Quik the Thunder Rabbit is a platformer for the Super Nintendo that might have been lost to time if a fan hadn’t found it. Unfortunately, their decision to alter the old game’s code has been met with backlash.
Years of neglect are eroding gaming history. Cartridges rot in garages, companies horde demos that they will never release, and obscure titles fade into the ether. Some games may even be lost forever.
Were you one of the eleven people waiting for the Duke Nukem game that was supposed to come to the PlayStation Portable? Still bummed that it never came out? All hope is not lost. A disc containing the source code for Duke Nukem: Critical Mass was recently found in Washington, D.C. But getting at the guts of the thing…
Check out the second of our 1st Person Perspective videos, shot by our own Chris Person with Evan Narcisse taking the interview lead.
Game designers and enthusiasts have, for many years, faced the challenges of preserving history in a digital medium. Source code and original designs for a project get lost over time, or data storage methods change and degrade.
Gaming has a substantial history now, 40 years after Pong first went out into the wide world. Even the Smithsonian is running a detailed exhibit on the art and history of video games, opening later this month.
Preservation of any art or technology is always a tricky business, and it's no secret that video game preservation is particularly thorny.
Video game preservation, educational robot dragons and Department of Homeland Security Sno Cones are just some of the "outlandish" federally funded projects called out in U.S. Senator Tom Coburn's annual big book of wasteful government spending this week.
In today's Speak-Up on Kotaku, commenter Pixiebutt salutes Sega for making its classic console titles available on Steam, and dreams of a day when other present and former gaming hardware companies follow suit.
I've mentioned my love for the delightful How They Got Game, which catalogues some of the neat holdings of the Stanford Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection (among other things); now, they're getting some love from the Stanford alumni magazine, which highlights the Library of Congress 'Preserving Virtual Worlds' project…
I'm an archive junkie — I consider it a side-effect of my profession, since we spend half our lives in temperature-controlled buildings with lots of old stuff. So I watch the growth of the video game archives across the globe with no small measure of excitement — not only does my little historian heart go…
Preservation of 'new media' has gotten some attention in recent months — a lot of venerable collections are moving to figure out the best ways to preserve games and gaming media in an archival setting, while building useful collections for the future. The University of Texas at Austin was recently awarded over…
Rob Zacny has a thought provoking piece up at the Escapist: on the whole, we're the worst genre when it comes to preserving our history, even the great classics acknowledged as 'great.' In a society - never mind technical area - where progress and marching forward is the name of the game, it's not exactly surprising,…
