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Disclaimer: this thread is a signal for discussion about preservation of gaming stuff from another point of view. I have no intent to offend anyone, this is just my own point of view about debatable and controversial topic. I understand that many people disagree with me and that's fine.
Recently I've came across this article and wanted to share my thoughts about it.
Indy the Magical Kid (Shounen Majutsushi) [NES – Cancelled]
Collector Blocks Preservation Of Rare NES RPG
Reason №1 - sudden emergency situations
First of all i sincerely hope that nothing like that ever happen to anyone. I wish that your collection will be always fine and safe. But unfortunately in reality emergency situations may occur.
House Fire Destroys Collection of Over 2,000 Games
John Lewis - facebook
Reason №2 - nobody lives forever
Whay happen with your game collection after you? Does your relatives will really care about your collection, are you sure about that? Are you living alone? What is the probability that your collection end up in trash pile/landfield/junkyard? Thinking about it is producing sobering effect.
Most protos and betas end up in the trash pile after companies closure (dev hardware gets recycle as e-waste). Almost nobody inside the industry cares about game preservation. Companies often produce effort to shut down game preservation comminities activity.
Konami lost the source code for Silent Hill 2 and 3 resulting in HD Collection’s poor quality
Many game collectors prefer to not make copies of CD and DVD protos they have because of their own principles. As Borman said - many protos were written in a simple cheapest media. Without proper backup maintenance someday you may end up with non-readable only copy of proto on CD that now is a complete useless pile of plastic even if your storage conditions are perfect.
An important note to Video Game Sellers and Buyers
Sometimes prototype can be unplayable without specific modification of the game code.
Sometimes prototype can have a security dongle protection, that may not easy to disable without external help.
It's can be hard to properly recover some content without extended guide of how to do it.
Prototype may have hidden inaccessible areas or hidden futures that only may be found by a few talanted guys.
Single man usually can't handle all complicated structured research of the some games himself, so help is needed.
Reason №6 - releasing protos publicly may inspire other collectors to share more stuff
Other collectors will see that it is possible to gain more significant benefits from releasing it, than keeping secretly and locked. In result of that you may gain access to more content than before. Creating a friendly atmosphere of mutual sharing is far better way, than creating endless discussions consisting of emotional drama because of unfair competition of other collectors.
Short FAQ
Q: If i release something i will get legal issues immediately with a lot of bad consequences
Sometimes it may happen. But directly depends of the release date and specific publisher policy individually. Safe way is - no releases of current generation (4 years old +) or two generations older from the current as rules says. If you still worry, you can always take opportunity to release it anonymously in alternative place.
Q: If i release something, this item will lose a lot of it's value. I will lose my money.
Yes. Your item may loss a lot in value. Most likely you will not restore the full value of a loss through donations. That comes down to what is important for you and how selfish you are. Sooner or later there is high chance that someone else will run into same kind of prototype from alternative source and possibly release it publicly without you. And you can't stop other people from doing actions with stuff that they now own. You lose something at start but in the same time you'll gain a chance of receiving back much more bigger benefits than money.
Q: i was thinking about releasing something, but some angry kids started to insult me, demanding as if i owed them something
Nobody should force you to share something without you good will. It is your own item and only you will decide what to do with it. Share something is not a necessity. It's must be a decision based on your own conclusion, regardless of someone else opinion. But always make a note that someone else may have similar content with a different worldview.
Conclusion: based on these six reasons - sharing protos publicly isn't good for you wallet, but more often brings benefits for game preservation community (and for you too as being a part of it) and helps to save important pieces of history, preventing loss and oblivion, that can happen. Sharing important stuff is thoughtful, reasoned and adult action based on deep understanding of situation we all have. It means acting with understanding of all negative and positive consequences of this action for you and for the community. I'd also like to take opportunity to deeply thank all of those who understand that and make releases of stuff available for a wide audience.
For the ending i wanted to highlight some quotes from the story behind RE 1.5 builds:
The 15-year hunt for Resident Evil 1.5
Good Luck everyone, i hope my thoughts will make a signal to rethinking about important things that concern many of us.
Recently I've came across this article and wanted to share my thoughts about it.
