A few weeks ago I was browsing Reddit and saw a helpful image showing the platform availability of several games in the long-running franchise Shin Megami Tenseiincluding the popular spin-off series Persona. The developer of the franchise, Atlus, had recently announced the release of several Persona games for new consoles, and the user who shared the image celebrated this news. The image features four rows, each representing a current generation video game platform with certain titles available to play next year. you can play Shin Megami Tensei V only on Nintendo Switch. You can get the next . to play Soul Hackers 2 on everything but the Switch. you can play Nocturne on everything but the Xbox. This only applies to the franchise titles available on at least one current generation platform. Some games can only be played on a Nintendo DS or 3DS, both no longer in production, or using a console emulator, software that operates in a legal gray area.
The legal route for the Shin Megami Tensei enthusiast is thus to keep three different PlayStations and three different Nintendos in good working order if they want to play these games at will. This concept actually applies to every popular game franchise. The average gamer, the sane consumer, will play the games available on the latest console generations and accept that the previous titles, including those released as little as five years ago, are simply lost through time.
Video games are shockingly disposable. This is true, even if they are small miracles of a hundred software developers banging on keyboards and somehow turning a million lines of code into living simulacra. It’s demoralizing to see the fruits of their labors have the same shelf life as a pack of instant ramen, but this is the commercial reality. Every line of consoles and each line of games is a mess of platform exclusivity, backward compatibility, publisher shenanigans, discontinued services and expired rights. Games die young.
Video game culture deals with death in strange ways. Capcom making more remakes Resident Evil games than that makes it new. It remade the first game in the series just six years – that’s one console generation – after its release. Naughty Dog has released a sequel to The last of us a few years ago, and now the developer is releasing a remake of the original game despite already remastering it for the PS4. That’s a lot of resources spent rejuvenating a game we’ve already played so we can have this conversation all over again eight years from now with the launch of a PlayStation 6.
It’s easier to understand the cases where a developer fights obsolescence: Dragami Games remake lollipop chainsaw due to licensing issues with the original game and soundtrack; Artur Laczkowski remake PT because Konami didn’t publish the game during the company’s split with its president, Hideo Kojima. Sometimes a remake is just a second bite to the apple. But sometimes a remake is the only prospect of keeping a game (or at least its legacy) alive on modern hardware.
Cloud streaming is a somewhat promising solution to these compatibility and longevity issues. Recently, Sony has relaunched its video game subscription service, PlayStation Plus, offering a variety of digital benefits such as game discounts and giveaways, access to online multiplayer and cloud storage. The service competes with Microsoft’s leading subscription service, GamePass, which offers similar features to Xbox and PC players. I wouldn’t be the first gamer to say that the levels and sub-services included in a PS Plus subscription are a little complicated to parse at first glance, but I’d also argue that these services are only as complicated as the variety of problems they’re trying to solve. With cloud streaming, PlayStation Plus and GamePass both allow players to run games from a remote server without downloading them to a console. This is a janky but clever solution to a number of different problems, including the persistence of valuable games across console generations.
For a while PS Now (the cloud streaming service integrated into PlayStation Plus) streamed Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, a title that otherwise stuck on the PlayStation 3, to the PlayStation 4. This was a slow, subpar experience, but it was something. It was a step toward solving some of the conundrums of platform exclusivity and backwards compatibility. This was until the game disappeared from PS Now without explanation. This is not an obscure game. It is one of the best-selling titles of its console generation. And now, unless you still own a PS3 16 years after launch, it’s just gone. What if Iron Man 3 were the biggest movie in the world and ten years later you couldn’t watch it legally anywhere? That’s how video games work. Happens all the time.
The video game conservationists, who work with copies and not rights, can’t do much. A few months ago, Shame published a story about curator Frank Cifaldi and his recent contacts with Wata Games, a small company that amassed a huge private collection of rare retro game prototypes, some worth millions of dollars. Interestingly, and controversially, Wata Games does not distribute the software to consumers. It’s just keeping the physical copies as antiques. The disc is valuable. The data is available as always.
Even at the height of video game success, as the medium continues to merge with popular culture while generating a multi-billion dollar esports industry, there is this rapid degradation of games. Video games are just as prohibitively different, in form and function, from other entertainment. Movies and music are standardized media with less acute and ubiquitous issues of sustainability. Television is a jumble of channels and subscriptions, yes, but it’s all consolidated into the television itself; you don’t need to own five different types of TVs and subscribe to three different subscription services to watch The Sopranos. But video game culture is largely defined by the fragmentation of its essential parts. This is an area of entertainment in which even stepping into the past half a decade often requires antique hardware, pirated software, and immense patience.
This isn’t just a problem for our law-abiding hobbyist who wants to play the hits and cult classics without sticking to old hardware forever. This is the definitive, if impossible, problem of video game culture. Video games are complex code. There is really nothing that can be done about the inherent compatibility issues with such code. Sometimes I look at my workplace and I see the Tower of Babel. I see a medium that suffers from aging. I learned to emulate in high school, and I don’t mind keeping a few emulators in my taskbar now that they’re retired from my desk. But I’m still hoping for a longer lifespan, greater availability, and a brighter future for video games. I play on Shin Megami Tensei in one way or another.
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