Ethan Lee has been keeping your favorite indie games running for years by porting them to Linux. Now he wants developers to start thinking about “maintenance” instead of “remasters.”
Ethan Lee has been keeping your favorite indie games running for years by porting them to Linux. Now he wants developers to start thinking about “maintenance” instead of “remasters.”
I appreciate that many older games are still available on Steam either “maintained” as in the article or “remastered”. Someday soon I will buy Total Annihilation…again…on Steam this time.
But I do not understand why games are seen as disposable, temporary media. Sure the latest titles are flashy but there are plenty of fucking awesome older games that are still fun to play. And as physical media disappears it becomes much more important for the gaming industry to stop pulling the ladder up behind themselves. History matters. Old <> bad.
There should be an equivalent to the classic rock stations for video games. I greatly appreciate the efforts of the MAME, archive.org and Mr. Lee to keep the classics alive.
What you say reminds me of this GDC talk. There’s a great analogy comparing the experience of buying a movie from 1989 vs a game from the same year. Why don’t companies just embrace emulation and treat it like we do video codecs?
Thanks for that link, very interesting.
Seems like the game companies sort of allow the emulation…unofficially. It should be part of their actual business and profits and emulation looks like a great path to that.