Indy the Magical Kid (Shounen Majutsushi) [NES – Cancelled]
Collector Blocks Preservation Of Rare NES RPG
I don't think that this kind of behavior is exclusively to Japanese people. Furthermore I've seen the exact same behaver from different western game collectors many times over and over again. This anonymous Japanese collector has no obligations to NES community. Nobody should complain or force him to share the ROM publicly. He paid his own money and get his own item. He is not obliged to do anything with that. But... isn't there is something wrong here? Let's make things clear, maybe there is some real reasons to share something like that publicly to the community...Forest of Illusion said:When the Indy prototype appeared on auction, the Web’s most visible preservationists called their fans to arms and urgently asked for donations. The game was ticking up in price rapidly, and would only be released to the public if someone won who cared about such matters. They gave it their best shot, but they were massively outbid by an anonymous Japanese collector, who bought the proto SPECIFICALLY to keep it from being saved. To make things worse, the winner of the auction left an anonymous message saying he bought it to stop "copy sales" and dumps. Nice. I'm hope he is happy that he spend 1.5 million yen on a video game just so nobody can dump it. "I will always protect it as a Japanese treasure" is what he says. This is insane.
Reason №1 - sudden emergency situations
First of all i sincerely hope that nothing like that ever happen to anyone. I wish that your collection will be always fine and safe. But unfortunately in reality emergency situations may occur.
House Fire Destroys Collection of Over 2,000 Games
John Lewis - facebook
Dalton Cooper said:John Lewis is an avid collector of video games. He started his collection as a child and continued to collect games for over 20 years. In 2011, his home was burglarized and he lost around 600 of the games that were in his collection. John’s collection ranged from the Atari 2600 to current-generation consoles. In the last two years, he started adding complete-in-box NES and SNES titles, including critically-acclaimed classics like Super Mario RPG, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, and Earthbound. To put John’s unfortunate circumstances into perspective, a complete-in-box copy of Earthbound for the Super Nintendo currently runs for about $850 on eBay.
John Lewis lives in Pioneer, Ohio, you can contact him via facebook for donations if you will.John Lewis said:I had a house fire last night. Unfortunately, my game room with 30 systems and over 2000 games did not survive. It is all gone, I have nothing. I'm not asking for anything, just press f to say goodbye. Everything in the house is a loss. Furniture, clothing, appliances, even possibly the dog. There is nothing I can even walk out of there with. When they let me back in, it will only be to recover my dogs body
Reason №2 - nobody lives forever
Whay happen with your game collection after you? Does your relatives will really care about your collection, are you sure about that? Are you living alone? What is the probability that your collection end up in trash pile/landfield/junkyard? Thinking about it is producing sobering effect.
Reason №3 - game companies usually don't care about preservation (Volition devs are rare exception)Pyotr Mamonov said:There is not pockets in the coffin. You'll be left only with that, which was collected inside your soul.
Most protos and betas end up in the trash pile after companies closure (dev hardware gets recycle as e-waste). Almost nobody inside the industry cares about game preservation. Companies often produce effort to shut down game preservation comminities activity.
Konami lost the source code for Silent Hill 2 and 3 resulting in HD Collection’s poor quality
Reason №4 - physical media may die in any time (HDD in dev hardware may fail in any time)Tomm Hulett said:We got all the source code that Konami had on file – which it turns out wasn’t the final release version of the games. So during debug we didn’t just have to deal with the expected ‘porting’ bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we’d never seen before. A lot of assets such as textures and sound had to be taken out of the compiled game, and that brings with it a host of unique issues, especially taken on top of the tricky coding workarounds at play in the original games. We certainly had our hands full.
Many game collectors prefer to not make copies of CD and DVD protos they have because of their own principles. As Borman said - many protos were written in a simple cheapest media. Without proper backup maintenance someday you may end up with non-readable only copy of proto on CD that now is a complete useless pile of plastic even if your storage conditions are perfect.
An important note to Video Game Sellers and Buyers
slackur said:But when I learned about this problem, I checked my several hundred discs between Sega CD, Turbo CD, Saturn, and even Dreamcast games and found DOZENS had this problem. Several expensive games I owned were mint- except when held to the light I could see one or more little white dots that proved my game had damage. Some of these I went back to play after not touching for years and found they now would occasionally lock up or not play at all. I had a few FACTORY SEALED games that I opened and found the same thing. It has been a nerve-shattering nightmare for a collector like me.
