The Emotional and Historical Impact of Gaming Emulators
The first video game I remember playing was Sid Meier’s Civilization II. I remember playing it before I fully understood the rules of the game, simply clicking and hitting keys randomly until my settler moved across the map. Soon, however, I was navigating randomly generated digital civilizations that have come to be a cherished part of my childhood. I spent countless hours creating civilizations, fighting wars, and developing the coveted “wonders of the world,” all the while hoping to develop my civilizations far enough to reach the end game: the moon.
It was a couple of years ago that I found the old CD for Civ II, and was beyond excited to try to play it after so many years. I inserted the CD to my laptop (I luckily had a laptop with a disc drive at the time) and was given an error. The CD simply would not play on my modern Windows OS.
Now that time has passed and I know more about computers, I’m sure there is a way to work around this error and still play the CD on a modern computer, but at the time it felt like an enormous loss. All those childhood years of play, washed away by technological obsolescence.
Enter: the Internet Archive’s Console Living Room Collection of emulators.
I started looking around the Internet Archive Console Living Room Collection looking for a game to play for this assignment. I wasn’t entirely familiar with using emulators before this assignment. I’ve watched countless YouTubers use them to port older games for their Lets Play videos, but I’ve never considered using them myself. There’s always been an air of mystery about them– rumors that if you used them, you’d be riddled with viruses, or worse, hunted down by the FBI for copyright infringement or something (which, for many games, there is less of an airtight answer on whether emulations are legal). Needless to say, there was an air of nervousness as I navigated the archive, but this was all lost when I saw it: Civ II.
I’ll be honest when I say I haven’t thought of the game in years. Ever since I found out I couldn’t use the CD, I’d filed it away, left it sitting in an old box. I’d played newer Civilization games of course, but here was my Civilization game. All packed up and able to play right in my browser, for free. It was the Playstation version, slightly different than the PC version I knew, but with one click, the intro music started up and it was like being sent back in time. It was an indescribable nostalgia.
As our world digitizes and console and PC gaming advances past the ability to incorporate older games, the need for a digital archive becomes more and more important. This is where emulators come in. Individuals can upload the contents of their game cartridges or PC files to an online database where other users can then download the contents and play the games themselves. Oftentimes, this is so users can play a console game on their PC, or play a game that is no longer available for whatever reason.
Archives like the Internet Archive allow us to preserve and store emulators like this so that we don’t lose out on a history of gaming that is deeply complex and oftentimes very personal to those involved. As we lose the physical objects of gaming (consoles, cartridges, CDs,) and the software to run them, we are at risk to lose important milestones in gaming culture and in our own personal gaming histories.
In addition to Civ II, I also took a look at an emulator that did more than just port a game to PC, the Knuckles in Sonic the Hedgehog emulator. This emulator shows us a fan-made ROM of Sonic in which the character Knuckles has been patched into the game, allowing you to play as him instead of the titular Sonic character. As the archive states in the description of this emulator:
“In the ROM hacking community, creating a patch that allowed the gamer to play as Knuckles in Sonic the Hedgehog was considered the “Holy Grail of ROM Hacking.” On September 1, 2005, Stealth created a hack that allowed a player to do just that.”
Emulators like this allow us to preserve gaming and coding history in this way. ROM hacking has played an important role in the development of gaming and game development, and to lose important achievements in this practice to time would be a devastation for those involved in the community. While game enthusiasts have been vigilant to preserve games in this way, it does raise the question of what has already been lost without our knowledge– what games with important history have been left behind, unpreserved?
Digital preservation allows us to save what could be lost. There are limits, however. You cannot replicate the physicality of a gaming cartridge with virtual code, and some game features are lost depending on the game and the way it’s been preserved, but there is something to be said about the history and nostalgia of these games we have saved. Even if they are not always a perfect replication of that first experience, they can have an incredible emotional effect on you as you view them.
I would say more, but I think my civilization just built its first library, and I need to go check in on them.
