"It's Just Emulation!": The Challenge of Selling Old Games

[Music] guys ready to go should we do this all right hello everybody thanks for coming my name is Frank uh I look like that uh I'm putting my Twitter bio up here because I think it's the best description of my job I've ever given myself I like to call myself an archist and an historian with a Game Dev day job because uh it turns out that's not really a job that pays bills or anything um so I was born back in ' 82 uh I'm going to start this off I should say uh with a little bit of a mini bio just bear with me it makes sense uh I was I was born in 1982 with an Atari in the house but uh really my first love was the mighty Nintendo Entertainment System I don't know if you guys have ever heard of this Antiquated device before uh this actually came out originally in ' 85 I was I was kind of a latecomer um so you know I had a couple of games my neighbors did too I played them it was a toy I was a kid uh but more than that I had a subscription to Nintendo Power uh this was actually my very first issue and uh it was Bim monthly at the time

meaning this is the entirety of what I read for about two months um and I really think of my curiosity and appreciation for the breadth of what video games had to offer started here with this issue uh reading coverage of games with weird titles like Clash at demon head and and uh thank you for that one clap for clash at demon head um River City Ransom was in this issue that was a cool looking game uh there's a game in here called dino wars about like Mech dinosaurs and I and I remember I think a lot of us did this sort of tracing along the map with my finger like imagining in my head what these weird games must be like to play um so you know that was my childhood and and then uh I became you know a dumb teenager and I started uh playing with one of these instead of a controller I kind of grew out of games whatever that means uh I think times were kind of different back then uh there wasn't really a gamer culture that I was a part of you know they were just toys and I and I grew up which was kind of dumb in retrospect um but that all changed in

1998 when I got my first computer um it looked something like that I couldn't find an exact picture of my model I also looked something like that so a little bit kind of like that I had long hair um and along with my first computer was my initial access to the internet which yeah woo AOL 4.0 yeah 100 hours free um so you know this is kind of what the internet looked like back then and and and with my access to the internet I started looking up things I was kind of nostalgic for like those video games I used to play when I was a kid and uh I discovered something amazing you could download and play Nintendo games on your computer uh this is Gen I'm sorry this is not Genesis this is in fact nesticle uh which was the premier Nintendo Entertainment System emulator of the time uh the word if if you don't get the joke rhymes with a certain piece of anatomy that's on about half of us um the the mascot of nesal you can see here is is the feal Lord or man depending on which part of the screen

uh you're looking at uh the the icon there is a is a bloody hand that's actually dripping uh as you can see this was sort of the the you know very very mature emulation scene at the time um but you know nesle ran NES games I grew up with in various degrees of accuracy coming coming to go you know uh in full speed on my computer which was Bonkers back then like that was amazing uh you know there was no digital distribution worth of darn yet these were you know cartridges that it barely came across uh but uh you know so I started playing the games I grew up with I played the games I rented back then maybe I played the games that like my neighbors had but then I was like wait I can play the games that I read about Nintendo Power see what those are about so uh you know Clash of demon head turns out wow that was a really cool game you know River City Ransom that's almost even cool look this guy's going to hit that guy with a tire that's amazing and and then uh dino [Music] wars The Clash of demon head was really

good though um so uh I started realizing that I wasn't alone in this I was getting really interested in in what older games were and what they had to offer and I wasn't alone uh it there there was an emerging emerging sort of Retro Gaming Community at the time uh these photos are from classic Gaming Expo 1999 I couldn't find a picture of gross little teenage me in in any of the archives but this is what the show looked like uh this happened to be in my hometown of Las Vegas and I met a lot of people who shared my interest in this old stuff and in exploring the the deeper back catalog of our past and you know I discovered things that even went beyond the the games I'd read about you know there was stuff that only came out in Japan like ir's Holy Diver was a great game there's weird unofficial stuff there's a there's a Christian themed Zelda clone where you throw fruit at Satan to to murder him it's amazing and there there's porn on the Nintendo that's amazing like like what what a wacky world that I was suddenly finding myself into um so you know I started sort of wondering

uh where where these images come from and and and I started thinking about what else was out there that I was missing and um it it was around this time that I remembered a special I'd seen at one point in my life I think it must have been on AMC or something about uh the movies that we've lost um according to the the film Foundation over half the films made before 1950 are gone and about 80% of the ones before 1929 I don't I don't mean you can't buy these on DVD I mean they're they're gone they don't exist anymore and and that terrified me I mean I wasn't particularly a film buff but the idea of of these works just disappearing forever and never being recoverable that scared the crap out of me so you know I started wondering is anyone doing this for games is anyone making sure that video games aren't doing the same stupid that the film did to to make their Heritage disappear and and I mean yeah there were people doing this uh we didn't call them

archists uh we didn't call them digital archaeologists or anything you know that belongs in a museum we called them software Pirates is what we called them and and we still do it turns out um but uh man I I saw what was going on and I want to be one of those software Pirates I wanted to be in on the ground floor uh because I understood at the time and I still believe this that we can't leave preservation up to the content owners and and the only way to ensure the stuff was safe was to make sure it was easily accessible to anyone uh but I wanted to Be an Effective pirate I didn't want to I didn't want to do like the little niggling things that people can do I wanted to uh you know really strike and I started thinking which games were the most volatile which games were in the most danger of Disappearing if no one did anything about them and and the conclusion I came up with was uh games that never actually shipped to stores uh this is a very small selection of of the games for the Nintendo Entertainment System only uh that never actually

