itself is very, very easy. What would be difficult is the paperwork. Yes. Which, that is not for me to say that that is an excuse. I think that's actually very legitimate, especially I think a lot of people believe that developers should be paid for their creations, right? And a lot of these games were made before people could even conceptualize something like this sort of emulation or games being widely available like this and digging up who even owns some of these games. I mean, I think I'm curious

if people talk about this in any of your interviews, but I think listeners would be shocked how many popular games nobody knows who owns them. Yep. Or knows who. where the original code is. They have been, over the years, caught in so many various mergers or acquisitions, that that paperwork is gone. And if you've ever wondered why your favorite game is just never made available on the Nintendo Switch, often the answer isn't somebody's punishing you. It's that they would love to, but like you said, it's really hard to figure out how or

if it's even possible. So people just don't. Yeah, I would also add to your point about kind of triaging where your priorities should lie. You're right, it's, it is more time that you would spend bringing these older games that a lot of people wouldn't play. The amount of time required is so small compared to the amount of time required to make a brand new from scratch game, given the fact that, at least for the first party games that they have access to, like they don't have to worry about that paperwork. They own all the stuff already. I mean, that's really what they've done with the Nintendo. Switch Online subscription model is like those are all running through emulators that emulate an N64

or GBA or whatever and they kind of pump them through and Nintendo has some stipulations about like we wanted to look pretty close to the original hardware but they've also released ports that are like pretty rough on there pretty not well amulated uh I think the original version of o'grine of time uh look pretty rough on the Nintendo Switch online version so I think they're still doing it. I don't think it's that hard for them to do it. And it hasn't, certainly hasn't prevented them from making new stuff as well. And I think you're seeing a lot of companies like Microsoft as well and Sony doing this with their back catalogs because they have the access to that back catalogs and they own the games already. So might as well. Like,

it just adds more value and more incentive for people to buy the hardware. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And I think over time, that's a victory, right? Because it's like it is a small but predictable business for those companies and they can kind of add to it over time. But like, I mean, we talk about like the weird incentives of like venture capital all the time on the show, right? And one of the things that it does is say, like old games are like a lifestyle business, right? Like it's a nice thing. It's predictable.

There are people who will like it. There is no earth-shattering gigantic business in that, right? And the incentives in the other direction are like, if you can go out and stumble into being the next fortnight or call of duty or. Roblox or whatever you want to be, that's so much sexier that I think, especially if you are in a position of having to like make hard decisions, it's just so tempting to go that direction, even though the audience and ability to do that older stuff is there. And my hope is that calculus like shifts more over time, especially as a lot of these companies try to like make smarter decisions about

how they make games because this business has gotten so chaotic. But I don't know. A lot of the folks I talk to are not crazy optimistic about that happening. But I, I sincerely hope it does. I think we're all on the same page. I think the where the sexiness of this, if there ever was or is or will be one, is the streaming services, is subscription services, because it is a number that you can add to the list of how many games are on your platform. If you can easily go from a platform that has 100 games to 600 games, that is appealing,

even if it is disingenuous, maybe. But I agree. And I think Sony said as much when they were asked about backwards compatibility versus Microsoft, you know, like it does not believe us to spend all of our resources on a thing that we have tried to appease fans with time and time again and we do not see a big payoff for. Chris, you just brought up the thing I am perhaps most excited to talk about in all of this, which is what I would call Spotify for video games. Before we get into the Spotify for video games thing, there is, I do want to go back to the thing, Chris, you were saying about basically. the paperwork part of preservation and emulation of video games. Because that is something I heard a bunch about. One of the people I talked to for this was Chris Kohler, who was a video game journalist for a long time,

now works at Digital Eclipse, which does a lot of really interesting work about emulation and preservation of video games. And he was saying they worked on a teenage mutant Ninja Turtles thing. He basically said it's a miracle that that collection existed because there are so many different rights for different versions of those stories and different actors and different characters in different platforms of different games in different countries that he called it kind of a minor miracle when all of those things come together. And then I asked him, like, is there a version of this that is just totally impossible? And he thought about it for a while. And he's like,

