Burning the Library of Alexandria

I'm not sure if it's really dawned on people yet that the retro gaming world suffered a horrific blow this January. I'm talking about the fall of Megaupload and the subsequent abandonment of Snesorama.us - a crippling one-two punch to the archival of classic video games as an art form.

If you're unfamiliar with the whole situation, Megaupload was one of the most popular file lockers on the internet from 2005 until January of this year.  In addition to countless legal files and personal content, Megaupload was the host of choice for pirates and file-sharers the world over.  You almost couldn't run a Google search for an album, movie, or game without turning up dozens of blogs and forums dedicated to uploading digital content to Megaupload.  Kim Dotcom's brainchild offered it all - huge file limits, nearly unlimited download speeds, unobtrusive ads, and short wait times.  There were even freeware utilities (JDownloader) designed to make Megaupload and its imitators completely automated affairs.

One of the communities that eventually grew around Megaupload was Snesorama.us.  The site started out as a small-time ROM outlet, offering the same throttled direct downloads of illegal ROMs that countless other sites in the early 2000s served up.  Thanks to the encouragement of the site administration, however, the site's forum members began uploaded games to file lockers and cataloging them by platform, genre, and file type.  It was a limited effort at first, but - thanks to some mysterious kind of obsessive internet zeitgeist - it turned into one of the greatest retro community archival efforts in recent memory.

At the height of its popularity in late 2011, Snesorama's tireless volunteers had uploaded essentially complete sets for every system under the sun to online file lockers - mostly Megaupload and a few others.  PSX, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube - you name it. Most importantly for retro gaming, the site offered a stunning variety of Sega CD, Saturn, Dreamcast, PC-Engine CD, and NeoGeo games.  The site was a digital Library of Alexandria for retro gaming, allowing curious gamers to experience the most impossibly obscure games for obscure systems.  Want to play Stellar Assault or Hyper Duel for the Sega Saturn, but don't want to spend $200+ to import it used from a Japanese game shop?  Snesorama.  Want to experience insanely rare, impossible-to-find games like many of the PC-Engine CD releases?  Snesorama.

Even more amazing than its archival effort, Snesorama was home to a variety of homebrew and original hobbyist efforts for older systems.  TuxtheWise's Dreamcast Resurrection project offered streamlined Dreamcast ISOs with re-ordered, optimized file layouts that actually provided better performance than the original retail GD-ROMs.  The original Xbox's vast array of hard-to-find, grey-area homebrew projects such as the fantastic Streets of Rage Remake v5.0, Quake 1, 2, and III: Arena ports, Beats of Rage mods, and obscure emulator builds were all easily available as well.

The point of all this is that - regardless of your beliefs on file-sharing and copyright law - Snesorama and Megaupload together had achieved something that isn't even attempted by the video game industry at large: a meaningful archive of video game history.  Bits and boards are rotting as the months turn to years, and only certain privileged retro games are seeing re-releases in newer mediums.  But even then, petty legal conflicts are changing the very nature of the games we know and love.  Yes, Crazy Taxi is on XBLA, but what's Crazy Taxi without the Offspring soundtrack?  The only way to truly preserve these games is to preserve the original releases in timeless digital formats, accessible to future generations.

Snesorama was working to achieve that.  But a combination of media panic and corporate greed led to the shutdown of Megaupload and the destruction of a retro gaming heaven.  While some of those rare games and homebrew projects maintain an Internet presence through other sites, many others existed on Snesorama/Megaupload and nowhere else, and are lost...for now.  There certainly is no alternative that provides the same level of documentation and organization that Snesorama featured in its prime.

Please understand that I'm not condoning piracy of modern consoles and other media.  I see sharing ISOs and ROMs of old, abandoned games as largely a victimless crime.  When you download an ISO of Thunder Force V for the Saturn - a game that is out of print in all formats - who are you hurting?  Even the aforementioned Japanese resellers coexisted with sites like Snesorama - there will always be a collector community that demands physical copies to satisfy their desires.  The digital duplicates live on for everyone else.

This is an issue that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.  When I consider the number of legal obstacles (and apparent lack of interest) that are hindering large-scale archival and preservation of video games through official channels, the cynic in me is already looking for the next Snesorama.