Hello. My name is Travis Arbon and welcome to Game Flow, a collection of audio essays about the culture of video games and experiences with gaming. Today’s essay is: The Importance of Ports. If you have an essay you’d like to submit to the collection, head over to gameflowpod.com or send an email to [email protected].

Do you ever feel nostalgia for something that you have no connection to?

I do, and frequently. It’s my greatest curse, and I’m pretty sure it runs in my family. Growing up my mom was always taking me to antique stores and yard sales. It was like a treasure hunt, and half the value gleaned didn’t come from the items uncovered, but from the stories and passion people shared along the way.

But there’s something about old technology, or in this case, old video games, that triggers my unwarranted nostalgia bug like no other.

I own a lot of consoles, most of which were released before I was either conscious or alive. There’s just something about the satisfying click of a cartridge, the gleam of an early-generation CD, the jaunty chiptunes of an old game soundtrack that sparks my love of video games.

But I think the biggest reason I cling to and collect old games and consoles is that they’re fading from the world - and fast.

If you’ve ever read The Lord of the Rings series, you know that there’s a plot thread underpinning the saga. The age of Hobbits and Elves and ancient knowledge is being slowly replaced by the age of Men. It’s a nostalgic and magical and mournful process all at the same time.

Now, Tolkien's point here speaks to a variety of different themes, but I believe we’re undergoing a similar process within the world of video games. Every generation is an age, so to speak, and as the generations continue at their unrelenting pace, our connection to the past slowly diminishes until it disappears.

One day, eventually, the last Playstation 1 will stop functioning. No matter, we’ll just play on the Playstation 2. But what happens when the last PS2 ceases to exist? There are even fewer backwards compatible Playstation 3s. And only a portion of Playstation 1 games are playable on PS4 via downloads.

That’s to say nothing of the games themselves. All physical media will eventually decay. Discs will rot and break. Cartridges will corrode or lose their internal charge. Everything ends eventually.

There will come a time when the last NES game ceases to function, the last NES controller stops working, the last NES console lies broken, and the last person who cares enough about the NES to maintain it, dies.

And with that person, the original intended experience of a work of art dies too.

Games are in a unique position compared to a medium like movies, because they’re inherently built to run in a specific fashion on specific hardware. Films can adapt to changing technology much more easily because the data exists in a base, malleable format. Whether that’s analogue film reels or standardized digital file types, a movie need only change its form in order to live on.

But a game is much more than that. Games are developed to run on specific hardware architectures and operating systems. Certain coding tricks may rely on the quirks of a target platform. The feel of a character’s movement may be tied directly to a certain controller. A game may have been designed using a now defunct engine that no machines today are compatible with.

Porting a game forward doesn’t mean merely copy and pasting code, it means rewriting the core of the game for a new technological paradigm. And what happens when the paradigm shifts so radically that everything becomes incompatible overnight? You have a nightmare scenario of cultural erasure.

Certainly, movies have faced their own preservation challenges. Very few films exist from the earliest stages of the technology. Thousands upon thousands of original cuts have been lost to fires or rot over the decades.The shift from analogue to digital formats left many movies in the dust without a hope of a transition because the companies that hold the rights are gone or see little value in doing so. There’s definitely a loss there.

But movies’ origin on analogue media and comparative simplicity in digital form means they survive paradigm shifts much better. While there have been various types of film and projection standards over the past century, the fundamental mechanical ideas remain.

Playing an old film reel on modern hardware is a matter of finding a projector that can support the reel’s dimensions and light requirements, and then viewing the movie as directly represented on the analogue media.

Playing DS game Yoshi Touch and Go on a PC means using specially created emulator software that has to translate the unique elements of the DS hardware - the two screens, the touch screen, the microphone - onto a platform with an entirely different input and display mechanism. You lose a good deal of the original experience in the process.

To combat this, we need ports and we need as much backwards compatibility as possible.

In my dream world, every game ever made would get ported to PC. We’d have massive teams working around the clock on preserving as much of the original experience as possible with new technology. The focus would be on long-term compatibility and staying ahead of the technical curve.

I know it’s a total fantasy. The reality of our situation is that we live in a world where corporations control the production, distribution and preservation of art.

Private collectors, certain groups, rom sites and emulation communities help somewhat with the preservation aspect. And the thousands of ambitious indie developers ensure that, more than ever, games are in the hands of artists instead of companies.

But it will never be enough.

Because none of us control the platforms. None of us control the marketplaces. None of us control the internet. In fifteen years, we could live in a world where Microsoft has axed compatibility with all current Windows applications. Who’s going to write a Neo Geo emulator?

We could live in a world where Valve is defunct and Steam no longer exists, and ninety percent of games listed there are never accessible again. Who’s going to make sure Euro Truck Simulator is still available for download?

This isn’t some speculative future. This is the present. In 2018, Nintendo is in the process of shutting down the Wii Shop Channel. There are games made specifically for the Wii store that will be lost to time. Real people sunk their lives into making these games, and only a handful of us will remember their creations.

Not everything can, or maybe even should, live forever. Certainly no one has archived every single film produced since the 19th century. And I’m not one to gnash my teeth at the inevitable progress of technology. Broad technological paradigm shifts have the potential to transform and improve countless lives.

But I do believe that there’s value in preserving the cultural legacy we’re building here. Gaming is still in its infancy. We’re still only at the beginning of what’s possible with video games and it’s vital that we maintain a record for future artists to look back on, reference, analyze and build upon. And that means preserving the worthwhile as well as the seemingly worthless.

I can open my copy of Clockwork Knight for the Saturn and I can see not just the disc with the game, but also the manual with the art that someone drew and the flavor text that someone wrote. There’s even a section for writing notes and sharing with a friend. It’s a time machine, a snapshot of a specific group of people at a certain point in their existence. And it represents a point on the ever-expanding timeline of the history of video games. One just like millions of others, but unique in its own way.

So bring on the ports. Bring on all the ports. Every time a game gets ported to a new platform we should be cheering instead of complaining that it isn’t something new.

Because every ported game extends the lifespan of someone’s work. Someone out there is playing that game for the first time. Someone else is playing it again and preserving the memory.

Maybe we can’t save everything; maybe we shouldn’t. But maybe we should try.

That’s it for this edition of Game Flow. Thank you to Sylendanna on Soundcloud for letting me use the track “Last May” on this show.  If you have an audio essay that you’d like to submit to the podcast, send an email to [email protected]. Feel free to head to the website gameflowpod.com to leave a comment, or reach out on twitter through @TravisArbon. And make sure to subscribe and leave a review via your podcatcher of choice.

Next Week: Reviews and Rankings - Chasing the Dragon