I don't really want to say because as soon as I say this, like, it'll come together and everything will be great. But he did say that any time somebody comes to them and says, can you bring back this big hit game that we loved when we were kids, they've almost always looked into it. And it's almost always just logistically like paperwork-wise impossible. But then he told me a story about NBA Jam that I'm just going to play for you very quickly because I thought this was a really good example. Something like NBA Jam, where NBA Jam has all of these likenesses of all of these individual basketball players. And it's like they will never, ever, ever be able to re-release, you know, the first NBA Jam. But does that mean that literally like no one gets to play it unless they

go and, you know, buy an aging piece of hardware and spend a bunch of money getting a a super Nintendo running on a, you know, it's like, does that mean literally, like, you don't ever get to experience that, that important, very important part of history? And I think that that's, that's an untenable position. I love this because A, I think NBA Jam is like a perfect example of why this is so impossible to do because you have to call up a bunch of NBA players, like living and dead and try to convince them to do this with you. But also kind of perfectly describes this tension, right, between this stuff feels intuitively like it, should be available in some way. And it is a part of history. Like NBA Jam is maybe the game I

personally have the most childhood nostalgia for. I played the shit out of NBA Jam and I loved it so much and I miss it terribly. And it is sort of sad that in a very real way, that game is probably never going to come back into my life in a meaningful way. And like I just, I like that as a way of thinking about like why this is complicated and for perfectly valid reasons is complicated. but it also sort of sucks that that's the way that it works. Okay, but it kind of then begs the question. And again, I'm sure this is part of this episode of obviously there are ROMs out there that you can get within 30 seconds of Googling MBA Jan, I'm sorry.

I don't want to like step too far a field of Midway and their lawyers. But like, you just did the same thing that almost every single person I talked to for this show did, which is you kind of can't have this conversation without basically. saying, yes, this is illegal, but it shouldn't be, go do it. Well, I'm not necessarily saying go do it, but I am saying, like, I think everyone who knows this space knows how easy it is to do. But there's step one and there's step two there, which is, yes, there are ROMs, and that's creating more VHS tapes, right?

Like, that's what we're kind of talking about there. And the problem with relying on ROMs and relying on piracy, forget like all the legal stuff for a moment. is it's just not organized. So it's still so easy for things to be lost and to slip through the cracks. It really actually relies on popularity and a collective willingness to remember something versus something that is more official like a library where whether or not it's popular or is irrelevant. It existed.

It will be preserved. And then even if people forget about it for 30 or 40 years, when people go back to look, for it in the future and there is suddenly a reason to care, it'll be waiting for them. It won't just be lost because it didn't keep getting uploaded over and over again onto different random ROM sites that were getting whack-a-mould by Nintendo and other companies. Yeah, but don't you think that the, you know, non-centralized distribution of this stuff ensures its longevity rather than relying on like a singular... Not at all. I mean, I appreciate a Bitcoin mentality.

my friend. But that's not me. I'm not that guy. I think it's idealistic in that, again, it's so informal. And it's so easy for those sites to get taken offline at any moment. Actually, there's a really easy way for me to point this out. When Napster was popular, and this is when I was in high school, there were a lot of songs that were like alternate versions of songs or live versions of songs that I loved and some of my favorite music. And I can't not find it anymore. And a lot of those, I was like, why don't you down? It's going to be on that.

It's in the air. Everybody's sharing it all the time. It's just available there forever. And now, I'm sure it exists. I'm sure it's on some, like, you know, 40 and 50 year olds hard drives somewhere, but they're not sharing music anymore. And then younger people don't care about those bands. So it's just gone.

