It's Still Emulation: Saving Video Game History Before It's Too Late

Uh my name is Frank Cifaldi. Uh I kind of lead two lives, I think. There's the sort of a commercial aspect and a and a and a charity aspect. Both of them have kind of similar uh color schemes to their logos now that I'm looking at it. Um So, I I produce and direct games at at a studio called Digital Eclipse, and we're mainly known for making uh re-releases of classic games usually in compilation form. We like to think of ourselves as attempting to be the sort of Criterion Collection of games to sort of contextualize titles and add bonus features, things like that. Uh I also run a charity called the Video Game History Foundation. Game gamehistory.org. Don't look right now. Um And I will talk a little bit more about that later. Uh question I know that's on everyone's mind right now, what's up with my forehead? Uh I have a cat. And uh that's Tony.

Um that's Tony in his very, very expensive bed with the uh the heating pad we put in for his comfort, decided this morning of my talk to attack my forehead. Uh so, that's why. Um all right, just a brief summary. This is Here's kind of what we're talking about today. Uh I'm going to give you I I did a talk 3 years ago and I'll recap that real quick for you cuz this is a quasi sequel to it. Uh I'm going to tell you about who it is that actually plays and buys classic games. I think I think we've identified the sort of three uh targets of that. Uh the duties of the classic game publisher, meaning like in the commercial industry, what is it we should be providing this audience? Uh I'm going to tell you a little dirty secret. Doctors hate them. Um the that uh that you might not know or you might if you work with me. Um some inspiring words, some terrifying words, and then some hopeful words. Um So, 3 years ago I gave a talk uh called It's Just emulation. Uh like I said this is kind of a sequel. Um if you've seen

it on the vault If you haven't seen it on the vault and you're watching this right now on the vault, maybe go watch that instead. If you're in the room, don't leave. I'll recap it real quick. Um The gist of it essentially is that uh old movies, old comics, old books, old everything, music, uh for the most part if it has even minor commercial potential is available. You can buy it legally. Um when it comes to games, that's really dire. Um This was a This is a similar slide to the last one. Uh just very, very few of our notable video games from the past are available commercially. I illustrated this uh with a comparison if you were there if you or if you watched it on the vault by comparing Disney's DuckTales for the Nintendo Entertainment System to a John Candy movie called Uncle Buck. Uh Uncle Buck is available on like 30,000 digital services from startups you've never heard of uh and all the ones you have also. It's even on video game console uh services, right?

Like like on the PlayStation and the Xbox, you can buy Uncle Buck. Uh DuckTales Disney's DuckTales uh had at the time been out of print since 1989. Um and I think it's cuz we largely demonized as an industry the notion of emulation. Um back in 1997 when emulation kind of became a viable technology on the internet, uh the the industry basically freaked out and uh and went after it legally. Uh Nintendo put some text on their website calling it the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property of video game developers. Uh you know, a few a few uh like Connectix got taken to court by Sony um unsuccessfully, I might add. Uh no video game emulator challenged in court has ever been ruled illegal. Emulation's fine. But despite that, to this day that's a screencap from nintendo.com that's still there. Um But because we demonized it instead of embracing it, I argued that emulation um

instead of becoming the tool that we used as an industry cuz it is the best tool for keeping older games in print and in a cost-effective and accurate way, instead of instead of embracing that, we we demonized it and and because of that, I think two things happened. I think old games kind of became the domain of the pirates, right? So people started thinking of games the way we thought of MP3s in the Napster days, right? Where it's like music's just free now, who cares? And we also, I think by not getting ahead of it and getting these games back in print through emulation, I think for a lot of games it's kind of too late now. I think I think a lot of the legal rights are just never going to be cleared up for a lot of games. Um And while yeah, it is a means of piracy, it's like I said, it's just the best tool we have. I liken it to film even, right? So film, um when a company wants to re-release a film, they basically just have to digitize it the once. And once you have

a digital copy of a film, you just convert it to different video codecs. We've all heard that term in this room, right? Codecs, right? Um But we don't seem to understand that there isn't an equivalent of that with video games and ultimately, I don't really see the difference between a video codec and a game emulator. And if we were to think of it that way, perhaps, you know, we could stop the bleeding, we could get things back in print. Uh like I said, I think the damage has largely been done, but I do think we can stop the bleeding a little bit if we embrace the emulator loudly and proudly. Emulation's the king. I recommended at the time that we start taking open source emulation as an industry a little more seriously. I pointed out that MAME, which is used to stand for multiple arcade machine emulator. I forget what it stands for now, but it it is essentially a video codec for video game machines. And uh I suggested we start taking that a little more seriously, especially now that it is open source and most of its components are available to use commercially. Uh what I didn't mention at the time was that uh while we're at it, maybe we should be contributing back to this

fantastic resource instead of just uh taking from it. We all caught up? Good. Get in your calendar Johns, let's go 3 years in the future to today. Uh what's been happening these last 3 years since that talk? Hey, someone did it. A company actually did embrace open source emulation. Uh this is Sony's PlayStation Classic. Um They use an emulator called PCSX, specifically the rearmed branch of it. To me, this is huge. It meant Sony was admitting that an emulator written by the community was good enough, right? Like this is Sony saying, "Hey, uh this is good enough that that that that this has our, you know, the Godfather blessing, right? This is this is a real PlayStation game, this this uh open source emulator." Um so, yay, good, right? Well, it didn't really work out that well. Uh the the the product had a lot of issues. Um It which is a shame. It's just that this particular emulator, I don't think it was the right tool for this job. And they also, I don't think like fixed it, you know, cuz it it didn't

entirely support all of these games and they they also made some weird decisions uh in terms of like putting PAL games on an NTSC console, stuff like that. So, that that kind of sucked because it it it it on the one hand it was, you know, yay, we're we're in acknowledging this this community of authors is doing work that is good enough to sell, but at the same time where it sort of took a hit, I think, uh because of public perception of this product. Uh Nintendo sold you Super Mario Brothers again and again, actually three times in the last 3 years. Um Oh my god, Sonic Mania. Did you guys play Sonic Mania? Oh my god, that game blew me away. Um Doesn't directly have anything to do with emulation, but it would not have been possible without emulation. Uh the the core team of this game actually got their start modifying uh original Sonic the Hedgehog games uh using uh you know, emulators and and easily available ROM files for these original games. That's