shipped and you know nowadays yeah games get canceled cuz they're crap usually or they're unfinished the Nintendo era the NES era was kind of a weird time because uh Nintendo's policy meant that you could only release five games a year if you were a publisher games are so cheap to make and they were making so much money that they would just throw everything at the wall and just come up with the five best ones basically so a lot of games that didn't ship were actually good games or at least interesting uh but for one reason reason or another they just didn't ship them because they had better things to do um so you know these games these would still sometimes exist in playable form on uh what collectors would call prototype cartridges so these are you know these are temporary things that are that are disposable that are that are made to uh you know be used temporarily they're actually stored on uh eoms which are temporary media uh so these cartridges for games like these like you know that is the only copy in the world

anyone knows of of California Raisins for the Nintendo for example uh these These are games that there might only be one left of that's just slowly dying and that's that's horrifying um you know there and and it's not like these are just unknown games there were there were weird games like Bio Force ape that that you know were were discussed in in Nintendo Power uh not that exact same issue but later on um so so I dedicated myself to this so I started sort of tracking down uh you know working with collect to track down these prototypes uh talking to programmers uh you know who might still have something in their garage I started a website in 2003 called Lost Levels um and this was uh you know my first attempt at really preserving video game history uh I recognized at the time that preservation uh was more than just a playable binary of a game uh game preservation to me is also everything surrounding the game the people the stories the history the ephemera so what I did was in addition into uh frankly pirating the video game

uh online for everyone to download I also when I could which wasn't very often because I wasn't a very good journalist yet um track down the people who actually worked on them to get the story behind them and find out you know why they didn't come out um and sort of unexpectedly uh people took notice of my work I was writing articles and you know so were the other people on my team but I started getting work I started freelancing for magazines and reviewing games and stuff I suddenly found myself a video game journalist which was cool um in 2005 I took my first job at a website that uh some of you may have heard of it's called gamasutra uh if you weren't around back then like yeah that really was the color scheme I had nothing to do with that um I took an editorial job here in 2005 uh Simon caros who's still around uh at this he's actually running this conference uh took a chance on me which is really cool but uh you know even as I'm doing this journalism stuff uh my primary interest in anything I do related to games is preserving its history so even a

gamasutra I sort of took that with me I started a column where I would track down uh people who from the industry's Past who weren't so active anymore and just kind of ask them what they'd been up to sort of get their story because I felt like if no one did that you know if I didn't do that no one else is going to like for example this is sort of a rare modern interview with Mike Berlin who uh you know was a very influential infocom Game author he also created Bubsy the Bobcat the butt of many jokes but you know Bubsy was okay um after gure I worked at a company called gamap we were a Turner Broadcasting product we were a games on demand Subscription Service uh which is an idea that's still way ahead of its time but again you know working there a lot of what I did was was help make sure that these older games were still in print that they were still around like Castlevania for example um but uh like I said way ahead of its time didn't last so long uh kind of went under so I actually went back to editorial I got a job at oneup again just bringing that history thing with me like wherever I go that's that's what I

secretly want to be doing uh and every job I've ever had was an excuse to stay close to preserving history that's just the guy I am um so you know even at one up I started doing more uh oral history reporting uh this article is fantastic please look it up I love it uh I had a column at games TM magazine in the UK where uh every month about game history uh I actually went back to gutro because they had better colors now so they let me back in um and you know I did articles like this one just like this gigantic article trying to figure out when Super Mario Brothers was first sold in the US cuz we don't actually know I can't substantiate that date and that's really weird to me um but uh now I'm making games so uh for about the last three years I've been at a studio on the other side of the bay uh called uh other ocean I worked on a game called idarb some of you might have seen me give a micro postmortem of this last year with uh the lead developer Mike Micah um I am still the only person to direct direct a

an official game based on the shark NATO film franchise uh this is shark NATO the video game which uh thank you thank you Keith um which which you can no longer download on the App Store it was less for less than a year not because it was bad it was a licensing thing uh the last project I worked on just shipped it's called Mega Man Legacy Collection um so again you're kind of seeing a trend here right like everywhere I go I try to Veer it toward preserving history uh the the the the idea with Megan Legacy Collection was uh we wanted to create a boutique package and really preserve these games for future Generations in a way that made sense commercially we will get back to Mega Man I promise but I want to get to the point of what we're all here about really dirty word emulation evil evil emulation um I think emulation has gotten a bad rap over the years I think that we all uh not all but I think the industry and even our consumers have a really basic misconception of what emulation is what emulation is and I'm simplifying it a

bit emulation is software that makes a computer act like a different computer that's it it's a tool and it's a great one for many uses emulation is not illegal it's not threatening it's not unprofessional it's not lazy it's not the same thing as software piracy it's not free um but uh you know this is the perception that people have and when we first started going around to clients pitching the idea of bringing back some of this NES back catalog uh what we commonly heard from them is that we couldn't emulate a Nintendo console without Nintendo's approval uh the implication being that there was something inherent to the NES it could not legally be replicated in software uh that the only place you could legally emulate an NES game was on a piece of Hardware marketed and sold by Nintendo itself but you know what no emulator has ever been ruled illegal in a court of law that has never happened and in fact they tried but we'll get there soon uh but still this this persists and in fact Nintendo's legal page right now if you

go to their website has this language that that I looked it's been up there for 16 years now uh about how the uh the uh distribution of of emulation uh it's you know going to ruin the industry it's like the worst thing that's ever happened I'm paraphrasing because I can't look behind myself without uh talking to the mic but uh um you know notice this last question where how come Nintendo doesn't take a step toward legitimizing emulators uh that's like asking why Nintendo doesn't legitimize piracy it doesn't make any business sense except they actually have legitimized emulators by selling you emulators the the Virtual Console is nothing but emulations of Nintendo games uh and in fact if you uh if you were to download Super Mario Brothers uh on the on the Wii Virtual Console uh so on the left there is a a ROM that I downloaded from a ROM site of Super Mario Brothers the same file has been there since it's got a time stamp on it of like 1996 on the right is uh Nintendo's virtual console version of Super Mario