And that is what I always worry about with ROMs in the world of gaming is. It is easier for it to disappear than I think we think. because generational shift is a real thing. And a lot of, you know, 40 and 50-year-olds right now really care about 70s and 80s game preservation. But like, who knows if that'll stay this, you know, true another 10 years from now? The question there is kind of who should be responsible for it, right? And this is where we start to get into like some of the legal stuff. But I did have a couple of conversations with people who think that public libraries are really the correct home for this, as we were talking about at the beginning of the show.

that that is a place that can not only sort of preserve this stuff for historical reasons and has good, useful, like, loopholes by which to do so, but also can give you access to it. Like, we have this idea of controlled digital lending, which is very much under threat because of what, like, the Internet Archive did with books during the pandemic. Like, it's all very complicated, and we'll get into some of that in a minute, actually. But I think this idea of who is the right steward of that is really the question. And this is where we get to Spotify for video games because there are a bunch of people out there who think that maybe the way to do this is to essentially bundle it all together. And I think you have to sort of set aside a bunch of realities in order for that to be possible.

Like the idea that a bunch of these companies that have been making games for 40 years are suddenly going to decide to all kind of throw in on a single service for old video games, probably super unrealistic. But who knows, maybe we would have said that about the music industry 20 years ago and now here we are, Spotify exists. I think the theory of it is a really interesting one for two reasons. One, because it gives it a real chance, I think, of being an actual business in a way that I think these sort of mini libraries and multiple different services is less compelling. Having this like one giant place with all the old stuff could work in a more convincing way. I talked to some people who do not agree with that and I talk to people who do. But the other thing is I think it would just make it easier.

And I think like it's definitely true that you can Google video. game name and ROM, and we'll talk about the legality of all this in a minute, but you can Google that and find it. But the gap between that and actually playing it somewhere is bigger and more complicated than it off of this. Like one of the first people I called for this episode was a guy named Riley Tessit, who made this emulator app called GBA for iOS a bunch of years ago. Yeah.

He exploited the like enterprise certificate thing on the iPhone so that you could download games onto your iPhone and emulate them and play them there, doing all these really. cool old video game things. And he then made a thing called Delta, which is this very professional kind of high touch, beautiful way of emulating old video games. It's not a way to get ROMs. It's very like cognizant of the fact that it can't have the ROMs for you. So you have to bring your own ROMs and it just kind of turns a blind eye to where those ROMs come from. But it's in this place of like, he built a really great app and went to Apple and said, I built this app. I built this app for emulating old video games, can I put it on your platform? Let me do it for you. It'll be

awesome. And let me just play you the way he described what happened with Apple. After GBA 5 was shut down, I like tinkered away at what would become Delta, like just to entertain me and also to learn Swift. It's like a fun thing. But then I was like, you know what? I should just reach out to Apple and see what I could do to get it in the app store. And like, is there anything? And so I talked to like the app review team at WBC and they basically told me, Apple, problem is mostly that they don't want to allow people to install any game that they can't approve. And I believe them. Like, they were concerned that people could down, like, go around like the age rating and stuff

if they just like downloaded old games through Delta. And I've heard that. And I like, you know what, that makes sense. I understand. So that's the first half of the story. The second half of the story is he figures out how to make kind of an allow list for these games. He's going to say only these ones are allowed, which again is a complicated legal thing to do.

Because if he's saying you can bring your Pokemon ROM and emulator, on this thing, you've sort of entered into a world of hurt. But then Apple ultimately just said, never mind, we don't want emulators on this device at all. So he built this weird, complicated thing where you essentially use your computer as a server to run Delta on your phone. And it does work. You have to like turn on developer mode and it's really hacky.

And most people just aren't going to do that, right? And I think we're just in a position now where if you want easy access to these old video games, the best move, at least that I've found, is to buy one of those slightly sketchy things on Amazon that ships with like 27,000 games on it. And some of them work and some of them kind of don't. And some of them are definitely like porny and gross. But it just doesn't feel like we have the good system for it that would even give it a real fighting chance to work. The good system for like easy emulation for the masses, basically. Yeah, like even leaving aside the legality of it. Like, it just doesn't feel like there is a good tool by which I can get access to this stuff. It's all out there.

if I'm willing to search through Reddit and GitHub and find all this stuff. And this is also kind of where we get to the emulation hardware and software side of things. The thing that surprised me the most, honestly, in doing this research, is how sophisticated the emulators are for basically every console ever. There are amazing groups of people out there working on this stuff, mostly in an open source way, mostly just out of the goodness of their hearts. The software behind it is incredible. It's just really inaccessible to most people. Which makes sense because whoever would centralize all of this stuff would need all of the permissions that we've been talking about that are next to impossible to get. So that's why we don't have the core main person doing this.