how they reverse engineered the the system and and that's how they they uh basically were able to uh copy Yuji Naka's Sonic engine and and make new things with it is because they had uh access to these open tools and and and to the ROMs themselves. They could stumble into those and learn and get inspired. Amazing. Uh I don't think that's likely to happen anymore cuz uh easy access to ROM files was also taken away from us uh recently. Last 3 years, actually just few months ago. Um you guys probably saw this story, right? Like like Nintendo um successfully uh won a suit against uh LoveRoms. Um and it causes ripple effect on the internet where a lot of um I I have a question already. Sure. Um when it looks like it the court wins does not mean they will actually earn it. It's more like a sending an intimidation message. Okay, so the the the the statement from the audience was that it was more of an intimidation message. Uh yeah, I think I

think that's true. Like they didn't actually win $12 million from these guys. Uh it was settled out of court. But But the point being that that this causes a really unfortunate ripple effect where yeah, a lot of the you know, the the commercially viable products you can't find online anymore, which is fine, of course. Yeah, that's your property. Uh you know, uh go after that, but it also meant that like every other video game ever made that had nothing to do with Nintendo is kind of hard to find now. So, that was really unfortunate. Um Nintendo's boogeyman tax is still up there. Uh in fact, we're about to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of uh any day now. We couldn't We couldn't substantiate it quite to the exact date because the Wayback Machine didn't scrape, you know, daily back then or anything, but actually I noticed something when I took the screen cap. The So, this is 20 years ago, the introduction of video game emulators represents the greatest threat to date, blah blah blah, everything's terrible. Sometime around 2006, they actually Oh, I I don't have it here, but sometimes

around 2006, they added the text emulators used to play illegal copies of Nintendo games. So, they actually added that text right around when they launched an emulator service. So, that's that's cute. Um This is kind of an interesting thing. This hasn't come out yet, but this is Antstream. This is a company that's building, you know, like a basically like the notion of a video codec that you deploy to, right? This is a platform for classic games, sort of your Netflix for games play. I think these guys are out of the UK. You can tell cuz Speedball 2 is the game up front. Um And as for me, actually something I said 3 years ago was that I felt that the only path toward accuracy, toward doing these games justice, was to do a one-to-one copy of a game, right? That that it should be warts and all exactly as it was. And and some products over the last 3 years have caused me to start rethinking that. Do you guys know this? Wonder Boy the Dragon's Trap. This is by Lizard Cube. This was a remastering of

Wonder Boy 3 the Dragon's Trap on the Master System. And it did a really good job of translating that old game and and giving it modern flourishes, you know, beyond the HD graphics and stuff like that. I think an even better example, no comment on the game itself, but Night Trap 25th Anniversary added so many quality of life features that it is like undeniably a better game than you could have played on the Sega CD or whatever back in the day. Uh they It's not only better now, I think I think it might even be reflecting artistic intent of the original more than the original did. So, uh I've been thinking a lot about that lately. Um as for Digital Eclipse, we released a few more products uh including bringing DuckTales back in print. That was actually a complete coincidence that that was the game that I chose 3 years ago and that it ended up being our next project. So, you're welcome. Um Thank you. Thank you one person who

clapped for DuckTales. Um We also expanded our scope at Digital Eclipse quite a bit and we started working on these deluxe anniversary packages. So, Street Fighter 30th was a collection focused on the original main line Street Fighter arcade games. Uh SNK 40th came out last year. It's what I like to call a playable documentary uh about what I think was a strange and wonderful uh little developer called SNK in the 1980s. Uh this is sort of a snapshot of what they were before uh the Neo Geo system was introduced in the 1990s and they pivoted that way entirely. We're going to get back to that later. But, uh these last few years we've these last 3 years we started thinking a lot about like who who buys this stuff, right? Who is the consumer of a classic game re-release? Uh and and I think we can, you know, basically narrow it down to three main groups. Of course, we're missing some here. Um You have your casual player, right? This is someone who you know, just sees the game on the store and is like, "Oh, cool. Metal Slug." or whatever, right? Like this is

someone who probably has a kid, I don't know. Um and you know, this is this is this is just sort of the impulse purchase uh slight nostalgia kind of person, right? Uh your next tier up is your sort of collector type, right? This is This is someone who uh you know, probably identifies as a retro gamer, right? Like probably still has like shelves full of old cartridge games and stuff and and they kind of almost uh in a lot of ways I think vote with their dollar toward the idea of old games being around. So, that's sort of the second-tier market. Your third market's uh kind of strange. This is your really hardcore market. Um So, this is this is the kind of uh consumer that is Thank you for laughing. I thought it was funny, too. Um This this this is your consumer who just knows way too much about this stuff and it just wants more, right? It's like, "No, I already have access to these

games. I know how to use MAME. If you're just selling me the ROM again, I'm like, I'm not giving you eight bucks for this arcade game that I've barely heard of. I can just play it for free and it's it's just as good as your emulator. Uh probably is actually MAME, but we'll get to that. Um So, you know, the these three audiences, I think I think the I think one and two, you know, can graduate forward, right? I think I think that a casual type can become a retro gamer, can become a hardcore weirdo. Uh but I don't think there's a backwards, and I also think that groups one and two, no matter what, uh it are capped by their personal nostalgia, right? For for things that they grew up with, whereas I think uh number three, I think is a much more sustainable audience. I think that's an audience that that you can grow. I think that's an audience that you can educate on wanting this kind of product, and that's the kind of hardcore audience that we target at Digital Eclipse, and I think that's what we should all be targeting in this industry because it applies to every

possible consumer. Uh but let me tell you about group number three, the hardcore. The hardcore play hard, all right? Like like we can do so many things without the industry interacting with us at all. I mean, we can download every game ever, right? Like it's it's super easy to just go download a MAME set, and you have all of arcade history in front of you uh playable. We We have emulators on our computers. We can If want a really terrible experience. You can have you know touch screen like PlayStation emulators on our phones and stuff. Um We don't even need emulation, right? We're in an era now where we can use our original hardware and we can load entire system libraries on one single cartridge and just channel surf every Sega Genesis game ever made easily. And while we're in that original hardware, we're like enhancing it, right? This is This is the MSU-1 core. It's a demonstration of it on the Super Nintendo. This is actually This is author Beau basically created a hardware add-on for

