GameInformer: Video Games’ Vanishing History
There’s a great article up at GameInformer that takes a look at the troubling trend of video game history disappearing, slowly and surely, from various different places online.
The past 15 years have been tumultuous for the media business, both traditional and online. Just think back to all the once-popular game magazines and websites that are gone: GamePro, 1up.com, GameSpy, Nintendo Power – the list goes on. With each closure, an important part of game history disappears. Online servers are shut down, reducing thousands of interviews, news stories, and game reviews to 404 errors. I’d like to believe the archives of physical issues of old game magazines are preserved, but that’s not often a priority when people are losing jobs and figuring out what to do next. In any case, even if a conscientious employee rescues the back issues, they will likely be locked away in someone’s garage or basement.
Even currently operating publications and websites aren’t immune to content loss. For instance, there are hundreds of news stories and game reviews that Game Informer published online that are now gone. When we created our current website, the differences in technology between the platforms meant it wasn’t feasible to migrate content to our new site. So, with the exception of some content we re-entered manually into the new site, we blew it up and started over. I’ve found similar examples of this on other game websites that have redesigned or re-launched many times over the years.
As an experiment, I went to the Metacritic (a popular online review aggregator) website and looked at the page for the Xbox 360 version of BioShock. It’s about seven years old, and generally regarded as one of the true artistic achievements of this past generation of games. Metacritic lists 88 review scores (with one- or two-sentence pull quotes) that were published when the game released in 2007. Guess how many of these reviews are still available online? A paltry 27. That means that 70 percent of the original reviews for BioShock – a historically significant game – are now gone forever.
This is something we’ve been dealing with in the Ultima fandom for a while now; how broken has the Ring of Dragons become in the wake of Geocities’ demise, to say nothing of what has been lost in terms of “official” Ultima-related sites as a result of changes at EA. Fortunately, the Ultima Web Archive was able to be preserved thanks to the quick actions of Jeff Skalski before the shuttering of Mythic. As well, I’ve got a copy of the data from the old Ultima Lives website that I need to find time to put online.
But…this is a problem. For as much as the Internet is a helpful tool, not every part of it is truly a permanent archive; much of it slips away over time, and not all of it ends up preserved in some form or other.
(Image credit: Dhaka South City Corporation)
…which is why I spent quite a bit of effort creating the Ultima Web Database, that could at least keep track of the old links, which one could then look up in the Internet Archive.
Indeed. But even the Internet Archive doesn’t necessarily capture everything.
I constantly encounter a lot of dead links and deleted pages when doing research for the book… gladly stuff like the CGW Museum and Internet Archive are still around, or we would be screwed. :/
It would be interesting to know the future of our data in 100 years. We’re at seven billion plus now and growing rapidly, and a lot of these people don’t have Internet or even computer access yet. Before the digital age it was normal for works big and small to disappear forever. The majority of human history and art has been destroyed. Fortunately now this is becoming far less a problem, so the biggest challenge will be permanent archival and search methods to provide relevant results. On the other hand, the more we produce the more we have to lose. Ultima source code and fan sites, for example.
It would also be interesting to know the stories behind all the little sites out there, especially the ones whose bills are still being paid and are online, if frozen in time. In the early 90’s I ran a BBS from my parents’ house called Neo Tokyo and hosted some of my MIDI files of game music remixes. Ten years later though Google I discovered some ancient-looking web sites hosting VGM MIDI files and saw my own files there. Someone had downloaded them from my BBS, archived them, and later hosted them from their web site. It would be a shame to see any loss of first-hand examples of the formative years of the web, but even with our current tech it’s inevitable.