They don't want the responsibility. It's much easier to just say, okay, it's on archive or whatever. You know, you'll find it somewhere. But I don't want to be the person that's responsible for that. Yeah, I mean, I do think that's part of the challenge is it's like building the Spotify for video games would be 5% really interesting product challenge and 95% just nightmare legal paperwork scenarios. Like, I would say literally impossible. From a legal standpoint, literally impossible to get the clearances on the entire catalog of old

games. I think that's probably right. But even in theory, like just play out this flight of fancy with me for a minute. If in theory it worked, do you think there is a real business for the Spotify of old video games? Not in all. No? No, it's why it should be in libraries.

Well, again, I'm obviously very clear with my belief here. Who gives a shit? I mean, an adventure capital size thing, right? Like, music, people love music. Every, like, you go out to a stranger and like, have you heard the Beatles? And they're like, yeah, I know a few of the songs, definitely. You go out to a stranger to him, you're like, hey, did you play Belmont's quest? And they're like, can you stop talking to me?

I'm trying to buy my groceries. Like, I love this. I am a huge advocate for it. I would love for it to exist. But as we already said with Microsoft and Sony, part of it sure is the legal. Part of it is the financials, again, of all the legal. And then part of it is just the hosting of it. You put up thousands and thousands of games, most of which are like bad.

That's the other part of this. It doesn't mean they shouldn't be preserved. But just like early film, most of it's garbage. And then you get into like, it is a spiral of more questions, right? Like, okay, well, we did all of that. How do we curate it? Okay, we did all of that, but all that people are playing is Mario and Mario Kart and the original Zelda, which have always been, not always, but are relatively readily available. I'm not saying, let's not do it.

You know, fight a fancy. Money is no object. I can't wait for somebody to, like, lose money on this. But when I think of things that are important for history, important for culture, and are going to lose. profound amounts of money, there's only one group that comes to mind. And it's the good all USA government. And they are going to do a great job doing what they've done again with books. In the same way that only now are we seeing Barnes & Noble trying to figure out how to make a business out of books. I just, I don't buy that it as a business on practically any

facet, unless you did very specific targeting, which is, again, what emulation is now, which is you can pay and get Metal Gear Solid Collection and you can get just the game that is like very specific and I'll charge you a ridiculous amount of money for it. Yeah, or you subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online, which is the arguably the closest comparison, David, to what you're talking about. And obviously that is the main selling point. Like, you get a few other perks with Nintendo Switch Online. You can get cloud saves of various other things. But what they're selling is access to this library of old Nintendo games. And it's a pretty important. pretty big library. I don't have a count in front of me, but it's a lot of games. And so they do view

that as at least some level of an incentive. I don't think it's a genuine, like, big tick on their balance sheet, but it's there. And I'll say even with Nintendo Switch Online, it's telling that they advertise that, but then they also advertise the free DLC for their major games. They advertise the Mario Kart, you know, courses or whatever. It's even, even they see Nintendo, you know, with the best collection is not like, well, this is enough. You know, like, we have these great old games. That surely will be enough to get people to spend it each month. Even they're like, we've got to get some new stuff on here else we're not going to get people.

Yeah, I think I want desperately for it to be a thing. And I think the case for it, which Chris Kohler made to me, is that essentially if you can get to a world in which everybody has a handful of games they want to play, right? And that handful might be totally different. But if I'm willing to pay 10 bucks a month for access. to all these games, even though I'm going to play 10 of them, you're going to play a different 10. Somebody else is going to play a different 10. That's kind of how you can build a sort of omnibus service that works.

Everybody else I talked to said, seems super fun, incredibly niche, probably not going to be worth anyone actually investing in. So I tend to land on like, I wish it existed. I'd be very surprised if anybody actually does the work to make it exist. The other flag that I would say, even if it did exist, is does it fundamentally devalue video games in general if you do that? In the same way that Netflix trying to have as much as possible on streaming has devalued media in the same way that Spotify having music has pushed it so that musicians have to tour to make their money. And people don't expect to make money off of the music itself. I think that's a pretty fair concern that people have had about Game Pass. Is that like are we seeing this yet again with a devaluing of creative work?