the Super Nintendo to add full motion video and and and and CD quality audio stuff like that. And like so people have made like the definitive Chrono Trigger that has the PlayStation features without the load times and stuff like that. Oh, we're playing on like beautiful RGB professional monitors from the '80s and the and and and and the most perfect display possible. People because of this hobby are figuring out how to hack like old consumer CRTs to get the best picture out of them. No one's died yet, but my God, please be careful. Um We're like building arcade machines and we have been since the '90s that has just everything on it. You know, there's even like new hardware being created to play these games in an accurate way in HD. This is the Mega SG which I don't know mine just shipped this morning. That's how new this is. I just got the alert this morning. This is a basically a Sega Genesis natively inside spitting out 1080p clean picture and they do this

through what's called an FPGA a field programmable gate array. Is that right? Yeah. And and the idea being that it's not even software emulation at this point. It It is a chip that reconfigures itself to be a Sega. So it's just like hyper accurate, right? And we're even getting into like open source now. This is a build of what's called the mister project. Has anyone heard of this? Uh yeah, yeah, I see a couple enthusiasts for the mister. Um So, this is like an open-source FPGA retro console using off-the-shelf parts that are like fairly affordable. So, you know, we don't we don't need we don't even need we don't need emulators. We don't even need the original consoles. We have we can build hardware that replicates the hardware uh without anyone, right? And we don't even need the commercial games. We can like translate games that no one bothered translating and in these cases damn well should have. Uh and we can play through them. Uh we don't need to wait for it. We don't need to yell at Reggie Fils-Aimé to translate Mother 3. Just do it. Who cares, right? Uh not even translations. We we're modifying games, right? Like tecmobowl.org, these guys

for 12 years have been have been upgrading Tecmo Bowl. Uh not only have they been upgrading the NFL rosters, they're like adding new NFL teams as they're created. They're like adding new NFL rules. They are maintaining Tecmo Bowl. We don't need whatever Tecmo is, right? I don't even know what Tecmo is. But but but you know, we don't need the industry to like do things like that. We're doing it on our own. Uh the middle picture, like we're we're basically correcting mistakes of the past even, like remastering in a sense. So, like when Donkey Kong Country was ported to the Game Boy Advance, you remember the thing didn't have any backlight on it, right? So, people had to alter the color palette so you could actually see the damn thing. Uh but you know, we're we're because we don't play on that actual thing anymore, uh people are fixing the games, right? To to run on modern platforms. Uh they're modifying the games to add or replace content. This is Rollchan, which uh replaces Mega Man with his sister in the game, which is super cool. Yes, I tried to get that in Mega Man Legacy Collection, but the author didn't reply to me. I think they didn't believe me. Um

But we don't even need like human authored stuff anymore. Like we're building randomizers that that that modify and change the game in a in a perfectly playable way every time. And this is getting huge. Uh we are building the tools now also to uh start reverse engineering games and figuring out how they work and tinkering with them. So, this is a disassembly of the original Super Mario Brothers uh with commented code, which is awesome. And people are like taking that and porting that to C and are and are figuring out how these games work and the mysteries behind them and they're finding bugs in like Super Mario Brothers and fixing them cuz it turns out there was like a copy-paste error that causes the uh spiny balls to behave in a way that they weren't meant to and we're discovering that with all these emulator tools. Uh, and again, this is not something the industry provides. There's we can't replicate a lot of this in the commercial industry. I can't make anything look as good as one of those CRT monitors as my beautiful Sony PVM-2530. That's That's what That's how I roll, by the way.

We can't We can't eliminate input lag. Okay, that that that that's a thing that's We'll be chasing that forever. It's It's in in the world of software emulation versus these original pieces of hardware running on a CRT. There's nothing preventing uh your your button press from from immediately reflecting on the screen, but but with modern hardware, that's just inherent. We can't defy the laws of physics. We can't give you an experience like that. Uh, we can't clear up the legal issues for most games. Like we're never going to see like Home Alone on the Super Nintendo like ever again, right? Like based on the Tim Allen show. Like that's just never going to happen. Um, I don't know why that one. We can't provide infinite variety. We can't give you every game ever made, right? We can't do it for literally free, you know? Like like so well, what can we do, right? Um, I think there's a lot we can do. Uh, I think we can we can curate these experiences that we're giving to people. Uh, we can I I think this is actually maybe the most important because we're

we're the commercial industry because we're working with the rights holders, we can theoretically provide behind-the-scenes access to help contextualize these things. Uh, or, you know, we can talk to the original authors to sort of ask them their intent and and and and restore the games to their liking. Uh we can put out titles that no one's seen before, previously unreleased works. Uh Nintendo did that with Star Fox 2, which was so cool. They put it on their SNES Classic. Um we can offer new play modes for the games. I mean, they're already doing that, too, but we can sort of author them, uh you know, with perhaps the original creators, right? Uh we can offer thoughtful improvements to the games. Uh we can we can do all kinds of stuff that that people can't necessarily uh do in the community as a commercial industry, and we should be. Like, we're getting paid for this, right? Like, this is our jobs. We should be providing a better experience than people can get for free if they happen to be pirates or whatever. Um and a lot a lot of companies, not just us, are are are doing things like this to enhance their experiences, like M2. Uh M2's out of Japan. Oh my god, I have a crush on M2. Um

these guys are amazing. Their the list of cool stuff they've done is really long. Um the most recent one uh is uh Fantasy Star. Um I forget what they called it, but it was a Fantasy Star remake on the Switch. Um and this release just did an amazing job of of modernizing this game. They This is a classic like RPG with random encounters on the map. So, they because we don't play like that anymore, you know, we don't we don't have one cartridge that we play for a month and like, you know, like they they reduced the random encounter rate and they increased the experience you get. So, you play it a lot less, but you're getting the exact same experience, just less of it. Um they uh they modernized it without actually modifying. They just tweaked it, right? Uh they let you speed the game up cuz the walking speed was a little bit slow. Uh they added this auto mapping feature in these stupid first-person dungeons that no one likes anymore. Well, they have their fans, I guess, just not me.

