 Games you can't play, there are some problems that have been talked about in online spaces, in non-online spaces and communities since the dawn of time. My D&D group has collapsed into drama, how do I stop this? Whatever the equivalent of the AWP is in the game that I play is overpowered and the devs are jerks and they should nerf it. This jerk sold me the wrong copper. I see we have some EA Nassar fans out there. And I wanna play a game but I can't. Wanna play a game but you can't. There are a surprisingly large number of games that you can't play and most people think it's cause the game's just not available. It's an ancient game, we don't know the rules, or some Roman thing or whatever, right? But there are actually many, many reasons you cannot play a game. Now it might just be, what if it's a little hard to play a game? An old Penny Arcade, you know this is the Penny Arcade Expo, I think some people have heard of this webcomic, but there was a little fun drama around the fact that a lot of people said they couldn't play Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles cause you had to have friends and own four Game Boys and a Game Cube and four special cables to connect those Game Boys to the Game Cube. We somehow got those special cables but not everyone could, even if they had the four Game Boys. So that's even harder than getting a drama light or drama-free D&D game together. You gotta have all this stuff. What if it's almost impossible? Like what if you wanna play Tribes 2 or the Battle Tech pod? What if we're talking about the Quake Arcade game? Wait, what? Yeah. So we don't do a lot of research for our panels but I did like an hours worth of research and three weeks ago I found out there was a Quake Arcade game. And some games are actually lost forever. Now there are some Roman and Celtic and Greek tabletop games that we actually have the rules to, which is amazing. Like credit to these monkeys that somehow built a civilization. Like we kept these rules around. But that game, we don't know all the rules to that game. We don't even know if that is a game. It could be like a back scratch. We do know. We do know that is a game. You could be a serving tray. But it is possible, just like an animal can go extinct, that a game could go extinct. It could literally become permanently lost to the universe. The person who designed it flies into a black hole and that's the end. Someone might by luck recreate the exact same game with the exact same rules at some point in the future but you will never know if that was the game. So the shtick of this panel, which was Scott's idea and I think it was a pretty good idea is we wanna try to take the IUCN Red List of species conservation. I feel like it was a good panel idea. Yeah, people know what that is. I don't know what that is like a few days ago. And we're gonna try to apply this to games but I wanna be clear. There are people out there who are professionals professionally trying to save games, to preserve games. We are not preservation professionals. We are talking professionals. That's right. So we're gonna try to apply this to games. But one, we are not scientists. We are not experts in this and more importantly, games are not the same as living, breathing animals. If an animal goes extinct, that is more of a tragedy than if a game goes extinct. I wanna make that very clear before we get into this. But also games aren't the same as animals. There are actually a lot of things that it was hard to classify a game because that thing was designed for animals, not games and we're gonna break the whole system around 23 minutes from now. Don't come with your biology at us. We don't have time for that. Yeah, don't raise your hand if you think we have miscategorized something. Don't raise your hand at all because we don't take questions. Let's go. But the biggest difference between a living thing going extinct and a game going extinct is that there are two different kinds of extinction for games. There are games that I want to play and you want to play and it is impossible to play. And there are games that you could technically play but nobody wants to play it with you. Yeah, there are two different animal. There's one ingredient, the animal, right? That's it. That's all you need. You have the animal, there it is, right? But for a game, you need people to play it and you need the game and sometimes the game cannot be obtained and sometimes the people cannot be obtained. So we're gonna go through this list from top to bottom. We'll start with the least concern. Now there's an important point here if you're not familiar with conservation as a whole. Least concern is the best you can do because they don't want to imply that anything is safe because I mean, wildfires and climate change, like you've seen the last 10 or 15 years, nothing is safe. So human, least concern. Yup. The ants in your backyard, least concern. Tabletop games, by and large, least concern. It is really hard to make a widely played tabletop game go extinct because if you know the rules, you can recreate the game full stop. As long as any game, right, even if let's say we lose the ability to make plastic and we lose the ability to, all the wood is gone, right? And so we can't make wooden cubes and meeples anymore. You can make any tabletop game that you can make the rules to, it can be recreated with cards. Cards can do anything. So as long as you can make cards or write on paper, you can make literally any tabletop game. You can, if you don't have a D6, fine. Get six pieces of paper and on the first one you write one and on the second one you write two. Boom, you got a D6. So as long as there is paper, you will never lose a tabletop game. You just need to have people who will play it and you need to know the rules and you're good. It's safe. And among the least concern, the leastest concern are tabletop games that use the standard 52 card deck. That has been a cultural institution globally for so long that it is almost impossible for that concept to disappear. Even in countries around the world, right? It's like you can't, you know, it's like Hanafuta, there's been Japan, there's probably a zillion Hanafuta deaths, right? But if you went to Antarctica, good luck finding one. But at Antarctica, I guarantee you there's playing cards in Antarctica, right? And no matter where you go, you're gonna find them. Also, there aren't many video games that I would consider least concern. Quake very recently has proven that it is one of the rare least concerned video games because how long ago did Quake come out? A lot of you just looking around the room, I don't think we're alive when Quake came out. Quake came out when we were in high school. And yet Quake got re-released and is perfectly playable today. Well, recently, not today, like a few weeks ago. Well, Quake too a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, and Quake won. One year or two after a few years. Very few video games are this difficult to kill. But the fact that Quake, more than two decades later is getting just updates, like I had Quake installed from when Steam first became a thing. And