Retro collecting 20 years from now

[Keatah]

Not sure how having the option to buy SOME VCS games makes emulation a worse option than what future preservationists will have to deal with. Whatever it is they gotta do.

 

There are many VCS games not readily available in physical form any more. Not at any realistic prices. Then there's the cost of hardware console, adapter, CRT, controllers, and other assorted sundries. This is raising the barrier too high for some. And not everybody does eBay.

[youxia]

 

I don't know about you, but I can't afford to fly to France, so I'm pretty darn glad for the photos & jpegs- otherwise I wouldn't know what the Mona Lisa looked like. I'm also glad for the museum that keeps the original safe for those who can go see it.

 

I'm very firmly in the Physical Media camp, to the point that up to this year I largely avoided any digital only games (I still don't have a Steam account). On the flip side, I can't fault anyone for preferring the space-saving, low maintenance digital option. It's not an anti-social thing either- instead of going to someone's house to discuss what they have on their bookshelf, you can chat online or look over a digital collection on a phone at school/work/etc, and make plans for a multiplayer session later. You & me might not care too much about a Steam screenshot- but other people might. And it's perfectly fine for them to- as long as everyone's having fun with their games, why worry about how they play them?

 

Did I really need to put a giant /SARCASM tag on that Mona Lisa jibe and did you really miss the bit when I say how I have a little bit of physical and terabytes of digital stuff? And how my entire post was intended as a reply to extreme attitudes from the "strictly-digital" side? If somebody wants to swap "collection" screenshots that's perfectly fine by me. But the moment it swings from personal preferences to sweeping declarations about how keeping real stuff is stupid because it smells and that the modern way is automatically the only true one, it's not so fine anymore.

 

I joined Atari Age to celebrate and talk about these niche hobbies hoping to meet like-minded individuals here, and while it sometimes works, it also seems that more often than not I'm being told that old hardware, media, - hell, even the games itself - suck ever so badly and we should all ditch them and sign up for the modern status quo. Again, if that's anyone personal opinion it's fine, whatever, but the moment it's being tried to be passed as some kind of "it is known" gospel I reserve the right to objection.

[HoshiChiri]

 

Did I really need to put a giant /SARCASM tag on that Mona Lisa jibe and did you really miss the bit when I say how I have a little bit of physical and terabytes of digital stuff? And how my entire post was intended as a reply to extreme attitudes from the "strictly-digital" side?

 

Considering that so far, no one in this thread has expressed an extreme 'physical sucks, join the Digital Master Race' opinion- yeah, it would have helped. Sarcasm reads very poorly in text form, y'know. Personally, I'm just loving the irony that the physical collector is advocating for digital while the digital collector does the same for physical. It's a wonderfully odd way to talk about the whole thing!

 

What could be interesting to watch, is what the physical collectors move to have as we reach a more & more digital era- after all, we know that there are people who measure their collection volume against another, but that's pretty hard to do on a digital front when meeting or exceeding someone else's gigs is only a matter of your download speed. Will people cling to useless discs & long dead carts as physical icons of their data? Will custom-made tat become a trend ("I put each game on an individual custom memory stick, stored in a homemade case")? Will some other object take over the space of the actual game in the collector's mind? Could we see a future where Funko Pops come to represent game ownership? I mean, maybe Gamestop is just ahead of its time!

[derFunkenstein]

We're vegans.

 

This checks out. No vegan can resist an opportunity, no matter how tangential, to tell you that they're vegan.

[Keatah]

Considering that so far, no one in this thread has expressed an extreme 'physical sucks, join the Digital Master Race' opinion- yeah, it would have helped. Sarcasm reads very poorly in text form, y'know. Personally, I'm just loving the irony that the physical collector is advocating for digital while the digital collector does the same for physical. It's a wonderfully odd way to talk about the whole thing!

 

I find it relaxing and "value-adding" to physicalize a few fav downloads. Print the manual, make a box, make a media-holder.. I probably won't exceed doing 10 packages in the next 5 or 10 years. Just a few select personal favs.

 

All the same I have nicely organized and curated folders full of wads and mods for the early Doom era stuff - up to about Quake III and Unreal Tournament. This would include Hexen as well. I collected all my physical stuff and stuffed it into some folder.

 

Digital information will ALWAYS have to have some physical container. You just cannot store it in the air and call it a day. It MUST have a real representation somewhere.