Um but, you know, and what what I like about this is that I am a Fantasy Star fan. I've played through Fantasy Star actually multiple times. I've worked on one of the translation patches for it actually. Um, but I know as a Fantasy Star fan having played through this that to me they didn't really change the game. You know what I mean? Like they in a way I think translated it. Like they translated it for modern audiences and I thought that was really cool. Uh, I mentioned Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap earlier. Um, something I really liked about it uh, other than you know, kind of did the same stuff as Fantasy Star where uh, Lizard Cube updated the game to be a little more accessible to modern players. They they up the frame rate from 30 to 60, which means I'll never go back to the original. Um, and but what I what I like that that they did is that typically when you get like an HD remaster of a game, I think the notion is like, "No, those old graphics, those are done. These this is what it's supposed to look like, right?" And I hate that. But what Lizard Cube

did instead was like an almost an artistic remix, like a reimagining, not a remastering of the graphics, and I thought that was great. Um, Double Fine does really cool stuff with the LucasArts adventure games. Uh, I think these projects are phenomenal because the teams have actual direct access to a lot of the core staff who worked on these games including, you know, Tim Schafer who runs the studio, was the director of Full Throttle. Um, but you know, even the art directors and things like that, they have a lot of direct access, so they can ask, you know, what were these ambiguous pixels supposed to be and get an answer and can draw the art appropriately. Um, excuse me, one second. Just spilled water down my my chin. That was great. Um, our latest uh, was SNK 40th. Um, unlike these guys above, we don't really get the opportunity to focus on one game at a time, uh, but we tend to make packages. Uh, this one in particular, like I said, it a snapshot of what this company was in the '80s. So, we and instead of a remastering of a

game, so we approached things a little bit differently than M2 or Lizard Cube or Double Fine. Um So, our goals with the project uh Unlike Mega Man, Street Fighter, Disney, these weren't IP that had an instant commercial appeal. So, it was kind of our job I thought to sort of make people care about this stuff, which isn't impossible because SNK does have really hardcore fans. They just tend to be fans of the '90s and more current SNK content, not the not the '80s stuff. But, this gave us an opportunity to you know say, "Hey SNK fans, here's the roots of this company." We also it was our duty we thought to sort of alter the the gameplay of some of these games to to modernize it in a in a way that was more understandable and to reinterpret the controls, which I'll get to in a minute. But, first I got a video up here. So, somewhere there we go. All right.

Um So, this is a demonstration of we're we're kind of known for our our extra material in these games, right? We we do a little bit more in the games. We kind of give you the original packaging artwork and and things like that. And and in SNK's case, they made like 60 games in the '80s. We'd still be working on this project if we did all 60 games. So, we kind of curated the collection, but but I wanted to at least show what all the other games were, right? So, this is actually a complete list of every game that SNK game that SNK had done in the '80s. And for each one of these, if if art exists, we put it in there. Like literally exists in the world. You can of course do your zooming and stuff and and and and and go in on there. We got the screenshots of the games, but each one of these also has a little bit of a history lesson. And and it it kind of comes across as like an interactive like art book about the history of SNK and and this was our way of

capturing that because a lot of this history has just never been talked about even by SNK. Uh a lot of these guys are you know not getting any younger and and so we wanted to sort of you know educate the the consumer on on what this company was and give you the definitive like package like here was SNK in the '80s. Uh so that was our approach with the uh museum content. Um But uh we also added a feature that um Oh wait, that is the same video. That is not what we want to do. Excuse me a moment, folks. Okay, so this is sort of the game selection menu. Um So another thing we did uh with this collection is that uh for all the titles in here like P.O.W.

for example, we included all the regional versions of it and we included the home console version as well if there was one which I think is really important actually cuz it it it it it tells you a little bit more about that game to know how the how they approached a home version of it. Like in SNK's case uh most of their home versions actually added features that the arcade games didn't have made them a little more RPG-like even. Um and even internally this uh was a little bit of a struggle cuz I think that a lot of companies are like oh why would you do the inferior version of the game, right? But for us it's like no, we're historians, right? We're we're trying to explain what your company was and we should include all of that stuff. Um luckily they they they uh they they they went for it. Um But a feature that we added uh uh I don't think it's crazy to say that people like watching people play video games. Have we proven that out yet? So, we wanted to make these games as accessible as we could. We didn't want to just throw you in an '80s arcade and

say good luck, kid, right? Like we wanted you to be able to access this content without being good at old video games. And so, if you want, you can just watch the game. Um so, this is a play-through. Um it's actually fairly tool-assisted play-through of me being more awesome than I actually am playing these games. But, like a movie, you can scrub through it, right? And you can go in there, you can pause, you can frame advance, you can frame rewind. Um it's all pixel-perfect cuz this isn't a video. It's actually a button playback of the movie. Um so, every frame or maybe three frames, we're capturing, you know, basically a save state and then the button presses that come after it, and that's how we're able to scrub through it like that. Um and because we did it that way, uh you don't have to just watch it forever. You don't have to be passive. You can actually just start playing cuz that's just a save state, right? So, um to us, this was a way of letting you just like flip through the game like it was a book and access whatever content

you want to, and and that was that was a a fairly, you know, low-tech-ish way. I say low-tech and and uh Adam, the programmer, is probably screaming if he's watching this. But, you know, it was our way of of of letting you access these parts of the game without having to like heavily modify a binary file, right? Um but, I think what was maybe the most important thing we did was was reinterpreting uh some of the original arcade controls so that they made sense not just to a modern player, but to a modern player on a modern controller. Um this is a rotary joystick. It's called the loop lever. Uh SNK was known for this in the '80s. Um so, just imagine this on an arcade machine. Uh Um, you tilt it like normal to move. It's a joystick, right? But, you actually rotate the stick to aim. Uh, so, you know, here's Ikari Warriors, for example. Um, there's only two buttons in the game. Uh, and and you would and they were nice