Brothers I want you to pay particular attention to the the hex values that I've highlighted here uh that is what's called an iness header an iness header is a header format developed by amateur software emulators in the late '90s what's that doing in a Nintendo product uh I would posit the Nintendo downloaded Super Mario Brothers from the internet and sold it back to you like not only could no one prove that there's anything wrong with emulation like Nintendo is pirating its own ROMs and selling it to you uh but let me put this back up on screen for you no one has ever ruled an emulation illegal it's never happened uh but regardless of that Truth uh it was actually cheaper for us to come up with a method to circumvent what was technically emulation uh than it was to hire a lawyer to prove this to our clients so that's what we did with uh Mega Man Legacy Collection we came up with a with a work around it works really great the the uh the result is

that we can now run original NES games exactly as they would run in an emulator but without actually emulating the CPU on the user end it's a lot of extra work for the exact same goal uh kind of a waste of time if you ask me but it got us a project uh so okay when and why did emulation become a dirty word uh I don't know that there's an easy answer to the answer to that but I think it all started in January of 1999 uh I'm going to let a young Steve jobs at that month's Mac world I tell you why so we're really really excited about games and again our goal is to have the best game machine in the world now this is another game machine it's the most popular game machine in the world wouldn't it be great if if we could play some of those titles too H well at macw world today connectic is introducing the virtual game station it is

[Applause] software it is software that they're going to sell for $49 that turns your Mac into a Sony PlayStation it plays this was huge the virtual game station was the first emulator to run commercial PlayStation games at playable speeds it was also one of the first commercial emulators uh as Steve just said Thank You by the way Steve uh they sold it for 50 bucks and uh I read a report that said they made $3 million in Revenue selling the emulator but it's not just that this play Playstation games this was the first time in history that you could play contemporary games that you could buy at Best Buy in full speed on your computer um and you know it it it only ran uh real discs you know you couldn't do PIR software on it but of course the hackers got around that really quickly and then just a couple weeks later was the first Nintendo 64 fullspeed emulator that ran commercial games on on a PC um came in January 28th

the first and only release of this emulator it's compatible with 17 games at the time uh including the Legend of Zelda ocarine of time a title that had just hit American shelves two months prior two months prior and you could just download it was like a 7 megabyte file which even at the crappy speeds we had back then was an attainable thing um if you know we we had there there there had been some discussion of stuff like M before this but this is really when you started seeing emulation in the headline uh and the the the the impact on the amateur emulation world was huge uh you know before this I think emulators were primarily seen as tools to relive the days of Gaming's past you know sort of a gray Market piracy tool for Niche hobbyist not really you know something that the industry took notice of um but you know all of a sudden people could download console games that were on the store shelves at that moment and pirate them for free you know console piracy has always existed but the barrier to entry was high enough that this was a niche segment of the market requiring

special Hardware or modifying your console but you know for the first time in history console games were on the same level as PC games as far as ease of use to pirating so this is when you started you know this is when that that uh discussion became public this is when this is when uh lawsuits started getting thrown around um in fact Sony did take connectic to court and uh well they lost um the the the the judge you know over a year and a half trial or something like that found that connectic was not violating any of Sony's trademarks or patents um and you know it's it's funny like this was not just a Sony versus connectic uh case Sony was backed by Nintendo and Sega in this Core case like this was the console game industry versus emulation the court battle and emulation one uh Sony tried again with a with an emulator called bleam I don't know if anyone

remembers bleam that got thrown out too um so the two times that I'm aware of that an emulator's ever been challenged in court it was found to be fine so if you were a software publisher that owned games that were originally published on Vintage Nintendo Hardware this is the best thing that could have happened to you all of a sudden you know the doors were open you could start republishing your content wherever you want you're no longer locked into Nintendo's ecosystem and yet this is a list uh this isn't entirely scientific it's just a quick Wikipedia scrape but these are thirdparty games available on Nintendo's Virtual Console right now for the Wii U and the 3DS these are games not published by Nintendo uh that you can buy emulated versions of on Nintendo platforms there's 156 of them uh the next slide is uh going to highlight which ones of these you can buy on platforms that aren't owned by Nintendo oh that's interesting huh those look familiar um there's absolutely no reason

for this this is lost Revenue there are 150 classic games here that we know have had all their rights cleared for redistribution because they're for sale right now uh all of these can be in print everywhere forever for a pretty low upfront investment and emulation is the key to that emulation is I'm just going to read the slide emulation is the cheapest safest and best way to republish an older video game on Modern Hardware um thank you uh there are pros and cons it's cheaper and safer than porting uh there's no source code required like like traditional porting requires uh emulation for the most part is portable and crossplatform the development you work that you do to emulate a game is directly applicable to getting other games to work and the games play just as they did back in the day exactly as they did uh cons they play exactly as they did back in the day um it's very difficult to fix Legacy bugs uh you can't really go in and and

easily change you know system limitations that would require that that would that would make games Flicker and and stuff like that uh it's even harder to add new features than it is to fix bugs and uh you know you can't really easily add new levels unless you're going in and directly hacking the binary which people do but you know we don't have time for that um and potentially potentially there's a higher CPU requirement than a direct Port would require but for vintage consoles it doesn't really matter so much uh but yet we continue porting and I would argue that uh porting by its nature will always be a derivative work that is not the original work that is a remake uh you cannot port a game without sacrificing something that was in the original there will be new bugs there will be inconsistencies there will be flaws and while it's sometimes the only valid option porting a game from source and expecting 100% faithful reproduction of the original is both a pipe dream and a financial Black Hole uh as nice as extra features are to have a ported game is not the original game is a remake