 

---

 

I hadn't played Hexen since I last played it in the 90's, and in the process of restoring my 486 I played it as a hardware test. And I was surprised at how blocky the gfx were. Somehow in my head I pictured it all "organic" and smoother and hi-res'd up. You know. The nostalgia goggles.

[MrMaddog]

For the record I have nothing against owning or collecting physical copies, in fact half of my 360 games are on discs and I still have a large collection of Atari carts (but no way of playing them). And I'm glad there's people like John Hancock who are collecting carts & systems to make a museum for people.

 

But for me personally, I just don't have the room or extra cash to go out and buy all this stuff to line up on walls. And I'm not out to impress people online anyway...

 

Yeah twenty years ago I had real Atari carts & systems hooked up to a CRT and had a large collection of CD-ROMS for my PC & Playstation. But nowadays it's just not feasable for me anymore, it's just easier to have all my stuff on my PC which works better on flatscreens. And I'm not going to feel ashamed about it or have to constantly justify my choices either to anyone here.

 

My beef isn't which media to play games on but with large groups of gamers (of a certain generation) on the Internet who dictate how everyone else should play their games. And this is the last time I'm going to speak about it here because this is really making me feel bad about a hobby that should be giving me enjoyment.

 

And if anyone here does has a large physical collection collected over the years, then God bless you for being lucky enough to be able to obtain such a collection...

[spacecadet]

Not sure how having the option to buy SOME VCS games makes emulation a worse option than what future preservationists will have to deal with. Whatever it is they gotta do.

 

It doesn't, to me. But there are definitely a subset of collectors that consider downloading emulated game ROMs to be piracy, and the manufacturers of the games - if they're still in business - often seem to think the same thing. The fact that you have the choice to buy the game means you're just taking the cheap, easy and potentially illegal way out by downloading.

 

But in the future, and even today for some games, there will be no choice. If someone wants to preserve those games - as someone should, because you know the publishers aren't gonna do it - they're not going to have a choice but to dump them onto some other platform and then get them out there on the internet. There's no point preserving something if you're the only one who can ever play that game. So future "collectors" (I don't know if we'll really be able to call them that, but the mentality's really the same) will have no choice but to become pirates.

[youxia]

 

Considering that so far, no one in this thread has expressed an extreme 'physical sucks, join the Digital Master Race' opinion- yeah, it would have helped. Sarcasm reads very poorly in text form, y'know. Personally, I'm just loving the irony that the physical collector is advocating for digital while the digital collector does the same for physical. It's a wonderfully odd way to talk about the whole thing!

 

This thread does not exist in a vaccuum, there is a consistent anti-physical narrative on this board.

 

Yeah, it may seem a bit odd, but I'm not really a collector, as I said in my first post here. I just have some stuff, in both formats. And the reason I advocate for some more physical luvv is because I'd prefer when things are kept in balance and not in Black & White edition. Both sides tend to gravitate towards extremes and that is neither healthy nor reasonable.

 

 

My beef isn't which media to play games on but with large groups of gamers (of a certain generation) on the Internet who dictate how everyone else should play their games. And this is the last time I'm going to speak about it here because this is really making me feel bad about a hobby that should be giving me enjoyment.

 

Like I said above, both sides tend to gravitate towards extremes. I find the strictly-physical zealots equally infuriating to the strictly-digital ones. But it doesn't have to mean everybody falls into these polar opposites.

 

There's also a fine line between being critical and a tunnel-visioned ranter. I'd definitely like to think I speak from the former position, though of course on a forum medium and perceived by others it may appear to be the latter. For example, when I criticize Steam's business model it does not mean I hate all digital shops/downloads (in fact I have substantial, ahem, collections on gog, humble, itchio and some others. Screenshot? ) or people who use it.

[godslabrat]

I can't help but think that the marketing of today's games is, in some roundabout way, an attempt to combat piracy. When games are sold with the expectation that they're temporary experiences, to be replaced after a year, and that all they get on launch day is the install file for later DLC purchases... it's as if the modern gamer is being weaned off the idea that there is anything *TO* pirate.

[Tanooki]

It's all about piracy and control. You take peoples rights away to control the media through physical ownership the barrier to piracy is dramatically nastier for people to attempt to swipe. Further by doing this you also take ownership control rights away too as you can't loan, share, or sell to another your game once you're done with it. They basically in the end want to make you pay whatever they like to rent a game with no expectation of anything but using what you're allowed until they cut you off for one reason or another from it so they can re-sell it yet again later or something new. They want the second hand and the piracy angles stamped out entirely so you have no choice and no deals until they want to give you a sale and only as much as they deem necessary since they won't have to compete any longer.