enough to do a left and right hand configuration, which is kind of cool. Uh, but, you would, you know, tilt to move your character around and and and you would twist to aim your gun and fire at people. And so, playing Ikari Warriors, you know, is supposed to kind of look like this, right? Like, you're able to sort of muscle memory your way in the original arcade game, uh, to be able to, you know, fire 3:00 and then point straight back up. Um, typically, when this game has been re-released in the past, uh, the way that that's been accomplished is to sort of map rotate clockwise and rotate counterclockwise to buttons, and it just doesn't work that well. It it doesn't feel like Ikari Warriors anymore. And I actually think that the reason that fans don't talk about these games is because the only access we have had to them traditionally is through means like MAME, where they don't play the way they're supposed to, so they're not they're not fun. Um, so, for our game, uh, I mean, it sounds simple on paper, but we made it essentially a twin-stick shooter. So, we're emulating the game,

you know, just as it is on one layer, but there's an abstraction layer above it, uh, that So, for example, if the player points straight down on the R stick, uh, our abstraction layer will tell the game, "Hey, change your game state, so that the player is pointing straight down." Uh, there's no, you know, there's no point straight down function in the original game, which is why we had to sort of interrupt the game, uh, to tell it that. Uh, so, essentially, we, I think, made Ikari Warriors playable for the first time since, uh, since its arcade origins. So, that makes sense, right? Easy to do. Uh, hydrate's actually a good idea if you guys need to hydrate. I think I do. Um All right, simple enough. What about the sequels? Karate Warriors 3: The Rescue. Uh not a very good game, by the But it's it's not it's not it's not our job as historians to judge, right? It's our historians to uh report accurately, right? Okay, so that's another rotary stick game, right? Another rotary one. So, you know, moving kind of looks like

this. You can aim where you want uh as you move and and keep pointing that direction. Uh you got a punch button. Uh and you got a kick button, right? And then again, it's a rotary game. And what the game encouraged you to do were like roundhouse kicks, right? So, using our existing setup, yeah, it kind of works. It doesn't feel that great, but you know, you kick and you rotate the R stick and you could do a roundhouse. Um in the arcade, much easier, right? Because you have one finger over here and you have a hand on the joystick, so it's just a simple motion. Um But wait, there's three buttons, right? So, we no longer have our our uh our just two buttons on the back. We have a jump button. And with the jump button, you can jump kick. So, uh again, this doesn't work. So, okay. Um What we did here was we basically combined uh auto like the pointing with the R stick with the moving uh and then put the three buttons on the face so that you know, he now points where you walk like you would expect in most games. Uh so, that works pretty well. And uh because of that, you can

actually now do the main move that the game expects you to do, which is a jumping roundhouse kick, right? Which of course you couldn't do uh actually, sorry. I just skipped ahead. Um which you which you couldn't do uh if you had thumbs on two sticks and had to like press two buttons at the same like it just doesn't work. Um Game had another move, backhand, right? And that one is actually a jump punch. So, uh jump punch on this controller, I didn't like the thumb movement that that was required to do that. I like the player to be able to just rest their thumb on kick and jump. Uh and in the arcade game, again, we're thinking about how is the player playing this in the arcade game? If you think back to the way it was laid out, you'd have your hand on the joystick and you'd have three fingers on three buttons, so you could instantly do any of that. You can't do that if your thumb's just resting on on uh jump and kick. So, we added a backhand button. We just combined punch and jump into one button. So, hooray, right? We solved all the problems. Oh, turns out that actually

strafing is like a valid thing to do in this game and we just took that away by combining the the aiming and the moving into into one stick. So, this doesn't work anymore, right? Um but we don't want to take away the ability to jump kick cuz that's actually the main move in the game. Uh so, what we what we went back and did was added a uh an optional aim, right? So, as you're tilting the left stick, he's moving and pointing in the way you're going. And and if you happen to hit the R stick, you he's then pointing wherever you're pointing that one. And then if you let go of the R stick, he just snaps back into the position that he was with the L stick. Uh can you guys see the problem here already? Like if you're shooting this gun, right? Like now you're now your thumb is on the R stick and how are you going to point that and like curve your finger to shoot, right? So, okay, well, we just added punch again like as another button so you could easily shoot the gun. Wait, no, there's actually a secondary fire, which is throw your weapon. So,

let's just do backhand again, I guess, on the L stick. Like it looks really complicated, but I'd like to think it works. And and that's just the level of thinking that I think you have to do to interpret these arcade games to play on controllers they were never meant to play on. And if you were to play this game on MAME, you know, you could theoretically maybe get close to that setup on MAME. Or you can even on MAME, like you people have made new rotary controllers You can hook up to MAME, which is cool. Uh But, unless you know that's how the game functioned, unless you know that, you don't know to configure the game that way, right? And it's not MAME's job to sort of like interpret. It's It's MAME's job to uh to to sort of be a binary equation, right? Um and uh you know, I So, last last time around, 3 years ago, I said, "We should maybe start using MAME, cuz it's a solid emulator. It's got a lot of systems supported. It's open I don't think anyone's done that yet. That actually includes us. We haven't used MAME, the emulator, yet. Uh

but, here's the thing. We're all using MAME. Every emulator author in the commercial industry is using MAME. And I don't mean the executable emulator. I mean the main project. MAME is a documentation project. They document how these games and systems worked and and put that information in an accessible place for people to reference. Like, we're not doing this every time we do one of these collections. You know, we're not we're not getting the original PCBs and like tracing the circuits and like, you know, like figuring out what the chips were and getting their specs and looking that up and, you know, I mean, there's a little bit of that, but but where we start is the MAME GitHub, right? Like, of course we would. Why Why would we look at the physical object to figure that out when someone's already done that? We've all done that. Um and the reason we do that is it's simple. I mean, I'd like to think of MAME is the Wikipedia of game hardware reference, right? Like, that's just how it is. Um and other emulators, too, of course. I'm