while remakes can be great complimentary pieces to the original work uh that original work should also be available uh I reject the notion that a classic video games need needs a new code of paint in order to be valid uh I think and this might be you know a controversial opinion here at the game developers conference but I think video games are an undeniable part of our history and cultural makeup and they should be preserved exactly as they were blemishes in all um this is a game called Ducktales Remastered this is a remake of an NES game called DuckTales strangely enough uh pretty cool game uh they did a great job uh redoing the art they changed a lot of stuff uh this is the original DuckTales um I like this game even better but you know maybe I'm biased I'm kind of old um the problem is you can only get the remake of DuckTales the the original is just gone it's been out of print since 1989 uh but and you know like maybe that's okay maybe people prefer the Remake maybe we don't need the old one

and maybe we should throw away the original King Kong cuz that Peter Jackson version is way prettier right like who needs the old one um this is a re-release of the first Zelda game from Nintendo uh Nintendo changed the script at the beginning and yeah that's a much better script it's much better translated that's probably what they originally meant and you know maybe Lucas originally meant for greo to shoot first let's just keep that and throw the original away um sometimes companies do try to the line between a remake and an original this is a screenshot from uh the secret of Monkey Island uh whatever it was called special edition special edition um and the these These are remastered Graphics they're uh they're new um and this is the the original that's in there you can switch back and forth kind of like that but in a better effect um whenever you want in the game and this is cool except that ain't even the original Monkey Island the original was a 16 color EGA version and that version is unavail a anywhere that is the version directed by The Game's

director Ron Gilbert the only one that is the version with the art by Mark Ferrari that was drawn over for that other version like that's the real Monkey Island and we can't play that and you know so even when they try like like if you you can screw it up and uh and again I don't know maybe people prefer the additional 240 colors and and and the CD soundtrack over the midi and maybe they like Pride and Prejudice better with zombies so we should just kill the original I mean I mean what what's the point of it um I want to make I want to make a point that I don't think I'm just a particularly nostalgic person who likes old games and that there's no market for him I I think old games are very popular right now uh here's that same DuckTales game being played in 2014 on awesome Games Done Quick this is an incredibly popular event where speedrunners play through games tons of people watch them how much there's 40,000 people and a couple years ago watching someone play the 8-Bit version of DuckTales and okay yeah 40,000 people are probably all always

watching that stream no matter what games on there right I go I went to YouTube a couple days ago I searched for Ducktales NES and just filtered it over the last week there are several new videos over the last week of this one random NES game that I picked it's it was a popular game but you know I picked it randomly and this is a game that people still want to play and the only legal way they can do it is to go on eBay and do this is to get you know a vintage NES console that spits out the 240p signal that most of your damn TVs don't even support it anymore and to get this like collector's item cartridge that's the only legal way to play DuckTales and that's that's weird to me uh but I don't know maybe maybe there's not much of a market for content from 1989 anymore so let's do a little quick study this is this is IMDB's most popular films of 1989 uh I didn't even bother scrolling down the page it's just quick exercise so uh I think Batman Ghostbusters maybe unfair comparisons uh you know Dead Poet Society pretty good movie but not really DuckTales I I think the most DuckTales equivalent here would

be Uncle Buck Uncle Buck was a John Candy mcau culen uh vehicle was actually pretty good movie I think it's one of those movies where I think I've seen it but I'm not sure I have positive feelings about it for some reason um so as you might imagine at the time it was released you know whatever formats made sense at the time there was VHS there was beta Max in the middle there's a laser dis version um so did Uncle Buck make the transition to the you know the future formats oh yeah there's a WID screen DVD there's probably a full screen DVD for people who are stupid and don't like the black lines they even reprinted it with slightly different packaging you can get it with Brewsters Millions you can get it with Brewsters millions and also Stripes uh you can get it with whatever The Great Outdoors is you can get it with the Great Outdoors and also whatever that is going berserk um you can get it in a classic comedy pack for cheap you can get it on Blu-ray if you're true Uncle Buck connoisseur you can get it in 1080p on Blu-ray or on

Blu-ray with a digital copy there's a variant there too you can get it with Fletch on Blu-ray I mean and it's more than just physical you can get it digitally however you want you go on Amazon right now um you can get it get it on uh iTunes get it on Google Play Get onle Buck on whatever Cinema now is but you shouldn't because it's $14 which is more than the other ones uh Voodoo uh you can go on YouTube and just watch Uncle Buck you just pay YouTube some some money and watch Uncle Buck right now go on flickster where it's even more expensive uh you can buy it from Microsoft and Sony on their video game consoles and watch it and yet you can't buy Ducktails uh and there is it turns out a new HD version of Uncle Buck but they didn't go and get rid of the old one they kept the other one in print cuz it's still valid um but okay maybe maybe DuckTales is an anomaly um let's look at uh 1989 in video games on Wikipedia let's uh this is this is their list of what they consider notable games the

editors of Wikipedia I would argue for several more than this but you know this is fine it's a good starting point it's just a quick exercise um great stuff on here right there's there's 16 of them um so those are all of them how many can you buy right now you can buy five of them that's a respectable what like 30% or something how many of these can you buy on in more than one place oh that's interesting that theme just keeps going coming up um okay but how does that actually compare to film all right here's the top grossing films of ' 89 we don't know the top grossing games of ' 89 because our industry is at tracking sales uh sorry if you're young um but these are the top 10 grossing uh films of ' 89 period how many of those can you get right now oh you can get all of them right now but how many of them can you get cross device crossplatform oh you can get all of them cross device crossplatform every one of these you can rent an SD you can rent an HD you can buy an SD you can buy an HD with the exception of Little Mermaid you can't rent Little Mermaid um all of them are on Blu-ray except for Li who's talking

