After Bioshock came out my interest was piqued in System Shock, an older PC title that was published by Origin and developed by Irrational Games. Irrational became 2K Boston – the guys who made Bioshock – and was a progenitor of Bioshock.
The only place I could find to get the game other than paying $40 for an older used copy was to download the game from a site called Home of the Underdogs. I read a little about the site before downloading the game, and everything seemed legit at the time.
Home of the Underdogs claimed to be “a non-profit site dedicated to the preservation and promotion of underrated PC games (and a few non-PC games) of all ages: good games that deserve a second chance after dismal sales or critical reviews that we feel are unwarranted.” They said that, “while not an abandonware site per se (since our aim is to pay tribute to all underdogs, both new and old), supports the abandonware idea. We believe that providing games that have been abandoned by their publishers, while technically illegal, is a valuable service to the gaming community because these games are in danger of disappearing into obscurity, and their copyright holders no longer derive any revenues from them."
At the time I did not think about what these statements meant, but over time I started to wonder just why gaming's history was not being preserved better than this. With the advent of things like Nintendo’s Virtual Console and the Xbox Live Arcade, why aren’t more people seeing the value in offering up older titles cheaply for new generations to discover?
Of course the flourishing ROM (files of games you can find and illegally download)and Emulator (the code that plays the files) culture probably prevents most companies trying to legally offer up downloads of older games from seeing any kind of a profit.
A big part of the problem with preserving gaming history and allowing for purchases and downloads of older titles must also be how the rights to the code for these titles gets lost in a quagmire of legal tape as companies are bought, sold and disbanded. As just who the owners of specific code becomes murkier, the legal means of writing contracts and paying royalties probably becomes too hefty to allow for games to be cheaply downloaded. If older titles are not cheap, then you are pushing more gamers to download these titles illegally.
Another issue on both the PC and console side is changing technology. I never got that download of System Shock to work on my Vista running desktop. After a number of attempts that all lead to crashes I gave up on getting the game to work, and had to hope that 2K could get the rights to the game and add it in as a bonus feature for Bioshock 2.
Luckily, not all is lost when it comes to older titles for the PC. Sites like Gametap offer up a subscription based service for playing older games and sites like GOG.com are starting to pop-up as well. GOG offers cheap downloads of older titles like Fallout and MDK.
What has to be asked also, though, is who is going to profit from these downloads? Are the people who worked so hard to make these games going to see even the first dime from these sales, or are all of these profits going to some lawyer who just happened to own the rights? The same question could also be asked of Nintendo’s Virtual Console and other means of downloading older titles.
Maybe sites like GOG will flourish as much as ROM sites and we will see even more games like Betrayal at Krondor offered up for download cheaply. For now I will stay away from illegal downloads and simply wait until there are legal means to repurchase these titles. Preserving gaming history is an important subject, but for now I think it might be best if we consider ways to legally preserve gaming history. The Underdogs might have a noble idea in mind, but noble does not matter at all when the service your site provides is potentially preventing legal sales… no matter how classic and under-appreciated the title may be.
From Overdos3.com
