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ICHEG Interview – Part 2

Jan 20, 2025

—

by

Metal Ghost

in Feature

Part 2 of Interview with Jon-Paul C. Dyson, Director, International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG)

Introduction

Back in 2012, I was fortunate enough to interview International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) Director Jon-Paul C. Dyson, PhD. At that time, well less than half the interview was actually published, leaving a lot of wonderful insights and information on the cutting room floor. I hope to rectify that with this multi-part post, whereby the interview will be published in its entirety.

ICHEG’s mission to collect, preserve, study and interpret video games, other electronic games and related materials remains as important today as it did back then. With the goal to “examine the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other, including across boundaries of culture and geography”, I cannot recommend enough going to check them out.

In Part 2 of this multi-part series, we discuss how ICHEG goes about accomplishing their mission of Video Game preservation.

Process

The Challenge of Preserving Video Games

(Game-Route) How is ICHEG preparing to conserve gaming history at a time when games and gaming content are increasingly distributed digitally? For example, some of the nuances that are becoming involved include: Digital Rights Management as it pertains to Xbox 360 or PSN downloads; PC ‘always connected’ DRM systems such as Starforce; Gaikai and OnLive.

(J.P. Dyson) If I take a step back and take a look at the bigger picture of ‘how do you preserve a video game’, it’s a hard problem as you raise some of these issues, and things like DRM and when things are born digital, what does that mean? So let me take a step back and talk about our approach to preserving video games.

ICHEG’s 5-Step Process for Game Preservation

At the moment we are pursuing a 5-fold strategy for preserving video games. Because even if it’s stored on a physical medium like a floppy disk, it’s going to decay over time. Bit rot is going to set in, 5 ¼ inch disks don’t last forever. So how then do you go about preserving these materials? The central thing that we’ve been concentrating on, initially, is collecting the physical copies of games and hardware. So that’s been the central pillar of our collecting, the focus so far, as we’ve gotten started. But we recognize that alone is not (enough), especially since materials won’t last, and even if you have a game on a shelf it doesn’t necessarily give you a whole sense in its entirety, so I think we’re going out in two different directions. One is a more physical direction, and one is a digital direction. So initially the games and the hardware themselves.

The second thing we’re collecting are printed materials, or mass manufactured materials without the games. So this would be things like game guides, gaming magazines, ephemera that’s produced related to the games, that sort of thing. But I think that especially the printed materials are key. Because they give you insights into the games, how the games were played, how they were created, interviews with authors, so preserving those are really key. That’s why we’ve built this collection of over 10,000 video game and computer magazines, books from the 1960’s and 1970’s dealing with computer games when a lot of stuff was rooted on mainframes. Again, very few places have DEC PDP-11s they can set-up and run or something. And so these printed materials are the 2^nd support of this strategy.

So the 1^st are games and hardware, the 2^nd are printed materials. Going further into this, you go from these mass produced printed materials to the 3^rd thing, archival materials. And for this it would include game designer notes, business records, marketing materials, oral histories. Things that tell you about how the game was made, how the game was sold, how the game was developed and marketed. These are all important things, such as Will Wright’s notebooks or Ralph Baer’s notes, those unique archival materials. So, games and hardware, printed materials, and archival materials, that’s 3 things we’re doing.

Going back towards the digital end, the 4^th thing is doing video capture. So, capture a record of the game at play. Now this is not the same as being able to load the game up and play it. But at least it gives you some sense of what the game was like, what was the feel of the game. So, historians who wanted to know a game from 20 years ago, they could look at a video record of that. So that’s where we have this grant funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to capture video from about 7,000 games in our collection. Those range from very common games, like Super Mario or something, to more obscure educational games or games that came out on the Apple IIe.

(Game-Route) That’s the goal, to get all 7,000 of those eventually play recorded?

(J.P. Dyson) Yea, so we’re doing usually a final cut of between 10 and 20 minutes. So, it’s not comprehensive, it’d be impossible to do that for every game, a complete play through. But at least it gives you a record of the game. And then eventually we’d like to link that with our online record of that artifact. So there are a couple things. One is there are some games where video has never been captured for. But also, two, we’re taking from the original game. One of the problems when you go on You Tube or something and you do a quick search and it’s gameplay, some of things you don’t know, ‘Is this from the orginal game? Or is it from an emulator or something?’. So we’ll have a one-to-one record, this is a video captured from this game, played on that hardware. So video capture is the 4^th thing. Games and Hardware, Mass Manufactured Printed Materials, unique Archival Records is the 3^rd one, Game Capture is the 4^th one.

Now you get to the 5^th one, which is Emulation and Migration of Code. And that’s where it gets real tricky. That’s the one, to be honest, we’ve don’t the least with. We’ve built up slowly, we know we need to be dealing with that, and we have plans to be dealing with that in the future.

The Role of Private Individuals and Collaboration

(Game-Route) But starting somewhere, you have to start at ground zero and work your way up.

(J.P. Dyson) Yes, and this is where private individuals have really taken the lead with this sort of thing, both with emulation and also with migrating code from one system to another. So we want to learn from what those private individuals are doing. But there are going to be all sorts of issues. I mean it’s not only with things like DRM, but when you have an MMO, what does that mean to preserve it? What if no one else is playing it, is it the same experience? If you even have the server to still run it.

What about an augmented reality game? Again, do you need the original servers to keep running it? How long are you going to be able to keep those going? Or do you recreate that? And what if it’s tied to a physical space? All sorts of questions there. So that’s going to be a topic where there’s no one answer to the question, there’s going to be many different ones.

And mainly it’s about working with the companies to preserve things. Working with private individuals who have pioneered a lot of this work. And really building on their efforts, saying ‘What can we contribute to this process that’s really unique, or that only we can do as an institution as opposed to a private individual?’.

(Game-Route) So it’s really something that’s been given a lot of thought, and that’s actually closest to its infancy as far as how best to do it, and what direction to go in.

(J.P. Dyson) Yea, and there are other groups, such as Preserving Virtual Worlds, which I’m an advisor to, that are looking at these issues. And again, there are all sorts of issues, from Digital Rights Management, to property issues, to technology issues for doing it.