Why can’t we play Pong or Spacewar! anymore?
They were built for the tech age, and yet oddly, and rather sadly, have been unable to leverage technology to stay alive. In the history of videogames, Spacewar!, for instance, was a gamechanger and an inspiration. The 1962 game where two craft shoot it out in space, was developed at MIT for the DEC PDP-1 minicomputer. But no other version was ever created or preserved. Since only three PDP-1S are believed to exist, all in the Computer History Museum in California, no average Joe will ever play this game again.
Isn’t it strange that you can watch the Roundhay Garden Scene from 1888, the first motion picture ever made, online, and yet less than six decades after the release of Spacewar!, a majority of the videogames created around that time are unavailable, or unplayable?
Table Tennis, an early game created for Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home videogame console (released in 1972), was turned into a popular arcade game called Pong by Atari. You can play Pong, and the growth in computing power over the years means that it can be played on your browser. But Pong is an exception. Other games created for the Odyssey, notably one called Haunted House, where players collected cards and avoided ghosts to eventually escape from the eponymous house, are essentially lost. You’ll find a game called Haunted House online, but it’s an Atari version “inspired” by the original.
There are games whose makers no longer exist. Other games may have been de-supported, or received shinier sequels targeting later hardware. Internet Archive hosts thousands of these, ranging from beloveds of the late ’80s and early ’90s like Pac-man, Digger and Prince of Persia to the original Leisure Suit Larry. Most of these games are shareware versions, offering limited gameplay free. But many thousands were just lost.
It’s not as though old games do not have an audience. The most-played massively multiplayer online or MMO game in the world is World of Warcraft, first released in 2004.
Games are frequently recreated for new generations of hardware and software. The 1980 arcade shooter Centipede was remastered 31 years later as Centipede: Infestation for the Nintendo Wii. But there just isn’t enough of this.
And then sometimes games are remastered even though the originals are still playable on the same platform. Some of the classic Black Isle Studios role-playing games from the turn of the century (the Baldur’s Gate series, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment) were still playable, with player-created modifications adding quality-of-life improvements, when they were remastered by Beamdog in 2012-13.
It’s not as though other media have been immune to this. A fire in the Fox Studios vault in New Jersey in 1937 destroyed almost all the silent films created by Fox before 1932. What is surprising is that this kind of loss still occurs in these days of source control systems, where source code is generally treated as the greatest asset a game company can have.
Beamdog was unable to create a remaster of the Icewind Dale 2 because the source code of the original 2002 game was unavailable. Even more absurd was the unavailability of the Mass Effect: Pinnacle Station DLC (downloadable content) in the remastered edition released this year. The reason? The source code of this 2009 module was corrupted, and therefore unavailable.
For players, some of these lost games meant so much. Time spent mastering levels, drawing maps, patiently perfecting strategies, sharing stories of progress. The indescribable rush of completing a difficult level (and believe me, they were difficult; the waterfall level in the 1994 Lion King game and the turbo tunnels in the Battletoads games, 1991 onwards, would make Bloodborne’s Orphan of Kos fight seem like a plushy toy in comparison). Memories of frustration and relief, achievement and joy, in a world where you couldn’t look up the internet for instructional videos or read up game Wikis for tips.
On a not unrelated note, a sealed cartridge of Super Mario 64, the bestselling videogame for the 1996 Nintendo 64 console, sold for $1.56 million at an auction in July. That’s the kind of respect we like to see, for these bits of history.