I didn't even know Irem were still a company! Sad to hear that though. Another case of companies not looking towards the future.
This is why projects like MAME really stand out. If companies don't know how to protect and preserve their own history, at least the fans / programmers can.
Amazing about Digital Leisure unable to access the source code for Dragon's Lair. They used to be known as Ready Soft and have been releasing ports of laserdisc games since the late 80s. I wonder if it was a case of saving the media on the old 3 1/2 inch discs of the time and now the data is gone.
Tell me about it !!! Any platform that has come out in the last little while has had Dragon's Lair on it, heck even DVD and Blu-ray players :lol: I thought they would have had the source code.
I think Midway managed to lose the source code to the Arcade Mortal Kombat games, or atleast the first ones. I think that's why when rereleased on more modern systems they are poorly emulated versions. It's sad but true that even companies that had hit games fail to preserve the original materials. I would guess some do (Nintendo perhaps?) but I have a feeling many don't and have even thrown away the materials.
The problem of preservation is back when these games where made, the practices and methods for being able to archive this stuff was not as good as it is in today's world. Now a days companies go to great lengths in archiving their stuff. Hell when I worked for Ubi, post game related task where horrible and could take over a month to do but the point was to make sure that at any date/time in the future someone could take the archive and have the game compiling and running with in an hour (depending on compile time).
There is no forever storage medium... Until hologram storage - and even then who's to say if it would last...
No there isn't but modern storage media is better then what we had in the 90s. As well standard practices at companies have improved over the years. It went from simply just all the files to now having to write out an entire step by step process to setup everything (tools, sdks, etc all on the hdd/disc), how to build and how to run the software. Then usually a few duplicates are made of the media.
places like romnation and similar are going to be the videogames's equivalent of a library... Companies should think about the opportunity of releasing old source/roms to the public like factor 5 did...
aslong as they can still remake a game in twenty years time and sell it for another $10 they will never do that.
Never going to happen. Devs still have ways to get the roms from carts. What I think you will start seeing happen is more store fronts like VC on Wii & PCE/NG/PS1 on PSN getting bigger as a means for company to keep old properties alive. As for releasing source. They can't for console games due to the license/copyright nature of platform SDKs. You will and do see it happen in the PC world and that personally is kind of cool.
