Deus Ex creator Warren Spector has “literally dumpster dived” to help with game preservation

Following a report by Game Developer on the ESA’s refusal to budge during a hearing on easing copyright restrictions around academia’s remote access to legacy games, Deus Ex creator Warren Spector has written for the website on his own frustrations with, and efforts to aid, game preservation. Channeling some of the classic immersive sim resourcefulness he helped pioneer, he writes that he’s “literally dumpster dived to retrieve information other developers have simply thrown away, believing it to be worthless.”

“The history of how a game has been made is critical to academics and authors of the present and future,” writes the man who correctly assessed Zelda: Breath Of The Wild to be an immersive sim, “A medium's history isn't just in the work product - it's in the work that went into making the product.”

To address this issue, Spector has set up an archive at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, which you can find here. He’s donated all materials associated with his gameography to the center, as have “other developers,” including Richard Garriot. “I've also literally dumpster dived to retrieve information other developers have simply thrown away, believing it to be worthless. That material is also in the Center.” Spector goes on to link a list of other organisations aiding efforts with their own archives.

If you’ve kept up the hearing, you’ll know that the ESA were especially reluctant - and dare I say, pig ignorant - to budge on copyright restrictions around games, fearing helping academics and preservationists would lead to some sort of horrific future where people are allowed to have fun with old games. “We’re likely to see a situation like the ‘online arcade’ that I’ve been warning about for the last several proceedings,” said ESA lawyer Steve Englund.

“As far as fears of people willy-nilly downloading games and game materials from videogame archives,” writes the man who made videogame crates the legend they are today, “there's an obvious answer to this non-problem: Only allow people to access games and other materials on-site at a physical location.” It’s a specious argument, he continues, to say that “people can just set up a fake location to qualify. Research centers around the world deal with control of information issues every day and there are solutions in place.”

Again, you can read Spector’s full piece over at Game Developer here, and read our coverage of the hearing here. If you’re wondering what happened to that nice Adam Jensen fellow, voice actor Elias Toufexis bid goodbye to the character earlier this year, calling the industry “a disaster zone” which, as the game journalism council obliges me to point out on pain of death, was absolutely not the outcome anyone asked for.