In 2009, nearly than 40 years after Star Trek's original series came to the end of its three-season production cycle, Paramount issued a remastered release of the complete series on Blu-Ray.
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| Bear with me - this post is actually about video game preservation! |
I spend a lot of time thinking about video game preservation, and the issues concerning it have a lot of overlap with the issues concerning other forms of commercial entertainment products, including film, television, music, and literature. For all of these, preservation can be broken down into two aspects - preservation of the materials, and preservation of the presentation, and most issues directly concern one or the other. This post mainly concerns the latter.
My posts often emphasize the value in having authentic, historically accurate preservation of the games' original presentations, and the efforts I go to locate and emulate original versions so that I can be confident that it well represents the original product. I am distrustful of so-called "remasters" as a means of video game preservation - too often the presentation is distorted by modern reinterpretation, censorship, omissions, or other alterations, which can manifest in ways both subtle and unsubtle. Film remasters are overall better about keeping authenticity, though in recent years I am starting to have trust issues with them too.
Let's talk about Star Trek again. Paramount's high-definition remaster of the original film elements, which forms the basis of the Blu-Ray release and all streaming versions, is not an accurate or authentic preservation of the show's original presentation, which had been produced with the limitations of broadcast television in mind. Cheap sets, costumes, and prosthetics stand out in ways they were never meant to. Film grain density and noise varies from scene to scene, even from shot to shot, which could not have been noticed originally. Episodes were also paced with commercial breaks in mind, and without them in place as palette cleansers, pacing can be a bit off, with Kirk redundantly explaining things about the plot that you just saw seconds ago.
Even when viewed with its original special effects and soundtrack, Star Trek never looked nearly this sharp or filmic, not on cable television and certainly not on NBC's original airwave broadcasts to television sets of the time, and over half of them weren't in color.
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| "Warp factor" simulation by Dayton Ward |
To some extent, this also holds true for older films that are remastered in high definition, despite the oft-mentioned aphorism that film is already higher resolution than video. Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, for instance, was shot in a 65mm format and its soundtrack partially recorded in stereo, but until 1996 it was only released to theaters as a 35mm reduction print with monaural sound. My 4K UHD copy, sourced from an extensive restoration of the negatives, is sharper and clearer than anything that audiences in 1958 ever saw, which like all other analog films would have also had resolution loss with each generational print made. I'd almost go as far to say that no digital film remaster is truly "authentic," but I think my point is made much clearer by using a film-to-broadcast television show as the main example.
So let me say that, despite its inauthenticity, and even despite some audio mixing faults specific to this release, Star Trek's Blu-Ray masters are the definitive versions, and likely will be for the foreseeable future. The old VHS tapes and DVDs are obsolete, and even the original broadcast tapes are of limited archival value as long as the complete episode film negatives are preserved. Younger generations who never had the opportunity to watch the show in its original format aren't missing much of value that could have been preserved anyway - the higher fidelity on display here is preferable to fuzz and analog distortion.
However, the remasters also add CGI-enhanced visuals, such as color-corrected phasers, 3D exterior shots of planets and ship fly-bys, and new matte backgrounds. Audio is also presented as a surround-sound upmix with new sound effects overlaid. I find this to be intolerable revisionism. I can quibble with some of the specifics creative choices here and there, some of the ship redesigns are anachronistic, sometimes the transitions to FX shots and back are abrupt and jarring, some effects create minor continuity problems, and to be fair, Star Trek is overall one of the least offensive "special edition" updates out there. But even if everything were perfect, one could not know without scrutinizing it (despite how it may seem, I don't want to scrutinize it!), and I would still take issue with erasing any of the original content. While most of this is optional, some of it isn't, and on streaming platforms, which is how most newcomers to the show will almost certainly watch it, the updated episodes are the default and only option.
So we have a paradox - to me, and clearly to many others, a high definition 1080p transfer is a welcome upgrade, but adding CGI fins to a space ship is going too far? And what does this have to do with video games?
