by Omar (@neo_graphyte)

Konami has announced the cancellation of Silent Hills, the ephemeral new entry in their horror franchise. With it came the takedown of P.T. from the Playstation Store, the removal of the ability to redownload the game for previous owners, and blowback against users attempting to sell PS4s with copies of the game on eBay. 

Recently, NBA2K14 had its servers taken down by its publisher. While this is standard business practice for older games, especially sports titles, this one was especially notable because 2K14 was built around online play. Not only were multiplayer options removed, but players’ career modes, characters and single player progress was wiped as well. 

In April 2015, the Entertainment Software Association declared that attempts to preserve abandoned games, even by archivists or museums, was illegal, calling it too close to piracy or hacking. 

Digital worlds are disappearing. Our history is being erased.

During my time working on a piece examining recent HD remasters I began to experience a crisis. I was reminded of the disaster that was the Silent Hill HD Collection, a version of Silent Hill 2+3 that was bad enough to be considered destructive of the originals. Compositions were destroyed, atmosphere mangled, voice acting replaced, and parts entirely missing. More terrifying that either the port or the games themselves, however, was the knowledge that these versions existed in this state partially because Konami itself had lost the original source code for the final games. In the piece I remarked:

If even major moments like this can be lost to the carelessness of the industry, what will happen to smaller, less known, but equally as important projects? As much as we’d like to think that these revisions and updates serve as a way to help us preserve them, they can only exist alongside the originals, never replacing them. At best they work as recut versions that attempt to realize the original’s ambitions while sanding the texture of the original, at worst, they become products like Silent Hill, a cut rate job that exists in place of the originals, a piece of historical erasure.

It’s a fear that I find myself revisiting now, as I see Konami not only shut down P.T. but remove people’s ability to gain access to it. To them it existed as only a mistake and the business move that’s now necessary is to functionally erase it from history. 

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. While not as zealous as Konami  in its attempts to remove its products, SEGA recently announced that it would be removing games that didn’t fit its standard from the iOS App Store. We’ve also seen downloadable titles such as AfterBurner Climax and Outrun Online Arcade disappear from the store. Outrun remains on my Xbox hard drive at the moment, while Afterburner painfully slipped my mind until the last moment, becoming something I’ll likely never play now. 

In all these cases legal and business decisions come into play. Licensing issues mean that selling a certain game becomes unfeasible after a period of time. Server costs mean cuts from games that no longer support a community or remain profitable. We’ve seen the Sims Online come to an end, joining worlds like those of Playstation Home, City of Heroes, The Matrix Online, and the original Final Fantasy XIV in the virtual apocalypse. These are games, characters, and entire worlds that we can no longer interact with. Worlds that exist only in memories, writing and temperamental online records of them.

As we become more reliant on online services and storefronts, events like these drive home the temporal existence of these games. I’ve said it before, but we’re living in the Lost Film era of videogames. A large part of our cultural history is disappearing, and we can only think about what we want now. What players have moved on to. What is good for business. But unlike physical media, these digital spaces cannot be stored in a warehouse, or purchased secondhand. They can only exist as data on a server or hard drive, and with no attempts to properly preserve and document them, they will cease to exist and deteriorate at a much faster rate.

We speak so fondly of nostalgia and our memories in these places, but they are slowly being atomized. They are removed to become part of the next big thing, to become nothing more than a story that we tell, of a place that can never be revisited.