But the problem was just getting started. I realized that I bought disc rotted games from everywhere in the country- it wasn't local or just a regional issue, like the north or New England states. Even imports were suspect: I have a copy of the PC-Engine Rondo of Blood Castlevania that is now laced with a small star-pattern of disc-rot that at best makes it skip the music, and at worst occasionally keeps it from loading. That was a Christmas gift from my parents when it was NEW!
I'm getting so sick of this problem, and no one seems to realize how big of a deal it really is. If you have a few hundred Sega CD, Turbo CD, Saturn, or even older PC CD-Rom games, and you look long enough, you likely have at least a few disc rot damaged games.
Reason №5 - people from the game preservation community may know more than you do about specific gameRecordable discs don't last as long, in part because of the organic dye used to record the bytes onto discs, which Youket says is vulnerable to degradation—particularly in the case of recordable DVDs, which have higher levels of light sensitivity, making them more susceptible to failure. Additionally, she says the way a recordable disc is burned is a major factor in defining its lifespan—a poorly recorded disc tends to wear out more quickly.
Sometimes prototype can be unplayable without specific modification of the game code.
Sometimes prototype can have a security dongle protection, that may not easy to disable without external help.
It's can be hard to properly recover some content without extended guide of how to do it.
Prototype may have hidden inaccessible areas or hidden futures that only may be found by a few talanted guys.
Single man usually can't handle all complicated structured research of the some games himself, so help is needed.
Reason №6 - releasing protos publicly may inspire other collectors to share more stuff
Other collectors will see that it is possible to gain more significant benefits from releasing it, than keeping secretly and locked. In result of that you may gain access to more content than before. Creating a friendly atmosphere of mutual sharing is far better way, than creating endless discussions consisting of emotional drama because of unfair competition of other collectors.
Short FAQ
Q: If i release something i will get legal issues immediately with a lot of bad consequences
Sometimes it may happen. But directly depends of the release date and specific publisher policy individually. Safe way is - no releases of current generation (4 years old +) or two generations older from the current as rules says. If you still worry, you can always take opportunity to release it anonymously in alternative place.
Q: If i release something, this item will lose a lot of it's value. I will lose my money.
Yes. Your item may loss a lot in value. Most likely you will not restore the full value of a loss through donations. That comes down to what is important for you and how selfish you are. Sooner or later there is high chance that someone else will run into same kind of prototype from alternative source and possibly release it publicly without you. And you can't stop other people from doing actions with stuff that they now own. You lose something at start but in the same time you'll gain a chance of receiving back much more bigger benefits than money.
Q: i was thinking about releasing something, but some angry kids started to insult me, demanding as if i owed them something
Nobody should force you to share something without you good will. It is your own item and only you will decide what to do with it. Share something is not a necessity. It's must be a decision based on your own conclusion, regardless of someone else opinion. But always make a note that someone else may have similar content with a different worldview.
Conclusion: based on these six reasons - sharing protos publicly isn't good for you wallet, but more often brings benefits for game preservation community (and for you too as being a part of it) and helps to save important pieces of history, preventing loss and oblivion, that can happen. Sharing important stuff is thoughtful, reasoned and adult action based on deep understanding of situation we all have. It means acting with understanding of all negative and positive consequences of this action for you and for the community. I'd also like to take opportunity to deeply thank all of those who understand that and make releases of stuff available for a wide audience.
For the ending i wanted to highlight some quotes from the story behind RE 1.5 builds:
The 15-year hunt for Resident Evil 1.5
Alzaire shared some important pieces of knowledge with The Curator, including how to access certain walled-off rooms using the game's debug menu, as well as translations for item descriptions and dialogue. Unfortunately, when the subject of him possibly releasing the game to the public came up, hopes were dashed. The Curator demanded $10,000 for the privilege. The talks broke down.
Mustering all of their financial strength, forum users came together and raise the $10,000 requested by The Curator. He promptly refused the offer, demanding "a healthy sum" for what he now believed was a priceless piece of gaming history. The Curator then listed 1.5 on eBay for an eye-watering $125,000, and any chance at an amicable agreement was lost.
In early 2011, The Curator confirmed what many fans had suspected: the original copy had finally succumbed to disc rot and the only copy left was sitting on his computer's hard drive. In response, Alzaire formed a delegation of seven or eight high-ranking 1.5 experts from the various forums. These people had, by this point, spent well over a decade searching for the game. Pooling their funds together and employing a take it or leave it approach, they finally negotiated a deal. A sum of $8000 was agreed upon and a few weeks later, in April 2011, a disc arrived on Alzaire's doorstep.
