I don’t need to tell you how many remakes have been coming out over the last few years. You already know. You won’t typically see them crack the top ten list, but if the games weren’t selling well, you wouldn’t be seeing them remade like they are. A recent one I noticed is Ty the Tasmanian tiger. That game didn’t sell well when it initially launched back in(2003?) Although I suppose it sold well enough to earn a single sequel, the game never found a legacy beyond that. It was a respectable, decent platformer at launch, but even back then it wasn’t considered groundbreaking, and certainly didn’t seem to have much of a fanbase. A few months after the game launched, I never heard about it again…
Yet here we are 20 years later and Ty makes a triumphant return. This article isn’t about him or his game. He’s just an example. What I find interesting is that although Microsoft and Nintendo seem keen to lean into it, Sony pumped the breaks on bringing their old titles forward into the new age. In 2015 they began releasing a steady stream of PS2 classics, upscaled to 1080p for the PS4. But after about a little over 50 titles across a couple of years, the stream dried up, and we are left with a long wish list of PS2 exclusive games that remain on that old system. Even some of the all time greats, like Metal Gear Solid 2, or Spider Man 2. Not only the greats, but many of the B games from that era were good enough to warrant a modern play through, like Maximo or Way of the Samurai.
Even playing these games in an illegal way is difficult. PS2 era emulation is imperfect, and lets be honest, as easy as emulation is, it would be much more satisfying to play it on a a legitimate platform and spend real money on it. Some of my favorite games of all time are stuck on the PS2, and even though the companies that made them are still around, the effort to preserve them isn’t.
Its strange how this lack of preservation compares across hardware platforms. Sony seems to care very little (unless the game is going to get completely remade), Nintendo has a long history or SORT OF preserving their games, and Microsoft, strangely enough, seems more driven to keep these games alive. Although they announced in 2019 that they were done adding title to the library of backwards compatible games, they showed a strong effort compared to their competitors. All told, Microsoft brought forward 42 original Xbox games to work across all of their modern console platforms. 42 is a paltry number compared to the 996 titles released in total for the system, but it is still far more than Sony or Nintendo have brought forward from that generation. I have trouble holding Microsoft to the fire on this one, to be honest. There were very few excellent Xbox exclusives in that generation.
They performed far better with their Xbox 360 library. They brought forward a total of 577 games from that system to their modern platforms. Xbox 360 had over 2000 games total, but we as gamers can be honest, no console has more than 500 truly good games. What Microsoft did was select the top 25% of the titles from that generation and bring them forward. I think that’s a hugely respectable effort. As a casual student of history, I understand that most of what we do as people doesn’t get passed down through the ages. As cruel as it sounds, not every poem deserves to be preserved. Not every book, not every movie, not every play. People and time both passively work together to weed out the not-so-great works that we as a society make. The greatest works among us are preserved. Thats ok. Some video game historians believe everything should be preserved. I understand the thoughts and intentions behind that, but it goes against human nature. If we are honest with ourselves, we don’t want EVERYTHING preserved, we just want the things we love.
A lot of people like to vent their frustrations with Nintendo about preservation, but they are actually doing the same thing with their libraries. The truly good games from the NES era are playable. There might be a total of 25 games from that entire era that actually hold up and are fun today. Even among that list, which should include The Legend of Zelda and the first Mario Bros, those games barely hold up today. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still fun, but they hardly compare to any respectable modern indie effort. The Super Nintendo library is the same. There were a lot of games that came out for that system, and many of them are being lost time. But the truly great among them, Nintendo has very lovingly preserved. A part of me balks at Nintendo hiding these behind their online subscription service, but I think that's actually the best path forward for something like this. Even as a huge Super Mario World fan, I don’t know how motivated I would be to actually pony up $5 to own that game on my Switch. I much prefer to subscribe to their service and get Super Mario World and the rest of that respectable Super Nintendo library available to me as an added bonus. It makes those games wonderful little experiences to play on the side, to revisit and appreciate, rather than invest actual money and sink in gobs of precious time.
I can’t end this article without mentioning the PC. Obviously, the best efforts are being done there. I can’t be bothered to list the number of emulators and classic stores that offer many of the games from every possible gaming era. It’s an embarrassment of riches if you know where to look. That presents its own problems, of course. Its like venturing into deep space. Windows is a wild west or compatibility, drivers, and ecosystems and perhaps always will be, but in an era where everything is becoming a closed garden, having a wild jungle nearby feels refreshing.
The PS2 is one of my all-time favorite systems, and home to some of the best games I will ever play. Some of those games are being lost to time. But maybe thats just part of this whole process. Maybe some of this isn’t supposed to last forever. Maybe some it will get passed on to my kids through a simple story and description from my own mouth over a nostalgic dinner conversation, and then maybe they won’t remember cause my kids couldn’t care less about the games I used to love. But if I look at the big picture, thats what time is doing to all of us. Our own bodies and everything we make, only the truly great things remain.