I'd like to resolve this with an invented term of art that I've decided to call "superauthenticity."
Defining superauthenticity
I mentioned that preservation of any commercial entertainment product has two aspects - preserving the materials through archiving, and preserving the presentation through releases. "Superauthenticity" concerns the presentation only. I define it as the quality of enhancing the presentation, but only in a manner that corrects flaws from the original, and not in any manner destructive to the materials. Star Trek's high definition release shows examples both of what it is and what it isn't - the improved definition is superauthentic, but the CGI enhancements are outside that scope and are simply inauthentic.
Video game re-releases generally come in one of three categories; direct emulation, source ports, and remakes. This is far from a hard and fast rule, and the lines between port and remake can be blurry (so-called "remasters" frequently straddle this), but emulation tends to be the most authentic while having the fewest options for superauthenticity, source ports lean more toward superauthenticity, and remakes toward inauthenticity. I must stress that this is a trend, not a one-to-one relation. All types of re-releases can exhibit all three qualities.
| Authentic | Superauthentic | Inauthentic | |
| Emulation | Cycle accurate LLE Audited ROM dumps |
Internal upscaling Control remapping |
Cheats Inaccurate emulation Texture packs |
| Port | Original assets |
Outstanding bug fixes Higher framerate Restored content |
Unported hardware-specific effects Modernized UI/UX |
| Remake | Original level geometry Original soundtrack/voiceovers |
Old/new toggle mode | Artwork replacement Snake jumping on rockets |
Even with this definition, there's a lot of room for subjectivity on what counts as superauthentic or not, but my stance is that for presentation preservation efforts, authenticity is good, superauthenticity can be good, and inauthenticity is bad. That last part is no doubt a controversial stance; many consumers of any given product are perfectly happy to have the latest and best and/or most convenient version available and do not care if the original materials are presented accurately or not. I am not proposing to tell consumers what to do - "play what you want" is an irrefutable adage, and I figure that anyone who would argue that is already doing so themselves. Nor am I claiming that inauthenticity is always bad for the experience - sometimes the flaws or limitations of the original just can't be fixed in a non-destructive way, and in a true remake, authenticity isn't expected to begin with.
But, as I said, I personally see value in having a superauthentic experience preserved, and not just for nostalgia's sake. If we can have Manos: The Hands of Fate preserved for all time on Blu-Ray without needing to use algorithms to artificially sharpen the picture, then the kids also deserve a definitive release of Duke Nukem 3D.
Why this matters
In my version of a perfect world, every notable video game would be treated the same way the Criterion Collection treats prestige films. They'd be restored tastefully, and bundled with well-researched materials and extras, curated by people who understand and love the source material. A curmudgeon like me could simply play the game and be confident that it was treated with care. Occasionally, we get this; Night Dive Studios and Digital Eclipse have both taken this approach in somewhat different ways.
Most of the time, though, official releases are unsatisfying, if they're even available! Video Game History Foundation claims that 87% of all games are completely unavailable. GOG, as much as I love them for dedication to DRM-free distribution, relies on bare-bones emulation that is often years behind hobbyist efforts in terms of both accuracy and enhancing features, and offer no indication that anyone behind the release has played it to completion. Other companies who preserve their libraries through preservation are much worse. For a number of more recent games, the only official releases are so-called "remasters" that are in fact ground-up remakes that modernize everything except the framework; these are no more an authentic preservation of the original game than a song cover by a new artist preserves the original song.
Officially, video game preservation is in a sorry state. The film industry figured out the value of material preservation a long time ago - even then, it was too late for the vast majority of films; The U.S Film Foundation claims 50% of all American films made before 1950 are lost forever, but today, preservation and restoration is a priority. Material preservation, here, means keeping archival copies of the negatives,
safety prints, digital intermediates, and production records, which carries some unique challenges given the fragile and sometimes flammable nature of these items.