And I think that's been a big part of the unions, all the strikes in Hollywood, right? It's like, if you're going to do this sort of thing, how do you pay people? Because the audience isn't going to like the answer, which is we should be charging way, way, way, way more stuff for all of this, for these services if we want people to be paid how they were in the past. It is tricky. It is tricky. I really agree. Okay, let's switch here. So we're going to take one more break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about the law.

And I have learned more about copyright than I ever intended to for the purposes of this show. We're going to get into it right back. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic, can mean getting lost in the shuffle. Grammally gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural,

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We've been sort of circling this the whole episode, so let's just dig into this now. I called up a guy named John Loiterman, who works at a law firm. He's been in the gaming industry for a long time. Now he's a lawyer thinking about a lot of this stuff. And I basically asked him, like, walk me through what is going on

with the legality of emulating and ROMs and where we are in this space. And it turns out it's both very simple and very complicated. kind of all at the same time. And basically, the first thing he told me was that emulators are lawful. As a general rule, if you want to emulate a thing that exists, you want to reverse engineer or something and figure out how to run it in software, that is generally considered to be

lawful. That's fine. So the actual act of emulation is okay. And he explained it in a way that I really liked. Let me just play this for you really fast. An emulator is considered to be lawful because it doesn't actually copy. anything. You know, an emulator is software that is designed to mimic the function of another piece of software, which doesn't necessarily require you to copy the code or to copy any, you know,

binary executable component of it. You can monitor how that system works and then you can make another system that functions the same way. And copyright law only applies to the expression of an idea and not to the idea itself. So I thought that's it's very good and straightforward and helpful, right? And what he did say is, do you guys know the story of the dolphin emulator and what has happened to Dolphin over the years? Not recently. I am familiar with it, but I don't know what the backstory is. So Dolphin, as I understand it, and please everyone email Vergecast at theverge.com and tell me all the reasons I'm wrong about this story. The way I've come to understand it is Dolphin is a group of people who made a Wii U emulator. And it was very good and very successful. The Wii U is a hard console to get

right and emulate it, but they worked on it really hard. Did a good job. And It was made available through, I think, the Steam store. And Nintendo basically went to Valve and said, take this thing out. It's breaking the law. And what it turned out was happening was, again, it's not illegal to build an emulator. So the fact that it existed was okay. But what Dolphin had done is found an encryption key, which is what allowed Wii U to connect to the games and content. They had this key that basically was a handshake between the two things.

and the copying and distribution of that key was illegal. So if Dolphin had shipped the emulator and said, bring your own key, like Riley did with the ROMs, right? It's like where you get them from is not my problem. It's readily available on the internet, but I'm not going to tell you how to do it. But if you bring them were cool,

that would have been okay. But instead, Dolphin got basically booted out of the store, not because it was illegal, but because of like the policies of Valve and Nintendo, like that just they agreed and took it down. But it did get into this tricky legal gray area where suddenly it's not as straightforward a thing because you are taking something that belongs to the company and distributing it. And one of the things that John said to me is he would bet that as gaming goes forward and as we get more consoles, they're going to find more ways to lock those things together, which is going to make them even harder to emulate, which I think is a big bummer. I will ease the raging nerd fire in certain listeners hearts and minds right now.

The dolphin emulates the GameCube and the Wii. Did I say the Wii U? I did say the Wii U. Yes. Thank you. I believe there's a different emulator for the Wii U. Simu. But otherwise, I agree with you.

I just love that we live in a world where I have to push my glasses up my nose and be like, that was a great point. but actually... Listen, this is what you're here for. Okay, so that's the first piece of it. And then the other thing that he said, which I thought was really interesting, is that straightforwardly ROMs are illegal, right? Like, that's very simple.

