Wait, you want to save this?

Most everyone will agree that Super Mario Bros. is a good -- if not great -- game. Absolutely worthy of preservation. (See my previous post for more canonical games.) But what about the not-so-good games? And what about the absolute dreck like Superman 64, one of the most critically reviled games of all time? Wouldn't it be better to dump those games in a New Mexico landfill and pretend they never happened? Why save Superman?

For the average gamer, it might be best for his sanity to forget. But for the historian, the failures are just as important as the successes. They provide a counterbalance to the classics, an opportunity to find out what went wrong and why.

Why did Superman 64 fail? It's Superman, for god's sake! How can you mess up that license? Of course, that was part of the problem. When a publisher obtains a slam-bang license, it's easy to slap a couple of gameplay elements together and hope that buyers aren't savvy enough to read the reviews. But is this cynical take what really happened? Does the blame lie solely with the marketing department? What did the developers think as they were making the game? How did DC comics feel about all this? What input did they have? These are all important questions for historians, and ones that can be answered if proper care is taken to preserve the game and its related materials.

Now, Superman 64 is a special case, a high-profile license gone horribly awry. There's plenty of low-profile shovelware that gets pushed out on the Wii every week -- what about those games? Obviously, those games perhaps won't receive the same historical scrutiny as Superman 64, but I would argue that the games themselves are worth saving, if only to provide insight into the Wii's audience, or at least publishers' conception of that audience.

But what about the mediocre fare? What about a game like The Club? Some people liked it (Hello, N'Gai Croal!), some people hated it, and most people forgot it even existed. I saw new copies at GameStop six months ago for $10. Surely we can push that game from our minds, right? But I think that games like The Club will pose intriguing questions for future historians: Why didn't the game succeed? Plenty of mediocre games sell over a million copies. Was it a marketing problem? A victim of shooter fatigue? Something else?

The old adage says that history is written by the victors. That may be true, but that doesn't mean that the losers aren't also worthy of preservation. In fact, they may ultimately provide some of the most enlightening stories.

What gaming disaster do you think is worth remembering? Why?

[For further reading on interesting failures, I recommend tracking down Banvard's Folly by Paul Collins. It's a fascinating look at "thirteen people who didn't change the world."]

[Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/bbretterson/.]