The RetroBeat: The Video Game History Foundation is on the hunt for source code – VentureBeat

The video game industry is still young, but were already in danger of losing parts of its history forever. Thats why the Video Game Source Project by the Video Game History Foundation is so important.

This project is a call-to-arms for the industry to locate and preserve source code, the original art and programming that make up our beloved games. For years, keeping this source code organized was not a priority for many developers and publishers. This can make it difficult to preserve the original versions of these games. It can also hinder historians who could learn about a games development by looking through those files.

To show just how interesting and important source code is, the Video Game History Foundation is hosting a digital event today with Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert. A $10 ticket gives you access to the live show and a recording of the event, which will pour over The Secret of Monkey Islands source code including content cut from the final game. The stream starts at 1 p.m. Pacific today, but since you get a recording of the show, youre not on a deadline.

I talked with the Video Game History Foundations co-directors, Frank Cifaldi and Kelsey Lewin, about this source code initiative and its exploration of The Secret of Monkey Island.

GamesBeat: Why did you start this Video Game Source Project?

Frank Cifaldi: We believe that there is no better way to study how a game was made than access to its source material. When we say source material, we mean anything that was used in the production of the game. That could mean source code, and it often does, but it also means things like original art that was produced, original sound and music, documentation, correspondence, just anything that survived that gives us more direct, behind the scenes access to the game. Thats going to give us so much more than the game itself could. And at the same time, this is the kind of material that is very unlikely to be accessible to people. Its something thats held as a trade secret among companies. Its something that, until recent years, was not saved and catalogued to our satisfaction. Weve already lost a lot of these source materials.

With the Video Game Source Project, its twofold. Its an attempt to call out, to the industry and to researchers, the importance of this material to telling stories. Its a callout, but its also a call to arms and a demonstration.

Kelsey Lewin: And it all goes back to our core mission, which is just that we want to see more video game history in the world. We want to see more books, more documentaries, more research being done. We dont have access to a lot of the stuff that makes that research, writing those books and making those documentaries, easy. Or even doable in a lot of cases. This is a thing that we think would help bring more interesting stories to light.

Cifaldi: This is not unheard-of in other industries. This is just how history books are written, with access to material. You dont write a biography about George Washington unless you read his archived letters. You dont write books about how a film was made unless you have access to things like its script and maybe even storyboards and any other behind the scenes materials. Its just not very common that those materials exist in an accessible space for video games. We havent solved that yet. It could be years away. But the Video Game Source Project is what we consider the first step toward getting to this future that we want to see, where its normal to be able to access this stuff instead of sort of taboo or perhaps stolen from Nintendos servers.

GamesBeat: Where are you most likely to come across source code?

Cifaldi: From the people who wrote it. We have maybe about 100 repositories right now in our archives that were almost entirely sent to us by people who were involved in the development of the game in one way or another, be it single author, or they were part of a team. That tends to be the only place that the source exists, especially for these older games. Its from people who took it home. We dont believe that many video game companies have maintained archives that extensively go back to the 80s and 90s. Especially for games of that vintage, most of them likely only survive in what we call private collections. And so part of the point of going out with this big splash that were doing with the source project is just to have this awareness campaign for people who have material like this. Hey, maybe this stuff should be somewhere. Maybe youve been holding on to it, waiting for it to make sense to donate it somewhere or give it to someone. We should start that conversation now. Weve added quite a few things to our collection because of that.

GamesBeat: Why was archiving such a low priority for these companies in the 80s and 90s?

Lewin: There wasnt really a secondary market yet. Were in an age now where there are lots of remasters and ports and that sort of thing, but back in the 80s, if you made an NES game, you put it out on the NES, and you were done. Move on to the next project. There wasnt an economic reason for companies to do this. They didnt have a reason that would make them money, to save any of this stuff.

Cifaldi: That might sound, I dont know, heartless, but thats how companies operated. Unless theres a financial reason to do something, theyre not going to do it. Even if they maybe did archive some of this material back in the day, a lot of it probably wasnt maintained. We know of some companies that are still around that did archive things in the early 90s, but its kind of stuck on an obscure tape format, and the person who backed it up doesnt work there anymore, and no one knows what software they used to back it up. Its a solvable issue, but for a company, unless they have a commercial product or some other commercial reason to go and solve those issues and read that data, theyre not going to do it. It really just comes down to, when were talking about things that are lost, its money, but its also the nature of the industry.