[Flojomojo]

I agree -- and what is "piracy" other than taking someone's property without their permission, sometimes by force? It's a ludicrously strong word when applied to copying software.

 

The developers want to control their stuff, whether books, music, video, software, just like always and forever. Copying cartridges was difficult, until it wasn't. Same for optical media. Owning media never meant owning anything more than a physical piece of media, but now the rights holders have new ways to enforce that.

 

I remember getting shiny shiny CDs so full of data in such a magical format that it was amazing to be able to rip & burn just a few years later. The DRM'ed up world is what they wanted all along. As someone who likes to support living creators, I don't have a huge problem with that, so long as they aren't dicks about it. Or disappear and take their goods with them.

 

Disney Plus starts in 100 days and will be $70yr or $7/month for gobs and gobs of entertainment, way more than I would care to or be able to purchase. I guess they'll still sell discs for as long as people buy them, until they don't. Those with bandwidth caps or bad internet won't participate, until they do. Things will always be exactly as they are today, until they aren't.

 

I don't see how describing (and to a varying extent, embracing) the new reality contributes to "a consistent anti-physical narrative."

[zetastrike]

Are movies and music as affected as games when it comes to lack of availability/oceans worth of content that will never be reissued? I have no interest in pirating movies or music, if I want to see a movie or listen to song, I'll buy it or gladly stream without an adblocker. But games are just another ball of wax. 95+% of commercially released games probably have no revenue generating potential beyond their original run, and won't be made available on modern formats. Acquiring old games and the hardware needed to play them can also be very problematic. There is no answer.

[godslabrat]

Movies are just as bad, if not worse, in this regard. They've been made longer, so there are more to lose, and old film stock is notoriously volitile.

[Keatah]

At what point do games become meaningless. I mean like Doom is a classic and part'n'parcel of computing's culture. But the guy next door doing some retroremake that's all modern-pixelized and crap - well - those are a dime a dozen. Are they even worth looking at? Let alone preserving..?

[derFunkenstein]

I think every medium has garbage not worth preserving but good and commercially-successful games in some cases have never been rereleased.

[godslabrat]

At what point do games become meaningless. I mean like Doom is a classic and part'n'parcel of computing's culture. But the guy next door doing some retroremake that's all modern-pixelized and crap - well - those are a dime a dozen. Are they even worth looking at? Let alone preserving..?

 

 

I wouldn't go out of my way to preserve someone's homebrew effort... but I'd rather do so than not, if the opportunity presents itself. Likewise, a couple of theater dweebs messing with a movie camera in 1911 might have been worthless 20 years later, but today I'd find it interesting regardless of what was captured.

[Keatah]

When I'm into a game or project I'm messing around in the digital realm. It only makes sense to keep the material there when I'm done.

 

In the 80's I had a small wall of carts, about the size of a normal room door. Toward the end of the 90's I had boxes and boxes and even a small warehouse full of the stuff.. and an even bigger wall.. multiple walls..

 

Today all my vintage stuff fits in my pickup, or a small walk-in closet. And I'm happier for it. Not sandbagged or burdened with worrying about connectors and capacitors. No farting around with power supplies or signal converters. No worries about having everything lined up perfectly for display or having to match a console to a display device.

 

Removal of all the physical annoyances and tedium has allowed me to focus on the fun when playing. And that's nice. If any of my contemporary hardware fritzes out I just throw it away and get new stuff. Can't readily do that with vintage consoles.

 

Been operating this way more or less since the dot-com era. And I don't see it changing 5 years, 10 years, from now. Too much fun!

[Austin]

I can't help but think that the marketing of today's games is, in some roundabout way, an attempt to combat piracy. When games are sold with the expectation that they're temporary experiences, to be replaced after a year, and that all they get on launch day is the install file for later DLC purchases... it's as if the modern gamer is being weaned off the idea that there is anything *TO* pirate.

 

Movies are just as bad, if not worse, in this regard. They've been made longer, so there are more to lose, and old film stock is notoriously volitile.

 

I wouldn't go out of my way to preserve someone's homebrew effort... but I'd rather do so than not, if the opportunity presents itself. Likewise, a couple of theater dweebs messing with a movie camera in 1911 might have been worthless 20 years later, but today I'd find it interesting regardless of what was captured.

Stop speaking so much sense. You do know it goes right over most peoples' heads here, right?