Back To The Future came out 38 years ago. Now, imagine that suddenly all copies of the film were wiped from existence, and you could never watch it again. What sort of world would we live in if other classics like The Godfather, Alien, or Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill each came with a shelf life consumers were powerless to influence? As an art form we consistently seek to preserve and value, such an oversight would be inexcusably tragic.
Yet this is precisely what continues to happen with video games. We sadly consider the medium throwaway, with corporations seldom interested in preservation as they switch online games off forever and leave years of hard work to rot on dormant hard drives. Some cases involve original source code being lost because studios didn’t understand the historical significance their creations might one day have.
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Square Enixrecently revealed thatChrono Crosswas remastered primarily because, without a new version, the RPG classic might have been lost forever, and it wanted to ensure the game was available in some form aside from laughably expensive physical copies and emulation. No matter the end result, it seemed to care about preserving its history, even if the only ones with any interest in playing this game were hardcore fans returning after decades away. If we want video games to be taken seriously, we need to care about where they came from and where they’re going, and a refusal to value the past stops us from achieving that recognition.
Players also discovered thatAnimal Crossing: New Horizonswill no longer be playable from the year 2060. Take your system offline and push the internal clock forward far enough and the game refuses to function, either because Nintendo has hardwired in some manner of internal lifespan for its charming island adventure or the hardware simply can’t deal with a timeline that far in the future. If that’s the case, hopefully an update can eliminate this weird niggle and alleviate my concerns, but otherwise it fills me with a tangible sense of worry.
You probably think this is a trifling matter since, by the time 2060 rolls around, the Switch and all the games that call it home will be forgotten relics. That’s the entire point though - video games are seen as an expendable art form to be thrown aside the second something more advanced and exciting comes along. We view them as forms of entertainment rather than monuments of culture, an attitude which will permanently doom them to landfills because consumers only ever hold interest for the next big thing.
New Horizons is more than that though, and since release has proven itself to be a valuable cultural touchstone in global history that brought us together when a pandemic made human contact all but impossible. Everyone was playing it in the early months of 2020, and there’s immense worth to be found in how it brought friends and family to a mutual place of companionship when none of us knew how to work from home, adapt to a changing world, or how long this strange phase of our lives was going to last. It warrants preservation for that alone, alongside how it takes the series forward in ways that showcase how much potential the life sim genre really has.
Its lack of continued support and only a single post-launch expansion has put a damper on things, but this inconsistency shouldn’t take away from what the game means to each of us, and how vital it is to a chapter in the medium’s history we’re still experiencing. Already we are discovering means for it to be wiped away when technology peeters out or Nintendo decides it doesn’t need to care anymore. Unlike other mediums, games are beholden to an online ecosystem that stifles their longevity in the womb, with developers knowing that they are piling efforts into temporary pieces of art doomed that will one day cease to exist. Fans will find a way around such eventualities, and have done in the past, but it shouldn’t be down to us to make up for corporate shortcomings that only came to pass in service of greed.
We won’t be talking about Animal Crossing: New Horizons in 2060, although we should be in a place to look back on and remember how much it meant to both us and video games as a whole. Films, music, and literature from the recent or more distant past are still instantly accessible today because said media have matured enough to understand the value of preserving history in the wake of never-ending change. Gaming doesn’t, and until it does, being invested in everything it achieves feels like a complete waste of time.