There have been hundreds of video game companies that have gone out of business since the industrys inception. The rights to those games may now have reverted to someone else, but its pretty unlikely in most cases that code survived and was transferred. Or things like, we know of source code being destroyed in office moves. Were moving offices, and we dont have as much storage space now, and theres this closet full of old stuff that were just going to toss, because we dont know what it is. There are so many reasons stuff gets lost. Its not unique to video games. We see similar stories throughout film preservation as well. Its just that we didnt think there was a good, organized effort to call all this out and start talking about these problems before now, so the source project is step one for us toward fixing all this.

Above: These floppies contain the source files for an NES game.

Image Credit: Video Game History Foundation

GamesBeat: What kind of a timeline are we under? How long can old media like floppy disks hold out?

Lewin: Weve lost stuff already.

Cifaldi: For sure. Nothing that was going to break your heart, but weve had floppies here that are pretty much toast. It depends on the media. We can go down a whole rabbit hole here. Im a bit worried about magnetic media from the 80s, things like floppy discs. This might sound counterintuitive, but Im extremely worried about optical backups from the early 2000s. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. By the time you get to the early 2000s, those things are now mass-produced consumer products, and weve found that the cheap spindles of 100 discs that we used to get in 2003 were cheap, not just to us but also in the manufacturing process. I mean, its not a significant percentage, but were starting to see discs of that vintage delaminate, which theres really no recovering from. Were pretty worried about that.

But even if, physically, data survives on some formats, theres also a danger of just knowledge loss, of how to recover these things. Weve managed to recover data from obscure formats, from DAT tape backup and stuff like that. But its only been through having a network of smart people who are interested in this stuff that weve been able to do it. Im worried about losing that level of expertise, even, when it comes to this stuff, even if its on a format that could survive. It becomes more and more specialized to recover it. It gets worse as time goes on, to be able to seek out those experts and recover these as those experts age out.

Lewin: What was that compiling program that you found at a company that still owned it, and nobody in the company was able to figure out how to get you this program?

Cifaldi: I dont want to specify who it was, because we did end up finding a copy through other means. But theres one game where we had the source. We had everything but the compiler, the actual program you would run to compile to source code into an executable binary for the target system. We had the raw assets, but we couldnt make the game to play with them. We knew exactly which version number. We had the batch scripts for building the game. The batch script says, run whatever.exe. We didnt have that .exe. We found the person who wrote that compiler in 1994 or something, and he said, no, I didnt keep any of that stuff, but heres the company that owns all of it. I contacted them and talked to their customer support first. They said, oh yeah, we have all of these, we have to maintain all of those, but you have to go through sales to get this compiler. Then I spent about a week back and forth with sales trying to buy a version of their software from 16 years ago. And theres just not a path for that. Theres not anything inside of that company that will do that. There just did not seem to be a way to get that old piece of software to build this game through the company. And so we kind of gave up on that, and obtained it through other means. Which was its own strange story. But I dont want to get into exactly how it was obtained.

GamesBeat: It sounds like you have a lot of adventures.

Cifaldi: Yeah, adventures through deceased developers old hard drives. Adventures through shady Chinese piracy sites, just to get these things running again. Thats another thing that degrades as time goes on. That compiler I just talked about, the place we found it was a really weird corner of the internet. And it was the only place we could find it. If that weird corner of the internet goes away, does that program go away forever, and is this game forever unbuildable? Its actually pretty scary.

Above: The Secret of Monkey Island.

Image Credit: LucasArts

GamesBeat: Along with announcing this initiative, youre starting with this big Secret of Monkey Island showcase. Can you talk about how that collaboration came to be?

Cifaldi: We were donated a repository that, among other things, had what seemed to be the complete buildable source for The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChucks Revenge. Im a fan of that game, and a historian, so for me this is like, cool, well, the rest of the VGHF shuts down for a week while all I do is go through this. You remember. It was like 12 straight days.

