Librarian – Page 4 – Video Game Research Library

A familiar video game lit up my PC screen. I was looking at a replica of Super Mario Bros. 3: the billowing white cloud characters, the green shrubs, the construction blocks, and rotating gold coins. But Super Mario didn’t exist on the PC, because the technology that powered it didn’t exist on the PC. It existed only on the Nintendo Entertainment System and a couple of the ’80s’ best computers, the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64. These systems had the custom chips to handle two-dimensional side-scrolling. PC games, due to a dearth of graphics support and processing power, had been restricted to static screen games and chunky scrolling — until Carmack created smooth vertical scrolling just a few days earlier with Slordax.

Now I looked at Super Mario Bros.’ Mushroom Kingdom and wondered what it was doing on my PC screen. I also noticed Dangerous Dave standing at the bottom of the screen. The character I created two years earlier who was inspired by Super Mario Bros. was now inhabiting the Mushroom Kingdom. I laughed. That was the copyright violation of the title, but how far did this parody go?

I hit the arrow key to move Dangerous Dave and find out.

What I saw destroyed me.

TITLE
The birth of id Software

AUTHOR
John Romero

PUBLICATION
The Verge

YEAR
2023

The Making of Tunic: How the adventure began life in the pages of a notebook – Edge (2023)

TITLE
The Making of Tunic: How the adventure began life in the pages of a notebook

AUTHOR
Alex Spencer

PUBLICATION
Edge

YEAR
2023

The Hottest Thing in Baseball Is a Grid of Nine Blank Squares – The New York Times (2023)

TITLE
The Hottest Thing in Baseball Is a Grid of Nine Blank Squares

AUTHOR
Tyler Kepner

PUBLICATION
The New York Times

YEAR
2023

Immaculate Grid Is The Game Sweeping Through MLB Clubhouses – Sports Illustrated (2023)

TITLE
Immaculate Grid Is The Game Sweeping Through MLB Clubhouses

AUTHOR
Stephanie Apstein

PUBLICATION
Sports Illustrated

YEAR
2023

Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States – Zenodo (2023)

Video games are part of our cultural history. The video game industry and cultural heritage institutions agree that video games should be preserved for both entertainment and study. As part of that effort, a growing market has emerged for reissuing historical games, popularly called retro games or classic games.

Despite this, the availability of historical games is generally understood to be limited. This is due to a variety of factors, including technical constraints, complicated rights issues, rightsholder disinterest, and the long-term volatility of digital distribution platforms. The scale of this problem is troubling for anyone hoping to access games, but it is particularly critical for the cultural heritage field, which depends on the ability to access historical video games for research and must otherwise rely on unauthorized means to access them.

Although the game industry agrees with the cultural heritage field that preservation is important, they disagree about how severe this problem is and how to address it. Industry lobbyists in the United States have opposed new copyright exemptions for game preservation on the grounds that there is already a thriving reissue market. While a healthy market for certain game reissues does exist, it is overshadowed by the volume of games that remain unavailable.

To better inform discussions of these complex issues, we gathered empirical evidence about the state of the video game reissue market in the United States and what portion of historical games are actually still in commercial distribution. We believe this is the first major study to analyze the availability rates for a broad sample of historical games in this manner.