I'm sorry if you're a huge fan of Li who's talking but like these movies have always been in print uh and and games could have been the same way except that uh we demonized emulation and by demonizing emulation instead of embracing it we've devalued Our Heritage emulated classic console games are now presumed free uh by not embracing it as a tool we've relegated the majority of our past to piracy and that's sad not because I weep for the Lost revenues of Corporations but because this has had a direct impact on keeping our very history alive alive on maintaining the franchises that we love on supporting the creators that made them and all of this could have been prevented if we'd embraced it instead of fighting it but we messed up this is not to say there's no such thing as commercial emulation there are releases uh I just pulled a couple examples here this is uh on the Humble Store SNK recently started selling emulated versions of its classic games for the Neo Geo console these run in a browser they won they run wonderfully actually the emulation is

great um they're $8 a pop totally Bare Bones though like like I don't even there's no online or anything I don't think even think you can reconfigure your buttons but the games work only in your browser uh so you're sort of limited to what you can do uh but there's stuff on consoles too there's the uh arcade archive series from hamster these are wonderfully emulated as well uh exclusively on the PS4 uh they do one of these a month they're also $8 each uh and and and these are just two examples there's there's others I could name off there's project egg in Japan does MSX stuff uh there's the occasional semi- random emulated games on mobile marketplaces someone tried to sell Bubsy on Steam for some reason uh and of course there's Nintendo's Virtual Console but I don't think these work to keep the games alive because these these peac meal releases uh are very limited uh they're usually on a single platform the selection is just bizarrely random cuz it's just the stuff people happen to be able to clear the rights up for easily uh they don't tend to add any

value uh and in the end you they're selling you a ROM for $8 and you know there's a certain audience of people emulation Savvy people who have this stuff for free and are playing it in a superior experience with stuff like MIM um and you know I I think that we've sort of considered these people a lost cause like oh those are the Pirates they would never buy the games but but I tell that notion uh the people who love old games enough to go out of their way to make them play that is that should be our target audience that should be exactly who we're selling to these are my people and if I could sell to them I can sell to anyone so at digital Eclipse we have a specific approach uh we we make Boutique packages for fans and collectors uh our approaches to sell them with as much Source material as is possible to to sort of stick in the package create a package with a lot of added value stuff it with as much as we can sell it on

every platform that makes sense uh as I said when I relaunched when I helped to relaunch uh digital eclips last year uh because it's actually an old brand that we just brought back uh we feel that classic video games deserve the equivalent of the Criterion Collection a curated selection of important pieces of History restored to their original condition packed with bonuses to help contextualize and celebrate that work uh for certain games I think this kind of package is significantly more sales potential than simply selling a playable ROM um so uh we were fortunate enough to find a partner in Capcom uh for Mega Man Legacy Collection which was our first attempt at this Legacy Collection collects the original six Mega Man games for the NES uh we wanted to create a package that provide value for anyone interested in these games even if they already owned them or emulated them or whatever when're going to create a collector's edition that fans would want to keep on their shelves uh you know even if it wasn't physical just mentally sh in their shelves I I guess uh include anything we can get our hands on I want to quickly show some of the features that we added to this effect this is not

a sales pitch I I just want to show the stuff off cuz it's cool um so this is the museum that's in the game uh fortunately Capcom kept a lot of the original art so there's a lot of promotional work these are from a marketing guide that they still have this is concept art and you know like look how cool this is you could zoom in on on these things uh there's just a ton there's something like 800 pieces in the package which is awesome um this is a screen shot from a prior re-release of the Mega Man games this is the complete works for the PlayStation one it was only ever in Japan uh this is a cool feature that Capcom did back then back in '99 or whatever it is it's called the database um this collected every character in all the games showed you their stats what they were weak against and gave you a description which provided backstory which is really cool because this backstory to these characters was never reprinted anywhere else in any other language other than Japanese so we ported that over and we made that HD uh and we we helped translated it to to uh the six I think

languages um but we also added another feature while we were at it which was because we could you could just go ahead and practice fighting one of the characters from the database which is I think is a really fun thing um Mega Man Of course known for its soundtracks so we you know we wouldn't be doing our jobs if there wasn't a soundtrack player my only regret is not calling it sound test which was what they call um and this is what we call the challenge mode we wanted to give people a new way of of playing the game so this is a section from cutman's level in Mega Man 1 uh that portal right there that's not in the original game we added that in uh when you enter one you actually get thrown into a different section of a different stage the idea here was it's a Time Attack speedrun Mode that uh makes you think about the games in a different way um but more than that I'm going to switch to a different challenge this is a challenge against the Mecha Dragon boss for Mega Man 2 um so there a time attack and at the end after I win here

thank you very much that was me um 28 seconds not terrible you get a result uh you get you get a badge you get to save your replay but more than that there's a leaderboard so you can go and instantly watch how the fastest person in the world killed Mecha Dragon um which I probably should have recorded the whole thing but I cut it off I'm sorry but more than that getting back to the Criterion thing we wanted we artistic intent was important to us so we actually created modes that ulated uh the CRT televisions of the time this is uh it looks better in 1080P the 720p squashing kind of messes with it but uh there there was a TV mode and this is sort of The Best of Both Worlds we call it monitor mode uh that retains the scan line skipping and the aperture Grill but none of the fake noise of the composite mode um the reason we did that stuff is because we feel that uh there's no way of really knowing what the artistic intent was of those Sprites you I think even if you rounded up all the original Mega Man artists and them they wouldn't be able to definitively answer like oh