Preserving video game material means backing up backing up copies of the
source code, resource files, documentation, and of course the software
binaries themselves. With all of this material being born digital, preservation ought to be straightforward, but historically, developers have been very bad at this until recently. I think this is partly due to the once technical challenge of backwards compatibility, and partly due to a culture that views video games as functional entertainment, and that these factors reinforce each other.
That said, let's not get statistics on our preservation types mixed up. Although 87% of video games may not be available, this is very different from being lost forever. In very many of these cases, the system is emulated, and the game binary (ROM file, disk images, ISO file, etc.) is floating around in a pristine state, but the source code and other files are indeed lost forever. This limits the potential for superauthentic enhancements, and puts the responsibility of acquiring and playing copies on the community, often illegally, but these games can be played. Without official availability, there are no authoritative sources on the best ways to play them, but, as I hope I argued convincingly, the authoritative sources we do have often can't be trusted!
The above study says that less than 3% of games released before 1985 - my current year of coverage - are available. This sounds about right, but even when a game is available officially, I often prefer unofficial emulation, where I can control the authenticity. Ultima IV, which I just finished, is available at GOG, but it is a DOS port that is completely missing music and very likely has a number of creative decisions forced onto it in order to accommodate the different system. Emulating the Apple II original is the only way I can be pretty sure I am seeing the original uncompromised vision. Maybe the DOS version is flat-out superior in every way except for the lack of music (which is patchable in, though not identical to the original), but I'd need to play and scrutinize both of them in order to know. Maybe it has subtle gameplay changes that give it a different pacing. The fan port XU4 does, and I would say it is changed enough, for better or worse, that it does not preserve the original presentation.
I have a lot more to say on this subject, but this post is quite lengthy as it is, and that next whale has put off for long enough. What do you think? Your input, and Blogger's post statistics, will determine if I do. Either way, I cover a game next.
Interesting thoughts shared, and more of them could perhaps usefully space out posts on games as palate-cleaners. Keep them coming!
ReplyDeleteThis is a very important topic! I'd say preservation of video games shouldn't be left just on the good will of the developers, who often won't have any incentive to do so. I know at least in some countries dedicated libraries or other repositories are allowed to get copies of all nationally produced electronic materials (including video games) as so-called legal deposits for archival purposes (unfortunately, this is a very recent trend, so there's lot of material already gone forever). Of course, this doesn't help consumers, since the libraries usually can allow at most a local use of those materials, due to copyright reasons. Still, it's at least a failsafe for preservation of videogames in their original format for future generations. I'd hope changes in copyright legislation in case of at least video games with no existing copyright holders could give these libraries more rights to share them with the public in large.
ReplyDeleteI'd be very interested to read some serious thoughts on how to make it legal to preserve games from someone qualified to talk about it. I've long felt that there should be copyright exemptions for materials out of general circulation - I'm not arguing for a universal expiration date (nor against!), but it's difficult to see how the copyright on No One Lives Forever serves any public interest when nobody knows who owns it! I'm not a lawyer, though, and I wouldn't know how to navigate the legal quagmire here with a real proposition. Digital rights groups like EFF, unfortunately, I find are overzealously anti-copyright, and have a tendency toward demagoguery.
DeleteEven with moderate copyright reform, though, I don't think the reality would change much. Preserving and curating 87% of all video games would still be the responsibility of the community and digital libraries like Internet Archive. At best it would just become legal instead of illegal but unenforced.
I agree that this is an important topic and would love to read more from you about it.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting topic; one further aspect to this is that I think that we cannot always determine exactly how a game, movie, etc was "intended" to be experienced or what a truly "authentic" experience is. This debate has also come up in the classical music world with respect to period instrument recordings and other such things.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, one claim that I see people make sometimes is that you should not use hints or guides when playing RPGs because that's not how they were intended to be played. However, Japanese RPGs, all the way back to the earliest entries on the Famicom, advertised hint guides for the games in the instruction manuals of the games themselves and they usually went on sale the same day as the game. Although I have never seen any confirmation of this, I think it is quite possible that at least in some games, obscure secrets or vague systems were intentionally put in the game to encourage people to spend more money on the hint guides.