it just popped up and said, hey, RIM, there's an update to Quake. And there were release notes and it just happened. But also there's a deep community. How many people have reverse engineered or recreated Quake over the last 20 years? Quake cannot die. Quake is almost as safe as a card game because we have a multi-decade history of the company, the people who made it, and a community that is not officially associated with them, all working hard to make sure humans can play this game forever. And Doom is even more safe, right? You wanna play Quake, you kinda need something with a GPU, right? But Doom, as long as you have a CPU, you can play Doom, right? It's like if you have a vacuum tube, you can play Doom, right? So Doom is somewhat more safe, but Quake we wanted to point out because it's gotten patches so recently. Doom hasn't been getting the patches the way Quake has. So most video games that have ever been made are definitely near-threatened. They're not least concerned. These games need some sort of juice coming in, some sort of effort to keep them going. Even the most popular games in the world, Fortnite is more at risk of disappearing from this earth than Quake is because Quake, I can run an EXE and play this game. Fortnite has a company that runs servers that you need to connect to. You need a community to play it with. One player Fortnite is not that fun of a game. I mean, if you think about some other games that have required servers, right? You know, World of Warcraft, right? It's like, okay, it was the old World of Warcraft, but then there wasn't the old World of Warcraft. And then they brought back the classic World of Warcraft so you could play the old one again. But all the ones in between, right? It's like, where did those go? I mean, this article, this is a slide I stole from another panel we did. I just took a little graphic at the bottom. Fortnite had a version change that some of their community was mad about. And then they had another version change that rolled that back. And a different group of nerds were mad about it. And guess what? Not both of those versions. In fact, neither of those versions is playable now. There've been like 100 changes to Fortnite since then. All these versions of Fortnite are dead. They're gone just like tears and rain. But there were a lot of other MMOs that weren't so big as World of Warcraft. And a lot of them are just gone. Just goodbye, you can't play them. Maybe you found this demo CD for them. And it's like, maybe you can get something to run or some community server exists, but otherwise it's out. And plus Fortnite, you know, run by a company, a more recent company, Id and Bethesda, these companies have shown us they have demonstrated, they care about their games still being accessible. The company and all the people that made Fortnite, they may be good people, they may be bad people, we don't know, but they're new people. They haven't proven to us for 20 years that they will keep Fortnite running. Yep, I mean, y'all can just say that like there's a new quake that just got patched. Unreal Tournament has not been packed. And that's the same company as Fortnite, right? So they're saying. All right, now we're getting into the more spicy territory. So let's talk about a mod of quake, Action Quake 2. Does anyone remember Action Quake 2? This audience might be a little too young for this. So Action Quake, if you don't know, was a mod. And the whole idea of it was that you were sort of trying to simulate an action movie, right? So it's like, if you got hurt, you would start limping. And then you had to hide and bandage yourself like it was diehard, right? And like you could only carry one gun at a time and you could do cool stuff like jump through windows and other stuff that action movie people do. If you get a grenade, you get one grenade and you don't wanna be anywhere near that grenade. But this game of, have any of you played Overwatch? Ever hear of Overwatch? The devs said directly, Overwatch is a to a degree. It has the DNA of Action Quake 2. That's one of the games that inspired that. Ever play a game? What's it called Counter Strike? Yeah, what do you think inspired Counter Strike? This came first. So this game was one of the most popular quake mods in history. And I wanted to play it as part of this panel. I was like, hey, doing research for the panel? Can I play Action Quake 2? Now I could get the files and try to cram it into the new quake and probably make it work. But if you go on Steam and type Action Quake 2, some company has made a mostly legit game that is just a full reverse engineering of Action Quake 2. And it does just work. So this game can be played. However, there's like one server. There were like 400 people in there. So fast forward 10 years, will there still be 400 people? Will it be the same 400 people? Is that community strong? How many people are even in that community? None of you raised your hands. None of you know this game. Even if there's 400 players, will that one person who runs that one server keep paying to run that server? Yep. Even worse, a game like this, forget the community, forget everything else. This implementation is not the same. It is not identical to the versions that we played originally when this game was out. You know, talk to speed running people. There's a reason why if someone gets a speed run record on an emulator, they have to verify that's even possible on physical hardware because emulation is rarely 100% accurate. And that doesn't matter to a degree. The Action Quake II I played a few weeks ago is not identical to the original Action Quake II. So there is a risk of losing more and more of the DNA that made Action Quake II. I think, you know, we always, there's the, we talk about biology here, right? With animals and their endangered levels, right? But there's the old thing that they don't use anymore really, at least from what I know. King Philip called out for Girl Scouts, Kingdom Phylum, Class Genus Species, that whole. That's all basically gone. Like it's all so different now. Yeah, they just use DNA now to know what's related to what, right? But still the idea of this hierarchy, right? That there's a species is the most specific thing, right? And you might be in the same, what's the next one, genus, right? You might be in the same genus as some other game, right? But it's not exactly the same game. And you think about it, a lot of things that we consider to be games are not game species, but are game genuses, right? Can you play baseball? Of course you can play baseball, right? Anyway, you just get nine, you know, 18 people and you can play baseball. I couldn't get 18 people to play baseball if I tried right now. You could join a league and play baseball. It's anyone, there's a league out there somewhere that will let you in, right? But can you play major league baseball? It's like, no, there's only a few hundred people on earth who are allowed to play major league baseball and it's not the same as what you're playing, right? Because the ball's coming at you 90 miles an hour and that is not the same, even though the rules might be the same. You