yeah we we we assumed there would be some TV noise so we drew the Sprites that way um so we you know we we tried to make all those options available because I don't think there's any way of really nailing like this is what these games are supposed to be like so we left that option open that's really important to me and if you guys are doing you know emulation packages yourself please do that um so these features add a lot of value but more importantly they did not add a significant significant cost to the development budget our intent was to show that you can have the perceived value of an HD remake without having to invest in the extreme expenditure that those require because all of our code was written in house and our code bases crossplatform we will we were able to put this entire package together with a core team of uh just about three developers give or take in about eight months uh and we also ported it to the 3DS and that was its own product but again small team very lean we got it out and it worked and and you know the result was that the fan outcry was so

significant that they made a physical version that they hadn't planned on people want this stuff this works for Mega Man I don't think this works for uh Ninja Kid which was the example we we gave earlier from the the arcade archives uh you know I would buy the heck out of a ninja jaaja Maru Legacy Collection I would you know the games are really neat but I I think I'm a very small audience um so I don't think you can really justify this treatment for every game I think it has to be a franchise that people already know and love uh but I don't I think there's another way um here's how to keep every game in print on every platform without spending a ton of money basically forever uh we're going to circle back to Uncle Buck for a minute hi Uncle Buck um so how is it that Uncle Buck has Uncle Buck has remain in print across all these different platforms uh is Uncle Buck just worth more money than the NES version of DuckTales maybe maybe

it's got a better audience but I think it's a lot simpler than that Uncle Buck remained in print because video has format standards that are very inexpensive to quote unquote port to um you know I think the biggest upfront expense in keeping a movie in print is uh sorry my computer is not happy right now um but I think the biggest expense in keeping a movie in print is The Upfront cost of digitally scanning it every film has to be scanned digitized and cleaned up um but you know it's not really that expensive but the thing is once you have a scan of a movie you have a master file that is very very easily portable to any format you know you probably send a raw file to Amazon and they just push a button and encode it and push it live and that's it um so you know you have this method of getting a really direct copy of the movie uh that's more or less pristine and you have ways of deploying it very easily and you know it's real sad that we can't do that for games right we have no notion of scanning a

game we have no notion of of codec for games right no of course we do like video games are just binary files like you can make a perfect copy of a game easily it's actually it's actually in a better State than film and guess what you often don't even have to do the work of of digitizing those games because the Pirates have done it for you so just go on the internet and take it if you want to um I I paused that an emulator is just a video codec for playing video games and we got to start thinking about it that way or if you prefer I think a video Codec is nothing but a film strip emulator and and and and this is the mindset that I think this industry needs to be in in order to to push you know our our back catalog back in print and and uh make me happy so you know every time we re-release an old game we sort of reinvent the wheel and we Port it or we build an emulator from scratch and just all this wasted effort for no reason with one exception all right so here's here's a here's an

interesting selection of games does anyone know what the Common Thread here is between these games yes they're all PC games uh they they are not just all PC games they all run on Ms Doss which was Microsoft's pre- Windows standard uh there's these These are games you can buy digitally right now there's a large number of companies represented here there's ID there's apy Activision Bethesda Electronic Arts Lucas Arts which is Disney now it's still weird to think that um but uh in addition to all being run you know native Doss games they have another thing in common they're all using the same emulator this is called dosbox does anyone know dosbox yeah dosbox is sort of the Premier dos emulator uh it can run dos games of a certain vintage at full speed on just about any modern computer uh it's a great piece of tech but more importantly it's open source it's distributed under a gpl2 license what does that mean you may ask as my computer loads it well

gpl2 license means there you go look at the green open for commercial use uh it it gets a little bit complicated some part the moving parts of it but essentially you can sell a Dos game um with dosbox and all you really have to do is include dosbox in the package and that's what everybody does cuz it's easy and it's free and you know these games are now in print again because there is an open solution for everyone to use I looked at gog.com and my rough count is they're selling about 140 dos games right now um and you know a lot of the classic catalog that people remember and want is is represented and is represented already and when it's not you know people figure it out and uh and they get it up there they've they've done a great job of keeping these games in print now if only there was a dosbox for everything else right some news happened a couple weeks ago some of you might have missed it some of you might have not uh Mim just went open source on March 4th of this year uh MIM as you may

or may not know is the standard for arcade board emulation it emulates thousands of them I I mean I don't even know what the count is anymore and it's been around since 97 uh and if you read the text it it is now being distributed under that exact same gpl2 license uh we are now in a situation where we can use MIM for commercial releases and that's not all uh in May of last year MIM absorbed its sister project mess uh what M was for arcade games mess was for everything else um this is a list that's going to load any second here I promise of of drivers that are in mess right now it mess is basically like every console in computer ever look there's 2,176 of them like like between M and mess basically everything's covered in some form now I'm not saying MIM and mess are perfect uh there's a lot of inconsistencies the emulation usually isn't the top notch for consoles uh in

in their in their ms/ Mame equivalent but it's open source it's codebases out there it can be contributed to um you know just about any game can be run through M and and and you know if you if you think about this it's basically a video codec for video games we're already kind of there um we've already begun the process internally of porting M to our own Tech I don't know you know we have no commercial products that we're using it in right now but I wouldn't be surprised if that happens and uh I would be shocked and frankly a bit offended if we're the only ones that are smart enough to do this um but you know we're just we're a studio I can imagine someone like an Amazon forking MIM bringing it in house bringing it up to Snuff and and bringing games back to the level of well Uncle Buck um where you know I I can Envision a future where we were respect DuckTales for the NES as much as we respect this John CL candy