Even my own experience with these games was often "inauthentic" in that sense -- I used the NES Advantage controller to play action games (with its turbo buttons and slow motion). I had virtually memorized the Nintendo Power Final Fantasy issue by the time I finally got the game for Christmas the year it came out. You could buy Wizardry modifier disks in the 80s.
Also, how "authentic" can any experience of a 1980s game be in 2024? Even if you bought an actual Apple II and played Ultima IV on it, the fact that you've played the 40 years of games that have come out since U4 means that it's hard to approach it in a truly "original" way.
Having said all that, I am not denying that it's important for historical preservation that the originals are preserved in some form. It would not be a good thing if the only way to play Ultima IV was through a xu4-patched binary, or if the original Famicom version of Dragon Quest were unplayable and all we had was the Super Famicom remake.
(And from a blog standpoint I do appreciate that you try to play the original form when possible; I know from my own experience that what makes for a good blog post is not always the same as the most fun or smoothest way to play the game! In my own Super Famicom RPG playthrough series I began with the high minded idea that I would only use emulator tricks and walkthroughs when it was really necessary, but I abandoned that idea after a while -- in particular, I used emulator speedup frequently.)
This debate has also come up in the classical music world with respect to period instrument recordings and other such things.
DeleteFor sure, and I have known people in real life who have said that you shouldn't play Bach on pianos because they didn't exist then! On one hand, forgive me for not owning a pipe organ, but on the other, I can see how knowing about the period-appropriate instruments is an important aspect of music appreciation.
Japanese RPGs, all the way back to the earliest entries on the Famicom, advertised hint guides for the games in the instruction manuals of the games themselves and they usually went on sale the same day as the game.
U.S. adventure games too! Arguably it's much more egregious here - Final Fantasy 1 is perfectly solvable without a guide, though some parts may be a struggle, and you may not discover all if its secrets. But in King's Quest IV, you're stuck fast if you don't figure out where to find the golden bridle, or what to do with the gems, don't take the axe during the one trip into the ogre's cottage that the game permits, etc. I think most of us assume these games were made obtuse on purpose to sell hint guides. That said, this is a different type of "authenticity" than what I aim to discuss - spoilers and privileged information transform your expectations and affect how you interact with the product, but they do not necessarily transform the product's material or presentation.
Gameplay-altering cheats are also an interesting point of discussion, though one I wasn't really thinking about with regards to this topic. In the 90's I was completely undisciplined about cheats - I'd steamroll through Doom and Starcraft with invincibility, I had a Game Genie for my Genesis and a Game Shark for my N64, and when I discovered emulation as a means of replaying games for systems I didn't own, I'd quicksave constantly and quickload whenever anything didn't go right. Even now I don't shy away using tools that wouldn't have been available at all back then. My Ultima IV playthrough involved plenty of screenshots for note-taking, a custom tool of my own creation to make maps, Auto-It to automate the tedious processes of reagent buying and mixing, and windowed multitasking with my game, my notes, my blog, and my maps all visible on a 34" screen at the same time. And I still made use of quicksaves/quickloads, though I easily kept my usual rule of one save per 30 minutes.
Also, how "authentic" can any experience of a 1980s game be in 2024? Even if you bought an actual Apple II and played Ultima IV on it, the fact that you've played the 40 years of games that have come out since U4 means that it's hard to approach it in a truly "original" way.
Indeed. Even if one perfectly preserves the original materials and presentation, you can never truly preserve the original experience. I think it is worth distinguishing these.
To use a film analogy, just last week, I was rewatching Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush. It had been originally released as a silent film in 1925, but in 1942, Chaplin had it re-cut and mixed with sound including narration, and had since attempted to have the original (and IMO far superior) silent version removed from history. Criterion Collection's Blu-Ray release is a comprehensive effort to restore the 1925 version, and preserve the original pacing, narrative, comic timing, and even music to some extent, but they can never truly create the experience of going to the cinema in 1925. Even art house revival cinema can't do that, and I've been to some swank art deco revival houses! But the presentation and materials are preserved about as well as can be expected, which I think is the highest goal we can realistically achieve, and the world is better for it.
