Dark Side of the Game

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon has had a 1666-week run on the Billboard charts (an ominous number as of this writing.) That's more than 32 collective years of being somewhere within the public consciousness. I'm trying to remember exactly when I bought Dark Side of the Moon. I'm pretty sure it was in 1998. In that year, the album would have had its 25th anniversary, and its 10th anniversary after leaving the Billboard 200 chart following a run of 591 consecutive weeks. I do remember that after hearing this news, my father decreed that I must go out and buy a copy. Not that I should get it as a gift, but to purchase it at retail with my own money. And so the next time we were getting the usual supplies at Costco, he made sure that I stopped at the stacks of CDs and fulfilled his mandate. I understand now what he wanted me to learn from this experience: not only to be exposed to an influential collection of music and a touchstone of his generation, but to understand the significance of the album's longevity. That evening, I put on my headphones for an extended session with rock's most persistent favorite.

That a popular work can stay popular for that long is a remarkable achievement, especially through radically changing tastes and new technological formats. It makes me wonder when a video game will reach that same mark. In recent years I've been concerned about the longevity of games, and whether or not later generations will be encouraged, or even able to play older classics.

Imagine if Dark Side of the Moon stayed forever on vinyl, never making the transition to cassette, CD, or iTunes. It would have been removed from shelves decades ago, ignored by a narrow-minded audience focused only on the new music of the season. Vinyl copies would be a slowly dwindling resource coveted and traded by a devoted niche of collectors.

This is the current state of many classic games that were loved in their time, but are all but lost now. Games that are playable only on dusty old systems, command high prices on Ebay, and may be locked behind their rights holders or dead publishers. If you're a long-time gamer, I'm sure you can think of some examples. You may have bought one in a retro gaming store, or even played a bootleg on an imperfect emulator.

It irks me now when message-board game nerds accuse publishers of making cheap, money-grubbing ports when they announce that they're re-releasing an old game from their vault. Nintendo, Square/Enix, and Sega are common targets of this reactionary disgust. Square/Enix has gone back to the Final Fantasy IV well many times, and each time someone bemoans the idea that they would pander to their horde of fans with yet another port to the newest platform, while their new cutting-edge title still isn't done. It doesn't occur to them that they are not the only generation of gamers out there, and that nobody is forcing them to buy this release. Just because you, hipster 27-year-old played FF4 back when you knew it as FF2 on the SNES, doesn't mean that your 8-year-old niece has had the privilege. Never mind that in this age of skyrocketing production budgets for current-gen platforms, easy ports of classic games help the publishers fund new projects. Nobody is making you buy it, but don't get mad at the publisher for selling it.

From-the-vault releases keep old games fresh in the minds of the gamer public. I have a habit of re-buying Super Mario Bros, the first video game I ever played, whenever it reaches a new platform. I've owned it on NES, Game Boy Advance, and the Wii Virtual Console, and I'll probably keep buying it in the future. Frankly, I don't want to game in a world where I can't buy a fresh new copy of SMB and play it on a current system. Not that I need to, but I want to know that I can, and anyone else can, too.

So I wonder what will be the Dark Side of the Moon for video games; a game that is timeless and perpetually available to the audience. Pac Man? Tetris? Super Mario Bros? Half Life? Have these games, or any other reached that point? Among entertainment media, video games have shown the worst record of preserving their history, but when will the medium be comfortable enough with itself that this is no longer a concern?

What I'm playing:

• Main Campaign: Space Invaders Infinity Gene, Sacred 2
  
• Side Quest: Left 4 Dead, Bookworm