classic I want to thank you all very much for coming to my talk it's about all I've got uh couple reminders um you will get an email to evaluate me as a speaker uh please uh rate me as you see appropriate uh please these are your takeaways uh there is an audience for old games out of print games are lost Revenue emulation is cheap and accurate embrace the emulator um and I will now open it up for questions have we got no questions are we done here oh oh oh uh I think microphone in the middle is where you want to go yes John Paul Dyson of the strong Museum of play in Rochester New York how can I help you thanks um so what do you think about commercial versus say what the internet archive is doing with JS oh yeah yeah this is a great point so a lot of these games are absolutely easily playable in your

browser right now they are kept in print unofficially but the point I'm trying to make is that commercial emulation has its value too uh I think that I think that you know especially for products like we make where where the idea is to gather the ephemera and the materials and really make a collector's addition and really preserve the game properly Beyond a playable binary I think you need money I think money needs to be invested in that and and I and I think the commercial emulation can coexist with the quotequote unofficial emulation but uh thank you for bringing that up uh again the Pirates have it covered I'm I was a pirate myself I kind of still am um I I don't mean to imply that commercial emulation can somehow be better than amateur I don't think that will ever happen yes Kyle hey Frank hi um the legal cases you cited are from 15 or 16 years ago I think if they did it again for like the NES emulators inside J inside mess do you think Nintendo is going to have a problem with it maybe they'd be able to Prevail this time if they took it to court no I don't think

there's anything that you can show for I mean using the NES as an example I don't think there's anything in there that you can show that that uh violates any of of Nintendo's patents or trademarks uh and in fact uh something about that case is that that case was able to prove the legality of reverse engineering a bios chip for the sake of emulation that that was established in that case that's on paper I don't see a problem in any way the only problem I can see is if an emulator distributes the unaltered BIOS uh from a console because that is code that they don't have the rights to but if you're emulating a platform and not using any code that is proprietary I don't see how that can be challenged legally thanks I think it would have been done by now he I was one of the one of the original developers of M so I really appreciate this talk appreciate the work you're doing I appreciate the work you're I I assure you that all the developers of M they they would be the first that would run on Buy in any kind of officially licensed collection so we're stared things like stars you know came and went yeah um but I was CU you

mentioned that the Capcom collection for Mega Man wasn't actually an emulator but it was very faithful what yeah you like well how did you do it how did we do it okay so so like I said we we we sort of found a workaround that wasn't technically emulation but had the exact same result and basically what we did was uh internally we were emulating the game but we statically recompiled it into C got so that uh we weren't shipping any emulation code mode we were just doing the exact same things an emulator would without actually emulating it and everyone seemed Satisfied by that so that's what we did it's silly it's really silly but I will say that that did give us some unexpected advantages when we were making that challenge you to make modifications yeah so like you know it became a little bit easier to modify the game and we could do things like draw a portal in gamespace and have it scroll because we know exactly where to interrupt in the code because we can look at it thank you thanks hello so in the spirit of uh preserving history do you think that it's still

true that the most atrisk pieces of History are the uh ones that never made it to shelves like you mentioned earlier or there new Targets in 2016 where you're thinking wow we're at risk of losing this stuff you trying to get me to talk about PT I don't know anything I'm just curious uh can everyone hear the questions in the mics by the way I'm supposed to repeat that okay um so uh that example I made uh was I was thinking specifically of the NES or maybe a little more broadly of console video games of that vintage uh I still believe absolutely those are the the ones most in danger of Disappearing but in terms of the broader scope of game preservation what do I think is in the most danger I don't think we've really solved the philosophical debate of how do you preserve an online experience um and that is something Way Beyond my scope I would refer you to Henry lwood at Stanford for their efforts on that but I mean another example I like to give it's

not just MMOs when I say that it's like it's like Farmville right like even if you hate Farmville is Farmville preserved can can we play the first version of Farmville anymore or is that does zinga even have that right um so you know I I think there's bigger problems to solve and I think they're I think those debates become more philosophical than technical because at that point you're just kind of questioning what does it mean to save a game uh so for online stuff maybe it's just a whole lot of video footage maybe we start uh JP over there uh had a had a great quote in an interview once where he's he he uh he he thought of it more like preserving baseball history where it's not you know you you don't preserve like all the players in the stadium and everything but you preserve everything that happened and I think for for impermanent games I think we should think about it more than that way cool thanks yeah thank you hi Frank hello uh given the the challenges you faced with static

recompilation versus actual emulation uh and the skittishness of the companies that you were talking to Prior uh how would I as somebody who wants to get in on something like this using emulation convince say a Capcom or a Konami or a Square Enix to do something like this via emulation um this talk will be on GDC vault in 30 we can start there but I mean you're asking me to solve for you the problem that I myself have not solved yet so I don't really don't know how to answer that for you unfortunately but I think bringing this discussion public and then shaking people and saying look emulation is good emulation is good for you it's it doesn't it's not piracy it's it's a tool it's the best tool um I think really making that stuff public and and and and bringing that to light I think is the first step toward that um and you know hopefully my company will help further

that so that's what I would say to you and on a slightly different note Super Star Wars is now available on PlayStation 4 it is it's true um that was done by code Mystics in fact uh and I have not played it but I understand that it's a really good emulation of it so I I I believe yes that that uh we have we we now have Super Nintendo emulation on another platform which is real good news for everybody right thank you thank you ra regarding the context of what you put in a preservation sort of a pack like Mega Man Legacy Collection what pieces of information did you wish you were able to get or like what questions did you have that you wanted in the collection and what would you want answered in future collections that you might not be able to get so our goal was to contextualize the games because I feel that that's important to preserving them in in the way that I think of preservation what I think was missing from Mega Man was developer Insight um and you know there were several challenges uh and and getting developer inside for these particular games that I really

