Library of Congress Considers Archiving Games

GamePolitics reports on talks at the U.S. Library of Congress concerning archiving our digital cultural heritage, including games. From the article: "The initiative is called 'Preserving Creative America,' and plans to compile (with industry help) a list of the commercial digital content most at risk of loss or degradation. The initiative will also develop ideas for preservation, business models to help maintain archives, and promote discussions between the archives and commercial content producers so that the archives are kept up to date. CM: Hopefully the Library of Congress will consider that many PC games were rushed to market before they were ready. Critical software patches should be included in the archive. That's right Sierra, I'm talking about you."

copy protection

[gEvil (beta)]

Will the LoC also be archiving the NoCD cracks that allow these games to be played without the original media, too?

Re:Runs only on closed systems

[TheCarp]

Hell how about the games that came on a bootable disk with custom boot sectors and all sorts of nastiness to prevent them from being easily copied.

Of course, now they have the ultimate solution to that, good luck even finding a drive to read them :)

I shudder to think how many games are all but gone just for having been stored on old floppies that were hard to copy and have since degraded.

I actually talked with an old apple 2 game developer once. He described how he used the ability to control the stepper motors in the drive to cause it to write data to the disk such that instead of being concentric rings of data, the data track spiraled down the disk.

The things people did :)

-Steve

Half Life 2

[ToxikFetus]

Are they also going to archive Valve's Steam servers so future generations can access Half Life 2?

Re:Too good to be true?

[vertinox]

Abandonware sites often claim they just do it "so those games don't go into extinction". With this reason gone, there's no reason anymore for game companies to shoot with big shells their way without getting bad rep.

I think the point of Abandonware sites (like the-underdogs.org) is that they only host games that aren't being sold or have anyone to complain about them releasing them.

Technically, you can't sue someone over a copyright you don't own.

So game companies can't just sue someone they don't own the rights to whether they like it or not. If they can aquire the rights later down the road... Then yes they can sue.

I don't think this will take any steam out of the abandonware's argument.