A Tragedy of Media

The title of this post is meant to have two purposes: to highlight how media can become lost and the modern era’s means of recovering lost media. There isn’t always a perfect method to prevent lost media nor is there a perfect means to recover lost media without sacrifice to the media in question. I’ve faced this problem personally while gaming and emulating games, but I’ll get to that soon.

A brief overview of lost media is any piece of media whose preservation methods were either nonexistent or severely compromised to the point that part, most or the entire medium is effectively ruined or destroyed. Surviving copies can’t be located or recovered because they either don’t exist or sometimes won’t be released publicly, even after the copyright expires or the original author dies. For the longest time for obvious reasons, this has mostly applied to film, like so:

This film was released in 1927. It was kept in the MGM vault for decades until all surviving copies were destroyed in the 1965 vault fire. As of this writing, it only survives in posters like this and surviving still shots.

Yet as time has progressed, more and more forms of media have been created, to include video games which can also become vulnerable to media destruction. In one extreme case, Adobe Flash.

Five years have passed and I still miss it.

This critical piece of software was launched in November 1996 and has formed an important cultural touchstone on the internet ever since. Countless creators, new and veteran, have used it to make everything from videos to short films to even video games. There used to be countless flash games and even websites hosting those games. They were inescapable, until Adobe ceased support for the software on New Year’s Eve 2020.

A not insignificant portion of these games couldn’t be saved and are thus forever lost outside of admittedly s[dial-up]ty videos recorded in 144P in 2007. Yeah, they were hard to look at and aged really terribly, but having aged media is better than having no media. It shows the technological progress between, say, VHS tapes and Blu-Ray discs.

The crux in the custard I’m getting to is that efforts to preserve media have been undertaken for over a century, and while not perfect, as an advocate of piracy and emulation, I also advocate the preservation and, by extension, re-release of old media in as many forms as possible, especially when the format in question begins to deteriorate due to age. My grandmother clung tightly to old VHS tapes and while they may have been endlessly playable in 2005 for example, they had problems at the time and have considerably gotten worse since. Same for all the old floppy disks she never threw away.

In my documented experience on this blog, in order of difficulty from easiest to find to Raiders of the Lost Ark, video games have been fairly easier compared to movies. And movies are still easier to search up compared to TV series. I say fairly and not absolutely because digital stores like Steam and Epic Games Store have delisted video games before and will nonetheless do so again for a variety of reasons. MMORPGs are most vulnerable to destruction when the devs can no longer support the servers due to something like acquisition, shutdown, or “cost-cutting measures.” That last one is less excusable because video games haven’t had a better time to be profitable than the modern day. You can pick your favorite examples of this, but my pick for one of the best-selling video games ever goes to:

Once RockStar realized this game s[gunshots]ts platinum, it hasn’t turned the faucets off ever since. Notice the gap in time between this and Red Dead Redemption 2.

Time and tech is another factor for this. Games released on arcade cabinets or 16- and 32-bit consoles are merely a collection of pixels and a third party emulator is seldom needed. In some cases, they function the same as a browser game. Sixth-generation video games do require a third party emulator but I’ve yet to face any problems downloading them. Just needed to make space. Seventh-generation has proven the most difficult to emulate. On average a PS2 game can be downloaded to PCSX2, for instance, in several minutes to an hour or two, but PS3 and Xbox 360 games can take double or triple that, especially with a spotty connection. Maybe a signal booster would help, but the area of El Paso is surrounded by mountains, so the servers in this part of the country may be considerably weaker than more densely populated areas. Testing this out myself would cost me money and resources I don’t have.

I made mention at the end of the last post that I was planning on posting in the future a comparison of three underappreciated 2012 video games that tackled corruption in different aspects, one of those being Yager Development’s Spec Ops: The Line. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a store front that was carrying the PC release as it had been delisted ages ago. I’ll elaborate on that in the post, but in order to play it, I had to download a console version for four hours.

This is what I mean when I say it’s important to preserve as much media as we can. Spec Ops: The Line was one such example of a hard to find piece of media. I was worried it was only available in YouTube playthroughs from years ago, but digital libraries keeping the files available online were a godsend for this endeavor. For other games, this isn’t going to be the case. All traces of the game in question could be lost forever.

This wasn’t the sole inspiration for this post. Actually, region-locking of movies was the inspiration, but with the Stop Killing Games initiative going viral, I might as well include it here.

Going back to MMORPGs and similar online games, if a developer goes under or gets eaten by another dev, it’s not their fault if their efforts to stay afloat don’t work. And as I said earlier, the argument of keeping the servers up is too expensive faceplants epically when video games continuously make tons of money.

Although not the original victim of media destruction, the earliest films were most vulnerable to it due to attitudes towards them since inception. A lot of the first examples from the late 19th century were admittedly glorified experiments consisting of multiple still shots giving the illusion of a picture moving independently, but these early examples helped to perfect the craft. Science yesterday, artform today. But a lot of these old films were made with hazardous materials, notably cellulose nitrate. It could catch fire easily and long before the marriage between sound and sight, many of the silent films of a century-plus ago can no longer be recovered. At first, the reasons for preservation were balked at, but efforts to try and preserve it have been made. I consider the zenith of home releases to be the VHS and succeeding DVD-Video eras as both formats have re-released tons of TV and movies with estimates in the hundreds of thousands.

Then we progressed to digital streaming after some time and my main concern with that has to do with licensing and even region locking. If the license expires, you might find yourself unable to view the series you paid for. And if you move from one region to another, you might have to invest in a VPN to see the series you paid for. In a more perfect world, this wouldn’t be the case, but now that buying is no longer owning, piracy is no longer theft.

I do make some concessions with this. I don’t pirate modern games because of the risk of anti-piracy software. Some of the games I do pirate are from dead developers.

No matter the form media takes, it’s always important to save it for the archives. Allow future generations to be able to engage with it, even if it hasn’t aged well graphically. Ed Boon may be perpetually embarassed by Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, but it’s not like nothing was learned from that. Yesterday’s mistakes make for tomorrow’s masterpieces.

I’m still in the process of drafting up that comparison between Max Payne 3, Sleeping Dogs, and Spec Ops: The Line, but I want to preface that with a review on Spec Ops: The Line first. Now that I’m able to play it on RPCS3, I’m in a better position to give my thoughts on more than just its plot.