can't get into but I I do feel that that piece was missing so you know we we had this concept again of like a what would a Blu-ray collector's box set of Mega Man be like and I think all of those games would have director's commentary and and unfortunately we were not able to put that in but uh in the future yes absolutely I think that's an important uh piece to put in there uh that said I also think that um I think that it's more than just the making of the game I think it's also the selling of the game that's a compelling part of the story so uh you know I would love to do like mini documentaries that maybe dig up you know old news footage and stuff like that or like photos of people playing the games back in the day like I I think there's a lot more ephemera that we don't really think about when we think about like containing a game in a package thank you yeah thank you and I should say also other development materials other than art too like design documents things like that like anything that's still around you know I I I often think about um when I talk about preserving these

other ephemeral pieces of video game history I always think about uh you know the the Blu-rays I have for classic movies like cassablanca and Citizen Kane where you listen to the D the this not director's commentary the historian commentary right and and they're like citing Studio notes that went back and forth that still exist that are in an archive that they can access and I don't think we have an equivalent of that in the video game industry uh other than and you know we're starting to uh I'm going to mention JP dson over there at the strong Museum again um you know there are certain organizations like his that that are starting to collect the paperwork and the ephemera around games to make sure that stuff is accessible to researchers so you know I think that's an important part that uh I would love to start uh including in future collections hey uh first of all uh this was a very good talk thank you for doing it uh secondly uh my question is uh concerning price point mhm uh so

recently uh my little company was uh part of an effort to release what most would consider an older game on Steam and this was this was a PC game and whatnot and it was priced at around $30 and there was a decently significant amount of push back against this against the price point that the price point yes and so I'm wondering uh what do you think is a would be a good price point I'm not answering that rip uh but yeah like or maybe did you get any push back on the price point for the Legacy Collection well um we didn't set that so we this is an entirely a work for higher situation so we did we we pitched the project to Capcom we got them on board with it but ultimately it's their product and we just made it for so all that price stuff was way out of my hands um I think it

should have been more frankly like if you want my personal opinion um but that is because of the presentation of it and and and I think giving it that higher price point gives it that more of a boutique feel um but that said uh I I suspect that $30 is a high price point for an individual older game um which is why I'm suggesting these two Alternatives right which is either actually make a big deal out of it right like like make a really Boutique collector's thing or get us to the point where getting these games running is just such a cheap thing that that we can do the Spotify of video games or something right like like like I think both of those are you know effective Solutions and man I was I meant to talk about Napster in this talk and I forgot and one little comment about piracy yeah so my first project was a uh quote unquote dojan title that a lot of us were afraid wouldn't even sell 10,000

copies because hey you know it's Japanese independent games they get pirated the Helen Back 5 years and 450,000 copies later I you know I I've gotten hundreds of emails about uh people who pirated the game pirated our release of the game were impressed by it and then bought the game AB absolutely yes and and I'm sorry will be customers yeah absolutely thank you thank you for pointing that out and and in addition to that I think this industry has all but ignored the concept of a secondary market for its games yes I think we I think we just release a game and those are the sales we get and then we walk away with our Tails between our legs whereas every other industry repackages its content because it's easy to do so so yeah yeah okay thank you thank you a lot of good got about three minutes left by the way sure Charlie from polygon hi Charlie I um I guess I just wanted to

ask a point of clarification so it was really interesting to see you mention that inz header on Super Mario oh is this going to be your head mine I I think I mentioned I think I heard you talking about it on Twitter not like a while ago when did you first find that oh uh I did not discover that myself um that was discovered on God what Forum I think it was the nest Dev forums is what what where that was first discovered but uh I did validate it myself as of last night so which Super Mario that's available from Nintendo is that uh Wii virtual console is the one I looked at Wii Virtual Console interesting um a lot of other questions that Rony asked thank you and to be fair there's no guarantee that they downloaded the ROM but I you know I don't I don't see any alternative for there being an iness header and a Nintendo product right hey uh this is has to be the last question I guess but uh there might be one more okay cool cool if you hurry up come on come on come on okay so

basically my question is so obviously you're doing a lot of technical workarounds to get past the issues regarding certain uh copyrights with regards to bios and such um at what point do you think it becomes necessary for game developers and sort of the uh entertainment software like uh consumers to get together to try to lobby for changes with regards to copyright law Lawrence leig uh I don't I don't think we're enough to do that I really don't I I I I don't think that the video game industry as as a as a you know I I I don't think games are old enough that we're going to be able to do that for quite a while and and uh you know but I would also agree with Jason Scott who was like last year's video game history talk guy that uh who cares you know like like that stuff's on the internet archive it's not in your hands just go play it um but uh I I don't think like I think the Comm I think the commercial sales of older games you know has appeal

and I think it's a positive and we should do as much of it as we can but I don't think that uh and this is just a personal opinion not the opinion of my employer blah blah blah I don't I don't think that that is the only way to save a game I think the games are more or less saved my concern with commercializing them is that I want them to stay alive in the public Consciousness thank you uh probably last question no more no more no more questions uh but I will be where's where where is the room the the like after room that we can talk in it's like down the hall that way or something there there's a room they set aside I'm going to walk toward it right now uh if you guys have any further questions I'm happy to talk to you or if you just want to say hi happy to talk then too thank you very much for not going to the Miss Pac-Man talk and instead coming here I really appreciate that