The only thing that prevents this from existing is the licensing nightmare of trying to track down who still owns the rights to those old ROMs. So many defunct companies and cases where even the people who worked on it have no idea who currently owns the rights.

Had we kept the 28 year copyright duration from 1831 almost all ROM images would be in the Public Domain now.

And some of the licensing conflicts are because of an alliance that existed and made sense in say 1995 and today seems like inexplicable nonsense.

For example indie creator studio makes video game for the PS1. It's a huge hit, they go on to make other popular games, and one day Microsoft buys them, morphs them into an in-house team. And then one day you realise you're arguing that, Microsoft (now the owner of the license) should release this Sony Playstation game. No. Not going to happen.

When this stuff happens for individual humans, often even if the money doesn't mean anything to one person who is an obstacle, it does mean something to their co-creators and they'll do it for that. For example it would be possible for Alan Moore to have blocked a lot of stuff that uses his work, from the V for Vendetta movie (which lots of people liked but I felt missed the whole point) to the re-issues of Miracleman, but while Alan doesn't care about money, the artists on that work do, and him blocking it would hurt them. So e.g. that's why modern copies of Moore's seminal run on Miracleman say they're by "The Original Author" in big text but never mention Moore by name, that's his condition, he doesn't want the Mouse's money, but his artists do.

Corporations don't care though. If they can inconvenience a modern competitor by snuffing out an important cultural artefact that is exactly what they'll do.

I'd actually advocate outright abolition of copyright. The associated moral rights have some place, but copyright is almost entirely a means for corporations to try to control culture for their own profit and we don't need it. But 28 years is a more acceptable middle ground I guess.

Sorry that should credit Moore as "The Original Writer" for Miracleman not "The Original Author". Had to go check my actual copies of the books.

There should be a rule that if an IP was broadly commercialized at any point (eg. offered at a retail store) the owner can’t resist any abandonware offering unless he’s still offering the IP at RAND terms

That still protects the individual artists and perhaps the Banskys but doesn’t unnecessarily lock up these old games

It's difficult in some cases but demand is absolutely the main driver.

Much like Netflix, the reality is that people aren't actually very interested in old shows apart from a handful of super famous perennials which are already available anyway.

They say they are in surveys, but consumer behaviour does not back that up. They just use newer content in practice.

There is always interest in old shows, but not enough to deal with the licensing issues. You could have much wider libraries if the licensing was less of a nightmare.

Conveniently enough, actual public libraries do resolve a lot of issues for "older content". But they don't do computer games generally.

Until then, archive.org has lots playable in-browser.

e.g. https://archive.org/details/internetarcade

https://archive.org/details/sega_genesis_library

https://archive.org/details/atari_8bit_library_games

haha, the genesis library is about 90% just different hacked versions of Sonic 1, with different sprites replacing Sonic. And one I found particularly cute, "Sonic's Unexciting Quest", which starts in a level called "Straight Line Zone".

That one sounds hilarious.

I didn't know how to filter out the romhacks, if you scroll down the majority of the collection is original games.

The issue is that the VG industry is pretty far behind in this respect, not that there's a lack of demand. Just look at how the NES/SNES classic consoles sold out in the blink of an eye and there were mass shortages.

The demand is there, it's just a question of having a convenient enough package

I think Nintendo in particular revels in the scarcity. They value their IP above all else, and they know that's what their customers value, and they want to squeeze it for every last drop of fan loyalty they can. See the artificially limited-time (digital!) release of "Mario 3D All-Stars": https://www.nintendo.com/products/detail/super-mario-3d-all-...

Sony kinda wrote the book on artificial scarcity with the first 2-3 playstations...

I can see it now. Most ROMs would be available, but Nintendo would be notably absent from any of the platforms and only allow their ROMs to be streamed from their own service.

>Nintendo would be notably absent from any of the platforms and only allow their ROMs to be streamed from their own service.

They already do this, you need a Switch online subscription to access the NES/SNES ROMs they have available

Oh, I know, but in the theoretical world where there's a Netflix like subscription, I would assume that means a lot of different IP was also gathered there, like Sega, Atari, older Playstation and Xbox titles, etc.

There's not a lot of incentive for some of those groups to come together, but I imagine even if most could be assembled, Nintendo would be particularly resistant.

GameTap had a Decent collection of Sega consoles and arcade titles back in the day, though it unfortunately never got off the ground. Nintendo has been particularly aggressive regarding ligating against ROMs historically and sold them as individual units, though with the Switch's online service's free NES/SNES games it seems like they're dipping their toes into the model. I think the risk to them is if someone winds up playing say the GB version of Link's Awakening for free instead of the $60 remake.

I worked on GameTap! Old ROM websites at the time had these click-through agreements that would say things like "you may only download these ROMs if you have explicit, written permission from the publisher" and I may be on of the only living people who've clicked one of those "I agree" links in good faith.

Technically, GameTap had some really neat little features. For example, it would track your high score for most emulated games, and for really old games where the score would rollover to zero, it noticed that and would let you see your effective grand total score. So there would be a global Galaga leaderboard that could happily go into the millions.

Regarding the success of the service, Gametap was live for a few years. It totally had its shot. GameTap was regularly advertised on TV. It had a pretty big library covering a dozen or so platforms: Several Ataris, ColecoVision, Intellivision, Sega, PC games, and more. They did a few high profile things like buying some failed MMOs and keeping the servers running for all GameTap subscribers.

At the end, I think it turned out that the folks who get really excited about playing ColecoVision games are the same folks who are very comfortable downloading ROMs.

Reading back I definitely come off a bit too harsh on gametap - It was a good service from the start. but I remember it seeming like there was trouble figuring out a pricing/content model that worked, as you said a lot of people who were excited for those sorts of games are often able to download roms as well.

I think it may just have been ahead of it's time in terms of model in the era of battlepasses, paid online and gamepass, as well as monthly paid streaming services in general.

It's true. It was a plausible idea that certainly MIGHT have worked, but whatever form of the idea GameTap went with clearly didn't catch fire.

Here's a fun technical secret about GameTap. Several of the companies that we bought licenses from barely knew they owned the games and definitely didn't have any original binaries or source, and for the obscure consoles/titles, we sometimes could only find cracked versions online. Those would usually have crack intros (it was the birth of the demoscene!), though, and we clearly didn't want to use them. Ultimately we cheated. We just launched the game by loading a save state just past the crack intro.

Probably not. Most cartridge games outside of first party titles are mired in a confusing mess of IP ownership. Consider what happens when the developer doesn't exist anymore, the publisher was acquired, the brand for the franchise is owned by one company, and the code for the original game is owned by a different company, which has no interest in making games.

I doubt that's going to happen any time soon. Nintendo would rather publish its old games on its own store. Ditto for Microsoft and Sony. The older consoles now usually have a collection of ports for old games sold on the newer platforms, though those don't always behave true to the original platforms without special hardware.