Lewin: Yeah, I decided to just not bother you for a couple of weeks. Ill just do my own thing over here.

Cifaldi: In looking at all the code and figuring out how to build the game and working with the old Lucasfilm tools and things like that, I managed to learn a reasonable amount of SCUMM, the scripting language. Im like high school freshman-fluent in SCUMM at this point. I can read it. I dont know if I can speak it or write it, but I can read it, and mostly understand what Im seeing. I learned just enough to start doing things like finding areas in the game that arent used, that arent even on the disc or anything when you buy it, because it wasnt compiled, and restore them back to their original functionality. I was able to work with our team here to reverse engineer some of their graphic formats, figure out how they work, start spitting out all the frames of information into GIFs and things like that, and find even more older, weirder content.

Essentially, I was in an archaeological dig in what might be my favorite game. I was discovering all kinds of things. I was answering all kinds of mysteries that have been around with this game. Not the secret of Monkey Island. Its not revealed in the source. Im sorry. But it confirmed a lot of things about the developments history that I doubt even the people who made it remember. I was discovering a lot, and it just seemed like something that we could do something interesting with.

We contacted [Monkey Island creator] Ron Gilbert, first of all, just to make sure that we werent doing anything that might upset or embarrass him. Were kind of digging through his garbage, you know what I mean? Looking for things he threw away. We talked to him, and then we also talked to Lucasfilm, because we didnt want to hit them over the head with it, that we were publishing content around this game. Were sort of digging through source that was donated to us. And so Lucasfilm was very receptive to what we were doing. Lets face it, Lucasfilm, theyre the Star Wars company. They understand that fans like that behind the scenes stuff. They understand that its good for the franchise if fans can talk about it in a more substantial and interesting way. I think they understood. They applied that feeling to Monkey Island and gave us a semi-official blessing to go ahead and publish content. And then Ron is a very transparent person with his development history. He had no opposition to anything we were showing. Nothing in there is strange or embarrassing, I dont think.

We thought, since the anniversary was coming up were in it right now. October 1990 is when the game came out. We dont have an actual date. I dont know where the October 15 date thats floating around came from. I can find no source for that. But we know its October. We asked Ron, would you be willing to do a livestream with us, a ticketed livestream as a fundraiser celebrating the history of this game and looking at this behind the scenes content? And he was happy to, so thats what were doing. We expected to sell maybe 100 tickets. Were at 985 right now [as of October 27]. I dont know if surprised is the right word. Delighted is in there for sure. People obviously are interested in talking about how games are made on a deeper level. The fact that we were able to sell 985 $10 tickets and counting just goes to demonstrate to us that were on the right track. Were doing the kind of work that is going to open new doors and help us talk about video game history in more interesting ways. Which, by the way, is part of our motivation too. Its sort of the unspoken part. Kelsey and I kind of get bored by traditional video game history narratives. Is that fair?

Lewin: Yeah, I think thats fair. We hear, because there are kind of a finite amount of people who historians have had traditional access to, interviews and being very open with their work, whats popular, all of those things together, we end up hearing a lot of the same stories over and over again. Its good that these stories are being told. Its not that we shouldnt be telling the story of Pac-Man or ET or whatever. But theres a lot of video games, and a lot of stories to tell.

Cifaldi: Its not like Monkey Island is uncharted territory or anything. But looking at that game through its artifacts that were left behind in the development process is something no ones ever done before. Well, really the reason that were creating content as part of the source project is that we want to inspire people to think about and investigate video game history a little differently, to start going closer to the source and being archaeologists in that way. It wasnt a big leap of logic for us, that this is what historians would want to study. Sure, you can look at other mediums and compare. But also, when we tend to talk about development history and what people study to look at that, we see two things. People are really fascinated by published screenshots and video of a game before it was done. People obsess over minor details of things like Mario 64s old HUD graphics and the placeholder audio they had. People obsess over those small details from earlier visions.

They also tend to obsess over whats still left in the final game that isnt used. Like the cutting room floor wiki is an extremely popular website, and all they do is go through shipped games and data mine them and find things to help paint that development history a little more. For us, well, what if you could get rid of those abstraction layers completely and access those files and see whats going on in places that arent in the game anywhere? We hope that this is the start of normalizing this. We hope that authors will start throwing their old code on Github or the Internet Archive, just get things out there so that people can start using that as an educational resource, and start understanding development history on a level they havent before.

