Harrison
12th June 2007, 13:47
Most of us here enjoy playing the thousands of classic games on systems that have been commercially dead for years. With emulation we can still run them and enjoy them long after the real systems are long gone.
But current trends of gaming (and the internet as a whole) is to take everything online into a community based environment where we can all interact and play together. The problem is, what does that mean in the future? Many games won't even function these days without being able to find a connection to their parent server to check for updates, connect to vital files and to be given the thumbs up from the server telling the game it can run.
How can we preserve such games (and internet services) for the future? To archive them for future reference as a piece of history? We can't! Do the big developers even care about their games after they outlive their shelf life?
Our only hope to preserve such games for future historical reference could ironically be in the hands of the crackers who often manage to hack online games so they can be played on custom private servers, or even offline.
But current trends of gaming (and the internet as a whole) is to take everything online into a community based environment where we can all interact and play together. The problem is, what does that mean in the future? Many games won't even function these days without being able to find a connection to their parent server to check for updates, connect to vital files and to be given the thumbs up from the server telling the game it can run.
How can we preserve such games (and internet services) for the future? To archive them for future reference as a piece of history? We can't! Do the big developers even care about their games after they outlive their shelf life?
Our only hope to preserve such games for future historical reference could ironically be in the hands of the crackers who often manage to hack online games so they can be played on custom private servers, or even offline.