The act of distributing and selling ROMs is against the law, because that is just straightforward copyright infringement. You are making a copy of things. You do not have a right to make a copy of. Super straightforward. Where everyone seems to agree, at least in this space and where there seems to be real energy is that that is bad and broken and we need to fix it. Like almost everybody I talked to ended up on some long rant about how the copyright system

in America is broken, which listeners to the Vergecast will be very familiar with Nelai doing, so I don't need to like redo that rant. But this idea that by default, essentially a game has to exist for 90 years before people can have it and access it and do what they want with it, outside of just hoping and begging for one of these companies to re-release it for you, everyone. I talk to seems to think that's a very bad idea. Even John, who is a lawyer, was like, this is bad and we have to fix it, which I thought was really fascinating.

So let me ask you, because my understanding has always been that if you own a game, like, if you went and you bought Super Mario RPG on Super Nintendo and you have the cartridge in your home, it is not illegal to back up the data that is on that cartridge, which in turn would basically be a ROM. So the actual doing of that, using your own personal cartridge that you bought, is legal, but distributing it to other people is not legal. Yes. So that's my understanding of it.

That's correct. And one of the reasons that is the case is John told me about basically the federal regulations that govern a lot of this stuff. Actually, let me just play this clip. He introduced this thing 37 CFR 201. And he was like, if people want to know what's going on, they should read federal regulations, 37 CFR 201. And rather than read that to you live on the show,

let me just show you the way he explained it. There are exemptions for preservation of video games, but it's a little bit more narrow because some of those preservation exemptions only apply to libraries and museums and certain types of organizations. You know, there are other exemptions that are specifically listed in there

for, you know, in cases where you own the software already, and now you're allowed to make copies of it for different purposes, and there's some specificity in the Code of Federal Regulations about that. There's also provisions in there about games that require some online component. And there's ways that if you own the game,

that you can spoof these to play it locally. So this is also back to the like make games better thing, I think is an interesting way of think. How do you keep a game playable way past the like online infrastructure for it? It's going to be a really interesting question for the kinds of games people playing now. But yeah, to your point, rest, the federal regulations are what really govern a lot of this stuff. One thing that John told me is there's not a lot of case law around things like emulation

and preservation. And his theory for that was essentially that the people doing the emulation and preservation are so small that they literally can't afford the court fees. So the way that it has been is you would need some big player to have the wherewithal and resources to fight against Nintendo or Sony or one of these companies picking this fight. But what it has been is you have occasional times where Nintendo will say, take this down and they take it down because they can't afford the fight. But mostly we've just ended in this place of like, de taunt, I guess, where it's, Nintendo doesn't want there to be precedent that this is a thing that is legal. So they don't really want the fight either. They want to have this ability to sort of take down things that they want, but also leave well enough alone.

And like we've been saying, this is a niche enough thing. and it's for people who love games the most that it's just a weird group of people to pick this fight with, which what John and others said is kind of the license for freedom in this space. Like you can do stuff and try things and do interesting things

as long as you're not sort of flagrantly trying to become a billionaire selling old versions of Mario on the internet, you're going to largely get away with it because this is just not a space that these companies want to pick fights in. Which I thought was a really interesting way of thinking about it. Like it is you'll lose if it comes to that fight

but nobody really wants to have it with you. Yeah, and I think they know well enough that the idea of deleting something from the internet is impossible, especially something that people really, really want like an old version of a game that they loved when they were a kid. So even though you're right, they have tried, and I think they've shut down some of the more popular, let's say, ROM sites, but largely speaking, there's nothing you can permanently do

to get rid of this stuff. Right, and you just kind of look like an asshole, like chasing people making ROMs of old video games they want to play, is a tough PR look for a lot of these companies, which I think is how some of these things continue to survive. The other thing John said that I thought was interesting is those federal regulations are updated every three years, and actually next year is an update cycle. And so his argument was like, if you want to make changes to how libraries can access and distribute video games or how these things are preserved for what's allowed and what isn't, like don't

lobby Congress, it's a waste of time. Don't waste the company's time lobbying for that either. Try and get the federal regulations change and let's change the carve-outs and let's increase the things that people are allowed to do with this stuff for the sake of preservation and backup and keeping things that you already own as yours that are accessible. That was his advice kind of over and over. It was like, that's the move. If you want to make change, make that change. Who do I email, David? Tell me who to email. It's Barack Obama at gmail. No, I don't know. It's actually, it's a good question, but I should figure that And if I find an email address, I'll put it in the show notes for this episode.

