A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

I would hope that we can agree that piracy within the context of brand new games, done by people who could easily afford the games, is distasteful. If you don't agree, hey, fine, but please read onward.

I have a hard time believing that there's anyone out there under the age of I don't know, 35, 40 or so, who doesn't have at least one fond memory of playing a game in an arcade, being mesmerized by the quality of graphics and audio. I was there, I know it well.

In a given arcade, how many of those games did you actually play? How many of them did other people play? Apart from outliers, how many of those games were actually fondly remembered by, well, anyone?

To put it into perspective: A quick grep through the MAME codebase indicates nearly 22 thousand instances of the GAME() macro, which is used solely by pinball machines, electromechanical games, and arcade games - exactly the ones that would be in an arcade. How many can you name?

Now, to tie it back to the original point: How many of those games, do you think, had archives of the game's data kept by the company that created them? More broadly, how many of those companies even still exist?

What I can tell you is that that number is alarmingly closer to zero than the average person might expect. Even major companies like Namco, Sega, Konami, Taito, Capcom and others had abysmal archival practices. How do we know this? Read on.

In the early 2000's, both Konami and Taito issued retro arcade compilations on the PlayStation 2. One of them clearly used a build of MAME, based on unique string identifiers. Another used ROM sets that were clearly originally dumped for MAME. But how do we know that?

We know that because the .ZIP archives of the individual ROM dumps literally still contained the "readme.txt" files that were included by the people who dumped the board. So why, then, would these companies that literally *made* these games, go and use a 'pirated' copy?

The only realistic answer is that they did not, themselves, still have their own data archived. Now, this is not the case for all companies. Nintendo in particular are *meticulous* about preservation. Some Virtual Console releases were better dumps than the available ones.

At the end of the day, the fact that the existence of MAME, even in its infancy at the time, had encouraged people to maintain a global "redundant backup" of the data it documented, was how these companies still had their data available when they wanted to re-release it.

This absolutely isn't intended to go all holier-than-thou on other projects, or other preservation teams. There are ones that are amazing, like the CD-i community, and the Internet Archive folks.

Hidden Palace as well, they do deep-dives into what they get, then release it. Amazing folks. All the same, there are many who hold things to their chest for months, even years, until they get a chance to use that data for their own self-promotion.

Ultimately, if your so-called preservation team is one bad day, one failed hard drive, one missed domain re-registration, or one cloud backup away from not having anything at all preserved, re-think what you claim to be dedicated to, because it isn't what you think.

Just as a final post-script, a point that I omitted: If you're just building up archives of boards, of discs, of floppies, you're not preserving anything. Bit-rot is a thing. Disc rot is a thing. Magnetic coercivity going down over time is a thing.