Kelsey Lewin Is Leaving The Video Game History Foundation

i think the relationship between playing games and purchasing them needs to be reevaluated, maybe. the idea that we need 9x as many games available for purchase just so that we can play all of the classic games that arent being currently capitalized upon seems wrong. imo.

Kelsey is someone I admire a great deal and is consistently a great voice in the community. We dont really have any context here as to why she made this decision, I hope its just simply a case of "too many projects, too busy to give enough time to this thing I care about to do it justice" rather than anything more sinister. I wish her nothing but the best and will continue to enjoy her content and insights elsewhere.

@-wc- I feel that with all art/media the creators or original owners (ie those who either funded its creation, or purchased it from those original creators for distribution rights) should be able to sell and profit from it for as long as they want to, until the copyright expires.

However, in all cases (games, music, movies) once the original artist/owner no longer wants to sell them, or the rights are basically untraceable and unprovable, they should immediately become free to distribute. Doesn't have to be public domain, there are Creative Commons attributions where they are free to share as long as you don't sell them. Similar to what people label as "Abandonware" though the majority if that is no more legal than distributing roms.

To be clear, I personally support downloading and sharing of roms, old cracked games etc, as long as they are not available to purchase anywhere, I see no moral issue, regardless of legality. As an artist myself, I'm aware that once you release something commercially for a wide audience, it is no longer just yours, it becomes part of people's story of their lives. To suddenly remove access to it seems wrong to me.

In other words, if old games companies keep wanting to sell copies of their games from the 80s and 90s to new generations, I think that's good, and it's their right. However, if they don't have any intention of allowing people to access them through legal means, they should allow others to share them for free. And crucially, others who had nothing to do with funding or creating them in the first place should not be allowed to claim ownership, for reasons I'll cover below.

I'm aware that's all a massive over simplification and there's plenty of exceptions and whataboutisms but I feel thats a broad sensible starting point for the way forward. I agree with your sentiment (if I understood it) that having games for sale shouldn't be the priority. For me, the priority should be accessibility, and the copyright holders can choose if they want to profit, or waive their rights and give their old work to the fans 😀

There's an enormous unspoken sickness in the retrogames community with opportunistic leaches "buying the rights" to games, characters, hardware or company names/logos that they had nothing to do with creating, often for literal pocket change (£1-10 each!!!)... then cynically releasing hugely overpriced and poorly put together compilations, hardware etc to make money from the nostalgia of retro collectors.

Even worse, some of the biggest offenders even use their new found "ownership" to make copyright claims on YouTube videos, retrogame books, articles, blogs, documentaries... claiming tens of thousands in revenue from clicks through DMCA claims that Youtube/Google just grant without question. Spend £10, threaten lawsuits, YouTube transfers you thousands. Rinse and repeat. Even worse again, some of these individuals running this scam DON'T even have the technical legal ownership rights they claim to... they just grift that they do and rely on people not bothering or being able to afford to force them to actually prove it.

Its a sickness and I hate the abuse of our collective memories. It's ruined the lives of friends of mine. I've been harassed myself. Thankfully, I have entertainment lawyers backed by the huge companies I work with to help me out on the occasions I'm targeted. But many aren't as lucky and simply can't defend themselves against this fraud.

Sadly, pushing the selling old long forgotten retrogames, rather than legal free distribution, encourages and validates this behaviour. Of course companies that are still in business like Nintendo, Sega, Capcom, Konami et al should capitalise from their old catalogues. But companies that haven't existed for 30 years cannot possibly accept royalties, so these vultures sweep in and take over. In my opinion, the law is outdated, and being able to claim ownership of art that you didn't either create or fund simply shouldn't be possible. But I'm an artist who has lost control over a lot of my work over the years, so I'll always side with the artists over unrestrained profit above morals style extreme capitalism.

I'd love to see an effort to determine what percentage of other media are also lost to time like this. Is it really higher in games? Or have lots of shows and movies faded into similar obscurity and the gaming community is just more eager to see things like that preserved?

The link above goes to an article where Kelsey cites the hypothetical example of Titanic only being available on old VHS tapes, but that's kind of a silly example seeing as Titanic is one of the biggest movies ever released. Games of that cultural magnitude are still generally available.

It's the obscurities that aren't. I can think of all sorts of dumb sitcoms and things that I watched as a kid that aren't available for streaming or purchase anymore, but I don't see a movement to make them available.

I love the VGHF and what it's trying to do. But given the preponderance of ROMs and emulation options, I do sometimes feel like these efforts are just trying to formalize something that is already happening well enough out in the wild. The enthusiasm of the retro gaming community has functionally ensured that these games are ubiquitous and available to anybody interested enough in playing them. And since digital preservation of ROMs is essentially perfect, we're not even dealing with the challenge of masters degrading over time.

Best of luck to Kelsey, regardless! I wonder what projects she might be hinting at.

@Razieluigi in terms of other ‘lost media’ I saw a statistic once that of all the films ever released only about 50% have ever been released on DVD and from the ones released on DVD only about 25% were subsequently released on Blu Ray (with therefore even fewer released on 4K disc).

It seems strange but if you think about it, until VHS came along in the 80s, owning any visual media was extraordinarily rare. We have been quite spoiled since.

@Gamecuber It's a good point that until relatively recent history, there wasn't much way to preserve anything at all. And certainly not in comprehensive personal collections.

I'm often more interested in deeper dives — books about developers and the actual talent behind these games, stories about the artists involved, contextual information about how these games fit into whatever was going on in the industry at the time. You know... actual history.

I'm all for efforts to preserve gaming history. I think it's an important part of popular culture, and that it's gone comparatively ignored next to other audio/video media. But I do think we get a little precious sometimes.

@Razieluigi I agree with you. In recent times I’ve found myself buying and reading books on video game history, mainly to fill in the blanks around my own experiences. I started with a ZX Spectrum in the late 80s and was conscious of the 16 bit console wars, but information at the time was so limited to a kid. It’s great to revisit that time and find out what I missed, as well as getting the opportunity to own and play games I could only dream about back then.

@Razieluigi As far as the preservation itself is concerned, I'd agree that video games are in a pretty good spot: relatively few are "lost media". It's not perfect, but we've got exhaustive collections of ROMs for 40-year-old consoles, and there's a lot of awareness and effort around preservation now- in this regard, video games have caught up with TV and movies, despite their younger age.

Different people have different ideas of what "preservation" means, though, and it can possibly water things down when all these different definitions are being thrown around.

If we're talking about being able to purchase a legitimate copy of whatever game we want (not sure that counts as "preservation", but I support it regardless!), then video games are lagging way behind, based on the stats Gamecuber shared. Though even there, things are improving: look at how many older games are available on the likes of Steam, compared to where things were 20 years ago!

And then the more complete, contextual approach you mentioned... that's casting a wide net, but these things are definitely worth preserving as well!

As long as I have my own collection of media preserved I'm good.