might play nine innings, little league baseball, only six innings, not the same game, right? Even if you're in major league baseball, play off baseball. Even if the rules are the same, the players are trying harder, right? It's serious business time, right? It is not the same game. Different stadiums have different layouts, right? Nobody ever again will play Ebbett's Field baseball because it doesn't exist anymore. It's not the same game, exactly, right? You know, or the polo grounds, which is fricking, you know, really long. I couldn't get anything out there, right? It's like they brought the fences in over a century ago. It's not the same game. Any change is bringing you a different game and if somehow that eliminates a possibility, like you've destroyed the stadium, a game has been lost, even though you can play other games that are in the same genus, basically kind of the same, right? Yep, now this is where we start to make value judgments as communities, as gamers, of which versions do we care about? How important is it to preserve everything? There are some stinkers in the history of Counter-Strike's patches over the years. It's like if I get an old DOS computer, right? That has a voodoo card in it and I run Quake 2 and I get the old versions of the software and I make a LAN of these computers running all the original everything. It's like, okay, they're running the old Quake 2 version. We've got the action Quake 2 patch running. It's a LAN, we set it up at PAX. Everyone's playing it, but there's how many versions of action Quake 2 are there? It got patched a bunch of times. Which one do we pick? Never mind all the mods people throw in and the house rules and the nonsense. Or people scripting their clients to do special weapon switches in business, right? Now, we just talked about a lot of stuff that does not apply at all to animals, which is why now we got to talk about in this threatened zone, more specifically, and I hit exactly like I said 23 minutes later, let's talk about exactly in detail what makes games unique, what specifically can threaten games because there are a lot of threats out there. Of course, Fortnite is centrally dependent. Any game that relies on a central server, on a company existing, on some infrastructure existing, baseball needs the entirety of American and Japanese society to exist, to be able to be played. We talked about tabletop games being the most resilient, unthreatened, but organized tabletop games, the centrally dependent on some authority that is organizing tournaments, right? If like magic, right? You think magic is impossible to kill. If the magic judges go away, competitive magic will be gone, right? You'll be able to play magic all you want with all kinds of whatever, but the tournaments are not, and it's not the same, right? If that's gone, so. Yep, that support is crucial, and video games in particular, almost every video game today relies on some central server or some central level of technology, a certain kind of computer in console in a particular time, in a particular place, entirely confined to your gaming room. So that's a game. Good luck playing it if you don't have that thing, whatever that thing is. If you go to Magfest and that person who owns it brings it again, you can play it. I have played that game. If you know who they are and you go to their house, I guess you can play it, but otherwise you ain't playing it, that's the only one. If that game looks crazy from this blurry photo I took with my cell phone like six years ago at Magfest, it is so much crazier in person. It is hard to describe, but that game, it really depends on that device specifically. And there are a lot of games that require a specific device. Think about Steel Battalion, you can play that here at PAX. Somebody owns a Steel Battalion controller. If you don't have that controller, you can't play that game. You need a hot ass or a hot ass if you wanna play like a real flight simulator. What about a board game that needs an app? Well, that's not nearly as resilient as a board game that doesn't need an app. Is that even really a board game anymore? Yeah, that's a good question. Most arcade games. DDR, it's like, yeah, DDR is really easy to get. DDR pads, who's making them still? Cobalt Flux has an infinite waiting list that I have been on for like three years and I gave up and I bought a different pad. But that's DDR, that's like the popular rhythm game. All those other rhythm games have like weird controllers. I saw on the internet, the original Street Fighter 1, I don't know if there's anyone here too young who doesn't know this, but the original Street Fighter 1 had two buttons, punch and kick, and they were pneumatic, like you had to punch them. And so jab, you would hit it a little bit and then you had to hit it really hard and it really was not good. That's why I think I rid of it. People were hurting themselves. It's way worse than you're imagining. It's not like that fist of the door start game where you're like punching up at something. It's just two big buttons like down here. Yeah, you can Google it to see what it looks like. But like, I had heard that that was a thing, but I never saw it in my real life. I had seen Street Fighter 1 cabinets and they always had six buttons. And I was like, well, what happened to this rumored, you know, hardness button thing? Some guy on the internet found and, you know, scrounged up and recreated a cabinet to the best of visibility. It might be the only one that works, right? Which means that game is entirely dependent on that one guy to continue to exist. Thankfully, it's not a good game. We can play Street Fighter 2. We don't need one. Get that out of here. So there's a weird dichotomy, like there's a weird dissonance with Dungeons & Dragons. It is both one of the most popular role-playing games in the history of the world. It is one of the biggest games here. That is our gaming group. And yet, how many of you are struggling to find and keep anyone to play Dungeons & Dragons with? Or any kind of RPG that has a campaign with several people? Well, but Todd, you play one of the more rare RPGs. You're one like Shadow Run 2nd Edition. Good luck. Also call me. No, not really. That's a terrible game. I'm actually kidding. But D&D, the books exist. Books are one of the most easily preserved things on Earth and yet, every forum, every Reddit, everywhere you go, people are struggling and trying to find people to play games like Dungeons & Dragons with because you need a social circle willing and able to play it with you. And that's only if you want to play, you only need like four or five people to do that, right? There are some games out there you need a lot of people, right? When I was in summer camp, fourth of July, they would do this thing, Revolution. Basically the entire camp would go into the woods for a massive asymmetric capture the flag, right? You need those woods. You need a few hundred children. You need minimal adult supervision, right? But can I play that? No, I can never play that again. And that camp closed and became one of those like rent our field to have like weddings and shit, right? So