Dodo Blog

Nostalgia is a funny thing. It sometimes gives the past a little more shine than it perhaps deserves, but there are times when there is real value in looking to the classics, not just in cinema or literature, but in games.

Many are just as much fun now as they were then: Super Mario Bros 3 remains one of the greatest platform games ever, the original Worms is still hilarious, Little Big Adventure still a beautiful distopian epic… Yet much of this history is in danger of being lost. Who knows if we’ll still be able to play Tetris twenty years from now? You certainly won’t find it in a store.

While some degree of preservation is provided by roms and abandonware (and tools like ScummVM and DOSBox), the industry itself seems to finally be waking up to the idea that old games are worth preserving with services like Live Arcade and Nintendo’s Virtual Console.

It’s not just the games though being slowly forgotten, but all the work that led to their creation… Art books and collector’s editions are a fairly recent invention. There is a wealth of material from concept art to design docs that no one outside of their respective developers has ever seen, or will again if nothing is done to preserve it.

Warren Spector (of Deus Ex fame) is heading up an interesting initiative to create a center for videogame history in Austin, for the time being seemingly focused on the American side of the story, but there’s no reason why others could not follow suit and contribute…

I for one am not throwing away another note or drawing.