I'm kind of short handing MAME. There's plenty of documentation and amazing work outside of MAME, of course. Um but, we've all been using it and we all have been from the beginning. Um and uh I think we should stop doing this nudge wink thing we've been doing in this industry forever uh when when when it comes to stuff like this. Uh when it comes to MAME or other other forms of easily available hardware documentation. Uh, this is volunteer work that we've been exploiting for decades and like in secrecy like we're ashamed of it, but I don't I don't see where the shame is in referencing the main project. This is you know, it's again it's the Wiki like we're not ashamed of referencing Wikipedia. Why were you why are we ashamed of looking at open source emulation as a reference? I think we should be proud and boastful and and we should be thanking MAME in the credits and I'm calling everyone out including myself when I say that. Um

All right, Wikipedia of hardware reference. That should be your starting point not your primary source, right? Like when I was an editor websites if if a journalist was just citing Wikipedia as a reference like I'm going to kick that back and say no, do your research, right? So same thing with MAME. Right? It's it's it's only as good as as as the contributions that have been made to it and I mean sometimes it's wrong. So we actually found quite a few things that were wrong when we access the original boards for the games in SNK 40th. Um I really should probably report this stuff to someone over there, but I mean here it is now. These there's some of the things we we found and yeah in this case yeah, we're hooking up the original board in our makeshift lab in the back and but I mean we don't always have boards, you know, like like really we we we we might be provided ROM files from the client, but you know, how likely do you think it is that 20

plus arcade games we had English and US boards sent us not possible in this project. So we have to sort of rely on things like YouTube videos of actual cabinets, which is okay to do and it should be done. Like if you if if you're doing one of these projects and you don't have the original hardware, you should at least seek out video of the original hardware. It often exists, sometimes it doesn't. Um but it's not just that MAME is quote unquote wrong and inaccurate sometimes. Uh sometimes when it's right, it's not necessarily right. So, this is Street Smart. Uh it's a fighting game from SNK. Um on the left are the actual RGB values that the game spits out internally. Um and so, MAME being a sort of like, you know, binary interpretation of the game says, "Okay, that's the colors of the game." But, I mean, like look at that. That's like do you Do we really think the game's supposed to look like that? I think that I don't know. Like maybe maybe the artists had a busted monitor or something, but like clearly the game's not supposed to look like

that. Uh so, we adjusted the the RGB curve to compensate for that and and to reflect what I think would have happened in a real-life scenario, which would be an arcade operator like boosting the gamma to try to make up for this very very dark game that I just got in. Um and then you know, this kind of goes to what I was saying earlier. The game code is binary. Uh but game playing is human and subjective, and I think that as authors of this kind of work, we should be empathetic, I I guess would be the word, toward how a player would actually have played this game. And and what the authors' artistic intent was, right? And and and the sort of environment that the game would have been in. Uh and uh the context is needed to understand it even. And and you know, like the rotary dial stuff. It's like, do we need to actually reinterpret and retranslate uh in in a in a human accessible way rather than a binary way how to actually play these games. Um

and it's that sort of human interaction that drives everything we do. I like to say that we don't make games necessarily or game compilations, we make documentaries you play with a controller. Or if you prefer, we make like coffee table books you play on a video game platform. Uh and you know, of course the games are playable cuz it's about games, it's on a gameplay platform. So, the games to me are like feature two, but this notion of of capturing that history and and giving you the fan uh this this hardcore uh product to to to really experience and appreciate this, that's the product. But, we've barely started as an industry. There's so much more we could be doing. I mean, I'm just blue-skying here. I but like just think about it. Like we have complete access to what's on the screen, what's being shown and and played at you, and and the player can manipulate things with the controller. Like, what can we do with that? We can like we can like step backward and forward through the development process, right? And show you like early versions of it and let you like see why decisions were made. Uh I

mean, like we can I don't know, put the game source code in there, let you tweak it and compile it in the game, and like like see what what adjusting it would do, right? We can we can uh you know, like view earlier, we can improve the hardware uh that the games ran on to compensate for some of its uh flaws. Actually, M2 has done that beautifully with the 3D releases on the 3DS. Um we can make the we can make a game about the making of the game, right? Like we we can we can make like a visual novel or an RPG about making these games. Or like, there's this really wonderful book called Understanding Comics. Do you guys know this book? Yeah, Understanding Comics is a comic book that explains the art of comic books as a comic book, and it works beautifully to illustrate why comics work. So, what's Understanding Games in these terms, right? Uh I don't know, we could slow down time and like annotate game functions as they happen to help you understand what you're seeing here. We can uh we can let people mess with our virtual machines themselves, so like let

them turn off uh like graphic layers to see what's behind there, which they're already doing uh in the amateur emulator world, but we can unlock that for them in a in a consumer-facing way, right? We can let uh, we can give them like tile viewers and and asset viewers to like look at how the game was made. Uh, we can make new like like cuts of these games that combine the best features of each skew into like a master version, but put the original in there if you do that. Uh, but I mean the possibilities are like endless, right? We're just starting to think about how to do all these things using uh, these source materials to bring this stuff back. But we can't do any of that stuff if that stuff is lost. Usually when we talk about game preservation, I think the the notion that people have is uh, taking the binary data, making sure it's online or safe or accessible. Um, and usually what I say to that is like, "No, the pirates took care of it. We're fine.

You can download this stuff." But, you know, we that's not actually reality. Like we've already actually lost even binary data for some important games. Like this is a photograph of an advertisement of SNK's very first game, the Micon kit series. These were brick-breaking games in the late '70s. Uh, actually 1978. This is the game that SNK 40th anniversary got the 40-year anniversary from. We don't have it. No one has it. They're not available. They're not named. We don't even know how many they made. They made between three and six. We don't know. And like they're We don't even have people to ask anymore that were around back then. So like you know, even with this commercial support of making this like historical interactive document to preserve what this company was in its roots, we don't have its actual roots. They seem to be gone. Um, you know, we actually had to send someone like on a special mission to the the I believe it's pronounced Diet Library in Tokyo, uh, cuz they had an

extensive archive of literature and including like trade magazines for the coin-op industry. Uh, ads like this is just all we have now for the Mycon Mycon Kids series. We don't even have like player testament, right? Like as to how these games played, what the features were. Like, what does that ship do? We don't know. We don't know what the ship does in this game. And all we can do is sort of extract as much details we can and try to preserve that while we can. Um, and it's just like we got to at least these photographs like it's like the yet there's like a Sasquatch. You know what I mean? It's like that shouldn't be for video games, like looking at these mysterious things. Um, we actually did find managed to find one of the three to six Mycon Kid boards uh, for us to look at. And it was a it was through actually an arcade rental company in rural Japan called uh, Takai Shokai. Uh, one of our developers, Brandon Sheffield, uh, had to travel like eight hours on public transit to like go to this place. Um, and uh, you know, he's been running this arcade business since like the 70s and he happened to have one of the Mycon