the camp isn't even there anymore. That's never going to be played again in the history of humanity at the end. Cause you need, and it's not because I don't know the rules. If I remember them, I need, there's no way I can get all those people. And Dungeons and Dragons really popular, right? Well, socially, sure. Fifth edition is a lot of people playing it. Fourth edition, almost no one. Third edition, a weirdly large number of people are still playing it. Go bigger. What about games that really need a community? Magic the Gathering is not, you don't just need some friends. You need this whole universe of people who care about magic to make you care about magic, to play magic the way it's intended. Smash Brothers, Smash Brothers has a community that is like keeping this, that game will never die because of those people. You think about things like linked to the past randomizer, right? It's like, you can play that by yourself, sure. But it's like, there's a whole community if you go on Twitch or Discord or whatever of people who are updating the randomizer, right? Running tournaments, organizing the scene, right? Making, they make special roms on the holidays, right? There's this whole thing that goes on and if that goes away, then it just sort of, the whole thing freezes in time and that's the end. Yep, don't discount the effort of people who curate communities and organize scenes. Like PAX is a scene that is created by the effort of a lot of humans, a lot of enforcers wearing various colored shirts depending on what city you're in. It takes a lot of effort to make something like a PAX happen and that's just one weekend. How do you keep a game going with patches and updates and all this stuff for decades? So we live in a capitalist society. Most of us live in one. Sadly. Yep, and there's like, I might be able to, if I really wanted to, I could burn piles of money and play polo with horses. Like I could make that happen a few times before I ran out of money. Most people will never be able to play polo no matter how badly they want to play polo. No one will let you ride their horse. You won't be able to buy your own horse. It just won't happen. Even if it's the thing you want to do the most, you will never play polo the end. Yep, F1 race, F1 car. They won't even let anyone in this room ever touch an F1 car. They might let you touch an old F1 car that had the engine taken out while it's on display for an advertisement situation. But a current one being used this season, you will not be allowed in the same room with such a car out of just fear of spying on it, let alone touching it or getting touching the wheel. When the drivers won't even let you see the back of the steering wheel when they take it out of the car, they always hide that part and show you the front only because it's so secret, right? It's like, there are what, less than 20 people maybe, maybe around 20 people who are allowed to play F1 race. That is it in the whole universe, right? At any given time. Now also think about, you know, on a more zoomed in scale, virtual reality relatively new. The scene and the community around virtual reality is directly limited by access to money. Not everyone has VR. VR is very expensive now, which means there is a smaller pool of people to even think to preserve a game, even if they wanted to. A lot of games just will get lost because there aren't enough people, not enough critical mass to play solely because people don't have money. So I'm not gonna say any names of any individuals here. We'll just show pictures of individuals. Yeah. But, there have been many attempts by communities over the years to take a game that is disappearing or dying and recreate it or update it or improve it or keep it in the world in some way. And very similar to this one, somebody because of this decides that that is not going to happen. And there's almost nothing we can do about this because sure, a nerd, we talk about this a lot on GeekKnives. Some nerd could make one of these projects. You could make your updated version of Chrono Trigger. That's perfect. Yeah, someone tried to make an updated Chrono Trigger that was fancy and 3D, like re-imagine Chrono Trigger. They made it on their own and they announced it to the world and then Nintendo was like, get the shit out of here. Oh no, Square Enix. Square Enix. Square Enix is like, get that shit out of here. No, no, no. It's like, do not do that, right? The problem is a lot of people, for reasons that make sense, they put a lot of work into it. They wanna get credit, recognition, draw attention, right? Or they need money to buy food and pay rent to be able to do this work. Exactly. And so people will announce that they are working on it before it's done. And if it's got the litigious rights holder, you can't do that. The only thing you can do, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not, I'm gonna tell you to break the law. Nothing we say is legal advice under any circumstances. I'm not telling you to break the law, but I totally am. What you should do, if you were those Chrono Trigger people, is make the game, finish it, release it anonymously. I'm like peer to peer, dark net places that everyone can have it and it gets around the whole internet before they can stop you. But sadly, you'll never be able to claim credit, get money, et cetera, because copyright law. Even worse, if you do it that way, the community you need to do this work is now much smaller. Say you're gonna rob a bank. And again, we're not giving advice. The more people you involve in your plan to rob a bank, the more likely it is someone's gonna snitch. So, destructive evolution. We talked about this a bit before, but let's really zoom in. Every version of Fortnite replaces the previous one and it is almost impossible to keep that alive. But this happens in many places. Magic the Gathering. I played Magic between like- 1993 and 1994. Yeah, like I started playing when the unlimited set came out and I quit shortly after Fallen Empires came out because I remember kid brain thinking Fallen Empires wasn't that good. Magic is dead. I'm done with this. Now, I was wrong, of course. But Magic back then is almost impossible to play in the year 2023. It was a very different game. It was a very different scene. The rules are very different. Modern Magic has completely replaced what Magic was like back then. The combination of all these factors is gone and there's no way to get that back. No one's ever gonna take a black lotus with no sleeve on it and shuffle it into a deck, right? People used to take four and shuffle them in, right? It's like I've seen it, 1993. I was at a Magic tournament once where they had, this was the thing in, the 90s were a weird time, but Magic tournaments often had a Chaos Orb tournament. The Chaos Orb is an expensive card and the way it worked is you would throw it at the table and whatever it landed on gets destroyed, like it's a cool card, cool idea. There was a Magic tournament once where someone tore their card up and smuggled it over the board. Totally okay. No one would do that today. But the Chaos Orb tournament, and I participated in this, the tournament was always the same. Everybody has to own a Chaos Orb to play and you can play one time per Chaos Orb your own. You throw it as hard as you can. Whoever throws it the furthest wins another Chaos Orb. Can you imagine someone today taking a Chaos Orb and throwing it or even taking it out of its case? Counter strike. It's really easy to throw if it's in a plastic case. Remember playing Counter Strike? I remember I'm old enough when they added the P90 to Counter Strike and one, half the community was like, you had to get this gun out of here. It was OP. This gun is way over. It was the best. I don't want to use the P90. They nerfed it. It was the best in GoldenEye too. But it was removed from the game on purpose and has gone forever. And yes, there are people who play Counter Strike 1-6 to this day. But notice, it's right in the name. Counter Strike 1-6. 