Possibly we should also consider that there are cases where the "as intended" experience is, to be blunt, pathological. There's a whole era in game design where it was common for designers to think of themselves as being in a kind of competition with the player with each party having "defeat the other guy" as an explicit goal that trumps any sense of the player and the author collaborating to produce a good time. It's a bit like the experience of doing tabletop RPGs with a hostile GM (that kind of experience soured me on TTRPGs badly enough that I don't really like playing them any more, to my gamer wife's chagrin).
DeleteOr, more pragmatically, a lot of early games had an "intended experience" of "vacuum up quarters while releasing dopamine at the slowest possible rate that still maintains addiction".
(This brings to mind a book my dad read some decades ago. It was an edited version of "Oliver Twist" based on the editor's analysis of Dickens's other works, that attempted to present "How the book would have been paced if Dickens weren't under the contstraint of getting paid by the word")
I get that there can be a variety of perverse incentives to create a flawed product. Coin-munching design is video games' quintessential example, perhaps spiritually succeeded by microtransactions today. Sometimes a straightforward, superauthentic fix presents itself, such as the option for unlimited credits, but that rarely fixes the underlying problem. A fix like a difficulty balance patch, or de-bloating Dickens, represents a new authorial intent, and consuming when you aren't already familiar with the base product means trusting the new author to improve it.
DeleteI feel like superauthenticity in games often complements the original vision for the game a lot better than it does in purely visual media like film and TV. There are artistic dimensions to choices made for low-fidelity visuals as in your Star Trek example - but it's truly hard to argue that a game with a frame rate floating anywhere from 10-30 FPS, for example, is really doing that as an artistic decision. It was simply a matter of hardware, programming skill, and time/money - the intention for the game was clearly a rock-solid 30 FPS and then compromises were made along the way because of various constraints. I really appreciate emulation's ability to take games that were overly ambitious and make them actually playable as intended - particularly when you consider that the games were almost always made on devkits with more RAM than the stock console and so the devs themselves were playing the "superauthentic" game during development.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the statistic that VGHF talks of is slightly misleading since we have most games preserved in the form of those rips. It's not ideal, but that's been true of most preservation efforts in human history. We only have most books thanks to people tirelessly copying them over the years. Though it is worth pointing out that some disk rips are bad in ways that people who are ripping them can't find out unless they play all the way to the end of a game, which is often less than ideal.
ReplyDeleteIt's also worth pointing out that in a lot of cases, ports are also interesting even if they're not the original experience. In a lot of cases they're completely different from the originals, sometimes better, sometimes worse. They'd be comparable to a remake if they were made by the same company on the same system.
There's a lot of hand-wringing about how bad digital media is for historical preservation but I think it overlooks the boon that comes from being able to make an infinite number of bit-perfect copies for free. It isn't perfect, but "Oh no the server could go away and it's lost forever" is not that different from "the library burned down and it's lost forever", except that backing up a server is a lot easier than backing up a library.
DeleteIn a recent boon for preservation, I found out today that not only has the former social network Cohost worked with the Internet Archive to back up most (if not all) of its content, but any given Cohost URL will automatically redirect you to the Internet Archive's version.
ReplyDeleteIn bad news, I'm disgusted by "AI upscales," as the Toonstruck fan community is trying to get the game rereleased with. AI upscales mean nothing - they have no artistic intent and thus merit. I'd rather see an original low-resolution picture than whatever an algorithm thinks the details should be, because the AI-added details are, simply put, not "true" in any meaningful artistic (or even factual, in the case of photographs) sense.