Kids. Uh, so we he was able to like hook it up for us and Brandon was able to play the game to fill in some details for our museum feature. Unfortunately, it was too late in the product for us to actually like dump the ROMs with him and put it in the product, but at least we know where one is. Uh, maybe if more people buy the game, we can do a patch or something. Um, but it's not just these ancient like crusty Arkanoid clones, like Yosaku uh, is a game that even Takasan doesn't have. And this is a tree chopping game uh, that uh, from all accounts was actually really popular in Japan in the 70s. And in fact, uh, when you look up the game now, uh, the result you typically get are a an unauthorized clone of this original game that was made for a home console. Uh, but the original and it was a it was super popular that clone. But the original game that was cloned, we can't find it. Like we've heard like rumors that sometimes this arcade here

might like swap it in for one of the machines once in a while, but we we tried. We have communications like the game preservation society in Japan. We know a lot of the collectors out there. We can't find Yosaku. Yosaku might actually be gone and if it exists still, it's probably not digitized. It's probably literally rotting on a board and like dying right now. Um but it's not just the games themselves, even the material surrounding the games is becoming incredibly difficult to find. Again, even on a commercial project where we're paid to do it we and have access to people, we can't find some of this stuff. Luckily, we're really fortunate to find a guy Yoshino-san. Yoshino-san worked at SNK in the 80s and was like a super fanboy for the company. He actually got his start cuz I think cuz he wrote a fanzine about SNK in like 84, so they hired him to like be the communications guy and he so he made his fanzine like official. So, cuz he was such a fan, he kept a lot of this stuff and and you know, for these two games in particular, World Wars and Mahjong Classroom, um this is the only physical thing we have

for these games. Like we have the game ROMs and well and actually not for Mahjong Classroom. That game's not dumped. But for World Wars, we have the game ROMs and stuff, but but this is the first time this is the only thing we know of that has like the logo and what passes for its key art. Um and it's we were just so fortunate not only to find him, but that SNK is a company that not only acknowledges its past employees and allows us to talk to them, but actually paid him. Like SNK paid Yoshino-san as a consultant to work with us to answer our questions, to actually scan his materials, which I mean like that should be a standing ovation, but we're running low on time. Um Thank you again, SNK. And it's not just the materials, it's the memories, right? So, this is a game called Tangram Q. It's a simplistic using simplistic looking Tangram game. Uh you know, like making the shape out of the shapes is tangrams, right? Uh, this is another one that's lost. We couldn't find the ROM. Uh, we couldn't find a board anywhere. But, it turns out, we didn't know this until we had

access to Yushinason, the game wasn't released, right? So, like, that's information that doesn't like you can't Google tangram I mean, maybe you can now, but you couldn't Google tangram Q to find out, oh, it doesn't exist. We don't have to hunt for it. Like, it didn't come out. Like, we didn't know that until we had happened to have access to that one guy. Um, and you know, game preservation's kind of like that right now. Um, even on past products, uh, like going back to Disney Afternoon Collection that we did, uh, Capcom and Disney didn't have a ton of material for the games. And And this this beautiful box art that was produced for these games. Uh, Capcom doesn't have it. Disney doesn't have it. Or if they did, they I don't know. They might have it. They they weren't very communicative. Um, the only reason that we have this stuff is cuz I personally happened to have connections to the like video game art collector world. And I happened to be friends with this guy, Bronty, is what he is what he goes by in Canada, who happens to have purchased out the files of a marketing company that closed cuz

he cares about this stuff. And that's the only reason we have this art. Uh, and that's that's to me, that's scary. Um, but like scariest to me of all is is source, right? Um, how many of you guys here work on games? Raise your hands. Okay, keep your hands up. Uh, how many of I ask you Okay, so, keep your hands up if you worked on a game that shipped five or more years ago, let's say. Um, Franz, I know you did. Uh, uh, okay. Games five or more years ago. Uh, how many of you feel right now, if I asked you to, you can get that source compile a game? Okay, few of you. Uh, the few of you that are left, how confident are you that 20 years from now, someone could not only locate that but they could compile it and build it and it's right? Literally none of you. Literally zero people, right? Um you know, and okay. Let's let's let's make that even scarier. Uh Digital

Eclipse current incarnation, we've done these four products, 50-ish classic arcade games. Out of those 50 how many would you suppose we had source access to? The the Zero is the correct answer. Did I tell you that? Zero. Um and it's it's you know, it's I'm not shaming companies when I say that it's just the reality. We didn't hold on to a lot of the source code. Um and that's terrifying. So, you know, I'm speaking at a developers conference as developers what we can do. I'm going to sort of bring back some wisdom from GDC's past. These are my pals Lane Nooney and Jason Scott. I'm going to let you figure out the order of operations here, but you're going to steal from work and you're going to put it in a box. You can do the box at work or you can do it at home. I don't care. Just do both of those things. Um but don't forget that that material has to go somewhere cuz if it's in your house forever and you get hit by a bus like I don't just put it somewhere. There's a lot of places to put your stuff, all right? Um this list is nowhere near complete,

obviously, but these for my money are the best potential homes uh for video game material. So, the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester New Rochester, New York. Uh what I love about them is that they have a library in house. They have full-time librarians and they are actively collecting video game development material. So, for example, um Jordan Mechner who did Karateka, Prince of Persia, Last Express, um you know, he donated all of his materials to the Strong. And as a researcher, you can and I have, you can make an appointment with the library and they'll bring out Jordan's material and you can go through his design notes and like the video that he shot to rotoscope things. Like you can you can access those materials. Uh and it's and it's wonderful. I really that that is an option. Uh, the National Video Game Museum, Frisco, Texas. They don't have a library yet, uh, but these guys have been collecting this sort of ephemeral material longer than anybody, like since the '90s. Uh, and they've been they're in what they call their sort of 1.0 phase of the museum right now, which is more of a public-facing

