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Video game history is disappearing. A recent study reported that 87 per cent of classic games (defined — in case you wanted to feel old — as anything released before 2010) are “critically endangered”, meaning they’re out of print. It’s easy enough for anyone to find films or music from 50 years ago, but games just a decade old are often totally inaccessible.
There are a few reasons for this. Games tend to be made for specific hardware, and console generations move on fast; there’s no assurance that the games you buy for your current PlayStation will be playable on the next. It’s also hard to access older games: retro consoles are an expensive collectors’ market and the process of “emulation”, reconfiguring old games for modern hardware, is popular but legally dubious. The industry is simply not motivated to support serious preservation efforts: when big developers do reissue classic games, they’re generally driven by profit rather than a commitment to cultural heritage.
As a young medium, gaming is still negotiating how to take care of its own history. The hodgepodge preservation efforts include museums, archives and a few niche initiatives. One company with a novel approach is California-based Digital Eclipse, whose editorial director Chris Kohler believes conserving gaming history is vitally important. “These are not just old games, they are the foundational works of art on which this multi-billion-dollar industry and this beautiful creative medium was built,” he says over a video call. Until recently, Digital Eclipse was known for its re-releases of classic arcade games such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mega Man, but while they were planning 2022’s Atari 50 collection, celebrating five decades of the influential gaming company, the team had a brainwave.
“Gaming is the storytelling medium of the 21st century — why are we not using that to tell our own history?” Kohler says. They call their innovative format an “interactive documentary”. Loading up Atari 50, players find a timeline that whisks them on a multimedia tour of the company’s history. Along the way they can play classic games but also see interviews, artwork and design documents. Rather than setting you adrift in an overwhelming list of 100 games, some of which have not aged well, this format introduces vital historical context. It turns a home console into a digital museum, giving players the original works, but also surrounding materials, to understand not just what they’re playing, but also why it matters.
Their next project, The Making of Karateka, was more creatively ambitious. Instead of spanning a company’s journey across decades, here is the story of a single game. Karateka was an influential but somewhat forgotten beat-’em-up created by Jordan Mechner, who went on to make Prince of Persia. When Kohler discovered that Mechner had assiduously kept records of the game’s development on floppy disks and journals, he saw a unique opportunity to narrate the scrappy, personal journey of game development in the 1980s. As you navigate this documentary’s timeline you encounter drafts of the game, an interactive breakdown of Mechner’s trailblazing animation techniques and even Super 8 movies of his dad running through a forest in a karate outfit, used as reference material.
Digital Eclipse’s latest is Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, a loving homage to an iconoclast of gaming history. Minter is a British designer who was a major player in the early 1980s computer gaming scene. He’s also a brilliantly quirky subject for documentary study, from his long, flowing hair to his strange obsession with llamas (a classic Minter game title is Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time). The story charts the most prolific phase of his game-making, from the rough experiments of his youth to polished arcade products, all lent depth by documentary interviews, entertaining biographical titbits and even pages of Minter’s high-school notepad on which he learned to code — right next to a doodle of Sid Vicious with a speech bubble saying “Sod off”.
As a child of the 1990s, I’d never come across Minter or Mechner before, but these figures charmed me with their personalities as much as their games. While the audience for retro game collections is often thought to be older players looking for a nostalgia kick, the interactive documentary format provides a welcome entry to gaming history for younger players. “We want to explain how the game was made, why it was influential, how much blood, sweat and tears went into it. We want to find an emotional hook to get people invested,” says Kohler.
The hook for me was Minter’s wonderfully absurd humour, or the sweet relationship between Mechner and his dad, who helped create Karateka. As is often the case with history, it’s most accessible when you can relate to the people at the heart of the stories. “Human beings make video games,” says Kohler. “Let’s talk about that.”
‘Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story’ is out now, digitaleclipse.com
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