1-5 is gone, 1-4 gone, 1-3 gone. Yep, the community that remained chose what they believed to be the best version and they gave up on saving the rest of Counter Strike. I mean, you could probably run those. I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but good luck. And this is such as in other things too. How many versions of Star Wars are there? The answer was one until, again, the 90s. But iterations, modern games get patches constantly and a lot of those previous iterations are gonna disappear unless a speed runner and that speed runner's community needs a specific glitch. What about games that aren't for you? Similar to Finery was made by Maxis as sort of a prototype for there's a type of game that not too many people are familiar with. It's called in the industry, Serious Games. And they're exactly what they sound like. These are the kinds of games where like a three-letter government organization will have a VR game that is not released to the public where the employees of that three-letter government organization play the game as training. SimRefinery was not a joke. That game was a Serious Game to teach someone the basics of how to run an oil refinery as like the executive supervisor directly. These are real games, they work, there's studies that they work and there is no way you can play most of these. I mean, you could work for the company that then get the job that requires you to be trained using some of this software like some crazy ace pilot with some ridiculous flight simulator or an astronaut or who knows, right? But you know, it's like good luck, that's what a handful of people on the earth and that's it. And also if you can imagine a three-letter government organization is also probably a litigious rights holder. Now SimRefinery was leaked into the wild. You can go get it and play it today. You don't want to but you can. It's not complete because it was a prototype but I got to play probably the rarest game I've ever played. I got to play a legitimate for real US Air Force F-16 Simulator. The real one. The 1990 whatever. Yeah, 1990, first half of 1990s because I happened to join a program called Starbase that happened to operate out of Selfridge Air National Guard Base and all the kids who were in this program got to log an hour each on an F-16 Simulator. And it was cool and yeah, you can't buy that. There's no way to get a copy of that. And even if people are still have that, it's like the one they use now has got to be way updated. It's probably like 10 simulators ago by now, right? So it's like, does that one that you used even exist on this earth anymore? Or did they preserve it somewhere or not? We don't know, it's all secret. So this is a broader one, Action Quake 2 like I talked about before. I love that game, but I can put an asterisk next to love. Rimm in the year 1998 loved that game. I am different now. You will evolve, gamers evolve and there are things much like He-Man that are best left in the past. At least old He-Man, they've made some new He-Man's. But yeah, it's like, I learned this when the internet came into existence and they finally got fast internet. It's like I had memories of He-Man from when I was in elementary school and I loved He-Man and all kinds of figures. But between that time and the time that the DVDs existed, it was basically impossible for me to see He-Man. It wasn't on TV, so I couldn't see it. Then when I saw He-Man again, I was like, why the hell did I like that? So there are games out there where, yeah, you may have liked them and you might wanna preserve them and then you go back and play to them and you're like, what is this garbage? And it's like, sure, you have the game, you could play it, but can you force yourself to play it? If it's not any good, is anyone playing the game anymore? Even though you have this nostalgia for it and people might preserve the artifacts for the nostalgia reasons, the playing of the game is very difficult to tolerate because it's so old and busted, right? And this really highlights that distinction between able to be played and people actually play. I think able to be played is very important because just like with animals, once something goes extinct, you can't get it back. We gotta keep as much around as we can, but at the same time, that doesn't mean we should play every single NES and SNES game because 90% of them are unplayable to a human. Even when they came out, but especially in the year 2023. So let's talk about an endangered game. Now we're gonna go through the rest of this list after we've armed you with a little bit of knowledge. This is a game. When I first pitched this panel idea to Scott, I basically, I wanted to make this panel so I could talk about a game called Vampire Tag. And Scott said, that's bullshit. You can play Vampire Tag. It's not extinct. You can play it. The title of the panel is wrong. I'm an insufferable pedant. You're an insufferable pedant. That's right. So this game is endangered. Has anyone here ever heard of a game called Vampire Tag? Wow. Well, we know you know how to do this. So if you Google for this game, you find one website that looks like that, that has the rules of Vampire Tag. Are they correct? They're mostly correct. They're not 100% correct. The same as our Vampire Tag is a different version. Our version's lost. You find one reddit. I'm going to go to the grave with us. So you find this. And then come back as a vampire tag. You find one reddit post where someone's asking like, hey, there was this game I played at this gaming club a long time ago. And someone's like, oh, that's Vampire Tag. And then there are no more comments. And then you find a bunch of like, larp-er, yowie, weird nonsense that is not Vampire Tag. That was the crowd that played Vampire Tag, though. So Vampire Tag, I would say, is full on in danger. The way this game works very, very high level, this game requires several things. You need at least eight friends, ideally like 12 to 15, like that's the sweet spot. You need a deck of cards, but that's easy to get. You need a playground that is big enough for eight to 15 full grown adults to run around it at night with multiple paths and no dead ends with no one dying. Right, so we're talking about like the ones of the wooden castles