It’s in the Archive (Unless It Isn’t)

As an experiment last week, I boxed up my Xbox 360. I’m trying to downsize, and I wanted to see how I would feel about using the Xbox One exclusively. I was only a couple of days into this experiment when I realized it was not going to work. Like most people, I have a backlog or pile of shame, but because Humble Bundles and Steam sales have been good for us, I own most of my 360 games on PC as well. Even so, the experiment was a failure because of the games I don’t have on another platform, and in particular, those that are exclusive to the 360, like Dead Rising. I wasn’t terribly surprised to realize that I’m not ready to give up the 360 yet. The Xbox One’s lack of backwards compatibility is a huge downside for me, and I almost didn’t upgrade for that reason. If I’m honest, I sort of wish I hadn’t upgraded, but either way, eventually the Xbox 360, like its predecessor will be phased out completely. I hope my 360 still has a lot of life left, but sooner or later, it might stop working, and then how will I play Dead Rising? I know could play on someone else’s machine, but that doesn’t really solve the problem. The real problem is when a system becomes obsolete, so do many of its games.

I’ve heard similar concerns regarding ebooks with the increasing popularity of Kindles, Nooks and Ipads. But, those concerns always seemed somewhat less immediate to me because, for the most part, we still have physical books. And for the most part, we can still choose which format we want to buy our books in. And unlike some of the consoles, compatible file formats don’t change with ereader iterations. If I still had my original Kindle, I would be able to pick it up and read a book I just bought yesterday and vice versa. But, I can understand the concern, and not all ebooks are available in print. So, thinking about the lack of backwards compatibility on the Xbox One makes the concern about ebooks all the more real to me. Frankly, if Amazon goes out of business or changes the file formats, I’m going to lose a lot of books. 

The Xbox One doesn’t represent the first time we’ve lost games to advancements in technology, and recent releases like Grim Fandango Remastered have demonstrated the demand for games lost along the way. In other cases, games get lost not just because of the advancements in technology but because of copyright disputes that can become tangled over the years, such as in the case of No One Lives Forever. While some games remain lost, efforts have been made to bring back access to others. For example, the 3DS offers many of my old favorites, like Super Mario Bros., and Archive.org has thousands of MS-DOS games for free downloading and streaming. But, keeping these games and archives alive requires someone to manage them and work with gamers to locate and fix the bugs. And, of course, there is not an easy fix for copyright and ownership concerns.

I use Dead Rising as my example here because it’s the game I’m personally most concerned about at the moment. I think I’m going to have to unbox the Xbox 360 and accept that I’ll have two consoles for the time being. Perhaps one day, they will release Dead Rising on the Xbox One, but I would imagine that might require starting the game over from scratch, so it still wouldn’t be a perfect solution. Games can be just as valuable as other forms of media, so hopefully we will start seeing more attention to archiving and porting them from system to system. They offer us entertainment, of course, but they also offer art, cultural critique and reflection, and opportunities for social interaction, among other things. I’m sure others can provide many examples of games already lost that are deeply missed. In my case, I had never played Grim Fandango, but when it was rereleased, I fell in love with it, and it left me wondering what else I might have missed.