Video game preservationists have lost a campaign to get the right to study the vintage video games stored in US libraries remotely.
Enthusiasts in other fields are free to order rare films or vintage manuscripts from the library to work on them remotely, under certain conditions. But fans and researchers of gaming history might be forced to deal with hours of traffic every time they want to access these in person, The Verge reports.
The decision comes after two nonprofits, the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network (SPN), spent three years campaigning for the US Copyright Office to grant an exemption to its rules governing old video games.
Under the Foundation’s proposals, researchers would have been able to access emulated copies of their chosen games remotely, just like how libraries can sometimes grant members e-book access from home.
In a statement on the loss, the Video Game History Foundation blamed “lobbying efforts by rightsholder groups” such as the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the trade association of the video game industry that represents many of the world’s largest publishers, for holding back its ideas.
“During our hearing with the Copyright Office, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) declared that they would never support remote game access for research purposes under any conditions,” it said. “The game industry’s absolutist position—which the ESA’s own members have declined to go on the record to support—forces researchers to explore extra-legal methods to access the vast majority of out-of-print video games that are otherwise unavailable.”
The news comes as game preservationists may have an increasingly indispensable role in preserving the cultural history of video games. The vast majority—87%—of games released before 2010 are “critically endangered” in the US, according to the Foundation, which means that they aren’t easily available in their original physical and digital forms.
Some platforms have had better luck in terms of how their back catalog has been preserved. For example, the vast majority of games for the Commodore 64, one of the most popular early home computers, are thought to have been lost, with just 4.5% of its games library still in print.
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Despite its immense popularity, consoles such as the Gameboy haven’t fared that much better, only 5.87% of Gameboy titles are still officially available.
Only 13% of classic games are readily available to play, meaning that many classic gamers are forced to rely on technically complex emulators or maintain costly vintage equipment.
However, the ESA presented many arguments against the loosening of restrictions on vintage gaming libraries. In a legal argument, it argued that people accessing vintage games remotely would be much less supervised by librarians than on-premises users are and could open the door to piracy.
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