To paraphrase a spooky line from Konami's classic Silent Hill 2, there was a game here. It's gone now. That game was P.T.

Not only did Konami remove P.T., the "playable teaser" for Silent Hills, from the PlayStation 4's online store last month, the Japanese publisher outright wiped the game from Sony's servers. So, if you delete the game to make room for more digital goods on your PS4, you can never get it back. Nobody can ever download it again. Konami has digitally murdered a work of art.

This is a tremendous shame because even though it was an elaborate ad for Silent Hills, P.T. was one of the best games of 2014 and one of the best things to come out of Konami in years. But Silent Hills, which was set to revive the flagging horror series, is now dead, a victim of the falling out between Konami and its golden boy of 30 years, Hideo Kojima (pictured).

Best known as the creator of Metal Gear Solid, Kojima was set to work on the title with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, Walking Dead star Norman Reedus, and rumor has it, manga artist Junji Ito. But now, thanks to Konami apparently moving away from video games to focus on gambling and health spas, we'll never find out what that team of artists could've conjured.

It's tragic that one of the big-name video game makers of the past three decades is turning its back on fans, and frustrating them by killing their favorite franchises and good will in the process. But P.T.'s sudden disappearance is the big issue here, and highlights the industry's growing preservation crisis. Digital distribution, as Konami demonstrated, has a dark side, in that a company can yank a game offline at any point for whatever reason.

Konami is hardly alone in this matter. EA recently announced that it's "winding down support" for four free-to-play, all-digital PC titles—Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield Play4Free, Need For Speed World, and FIFA World—because they're "not as popular." Maybe if those games had physical copies, their removal wouldn't sting as much—at least you could still play them offline. But even if that were the case, precious few companies are taking steps to ensure that today's games can be played years from now. Games have been pretending to be movies (much to our chagrin) for a while now, but it has yet to inherit Hollywood's better qualities, like self-survival and a respect and record of its history.

Tumbling Down, Tumbling Down…

The medium itself is a big part of the problem. For the most part, movies enjoy the luxury of linearity. They're shot on film or digital and it's simple to transfer them to multiple formats like DVD, Blu-ray, or digital files. Video games, in comparison, have been a mess of differing, incompatible formats with tons of different types of cartridges, CD-ROMs, GD-ROMS, and UMDs spread across generations of various machines. It's a conservationist's (and collector's) nightmare. To make matters worse, online-only games and components are ephemeral by their very nature.

As games move further online, complicated by season passes, piecemeal DLC, and draconian DRM, it will become more difficult, if not impossible, to enjoy them again down the road. Fifteen (or even five) years from now, will you be able to revisit Bloodborne, which depends on online servers for social features like multiplayer and leaving users warning messages? What about Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn? Or any MMO? What's going to happen to all that DLC that you can only buy on online stores? All those costumes for Street Fighter IV and extra missions for Fire Emblem: Awakening? And what of patches? Will any surviving physical copies of the disastrous Halo: Master Chief Collection work six or 10 years from now without 343 Industries' (supposedly) game-fixing patches? What about Mortal Kombat X? What about your 200-game Steam library?

It doesn't help that companies are in the habit of losing the original code either, like Konami did with Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3, or Square with Kingdom Hearts. Licenses also expire. Nintendo 64 classic GoldenEye will likely never appear on Wii U's Virtual Console because James Bond rights are a quagmire. And Sega let the Ferrari license expire so OutRun 2 (above), OutRun 2006, and OutRun Online Arcade—three versions of one of the best racing games of all time—are stuck in limbo. It also doesn't help that many developers have closed shop or have been absorbed by other companies, which makes re-releases nearly impossible. Konami owns the entirety of Hudson Soft's library—Adventure Island, Bomberman, Bonk— but since Konami only cares about Metal Gear and soccer games now (if it cares about games at all after Metal Gear Solid V comes out in September) chances are we'll never see those games again.

Dedicated Cyberpunks

Ideally, if video games are to be considered art, like many purport, they should be treated as such. That includes preserving them for future generations. There's a solution to all this—hacking and emulation. But last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a non-profit digital rights group) reported that the Electronic Software Association (a large, governing group of video game publishers) deemed the preservation and maintenance of inactive services like dead MMOs and online games to be piracy, thus illegal.

It's unsurprising that there is a wide gulf in values between the people who love games and the hostile companies that make them. But without a "legit" method of saving games, then there is no other recourse but for dedicated cyberpunks to fly in the face of an industry hell-bent on throwing away its own history.

The Tecmo Bowl community is a fine example of fans taking matters into their own hands. The PC versions of Halo and Halo 2 are also kept alive through private servers. Konami's original Metal Gear Online (which was part of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence) and Capcom's Resident Evil: Outbreak survive thanks to PlayStation 2 emulators and player-made servers. And Phantasy Star Online, one of the first online console RPGs, lives on PC and Dreamcast thanks to fan-run forums and servers. Interestingly, the Dreamcast's Tamagotchi-like VMU accessory, a piece of hardware, can still be played via emulator.

For what it's worth, some companies are making an effort to keep classics available. HD remasters, for all the flak they get, extend the lifespan of celebrated games like Resident Evil and Final Fantasy X. Sega's partnership with developer M2 has produced some exemplary updates to gems like After Burner, the original OutRun, and Sonic the Hedgehog, redone in 3D for Nintendo 3DS. And Capcom recently re-released The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, a long-lost relic that goes for hundreds of dollars on eBay, on the PlayStation Network for six bucks. That's the closest thing to a big win for Mega Man Legends fans who have been unhappy since the P.T.-like cancelation of Mega Man Legends 3 four years ago.

Magic of the Digital Age

Movies and TV shows are undergoing a distribution revolution and that might help clear up how we'll play games down the line. You can access streaming services like Netflix from a lot of different places through a lot of different devices. Look at what Sony's doing right now with its PlayStation Now service, which allows the streaming of PS1, PS2, and PS3 software across a range of different devices, and what OnLive tried to do some years ago. Having access to a game and being able to play it on anything you own will likely happen sooner or later. That could be a new standard and a vital step in the right direction to keep games alive after companies can no longer make the most money from them.

Ideally, we'll see more forward-thinking attempts like PlayStation Now from other major companies in the future. Hopefully games archivists can secure legal protection to do what they do, too, preferably while avoiding a digital catastrophe similar to the one alluded to at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2. In Hideo Kojima's 2001 sequel, the villains sought to control and censor digital information in order to dominate society. With its deletion of P.T. and erasure of Kojima's name from the upcoming Metal Gear Solid V, Konami has become a real-life bad guy, callous to its own creators and the important cause of cultural conservation.

During MGS2's denouement, protagonist Solid Snake pontificates the value of passing the torch: "Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing." Kojima, way back in 2001, was onto something.

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