From hunting down missing devs to reverse-engineering ancient game engines, restoring retro games is as painstaking as art conservation.
Gaming has a memory problem, and I don't just mean the price of RAM. While the 0s and 1s that make up game code are immortal, there are any number of barriers preventing modern gamers from playing old games, from incompatibility with modern hardware to rights disputes that leave games trapped in unpublishable limbo. One company devoted to restoring this lost media is SNEG Games, a publisher "focused on reviving classic games from the digital abyss and legal hell." I spoke to Co-Founder Artem Shchuiko to learn more about the painstaking process of resurrecting a dead game.
"The challenge often starts even before we touch the game itself", Shchuiko says. Something as seemingly trivial as securing the rights for an old game could be a quest in itself. He gives an example: "in order to bring Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor back, we had to secure rights from three separate parties: Wizards of the Coast, the original developer, Stormfront Studios, and the original publisher, Ubisoft."
That's actually one of the tamer challenges SNEG has faced. "To bring the Ecstatica games we first had to find the original developer, who had left the games industry more than 20 years ago and moved in a completely different direction - into science and sculpture". Just finding him was detective work, but this was only the first step. "We then had to build a relationship and earn his trust, so that he felt comfortable putting his games in our hands."
Acquiring the rights to another, as-yet unannounced title was even more fraught. "We actually had to reinitiate legal proceedings related to the bankruptcy of a company that didn't exist for more than 25 years, just to create a legal path that would allow us to acquire those rights," Shchuiko says.
And that's just the beginning. "In the majority of cases, the original source code is no longer available," Shchuiko explains, "which means we have to reverse-engineer parts of the game in order to make it compatible with modern operating systems," let alone begin fixing any bugs or accessibility issues the game may have. And in cases when the source code is available, "it may have been written using languages or technologies that are no longer commonly used, and finding developers with the right expertise is a quest within a quest."
Shchuiko calls the process "digital archaeology - dealing with old or incomplete source code, obsolete technologies, missing assets and documentation, and figuring out the chain of title and who owns what." And just like an archaeological expedition, "you rarely know exactly what you're going to find until you start digging."
And all of this is "only the beginning of the road." The kinds of challenges that can crop up are varied and borderline cursed. "Depending on the title, we might end up rewriting parts of the renderer, adding proper controller support, rebuilding compatibility with modern hardware, or finding completely new solutions for systems that were designed 20 or 30 years ago."
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pcgamesn.com/dungeons-and-dragons-the-temple-of-elemental-evil/sneg-interview-preservation
