What the past will look like someday.
(Originally published July 29, 2001. This was the first post I ever made on my first weblog, now defunct. Republished here verbatim.)
While moving into my new house, I discovered my old Playstation console in a drawer. "Spyro 2" was still inside -- it was the only game I ever really played, except for the original "Spyro the Dragon" before it. That was good for a few nostalgic moments, but then it went back in the drawer.
Then today, while shopping for completely unrelated housewares, I stumbled across "Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon" or some such nonsense. Against my girlfriend's well-reasoned objections ("it's childish," "I'll never see you," "you love that damn little dragon more than you love me," and so forth), I bought it, hurried home, plugged everything in, and tried it.
BANG! The game refuses to play, complaining that the console "may have been modified". This is actually true -- when I first got the console, I modded it and went into heavy collect-at-all-costs mode, burning any CD I could get my hands on. But it got old quickly because I never got into any of the games, and they all quickly gathered dust. You might think it would be cheaper and easier to simply rent the games at Blockbuster long enough to discover that they were crap, and you would be right, but that sort of rational thinking means nothing to a geek, especially one who can't help collecting things. And so it went: find, burn, play, discard, lather, rinse, repeat.
Until I met Spyro.
Spyro, if you've never seen it, is a stupid little game. You're a little purple dragon who goes around collecting gems, solving puzzles, and breathing fire and ramming your head into a variety of monsters, who proceed to die in cute ways. It is not gory, not bloody, and does not involve blowing shit up, thus breaking my cardinal rule of video games. ("If it doesn't involve blowing shit up, it's too much like work.") But I loved it anyway, and I always will. And to make sure that I wouldn't wear it out, I conscientiously made a backup and never played with the original disc.
When Spyro 2 came out, I snatched it up within days at the local Funcoland (wow, do they still exist?), paying full retail price and never once complaining. My attempts to make a backup failed (the disc never booted), but I blamed my CDRs and didn't think too much about it, and somewhat nervously proceeded to play with the original disc.
Fast forward to today. Now, not only can I not make a backup of my legitimately-purchased disc, I can't even play the damn thing. Apparently, someone has decided that it's not enough to prevent me from making a backup (which could have *gasp* been shared with friends, if I had any friends who still played Playstation games); I actually must be punished retroactively for modding my console in the first place.
Without boring anyone with the details, suffice to say that after a few Google searches, some missteps, and about 3 hours of cursing, I now have two copies of Spyro 3: the original disc, which refuses to play on anything but a genuine, untouched Sony Playstation console, and the backup, which displays an ugly crack screen when it first boots up, but plays on anything.
It plays on anything. Right now, today, all that means to me is that it plays on my dirty little console, which I'm sorry I ever modded in the first place. (I would have gotten just as much out of it if I'd left it alone, since I bought legitimate copies of the only 2 -- now 3 -- games I ever played more than once.) But what does that mean in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?
Stay with me, this is about to get really important.
I am one of the few people in the world to own an actual, physical Apple //e in working condition. My original one is long since gone, but last year I bought another one from some guy who had a connection at some elementary school that was (finally!) replacing them. Having so splurged on the hardware, I was disappointed to learn that very few of my original floppies had survived -- years of neglect and harsh conditions, a flood, being confiscated by police, and moving 7 times will do that to you. Luckily, all the games I'd ever bought and more are available online, if you know where to look. The catch? They're all cracked copies. The original copy-protected versions couldn't be digitized, or even if they could, the cracked versions were much easier to digitize, and they work with the Apple //e emulators, and they work with the software that can copy them back onto real 5.25 inch floppy disks (the kind that actually flop, and did you know that Verbatim still sells them?) -- so the pirated versions with their ugly crack screens and their pointless ego-enhancing animation, those are the ones that survive.
(Digression: every time I see a web site that has one of those "skip intro" Flash animations, I think of those old Apple //e crack screens. It's a similar concept, really. When you boot the disk (go to the site), you're anxious to get to use the great program (web site), but before you can do that, you have to suffer through the cracker's (web developer's) gratuitous little flash of ego. Maybe that's why they call it "Flash".)
So what does it mean that my backup copy of Spyro 3 plays on anything? It means it can and will be digitized, and it can and will be reproduced. Not by me, but just in general. Someday, when the Playstation console is as hard to come by as a working Apple //e is now, some geeks who grew up playing Playstation games will go into heavy collect-at-all-costs mode, and they'll start making the celestial Playstation game archive to end all archives. Maybe it's already started; I have no idea. But it's inevitable, and it will be digital, it will be infinitely reproducible, and the games will be played on the next generation of Playstation-emulators-for-the-Pentium-9.
(This is not a new idea. The MAME project is already doing this for the arcade games of the 80's and 90's. And they're running into the same issues: original, genuine arcade boards have nasty encryption and other protection on them, but cracked and bootleg versions are much easier to emulate. Guess which gets emulated first, while the other may or may not get emulated at all?)
Anything that is infinitely reproducible can survive. Everything else will fall apart, get broken, get lost in the move, and be forgotten. If it can't be copied, it won't make it to the next medium, and that's a problem because no medium lasts forever.
Sonys and Broderbunds of the world, pay attention: the only long-term effect of copy protection is to ensure that those who defeat it are immortalized. Long after my Playstation console falls apart, long after all the original, legitimate, uncopyable Playstation discs have crumbled into dust, long after the no-doubt-teenager who cracked Spyro 3 has grown up and joined polite society and found better things to do with his time, Spyro the Dragon will be remembered. Unfortunately, it will also be associated with that damn ugly crack screen, because no other versions will exist. This is what the past will look like someday. And we'll just shrug, skip intro, and get on with it. [diveintomark]
6:51:54 AM 
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