[game_preservation] iPhone Game Preservation

[Devin Monnens]

RE: DVDs

You have to remember that DVDs aren't archival quality ot begin with.
Unless, of course, that was the only copy of the video (or there's something
notable about the menu), you ultimately want something with higher quality.
I don't think even Blu-Ray is archival quality for video.

RE: Film size

I am running into the same problem with my masters for Contra versus Contra
and Counting Bees #2. I honestly don't know if I still have the original
files, but I know I have some of them on an external hard drive. It's simply
too big to fit on DVDs economically and it takes up too much of a chunk of a
hard drive to make the drive useful for anything else. If somebody wants to
talk about selling art, I would say selling the disk drive with the master
production files would be the equivalent of digital art simply because it's
too expensive to copy.

Of course, this raises questions about what should be preserved. Arguably,
we can look at either the piece as an entire work of art or as a system of
parts which can be dissembled and used for other purposes, like taking
pieces from a Risk game to make your own prototypes. Essentially, there are
hacking groups who will take files from new 3D games and dump those into
something like Gary's Mod for Half-Life 2. This means fans and hobbyists can
do a lot of neat things with official production models stored within the
games. There is also of course the game music group as well, who extract
audio and video files to listen to those independently. This creates a
separate set of assets.

Again, I think it goes back to some of the basic questions of preservation
which are finding out why you are preserving the stuff and who you are
preserving it for.



>> Sure, there's the question of whether most of these iPhone games are worth

>> preserving in the first place.

>>

>

> Fun fact: According to my research, there are currently over 13,000 titles

> in the App Store marked "Game". It would cost over US$17,600 to purchase all

> the ones that aren't free.

>

> Don't know if anyone cares. :)

>


A drop in the bucket ;-) Seriously, once you have numbers, you can get
funding. That's what Fiona Cherbak tells me. Add the iPhone operating
systems to that as well. I'm sure you could fit every single app on a few
DVDs.

-- 
Devin Monnens
www.deserthat.com

The sleep of Reason produces monsters.
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