#bruces

And while drives do fail, drives that are attached to computers that people use every day tend to fail gracefully in that their material defects typically make themselves felt over time, giving ample warning (at least for attentive users) that it's time to replace them.

Given the spectacular improvements in mass storage, there's also no problem migrating data from one system to the next. Back in the 1990s, I stored a ton of my data offline and near-line, on fragile media like floppies, Zip cartridges and DAT cassettes. I pretty much never conducted a full inventory of these disks, checking to see if they were working, much less transferring them to new media. That meant that at every turn, there was the possibility that the media would have rotted; and with every generation, there was the possibility that I wouldn't be able to source a working drive that was capable of reading the old media.

But somewhere in there, storage got too cheap to meter. I transferred all those floppies – including some Apple ][+ formatted 5.25" disks I'd had since the early 1980s – to a hard drive, which was subsequently transferred to a bigger hard drive (which, paradoxically, was much smaller!) and thence to another bigger (and smaller) drive and so on, up to the 4TB drive that's presently about 7mm beneath my fingers as I type these words.

This data may not be immortal, but it's certainly a lot more loss-resistant than any comparable tranche of data in human history.

Data isn't the whole story, of course. To use the data, you have to be able to open it in a program. There, too, the problems of yesteryear have all but vanished. First came the interoperable programs, which reverse-engineered these file formats so they could be read and written with increasing fidelity to the programs they were created in:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

But then came the emulators and APIs that could simply run the old programs on new hardware. After all, computers are always getting much faster, which means that simulating a computer that's just a few years old on modern hardware is pretty trivial. Indeed, you can simulate multiple instances of the computer I wrote CD ROMs for Voyager on inside a browser window…on your phone:

https://infinitemac.org/1996/System%207.5.3

Which meant that, for quite some time, Bruce's prophecy of games living in an eternal ahistorical now, an art form whose earlier works are all but inaccessible, was dead wrong. Between emulators (MAME) and API reimplementations (WINE), a gigantic amount of gaming history has been brought back and preserved.

What's more, there's a market for this stuff. Companies like Good Old Games have gone into business licensing and reviving the games people love. But it keeps getting harder, because of a mix of "Digital Rights Management" (the "copy-protection" that games companies pursue with a virulence that borders on mania) and the difficulty of tracking down rightsholders:

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/just-in-case-you-thought-reviving-dead-games-seemed-easy-enough-gog-had-to-hire-a-private-investigator-to-find-an-ip-holder-living-off-the-grid-for-its-preservation-program/

And doing this stuff without permission is a fraught business, because the big games companies hate games preservation and wage vicious war on their own biggest fans to stamp it out:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/21/wrecking-ball/#ssbm

Which means that the games preservation effort is coming full circle, back to Bruce Sterling's 1991 description of "the ground crumbling under your feet"; of an endless series of "little cultural apocalypses."

It doesn't have to be this way. The decades since Bruce's talk proved that games can and should be preserved, that artists and their audiences need to continue to access these works even if the companies that make them would rather "reinvent everything every time a new platform takes over the field" and not have to be "in direct competition with Homer and Euripides."

The "Stop Killing Games" consumer movement is trying to save the library that games publishers have been trying to burn down since the 1990s:

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

They're currently hoping to get games preservation built into the new EU "Digital Fairness" Act:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act

It's a good tactical goal. After all, it's manifestly "unfair" to charge you money for a game and then take the game away later, whether that's because you don't want to pay to keep the servers on (or let someone else run them), or because you don't want the old game to exist in order to coerce your customers into buying a new one.

Or both.

No matter the reason, there is nothing good about the games industry's decades-long project of erasing its own past. It's bad for gamers, it's bad for game developers, and it's bad for games. No art form can exist in a permanent, atemporal now, with its history erased as quickly as it's created.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/17/stop-killing-games-again/#object-transience

Image: Erica Fischer (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/33439584792/