AI 'remasters' are a bugbear of mine. I know you can just play the original, but why are these things so danged popular? More than half the time they look horrible. It's especially bad when this creeps into film restoration, because they had the option to do a proper 4K scan and release a higher quality product, but they didn't, probably never will, and now the last known good release will be difficult to find and/or identify.
DeleteA bit late to the party, but great article. On my side, I love to know "academically" what the games or other pieces of artworks were at release , but the experience should mirror the designer's intention without betraying the nature of the game - so no bugs, graphical artifact, improved UI if possible - what you call "superauthentic". That's why I tend to play "the best versions" of games and you strive to play the first one.
ReplyDeleteOf course my project was based on the hypothesis (that proved to be incorrect as far as the 80s are concerned) that wargames don't age as fast as other genres, so there would be a lot of hidden gems in the 80s so authenticity is not my first objective.
In any case, I would be happy if you wrote more articles like this one.
Doom, mentioned above, is an interesting case - the game is still on sale, and there are several different ways to play it exactly as it was when it was new. So in theory modern Doom should be exactly the same as 1993 Doom.
ReplyDeleteBut back in 1993 I played it with keyboard controls, because that was how you played action games back then. The standard WASD + mouselook setup didn't exist yet. With keys, sidestepping was incredibly awkward, and it was hard to move quickly and precisely. So the game felt slower and more measured than it does today. It was more of a suspenseful horror game than a straightforward action blast, and the harder maps were really, really difficult.
Nowadays of course it's common to play Doom with mouse and keys, in which case it's a fast-paced action game, and even the later maps are relatively easy because the player character can dance around the monsters. You could even see that shift happening when Doom was new - the later mission packs, such as The Plutonia Experiment, have a modern-style difficulty level, because they were designed at a time when Quake and Duke Nukem 3D were popularising mouse + keyboard controls.
A similar thing happened with console games during the switch from digital controls to the standard setup of "left stick to move, right stick to aim". It's hard to recapture the experience of pre-dual-analogue game nowadays because the world has changed around them.
I'm also reminded of The Sentinel - the classic old 8-bit 3D game. There was a PlayStation reworking called Sentinel Returns that had exactly the same gameplay, but because the 3D engine was faster and the controls had been updated the game felt like a fast-paced puzzle game rather than a suspenseful exercise in tension.
This is more of a player issue than anything - it's not that the mouselook setup didn't exist, it's that a lot of players chose not to use it. The manual even specifically RECOMMENDS using the mouse to aim, and many players quickly realized this was the way to go.
DeleteSidestepping and running still required key combinations, though, and demand some player commitment that isn't required with modern source ports. Mouselook means your left hand either has access to the directional keys or the space/alt/shift cluster, but not both at the same time. And there's no good way to circle-strafe with the mouse and keyboard unless you had a three-button mouse, which wasn't all that common, and still more awkward than a WASD setup.
DeleteMy own recollection is that DOS Doom didn't even register my mouse input. I knew it was supported, but I didn't bother trying to figure out how to enable it; keyboard was good enough. When I got Doom II it was a native Windows 95 version and mouse input worked out of the box, but I found it awkward to use and just stuck with the keyboard anyway. I also recall DOS Doom being a much more deliberately paced game than the way I'd play today, at least until I learned about cheat codes.
Also, though this is straying from super-authenticity since this aspect was circumventable from the very first shareware release, Doom has a purposeful but forsaken design element. You're meant to lose everything on death, but every level is designed to be beatable. That secret plasma gun you get is supposed to be temporary. Beat the level, and you enter a new one with any pickups you collected, which gives you an advantage to offset the fact that you are entering unfamiliar territory, and if you finish the level on your first try, great! If you don't, then you lose that initial edge, but you'll have more knowledge and experience of the challenges to come, and eventually you'll find a new plasma rifle and better anyway. It's a bit like Dark Souls, kinda sorta. But I'm pretty sure that everyone always reloaded on death, except for a few hardcore types who just pistol-start each level. Either way, players don't engage with the intended difficulty dynamic.