By Nelson Schneider - 01/10/15 at 04:07 PM CT
The Internet Archive, also known as “The Wayback Machine,” started archiving retro videogames in 2013 and making them available via in-browser streaming. What started with ROMs for ancient consoles and arcade machines has now spread into the realm of old DOS games formerly dominated by GOG.com, the Polish company formerly known as Good Old Games and owned by ‘The Witcher’ franchise developer, CD Projekt.
I am a huge proponent of archiving old games and making them available for free to a modern audience for posterity’s sake. However, unlike old console games, where the emulators have been rock solid for years, DOS emulation is still a bit of a black art. I’m not sure if the Internet Archive is truly up to the task of maintaining such a library. When GOG.com started selling old, out-of-print DOS games online, they only picked the best of the best and made sure each title was in full working order via DOSbox emulation before presenting them to the public. Without monetary stakes, does the Internet Archive really have a driving commitment to ensure these antique games are all up to par? A number of the DOS games added to the Internet Archive have reported audio corruption and other issues that would never make it into a finished GOG.com product.
Furthermore, the Internet Archive’s goal of archiving everything ensures that there will be lax quality control throughout the process. Even the way each section of the Internet Archive’s Software Collection is organized looks like a digital hoarder’s hard disk threw up instead of the tidy compartmentalization one would expect from a website with “Archive” in its name. And let’s not forget that archiving everything literally means archiving EVERYTHING, be it a beloved classic or an absolute bomb. With the amount of pure garbage – the type of duds that don’t have swarms of lawyers scrambling to protect their IP rights and continuing commercial value (because they have no value) – finding its way into the Internet Archive’s collection, should we start calling them “Bad Old Games?” Of course, even a cursory glance at the Archive’s DOS collection reveals a number of good old games that didn’t make it onto Good Old Games before they became GOG.com and started selling more Indie games and movies than Old games: Stuff like the “Eye of the Beholder” trilogy, “The Lost Vikings,” and “The Oregon Trail.”
Between the horrible organization and the huge amount of crap, shareware, and demos all mixed together into one big, indecipherable pile, the Internet Archive’s Software Collection still has a long way to go. However, the fact that someone cares enough about the preservation of old videogames to even make the attempt is a positive step in the right direction. I wish the curators luck and look forward to seeing how future revisions of the site’s interface and improvements to the in-browser DOS emulator improve upon the current situation.
