[game_preservation] How studios dispose of prototypes and libraries

[Devin Monnens]

Not sure how most studios deal with development material, but in a recent
interview with Michael Kelbaugh of Retro Studios, we find out they have an
interesting - and definitive - solution:
"I always like reading the posts about Raven Blade. There's this underground
mystery about that game. When you start reading the blogs and newsgroups and
what have you, there's always this post that says, 'Oh, they're going to
work on Raven Blade' or 'I wonder if they're bringing Raven Blade back?' And
at one point I went back and had them burn the last copy of Raven Blade --
and this was probably two or three years ago -- and I looked at it," says
Michael Kelbaugh, president of Retro Studios..."I just couldn't believe that
we even came close to making anything like that because it was absolutely
horrible."

Despite my game preservation obsession, this brought me a chuckle. I think
we can learn from it.

In other news, there was an article in the Times the other day about how
some Tintin comics have been placed in the back room of the New York Public
Library because they were deemed too racist for visitors. They don't mention
them by name, but the Tintin comics are undoubtedly in the same storage area
as the Uncle Remus children's books. This brings some interesting things
about game preservation and also relates to some other current events. Now
hopefully, this won't get into such a huge long argument that it did on the
WIG SIG mailing list...

Essentially it involves how we deal with games depicting objectionable
material. I think what it comes down to is a situation similar to the Uncle
Remus books, which are horribly offensive by today's standards but which
have historical importance about the culture of the time. I think if you
look at the worst examples from videogames, there's Custer's Revenge which
is used as an example in many game studies books (such as Miguel Sicart's
book on game ethics). I would argue that from a purely formal standpoint,
even though the material is about as offensive as games have become (even in
its crude simplicity), because it is a work referenced by so many people, it
should be archived for that reason alone, but kept in a similar category as
the Uncle Remus books (not that I think there's anything really redeeming
about Custer's Revenge other than an example of what NOT to do - also makes
me wonder if anybody tracked down the developers and asked them what they
were smoking when they made it).

Anyway, I just figured I'd bring these two topics up here to see if anyone
had any reflections or anything they wanted to add.

-- 
Devin Monnens
www.deserthat.com

The sleep of Reason produces monsters.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/game_preservation/attachments/20090821/62b0ce7d/attachment.htm>