A few weeks ago, I was browsing Reddit and saw a helpful chart listing the platform availability of several games in the long-running Shin Megami Tensei franchise, which includes the popular Persona spinoff series. The developer of the franchise, Atlus, had recently announced the release of several Persona games for new consoles, and the user who shared the graphics was celebrating this news. The image contains four lines, each representing a next-generation video game platform with some titles available for play next year. You can only play Shin Megami Tensei V on Nintendo Switch. You can play the next Soul Hackers 2 on everything but Switch. You can play Nocturne on everything but Xbox. This only represents franchise titles available on at least one current generation platform. Some of the games can only be played on a Nintendo DS or 3DS, both of which are no longer in production, or using a console emulator, software that operates in a legal gray area.
The legal avenue for Shin Megami Tensei fans, then, is to keep three different PlayStation and three different Nintendo running if they want to play these games at will. This concept extends to any popular game franchise, really. The average gamer, the sensible consumer, will play the games available on the latest console generations and accept that previous titles, including titles released as recently as five years ago, are simply lost over time.
Video games are incredibly disposable. This is true even if they are small miracles of a hundred software developers tapping keyboards and somehow transforming a million lines of code into living simulacra. It’s demoralizing to see the fruits of their labor suffer the same shelf life as an instant ramen packet, but that’s the commercial reality. Every console lineage and every game series is a mess of platform exclusivity, backward compatibility, publisher cheating, discontinued services, and expired rights. Games die young.
Video game culture deals with death in strange ways. Capcom remakes more Resident Evil games than you create new ones. He remade the first game in the series only six years, this is a generation of consoles, after its release. Naughty Dog released a sequel to The Last of Us a couple of years ago and now the developer is releasing a remake of the original game despite having already remastered it for PS4. That’s a lot of resources spent on rejuvenating a game we’ve already played just to be able to have this conversation once again in eight years with the launch of a PlayStation 6.
It’s easier to understand when a developer is battling obsolescence: Dragami Games remade Lollipop Chainsaw due to licensing issues with the original game and its soundtrack; Artur Laczkowski remaking P.T. because Konami canceled the release of the game during the breakup of the company with its director, Hideo Kojima. Sometimes a remake is just a second bite of the apple. But sometimes a remake is the only prospect for keeping a game (or at least its legacy) alive on modern hardware.
Cloud streaming is a somewhat promising solution to these compatibility and longevity issues. Recently, Sony relaunched its video game subscription service, PlayStation Plus, offering a variety of digital benefits, such as discounts and giveaways on games, access to online multiplayer, and cloud storage. The service competes with Microsoft’s market-leading subscription service, GamePass, providing similar functionality for gamers on Xbox and PC. I wouldn’t be the first player to say that the levels and subservices included in a PS Plus membership are a bit complicated to analyze at first glance, but I’d also say that these services are just as complicated as the variety of problems they have “I’m trying to solve. . With cloud streaming, PlayStation Plus and GamePass both allow players to run games from a remote server without downloading them to a console. This is a quirky but clever solution to a couple of different problems, including the persistence of useful games across generations. of consoles.
For a while, PS Now (the cloud streaming service built into PlayStation Plus) has been streaming Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, an otherwise blocked title on PlayStation 3, on PlayStation 4. This was an experience. slow and poor, but it was something. It was a step towards solving some puzzles of platform exclusivity and backward compatibility. That was until the game disappeared from PS Now without explanation. This is not a dark game. It is one of the best-selling titles of its console generation. And now, unless you still own a PS3 16 years after its launch, it’s gone. What if Iron Man 3 was the biggest movie in the world and then a decade later you couldn’t legally watch it anywhere? Here’s how video games work. It happens all the time.
Video game conservationists, working with copies and not rights, can only do so much. A couple of months ago, Vice posted a story about conservationist Frank Cifaldi and his recent relationships with Wata Games, a small company that amasses a large private collection of rare retro game prototypes, some worth millions of dollars. Specifically, and controversially, Wata Games is not making the software out to consumers. It’s just preserving the physical copies as antiques. The record is precious. The data is disposable as always.
Even at the height of video game success, as the medium continues to blend into popular culture giving rise to a billion dollar esports industry, there is this rapid degradation of games. Video games are so prohibitively different in form and function from other entertainment. Film and music are standardized media with less acute and pervasive sustainability issues. Television is a mess of channels and subscriptions, yes, but it’s all consolidated into television itself; you don’t need to own five different types of TVs and subscribe to three different subscription services to watch The Sopranos. But video game culture is largely defined by the fragmentation of its essential parts. This is a field of entertainment where stepping into the past half-decade often requires ancient hardware, illicit software, and tremendous patience.
This isn’t just a problem for our law-abiding hobbyist who wants to play the hits and cult classics without clinging to old hardware forever. This is the ultimate, if not impossible, problem of gaming culture. Video games are a complex code. There is nothing to be done, really, about inherent compatibility issues with such code. Sometimes I look at my post and see the Tower of Babel. I see a medium plagued by obsolescence. I learned to emulate in high school and I don’t mind keeping some emulators in my system tray now that they have been pulled from my desk. But I’m still hoping for a longer lifespan, wider availability, and a brighter future for video games. I am playing with Shin Megami Tensei in one way or another.
