This is something I think is pretty important. Videogame companies are really disrespectful to their own history. They still see their works as disposable entertainment similar to how the film and television industry used to see their works. The proof? How about Donkey Kong? What version of Donkey Kong is available on the VC? Oh yeah the THREE LEVEL VERSION! Ideally the arcade version should be the only version being released, yet Nintendo loves to re-release the three level NES version that ironically was unnecessarily compromised in the first place. But because it's all just disposable product with no artistic merit the extra work to make the true Donkey Kong available isn't worth it.
I have Midway Arcade Treasures 2 for the Cube. Mortal Kombat II is broken. The random select code doesn't work because they mapped the start button to opening the menu. Anyone with any knowledge of that game would have known not to do that but Midway doesn't care and they passed it off to some development team that didn't care enough to do a good job and so we've got compromised arcade Mortal Kombat II.
How about Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the Cube with the swapped buttons? Lazy development, no attention to detail. It shows that those involved don't give a f*ck if they get it right or not.
Even now with the VC several classic games are not available in their original form. Wave Race and Mario Kart 64 are not exactly the same on the VC as the N64 cartridges. Square Enix is preventing us from getting the original Final Fantasy games because they want us to buy updated versions on the GBA or DS. And tons of arcade games have never had a commercial released perfect port. Sure we have MAME, but nothing official.
And I'm just talking about games. These guys are talking about original ads and box art and such. If we can't trust the industry to treat the games themselves with respect then we certainly need something for the less important stuff.
What games do you include? All the f*cking good ones. Yeah, that's a lot but there's more crap so it's not so bad. This is an archive, not a Hall of Fame. Super Mario Bros is an obvious choice but Mario is such a big deal that EVERY Mario game should be included and I think a handful of those suck. Include them anyway.
One sight I love to browse is AtariAge.com and I don't even have an Atari and I'm too young to have any memories about it. But the attention to detail is as close to perfect as you can get. You can get a real good idea of pre-crash history from that site along. I've tried to find a site like that for other consoles and they don't exist. They should.
Someday when we're old geezers I can see videogames being treated like movies where there's a universal standard and every game of significance is available like movies are available on DVD. And they all have every slight variation of the game on the disc (if discs exist then) and special features like TV ads and the whole works. You'll buy like Pong for what would be $20 now and it will have every version of Pong ever made plus developer interviews and the old cabinet art and manuals and a few knock offs to show the history of Pong knock offs. We get that kind of level of stuff with movies now that we didn't get in the VHS days. Caring about movie history isn't considered geeky or niche. It's very normal and I hope in the far future that's the case for games. It'll probably take awhile since videogames are pretty young and we're probably at best in the equivalent of the first talkies showing up.
Topic: The First Videogames Archive (Read 1882 times)
