Game Not Over

Posted Tuesday 17th February 2009 by Kerry in Uncategorized.

Preserving cultural heritage usually involves painstaking work on crumbling books and fading oil paintings, so I was surprised to hear that the European Union has just given 4 million Euros to preserve arcade classics such as Pac Man and Donkey Kong.  Apparently new technology is developing at such a rate that some of these games could be lost forever as consoles and software become obsolete, so computer historians are developing new emulation software to keep the games alive.

KEEP, which stands for Keeping Emulation Environments Portable is a project designed to come up with emulation software that will not be beaten by the tides of technology.  A stable general emulation platform will replicate the functions of hardware, storage and operations of outdated computing platforms allowing Space Invaders and Asteroids to be played on modern consoles and multimedia players.

Experts in the field have dubbed the potential loss of digital heritage as a “cultural catastrophe” and insist that the new general purpose emulator should itself avoid becoming outdated by considering the development of video games.  Whilst Pac Man can be offered to future generations in an arcade style museum, games such as Legend of Zelda, which has a narrative and takes many hours to complete, need to be presented in a different manner.  Here’s hoping that KEEP can rise to the challenge so we can play any game created from the comfort of our own homes.

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