But this stuff is also opaque that way, right? And this kind of goes back to like, this is almost an official industry, but it's not quite. And as a result, it's just so complicated. And this gets back to like a lot of the emulator software and hardware that's out there. Like, we should just talk about the mister for one minute before we get out of here. We are in this place now where a device like the mister is able to successfully emulate lots of different things at like a hardware. level, right? One of the things that it does is it's not just sort of making software that operates on a much faster device the way that an older device might have worked. It's actually

better at like on the board running it the way that it would have run a long time ago. And Mr. is such a weird and distributed thing that I literally wasn't able to find someone to talk to me about it for this. I emailed a bunch of like no name email addresses and nobody ever got back to me. I even tried Chris Grant, America's number one Mr. Fan, nothing. Wow. Things like that are really fascinating, but what Mr. Can't be is like an official product that you buy at Best Buy because that is just going to like open it up to complicated troubles that it doesn't need. But until you get there, it's just too complicated, right? It's like what you want is like the Raspberry Pi version of something like that that is like

much more accessible to regular people. And the emulation community seems to want that. And I talk to a couple of people who are like, we can get to the point where this is easier for people to get their hands on at a software and hardware level and install new things and find stuff. But it's just every step of that you risk kind of raising the ire of one of these companies that doesn't want to fight you but will if it has to. But I would counter that by saying I think there is one company and people will probably

know this if they're in the space that has done a very good job of getting misters out in the world and that's analog. Oh, yeah. So analog sells, you know, devices that. They sell the analog pocket, which handles basically the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, a bunch of handheld systems. They have devices for old consoles, NES, Super NES, et cetera. And they have made a business out of it. It is a niche business, but they sell those things out frequently, and they have constant models coming out.

It's also a bit of, for people who have not used the analog system, you have to have the original video game cartridges to play games on it, unless you have. you happen to find some additional firmware, software, whatever the word is that you could put on it, that would allow you access to start playing the ROMs directly through it. So I think that's true for, yeah, sure, if you have the VHS tapes on hand, but even analog is not putting out an official emulation machine. That's true, yeah. I do think you're right that analog is proof that from a hardware perspective, that is the kind of thing you can do really well.

But even it is like, it's very clear about the lines it can't cross. And I think until we make those lines easier to cross, which is really complicated, again, because like for the reasons we've been talking about, the people who made these things, both under the law and just in sort of like moral reality, like deserve to be compensated for the art that they made. And the idea that everything from the, you know, whatever, 2006 and before should now just be freely available to everyone is just not how it works. But it does seem like there should be a better way of doing this. Like one of the things that John proposed when he and I were talking was, is that a reform to the copyright system that he likes would be one where, let's say,

10 years after you release something, you just have to do an incredibly basic thing to keep your copyright. Like you just have to send in a piece of paper that says, yep, I still want this. And it keeps it as yours. But what that means is for companies that go out of business or for things that just literally nobody cares about that are going to otherwise just kind of die. And there are a lot of those out there. what it would do is without that one tiny piece of effort, that stuff would become public domain.

And he's like, that's how we get to a point where things that are no longer cared about become the property of everybody. And I think as like a common sense way of thinking about it, I like that a lot. Again, that's like a giant legal minefield that I suspect will never happen. But like spiritually, that feels about right to me. I agree with that. I think that will raise a lot of questions like what about disputes over ownership? So who sends in that sheet of paper, right? And what happens there?