display. Uh, but their expansion plans, should they raise enough money, include opening a library. So, that's that's going to be a really viable option, uh, when that happens. The Internet Archive, if you don't give a damn, you know, if you're like, I don't care who has this, just put it out there, that's your option right there. Uh, just pop it on the Internet Archive. If if you own the intellectual property, cool. Just put it there. If you don't own it, I'm not a cop. Put it on the Internet. Um, put it on the Internet Archive. If you don't want to deal with it yourself, find Jason Scott, um, who will do it for you, and he'll do free PR to promote how amazing you are for putting this material online. Library of Congress is one we never talk about, um, but they do have a video game archive in Culpeper, Virginia. Kind of remote, not the not the normal archive. It's where their films are. Um, and they, believe it or not, like they could be a viable option. They they they they do seek material like this, um, but, uh, they don't do a lot of outreach about

it. And I mean, this is a this is the Library of Congress. Their job is to take things, keep it safe, and and I've talked to them about it, and they're like, "Yeah, we'll take source code. We'll keep it safe." I don't know that they necessarily have the infrastructure to to to, uh, to maintain source code or anything like that, but I think that's something we could work toward. I mean, I don't know, let's use our federal dollars for a source repo, you know? Why not? Um, and finally, there's us, the Video Game History Foundation. Uh, this is my baby. So, we're the newest of the bunch. Uh, we just celebrated our 2-year anniversary, uh, basically this week, I think. Um, so, we're a 501c3. We're just across the bridge in Emeryville, uh just down street from Pixar. Um and we are actually going to open a library there this year. I haven't announced that, I guess I just did. Uh but uh we're going to open, you know, by appointment, but I I can't be a librarian 9:00 to 5:00, but we we're going to have a video game history reference library. I think it might be the first like dedicated one that that's

all it it's for. Uh so, we're doing that. Um If If I'm wrong, if there's another video game library for referencing this stuff, let me know. I got to visit. Um I like to say we fill in the gaps with the other institutions. Like we don't have to maintain a public museum. I don't have to use my money for rent on a large space or conservation of of really crazy rare material, things like that. So, we can be really flexible with our time and money. Uh but I think one of our uh our our best functions in the world is to sort of provide an impartial voice if you have materials like this. Uh so, if you have your video game development material, you don't you don't know exactly where you want it to go, but you want it to go somewhere. I'll go through your options with you and I'll tell you the the pros and cons of each. They're mostly pros, but, you know, we'll we'll help you find the right home. Um but I think our our best place in the world is uh I want to work towards source material being an educational resource. Uh I think the industry sees this stuff as a

trade secret. Secret. I think it's an educational tool. I don't think there's a better way to understand a video game than to go back to its source and to study it, maybe even rebuild it, right? Uh I want to live in a world where historians like me don't have to like reverse engineer binaries. This is stupid. You know, like like if that source exists, why am I going out of my way to circumvent that uh when when the real thing exists? It's kind of a new concept, I think. Uh source code is an educational resource, uh at least for games. I don't think the traditional library system really has language for that or tools yet, but it's something we're trying to figure out. But we're making it up as we go. It's all brand new. Figuring it out as we go, but maybe we should figure it out together. Um So, if you're interested let's get in touch. Let's figure this out. Let's figure out how to get our source material safe and accessible and and figure out, you know, where your comfort level is on access, things like that. Let's figure this out cuz it's only going to get harder as we go.

And that's it. THANK YOU, GDC. I I THINK I HAVE TIME FOR literally one question and there's one person at the mic, but before we get to that, I think two doors down, is that right? Yeah, two doors down there's a sort of congregating meeting area where I will be. So, let's go hang out there and and solve all these problems immediately today. Uh yes, sir. Do you know Showtime, Eric Chung? He's the guy who preserves a bunch of arcade games and he's part of the main community. He has extensive network with the arcade network and game preservation and he's also the founder and CEO of XR Arcadia, a new arcade platform that will be available worldwide. And hope And what do you think of the new arcade platform? Is it worth preserving its

history? No. No, of course it is. Come on. So, the question was do I know Eric Showtime? He's in Japan and he's an arcade board collector. He has extensive connections to other arcade collectors. He can find things. Yeah, I know Eric. Not personally, but I know of him. And do I think his new venture is preserve is worth preserving? Yes, of course. So, yes. Um I think it's Can we do one more in your Yeah, one more. Yes. Okay, I'll make this I'll make this as quick as I can. So, we're at the point where we have official remasters of games. What do we have to do to get to get to remixing? Ooh, okay. So, the question was we have official remasters of games. What do we need to do to get to official remixing? Um What Okay, something that Sega did that I really love is that they they did a collection of Sega Genesis stuff on Steam and they actually allow users to sub mit modifications to Sega Genesis ROMs, which is really cool. So, like there's already a sense of you know,

it's not Sega making remix games, right? But but there's a there there they're blessing remix games as as as being allowed on their platform. Um I'd argue we're already there. I think that Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap is a remix. Uh I I think I think the at least artistically, like the the actual art, uh it is a remix of the art. Um but what I'm really interested in, and I brought this up very briefly earlier, I'm interested in re mixing different versions of the game into like the definitive version of something. So, like the example I like to use is Zelda II. Uh so, Zelda II originally was a disk game. It was on the Famicom Disk System. So, it used the enhanced audio capabilities of that system. Uh when it was brought to cartridge, you know, we don't have that enhanced audio chip anymore, so they couldn't include that. But they added uh new quality of life features. They added new tiles, so that the dungeons varied more. So, like there's no definitive Zelda II. I would love us to start mixing things to make the actual definitive versions of these games. We're actually out of time. We're

over, but uh two doors down, I'm going to go hang out there. Thank you guys so much. This is great.