GamesBeat: What was one of the cool things you found digging through Monkey Island that you can share with us?

Cifaldi: Maybe not the coolest, but a couple things that come to mind. We already teased a room in the game that isnt in the final product. That one was particularly cool because its fully fleshed out. It seems finished. It has a really great piece of animation with this severed leg dripping blood. Whats fun about it is that theres this news report from 1990 thats been on YouTube for a few years, where they visited Lucasfilm Games, and they actually filmed Ron Gilbert showing off the Secret of Monkey Island while it was still in development, and the one place they show in the game is this room no one had seen before. People were like, whats this room? Where is this? Someone asked Ron, and he didnt even remember it. He had no idea. Things got cut all the time.

Above: The cut room!

Image Credit: Video Game History Foundation

Its one of the first things I look for, because I knew it was cut content, and I found it. Its in there. This room is not important to the game. Its not this huge grand idea. Its a room connecting two rooms, and in the final game they just connect to each other. This room separates them. That in itself is something that is worth talking about.

I think that a lot of the discussion around cut content in games tends to maybe amplify this level of mystique that was never there. Because game development is so secretive, because we dont tend to get behind the scenes access to game development, we tend to think of it as being sort of mythical, when in reality its a bunch of people collaborating and making something and cutting things out because it doesnt work, or because theres no more room on the disc or whatever.

Lewin: These arent all weighty decisions that changed the narrative or changed the ideas in the game. Sometimes a cut room is just a cut room.

Cifaldi: Right. If we start acknowledging that decisions are made for reasons, that things get cut for usually the right reasons, that we can sort of move focus away from these tiny details in the games development and start talking more about the process and what made the game unique and how the systems talk to each other and how decisions were made based on our knowledge now of how the game actually works. When I play a SCUMM game now, I feel like Im in the Matrix. I understand everything thats going on under the hood now. It helps me understand why decisions were made. Why this flame over here isnt animated, why the screen scrolls in this particular way. It gives me this intimate relationship with the game that I could have any other way. Im pretty thankful for that, and Im excited for other people to experience that too.

GamesBeat: Where was this cut room?

Cifaldi: Its on Monkey Island. Its basically a connection to the cannibal village. From the overhead map, you would click on the cannibal village, but before it took you to the village, it took you through this path that upped the tension a bit. At this point in the game, all you know is theyre cannibals. You dont know that theyre goofy cannibals that arent going to harm you. Youre walking through a path and seeing gore and horror and getting scared because youre about to go to a cannibal village and they might kill you. Its just a screen thats there with no purpose other than adding tension, I think. You cant do anything except walk through it. The only interaction is that when you get near the village, you can look at it, and he says something like, I cant see anything from way back here. Thats it. Its just a room you walk through to get to the village.

I mean, this is a world thats existed in our heads for decades. Its cool to flesh it out a little more. There are parts in the code that suggest to us that the developers thought fondly of it. Its not something where theyre like, ah, kill it. I think its in the script for the overhead map. The part of the code where you click on the hotspot to go into the cut room, its still there, but its commented out, so its not compiled into the game. Then theres a comment next to it that says, in memory of the unforgettable dripping leg. Something like that. They thought fondly of this room. It could be cut for various reasons. It doesnt really do anything for the game. It just slows it down. Thats one reason. But the other reason is that the biggest use of disc space was art, and this was a ton of art. It was not just one giant room. It was also eight frames of leg dripping animation and four frames of smoke animation. It was a lot of art. It might have been something that was cut for that reason. Incidentally, I have no reason to believe, having investigated this code, that a closeup of the dog was ever a thing in the game. Its on the back of the box. I think its just a piece of art. I dont think you ever talk to the dog and get a closeup in the game. Theres no evidence to support that. I think they restored something that was never there, is my take on that.

The RetroBeat is a weekly column that looks at gamings past, diving into classics, new retro titles, or looking at how old favorites and their design techniques inspire todays market and experiences. If you have any retro-themed projects or scoops youd like to send my way, pleasecontact me.

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