and stuff that they've all torn down and replaced with the nice safe rubbery ones, which are still good. Yeah, but they're not good. It's not like Vampire Tag on them. Yup, because Vampire Tag is a game where I would like crawl into the top of a wooden belfry. And if I fell out of there, yeah, something was breaking. Not the belfry. Even worse, you need to be able to play this at night. I can say of the last three times I played Vampire Tag, the police showed up in two of them because a bunch of adults were in a children's park at 11 o'clock at night playing a game and the police did not fucking believe that we were not drinking, that none of us were doing anything wrong. We were literally playing tag. But the playground is still technically, A, close to adults without who don't have children at all times, and B, close to all people at night. And so we're violating both of those rules regardless of if we were doing anything innocent or not. Now this game is really fun and I do know if we played it today. It could be a nostalgia situation. I'm pretty sure this game is really fun. I am very confident. But this game is endangered because the community is gone, the rules barely exist, the people who remember it are mostly gone, the facilities you need to play it are gone, the world you need to play it in is gone. For years, no cops ever showed up when we played Vampire Tag, but even toward the end of our college experience, cops started showing up because the world was different, the community was different. Somebody started calling the police on us and they had not called the police on this group for at least a decade prior when the people who were older than us who taught us Vampire Tag were playing it. The cops never came at any point in that time. What about a threatened game? Not Tribes 2. So Tribes 2 was really threatened. Yeah. So Tribes 1, if people don't know, was basically this FPS where you get this big old map and vehicles. It was basically everything FPS. And you had the main functions where the weapon he's holding there, the spin fuser, was basically it shoots Frisbees like Tron, the discs that kill you, and you also have a jet pack. So basically most of the game is sort of this dueling with jet packs and shooting slow projectiles at each other rather than instantly hit scan weapons. But in the same game, someone else could be in a tank shelling you. Someone else is flying a fighter jet around. Three other people have gone into your base and are playing basically like Quake inside of your base trying to blow up your generators. Yeah, it's got a lot going on on these huge maps and it's also kept to the flag. So Tribes 2 comes out and it's a huge deal when this comes out. Cause finally, Tribes 1 was a bit janky. Now Tribes 2 is out, it's gonna work. Tribes 2 actually worked when it was brand new, was surprisingly well. You could play this with a 56K modem and not really have lag as long as it was, you know, a good 56K modem. I don't think everyone knows what a modem is and they don't know what those numbers were. Right, it's like, it wasn't ideal, but you could, I had a ping of like only 200-ish with my 56K modem. Yeah, we're old, a 200 ping was to be sought after. My first modem was 2400 bod. The net code on this game was good and you could have like 40 people on a server playing this game together, it was pretty hot. Now this game was also in that era when we were in college, early 2000s, it was the Fortnite of its era. This was the biggest damn game. For about a month. In fact, Penny Arcade, you know, Penny Arcade Expo, until World of Warcraft, this was the game they had done the most comic strips about up to that point. Like Gabe and Tycho were really into this game. This game was really big, but then things started to go wrong. The game started to crash occasionally, bit by bit, like a patch would come out and then nobody could play. And then Penny Arcade gave it an award. So this game, I have wanted to play it desperately and it is very hard to play. It's 20 years of not being able to play this game. They had a central server, that's a problem. The old software that doesn't run on new computers, that's a problem and servers with 40 people, it's like, yeah, great. If we connect and play one-on-one, that's meaningless, right? It's all about the big knots of players on a huge map. That's Tribes 2. Good luck with that. It's hard to recreate. It's got a lot. It had a lot of DRM in it, like way more DRM than you kids today are used to. And thankfully, at least the people who made it, like that company was gone and bankrupt and re-bought and all sorts of nonsense happened. So like nobody cares about the intellectual property, at least of Tribes 2. So I did an experiment a few weeks ago before this con. I decided I am earnestly going to try to play Tribes 2. So googling around, this was the best lead I had. It was a Reddit post and so, and this Reddit post. So you're only two years old? Yeah, it's like, hey, is there any way to play it? And I had a promising lead. Someone said yes and they posted some links. So I felt like this is a pretty good place. Discord server, that's as good as it's gonna get, right? Yup, so I click on that link and I discover this is really tragic. That's not that long ago. You just missed it. So the server that they were running for this Discord is closed, but the Discord is still there. So I have some hope. So I click on the next link and this website still has the files I need. The problem is you have to download not one, but two EXE files from some guy on the internet. That seems totally trustworthy. Yeah. Yes. I will run that on my real computer that I use for everything in my life. So let's assume we're fine with that and we proceed, but I'm telling you right now in my professional opinion, Do not proceed. Get a separate computer just for tribes to. On a separate network. If you go through all that work, that is the list of active servers that are running. But wait a minute, it looks like there's players, but in parentheses, bots. So that top server, there's 10 people because it says 26 out of 64 people in one server. Oh my God, this game is so good. But 16 of them are bots, there's 10 real people there. That's eight, 10 real people. Yeah. So critically endangered, that feels like the classification's right. There are, maybe I would project 100-ish people on earth playing this game based on just this brief data we did. But wait, those 10 people are playing a mod called Triumph. If you look at the base servers and the classic servers, they're empty, empty, all bots, all bots, empty, right? Nobody is playing the original tribes too. They're all playing some weird mods. So Penny Arcade, when they gave tribes too that award, that auspicious award before, the problem with tribes too was that the players all had a lot of different opinions about what should be nerfed and what should be changed. And the game was very moddable. And the mods started replacing the original game, but all the mods were terrible because the players had no idea what they wanted. And the biggest mistake was that this game, like I said, a central server, the