Richard Mandel, who would later go on to write a book about the hunt for 1.5, describes what happened next as "a decision that still makes the average video gamer scratch their head". It's decided 1.5 will not release to the fans. Instead, Alzaire and his associates would keep their acquisition for themselves.
At the time, anyone who had their hands on a copy of any version of 1.5 was essentially sitting on a goldmine. If someone were to acquire and release a build to the public, it would severely reduce the value of everyone else's copy. By keeping their acquisition a secret, Alzaire, Gemini and Team IGAS were proving to those other collectors they could be trusted.
Alzaire dedicated his entire adult life to this search, became the world's foremost expert in a particular field, but found himself compelled to leave his baby in the hands of someone else because of how unwieldy it had become. In many ways Alzaire deserves to be the hero of this story. But as in Resident Evil, in real life things rarely work out nicely.
During all the turmoil, an eBay auction popped up. It contains a collection of console gaming relics, including a PS2 test kit, some obscure old games, and... yes, a disc purporting to be a copy of Resident Evil 1.5.
What Mandel had stumbled upon was indeed a legit copy of the game. He knew what he had to do. On 4th June 2013, Mandel won the eBay auction with a $2025 bid for a copy of the most coveted horror game ever cancelled. Much to the chagrin of Team IGAS, he released the game into the hands of other 'purists' and the rest, as many a hack journalist has written before, is history.
Capcom is still holding out on a practically finished build of the game. "They still have that final (80 per cent) build of 1.5 on hand," he says. "I'm also fairly certain none of it will ever see the light of day, unless Capcom Japan wants it to or there's an internal leak, and the odds of that happening are quite low."
"For treasure is what you make of it, and treasure always attracts the bad as well as the good."
Mustering all of their financial strength, forum users came together and raise the $10,000 requested by The Curator. He promptly refused the offer, demanding "a healthy sum" for what he now believed was a priceless piece of gaming history. The Curator then listed 1.5 on eBay for an eye-watering $125,000, and any chance at an amicable agreement was lost.
In early 2011, The Curator confirmed what many fans had suspected: the original copy had finally succumbed to disc rot and the only copy left was sitting on his computer's hard drive. In response, Alzaire formed a delegation of seven or eight high-ranking 1.5 experts from the various forums. These people had, by this point, spent well over a decade searching for the game. Pooling their funds together and employing a take it or leave it approach, they finally negotiated a deal. A sum of $8000 was agreed upon and a few weeks later, in April 2011, a disc arrived on Alzaire's doorstep.
Richard Mandel, who would later go on to write a book about the hunt for 1.5, describes what happened next as "a decision that still makes the average video gamer scratch their head". It's decided 1.5 will not release to the fans. Instead, Alzaire and his associates would keep their acquisition for themselves.
At the time, anyone who had their hands on a copy of any version of 1.5 was essentially sitting on a goldmine. If someone were to acquire and release a build to the public, it would severely reduce the value of everyone else's copy. By keeping their acquisition a secret, Alzaire, Gemini and Team IGAS were proving to those other collectors they could be trusted.
Alzaire dedicated his entire adult life to this search, became the world's foremost expert in a particular field, but found himself compelled to leave his baby in the hands of someone else because of how unwieldy it had become. In many ways Alzaire deserves to be the hero of this story. But as in Resident Evil, in real life things rarely work out nicely.
During all the turmoil, an eBay auction popped up. It contains a collection of console gaming relics, including a PS2 test kit, some obscure old games, and... yes, a disc purporting to be a copy of Resident Evil 1.5.
What Mandel had stumbled upon was indeed a legit copy of the game. He knew what he had to do. On 4th June 2013, Mandel won the eBay auction with a $2025 bid for a copy of the most coveted horror game ever cancelled. Much to the chagrin of Team IGAS, he released the game into the hands of other 'purists' and the rest, as many a hack journalist has written before, is history.
Capcom is still holding out on a practically finished build of the game. "They still have that final (80 per cent) build of 1.5 on hand," he says. "I'm also fairly certain none of it will ever see the light of day, unless Capcom Japan wants it to or there's an internal leak, and the odds of that happening are quite low."
"For treasure is what you make of it, and treasure always attracts the bad as well as the good."