But I agree. I also am a version of that that I think is, I would hope, much more doable. Again, with ROMs and libraries, is like, after five years or 10 years, you still have obviously the right to sell your game. But libraries have access to make the game available in however many copies you want for free at their discretion. And then it's like, yes, you still own your trademark, your copyright, whatever. Like, you still own the game. But in terms of public good, we can open this up. I also, I'm a firm believer that that should be true for not just games. I think the laws in our country in terms of preserving art as capital are deranged. But, but like that's a whole separate podcast. I'm sure

we'll do one day. Yeah, I agree with all that. And I will say there was real both enthusiasm and optimism among the people I talk to that we can get to the point where libraries can be that thing. That we're still figuring out so much about digital lending and how that interacts with copyright. And I mean, we're talking about this with e-books now, right? Like, is it the same thing you have to buy a copy of an e-book for everyone you want to lend out? Or can the library buy the book once and then lend multiple copies? Like, we just don't have answers to this stuff. But I think we're going to get them one way or another.

And there's a chance it's really ugly and essentially kind of kneecaps everything libraries want to do. everywhere because there are some publishers out there who would like that and are very powerful. But there's also a version of it that says, like, even digital goods can be accessible to people as a public good through libraries. And almost everybody I talked to was like, that's an outcome we can absolutely all get behind, which I thought was very encouraging. What do we do about the fact that it's not going to be a business? This is the question I want to leave with is like, do we have to just think about this as artistic preservation and a thing we do because it's important and worthwhile or do we need to find a way to like inject capitalism back into old games?

Like as we think about this issue over the next 10 years, do we think about this as a public good or like a line of business? Absolutely a public good. And that doesn't mean that like the really big things can't still be a viable business that keep people aware. For example, I, oh, humble brag here in a shout out. I'm on the board of my local indie movie theater here in Orange County. Of course you are.

And Santana called the Frida. People should go to it and see great movies like Dog Day Afternoon was just there, right? And really great old movies like that. And some small ones that could get lost screened there. And that is great. And that is a great service. And it is a nonprofit, even to show very famous movies like Alien. You still are probably going to need to be a nonprofit status just to justify your business.

But even we are not going to be showing the lost movies. of like 1928, right? And as time goes on, as this becomes a more mature medium, that's going to be more and more true for video games. And I think, yes, we can use the machine of capitalism to maintain interest in older games, but it's going to need to be the big ones, just like it is with any other form. You know, how many novels from 1944 do people read on a regular basis, right? Like, you have to find other ways of preserving them.

So I think it's a bit of everything. You're going to have the market keeping us aware of the really important stuff. You should ideally have libraries or nonprofits that are able to preserve the stuff that people wouldn't care about. You can do total remakes like Resident Evil 4 remake that are kind of doing, I think, something that you got one, which is even if you do preserve this, sometimes the games just aren't that fun anymore. And you need to kind of like upgrade it, Demon Souls on the PS5. think is another example. I think it's a multi-pronged approach. And I do think you're right that the fact that I can give all those examples is encouraging.

The one that I can't give is what do we do about all the 99% of games that are not the big stuff? And right now the answer is pretty much exclusively piracy and ROMs. And that's just neither it's not good for anybody. It's not good for the companies. It's not good for preservation to not have better options. It's not good for availability. It has people having to look at some really nasty ads on their browsers. Yeah, I think it's time for change in that department.

I agree. Russ, any thoughts before we go? No, that is a good summary. I do love old games and I love very esoteric old games as well. Stinger is a side-scrolling shooter where you fight a giant floating watermelon. And if I can't play Stinger every other year when I have the urge, that is a real crime. So I think we need to make this a huge priority across the country and across the world, really. Do It for Stinger is a slogan I can get behind.

I like this. Amen. All right. Thank you guys, as always. We're going to be back for one more of these next week. But this is really fun. Appreciate you guys doing with this with me as always. All right.

It's been a lot today. That is it for the show. Thanks to Chris and Russ for being here. Thanks to everyone who talked to me for this show. And thank you, as always, for listening. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, games you'd like to emulate, or just more things to say about the fact that I called the Dolphin a Wii you thing. You can always email us at Vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866 Verge 1-1.

Love hearing from you. Send us all your questions and thoughts. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Fox Media podcast network. We'll be back on Wednesday to talk about Spotify, Netflix, and the hotline, and we'll be back on Friday to talk about all the news of the week, because the news just keeps coming, my friends. We'll see you then.

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