It’s certainly not an absence of demand that keeps “dead” games like Black & White or the original Civilization off the market. It’s usually red tape and nebulous barriers involving copyright law and intellectual property ownership-flavored headaches that get in the way. And even though GOG has a team working on its preservation program full time, senior bizdev manager Marcin Paczynski said they found the process of digital necromancy “harder than we thought it would be,” on a recent episode of The Game Business Show.
He added that the strange stories involved were enough to fill a book, and served up some examples that make me really want to read that book. One tidbit involved someone in the UK who had unwittingly inherited rights to several games, but was “nowhere to be found.”
Paczynski told The Game Business: “He kind of fell off the grid, so we hired a guy in the UK that was supposed to find him. That was the type of person who was really, really living without any cell phone, without any online presence, just chilling. He didn’t even know that he owned the rights because this was just a package with his inheritance … we have a lot of stories like that.”
In the same interview, he mentioned a Vietnam veteran turned game developer turned business mogul behind a multimillion-dollar oil company, as well as more precarious stories like developers whose physical documentation of IP ownership was torched in a fire—the further back in time you go, the more game development relied on physical record-keeping. And notably, this is all before you get to the technical aspect of getting a game to function on modern machines and keeping it that way.
It’s a wild set of stories and a good reminder of how hard it can be to do this sort of thing on the up and up. The length of GOG’s Dreamlist, which catalogs users’ top picks for additions to the preservation program, as well as the Video Game History Foundation’s claim that around 87 percent of games are largely unplayable, can make the whole task of game preservation seem impossible. That said, players have made it clear the alternative—letting old games fade into memory—isn’t something they’ll accept.
