Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Private Forum

Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by pimmen on Sunday June 10, 2018 @05:17AM (#17277299)

Didn't the developers save copies of the game?

I know we've lost a lot of big movies from the early days of cinema because Hollywood studios didn't think of archiving the films, or even the scripts, responsibly but I thought we'd learned from that.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by sitharus on Sunday June 10, 2018 @05:35AM (#17277342)

Yes, most developers did save a copy but there often there was little thought to proper archive storage. This means the media degraded in storage, lost during moves or thrown out accidentally. For an example see this story about Prince of Persia https://www.wired.com/2012/04/prince-of-persia-source-code/, I've seen others over the years but don't have links handy.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by pimmen on Sunday June 10, 2018 @05:49AM (#17277372)

Not thinking of proper archiving proceedures is also exactly what happened with movies (and TV, the Dr. Who missing season was an ebarassing case of this).

I know that studios exists to make money, and that they do that by controlling the distribution of the media, but it’s very sad when parts of our culture can get lost like this even though it’s preventable.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by admax88q on Sunday June 10, 2018 @09:40AM (#17278058)

If they didn't make it illegal for home viewers to make their own copies then its possible that we wouldn't have to rely on studios doing proper archiving.

As it stands now most preservation projects start looking for copies of work once the copyright has expired, which is long enough for many things to already be lost, unless copies are found from so called "criminals" who made their own archives in violation of copyright law.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by the_seraphim on Sunday June 10, 2018 @08:52AM (#17277872)

I remember when a lost episode of Dad's army was found on a cassette because some guy happened to record it from the radio and never lost it.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by im3w1l on Sunday June 10, 2018 @12:45PM (#17278905)

Sweden has a law that any published book has to be archived in a national archive. Something similar could be setup for other media.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by gray_-_wolf on Sunday June 10, 2018 @01:19PM (#17279058)

Could work 20 years ago, but now? Games (software in general) is usually patched at insane rates (which version to keep? All of them?) and most games don't work without internet anymore (and you can hardly mandate archiving or never-released-server-software).

Sadly, I don't think there is a reasonable way to do this...

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by nitrogen on Sunday June 10, 2018 @01:26PM (#17279104)

and you can hardly mandate archiving or never-released-server-software

Why not? A hypothetical preservation law could require the submission of all servers, assets, and instructions required to make the game useful. Doesn't matter which version as long as the submitted package is usable as a whole.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by vatueil on Sunday June 10, 2018 @05:18PM (#17280189)

The Library of Congress similarly receives a copy of every book published in the United States, though they don't permanently keep a copy of every book.

Many other countries do the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by yongjik on Sunday June 10, 2018 @05:28PM (#17280236)

NASA has lost high-resolution footage of Apollo 11 landing. I think nobody can top that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by Rebelgecko on Sunday June 10, 2018 @04:50PM (#17280080)

There's also cases like the Star Wars Holiday Special, where the creator presumably has it archived but doesn't want anyone to see it again. I believe all of the available copies are from people who happened to record it, which led other people to splice together fan edits in an attempt to create the highest quality version.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by eridius on Sunday June 10, 2018 @04:26PM (#17279987)

I thought Dr. Who's missing episodes wasn't because they didn't think of proper archiving and it degraded, but because they literally overwrote the tapes with other stuff.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by pavel_lishin on Sunday June 10, 2018 @06:27PM (#17280516)

That definitely falls under "improper archiving procedures", and is tremendously more embarassing than merely having the medium degrade.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by eridius on Monday June 11, 2018 @03:26AM (#17282446)

You say "improper archiving procedures", I say they clearly weren't even trying to archive it.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by ingenieros on Sunday June 10, 2018 @07:27AM (#17277621)

There is a small non profit called the Japanese Game Preservation Society which has been trying to do just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyXaJvw_-B0&list=PLKAlBDOVnp... *They accept donations https://www.gamepres.org/en/support/

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by coretx on Sunday June 10, 2018 @01:06PM (#17278990)

Directly related, https://archiveteam.org/ deserves a mention.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by jccalhoun on Sunday June 10, 2018 @01:24PM (#17279091)

If the company goes out of business a lot of times everything will be sold off and saving the assets of a game that didn't sell enough to keep the company in business isn't a priority, especially in decades past when no one thought about preservation.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by azernik on Sunday June 10, 2018 @07:52AM (#17277675)

People learned from that only for media that they considered "art", and video games of that period were definitely not considered such.

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Re:Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered in a Folder on a Pri... by emodendroket on Sunday June 10, 2018 @08:04AM (#17277714)

They don't even have the source for widely beloved games made by big companies

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