But the damage that removing ROMs from the internet could do to video games as a whole is catastrophic. Many game developers and people who have otherwise made video games a major part of their lives, especially those who grew up in low-income households or outside a Western country, wouldn't have been inspired to take that path if it wasn't for ROMs. Entire chapters of video game history would be lost if ROMs and emulation didn't preserve games where publishers failed to. And perhaps most importantly, denying people access to ROMs makes the process of educating them in game development much more difficult, potentially hobbling future generations of video game makers.
"As a professor, I very frequently see students spinning their tires trying to solve problems that were already solved in 1985," Bennett Foddy, who teaches at New York University’s Game Center and is the developer of games like QWOP and Getting Over It, told me in an email. "And just as you would if you were teaching painting or music (or math), what you do as a teacher is you send them to the library to study the old classics, to see what they did right and wrong. That’s the only way we can make progress in the sciences, the humanities, or in the creative arts."
The problem is that even though NYU has a good collection of classic console hardware and games, it only covers a minuscule proportion of the total history of games. It doesn't include 8- and 16-bit computer games, which were distributed on magnetic media which has long since been corrupted. It doesn't include coin-operated games, which are prohibitively expensive for a library even today, and which are harder to access than ever now that arcades are practically gone. And, of course, most people who are getting into games don’t have access to NYU’s library at all.
"If I was teaching poetry, I could send a student to read nearly any poem written since the invention of the printing press, but in games my legal options limit me to, I would guess, less than 1 percent of the important games from history," Foddy said
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"I learned to use a hex editor to change palettes too, and was happy to have edited Dig-Dug's palette to better resemble the arcade game," Moffitt said. "Picking apart older games by disassembling them and looking at their graphics with tile viewers is an important part of learning about game design and development techniques, even when working on newer platforms."
What is really beyond the pale, according to Foddy, is that Nintendo's lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits is shutting down sites or forcing them to remove all ROMs from their site, even though Nintendo ROMs make up only a tiny fraction of the content on those sites.
"Most of what Emuparadise was hosting was work by companies that are now defunct and which have little or no chance of being sold legally," Foddy said. "This is one of those situations where copyright law just seems busted—though I assume they’re legally in the right, the companies bringing these takedowns are just committing massive cultural vandalism, in my view."
Been seeing a lot of good journalistic articles about this event lately. Thought I would be timely and take this opportunity to share at least one of them.
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