central server had a good thing, support for clans, right? And you could make your little gaming guilds and groups in your squad in the client. You didn't need to go to some separate community to organize your team for tribes too. They also included the discussion forums in the game. Like you would turn on tribes too and it'd be like play, clan, community. Click on community, just a forum in the game. Now you got to understand back then there weren't any of the websites you use today. Like we didn't even have Facebook. Like there was nothing. They could have made a PHP BB at that time, but they didn't, right? They just put a forum right in the game. Thankfully that forum died with their central servers, but that forum is what led to the downfall of them hearing community input, right? And then community organizing and doing dumb things. Speaking of community, this gets worse. There's nobody here and I want to know what to do, but remember that discord was till up. So I went into that discord and I'm not going to tell the full story because it's really unfortunate and I'm not going to link to this discord because I don't want anyone to go there about for two reasons, but I don't want anyone to bother anyone over there and I'll see you shouldn't go there. And I see the game, like there's like a hundredish people and there's some people chatting, like I see some activity and I see there's a politics thread and someone's in there. Why is there a politics channel even on a tribe server? That shouldn't be there. Now, of course, all things are political, never trust anyone who says, yo, I don't care about politics, I just want to play a game. They are making a political statement and it's never a good one. That's correct. But at the same time, there shouldn't be a channel that is hashtag politics on a tribes to discord server. So I click on it and the first post I see, which had been posted like seconds before I click because they were a person with the wrong politics. Let's say this was a extremely unfortunate right-wing extremist, not job. So I watched for about another minute and there's an argument going on. I would hold minute, I wouldn't. I'm doing research. And I basically was like, wow, this is the first thing I see after 20 years not paying tribes, F you all and I left because of that guy. Multiple people in this discord DM me and we're like, yo, don't judge our community by him. We all hate him. And I was like, but he's in your community and you haven't banned him yet. He's there. He is the face of your community. And by the way, I'm giving a talk about your game at PAX in like two weeks. So good luck. So tribes too is like on the edge of actually being extinct. It is critically, critically endangered, but it's still there. What about extinct in the wild? Let's go even further. I don't think anyone here is even young enough to know what that sprite is from. You'll figure it out later. I'm not even going to explain it. You really want to play that game. Everyone wants to play that game and that game is great. That game requires that. So much like our friend who runs the steel battalion, which if you haven't gone there, it's over in the classic consoly area. You still have a day in change of PAX to go check it out, right? It is a game that requires fancy hardware and there are basically a handful or maybe even one people on the earth who is personally taking on the great and honorable burden of keeping that alive. Someone at Magfest owns all these battle tech pods that they recovered from who knows how many arcades and maintains them and stores them and whatever. But it's like, if you want to play this game, you need to know that person, hire that person, convince that person to come to your convention. They haven't been to PAX as far as I know, right? It's like, that's the only way you're ever going to play the original VR, the only VR battle tech, right? It's like, yeah, you can play mech warrior one, two, three, four, five. You cannot play this. So has anyone played this? Yeah, right? It's like, we're not gonna add any hands. We've been talking like this is a dire situation and being very pessimistic this whole time. Turns out you can play it. There are like eight different organizations keeping these alive in a bunch of different cities. That is a place, this was near again, PAX South, rest in peace. You could just go and reserve time and play there. So it's not available in the wild. There's no more tigers out in the wild, but there's a tiger in a zoo and you can pay to pet it. That's not ideal, but it's better than no tigers. It's like Jurassic Park. It's like, you know, there's no dinosaurs, but they're in this park. I don't think the battle tech pods can kill you, but they're old, so I'm not sure. All right, there aren't, extinct is tricky because even with animals, we're never 100% sure and every now and then, something you thought was extinct comes back. There's also games you didn't even, they're extinct, but we never even knew they existed. So you have to know the game exists to know that it's extinct. Here's a game that's extinct. Mariah, a recent game. Has anyone played this game? Whoa, a person. Well, you were very lucky because Mariah was, quote, one of the best, one of the PC's most disturbing games and now it's gone forever. That article was published in 2017. I don't have time to talk about what the deal was with this game, but it was a unique game. This was something cool and it is actually extinct and probably could not be made again for a bunch of reasons and it's just gone. But obscure indie games are at extreme risk of extinction because not enough humans even know they exist. So no one even thinks to preserve them. I mean, our extinct, first extinct example, we had a whole bunch of hands. Are we gonna come up with a game that has no hands at packs? Anyone ever played Duel? Anyone ever kill another person? This is a game, right? And there's a lot of variations of Duel that you have also not played. For example, joust, right? It's like, yeah, this joust at medieval times, this joust at Renfair, but that's not joust joust. Like try to kill a guy with this long stick. Ah, ah, actually. Medieval times joust is a lot closer to real joust than you might think because jousting, usually they were not trying to kill each other. It's lacking the dire monarch consequences. The monarch consequences are gone. Duel's, there are definitely bad people out there who fight each other to the death. I don't recommend you do that, but not like this. But they're not doing it in a society where there are laws that say, hey, as long as you fight each other to the death like this, it's kinda okay. I don't think there's any country on earth where that life could be wrong. I did not do enough research. We don't do any research. But Duel's were still legal within not living memory in America, but within like fewer generations of people than you might realize. But this is a game, right? No one's disputing that, right? This is a game, you can't play it, don't play it. What about the games that are lost to time forever? There might have been the hottest goddamn tabletop