Software that lets you play any videogame, even when its hardware has long gone, could preserve parts of cultural history in danger of being lost (Image: Rex)

Software that can be used to play almost any computer game in history is to be developed as part of a European attempt to preserve digital cultural heritage.

The European Union has funded a €4.02 million (£3.6m, $5.2m) project dubbed KEEP, for Keeping Emulation Environments Portable, which will develop new ways to archive digital objects endangered by the relentless march of technology. As well as games, it will work to ensure that other kinds of files and software remain accessible long after the demise of the hardware and software for which they were originally intended.

Emulation involves creating a software package that replicates the functionality of a previous hardware platform, storage medium or operating system, making it possible to use old software on modern hardware. But existing emulators are usually specialised and themselves prone to becoming outdated. KEEP is intended to be the “first general purpose emulator”, designed to be migrated easily to new computing platforms.


Game over

The speed with which digital technologies become obsolete means that even programs from the 1990s are at risk of becoming lost forever, says computer historian David Anderson of Portsmouth University, who will work on KEEP with colleagues from France, The Netherlands, Germany and the Czech Republic.

“Early hardware, like games, consoles and computers, is already found in museums, but if you can’t show visitors what they did by playing the software on them, it’s much the same as putting musical instruments on display but throwing away all the music,” Anderson says. “For future generations, it would be a cultural catastrophe.”

James Newman, one of the leaders of the UK’s National Videogame Archive agrees. “We don’t value our gaming heritage in the same way that we do books or movies – we’re stuck with the model of everything being superceded,” says Newman. The best-maintained collections of old games can be found on auction sites like eBay or in the hands of dedicated amateur collectors, he adds.

Director’s cut

But it’s not enough to just make it possible to play old games in a kind of arcade, says Newman. While basic games such as Space Invaders can be presented without much explanation, he explains, “more recent console games involve playing for many hundreds of hours and feature complex narratives that branch as you make choices. They can’t be presented like that.”

The National Videogame Archive is attempting to capture the culture, as well as the software, of old games. One way to do that is to record commentaries from game developers as they play through a title they helped to make. One example was recorded by the two lead developers of the much-revered James Bond game GoldenEye at the GameCity conference in Nottingham, UK last year.

The result provides a richer way to experience old material than simply playing an outdated game, says Newman. “It was fantastic to get this insight into the way they’d built it, and the little bugs and glitches, and watch them get back into their game.” The National Videogame Archive is also preserving fans’ reactions to games that appeared in magazines and online.