This summer, the CVGA hosted our first ever cohort of student residents! Each of the residents has composed a blog post about their experiences, and we'll be sharing them over the next week or so.
Our second blog post is from Kiki Verdun, who worked in the area of Digital Game Preservation:
According to a recent study conducted by the Video Game History Foundation, an astonishing number of retro video games–nearly nine out of ten of them–are in danger of being lost. As gaming companies halt the production of aging consoles, they become obsolete. The games that were designed for the consoles become commercially unavailable. With no commercial path for obtaining games, they risk being lost permanently. Luckily, game preservationists–including hobbyists, software developers, and staff in libraries and archives–are hard at work to mitigate this.
This summer, I was fortunate enough to join this effort when I worked as a Game Preservation resident for the University of Michigan’s Computer and Video Game Archive (CVGA). Tasked with researching and implementing strategies for cartridge game preservation, I turned to various online video game preservation communities to learn more about their efforts and figure out how to blend them with archival and digital curation practices.
Cartridges, while one of the hardier storage mediums for video games, are not immune to degradation. While they are not as vulnerable to physical damage as optical disks, they are susceptible to bit rot–the decay of data on storage media–and other preservation issues caused by an unsuitable physical storage environment, such as oxidation. Building on previous efforts in the CVGA to archive digital games, floppy disk based games, and games on cassette tapes, I designed a workflow to image and archive cartridge games.
Github discussions, subreddits, YouTube videos, and retro gaming publications became my go-to source for finding hardware and software to make cartridge game preservation possible. “Cartridge readers”–hardware capable of saving data from cartridges and transferring it to a more stable, modern storage format–were an essential part of the archiving process. Online communities were also invaluable in helping me troubleshoot any issues I had with the hardware and imaging process.
The Sanni Open Source Cartridge Reader is a popular tool for “dumping”, or copying game data, from multiple cartridges. Once copied, this data is then backed up to a hard drive along with any associated assets, including photographs of the cartridge itself, the box art, and manuals. This data is not collected with the intent to distribute it for public consumption, but rather for storage in a dark archive, only to be accessed if the cartridges are damaged, replacement cartridges are unobtainable, and the data needs to be recovered.
The work of game preservationists from a diverse range of fields have enabled libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions to not only back up this irreplaceable data, but also ensure that it remains accessible for years to come.