game on earth in like ancient Greece and we don't even know. Like it's the game Socrates played. How many games? Yeah, if we could find the Socrates game. Maybe this is a game Socrates made. So we got about seven minutes left. Oh, that's too many minutes. Now, because we got a long denim all here. All right, good, avoid the questions. So where were we going with all of this? Like what do we want to instill into you? So you really got to internalize. A lot of you are young, like based on the number of hands raised at various points. None of you know what a bot is or what a modem is or any of this stuff. No game is going to last forever and be playable. Whatever game you think is the invincible game, the game you've played for your entire life because you haven't lived that long yet. The hottest game you're playing right now that a million people are playing that like, you know, it's just so easy to get. It's super free, right? For example, for me right now, Marvel Snap, right? Marvel Snap could die. It probably will die at some point, right? That's the way that's going to last. I probably played more Quake II weapons factory than most other games I've ever played. And I doubt anyone in this room has even heard of that game. I could not conceive of a world where that game was no longer able to be played. And here I am in 2023, that game is dead. Even Mario 1, something like that is threatened, right? In some way, we could end up in a world where nobody can play Mario 1. So if an old game still exists, it is worth playing or at least learning about, like do yourself a favor, don't play every old game because a lot of them are bad. Most. But if you find a game that is old and missing or hard to find and you see that there are people who advocate for it, if you see there are people who are putting in effort to make it still be playable, if there is a library of ancient tabletop games, maybe one floor directly down from us where people are putting in the effort to curate these ancient games so people can know they existed, take them up on it, talk to an old person, read a book by an old person, someone is putting effort in, at least see why they're putting that effort in. Right, if there's a zillion old games they're trying to preserve, right? We only really have enough resources to preserve the good ones. So if you see someone actively preserving one, that's enough, that proves it's a good one. There is some merit there, someone sees merit in it, even if it's not your merit, you might not like it, but check it out, right? Don't just keep playing all the brand new games and ignore all those people. They're working hard, give them, right? All they want you to do is play the game. And you wanna play games, otherwise you wouldn't be here. Do it. So we're in a really weird opportunity because video games were invented in living memory. There are probably a few people in this room who were born before the first video game was ever made. It wasn't that long ago. We have preserved almost every goddamn video game because it's the newest type of entertainment that humans have invented. So celebrate that, but also remember that with a golden age is a golden opportunity. Now is the time, we have the opportunity to make sure almost every game that was ever made continues to exist. When you think about the golden ages of other mediums of art, golden age of movies, there's a lot of movies from the golden age of movies that are gone, right? There's a lot of comic books, golden age comic books that are gone or super rare, right? But at the time, nobody thought that was rare or endangered in any way you perform. Disney's just like throwing away cells, like no one even cared, burning film prints. The golden age is right the heck now, right? Preserve what we have at this moment, even if it came, whatever game is in the Expo Hall right now, right? Don't think that that does not need attention. If you make stuff, put in some effort to make it less. The Geek Notes Archive right now is 716 gigabytes. I have that backed up in like 10 different places. I actually want to make sure that is out there. I'm not saying it's good. I'm not saying you should listen to our podcast. I'm saying I made it and I made it for some reason and I want it to continue to exist because it is information that somebody might be able to use in the future. Well, we're getting philosophy, right? You don't want yourself to die if your own creations don't die. Then you can, if your memory of your existence lives on, right, everyone has two deaths when your body goes in the ground and then when the last time someone says your name, right, or the last time someone thinks of you is that you're second to anyway. But if you make something, believe in it and try to make it exist in the future in some capacity. But more importantly, we talked about all these people putting in the effort. The only games that actually get preserved are the games that people want to be preserved. You, by telling other people about a game you like, are spreading knowledge about that game and you are literally, actively, and directly curating the future of the world by doing so. That is a tiny action, but it's an important one. Go to the next level, right? You can be that one person who's keeping some game alive, right? It's like, that guy who's got the Steel Battalion, like the rest of us, will not live forever, right? It's like, when this packs 20, 90, and we won't be there for sure, right? Will the Steel Battalion be there? It could. The Steel Battalion could be there at packs 20, 90, but somebody else will have to raise the torch to keep that Steel Battalion going. It could be you. You could be the person who kicks the one game and carries it for as long as your body functions and then gives it to the next person and be really race of gaming. But also, the word curate, I picked that for a reason. Choose to share the things that you think make the world better and maybe don't try to preserve the shit posts in the bad forum that you hung out on. Curate the future, make the future better, help humanity decide what's worth remembering about this century. Remember that Quake arcade game? You can play it. Somebody saved it and they saved it recently. So not all hope is lost and we end this panel on a call to action. Now that'll go to our website, like you can find Google Geeknives, pick up one of these flyers. We actually wanna do another panel at a Future Packs. Tell us about your game. Tell me about your tribes too, your action Quake. If you know someone who's curating a game, keeping some obscure thing alive, let us know. We wanna do a panel to highlight all these tiny communities keeping some tiny game that no one remembers alive because that is the kind of thing we can do being good at talking instead of being good at making games. We know a lot of people, some of whom we've mentioned who are the one person keeping a game going, but there are probably many we don't know. We want to know all of them if we possibly can, right? All those individuals who have a game that they are solely responsible for maintaining its existence, tell us who they are if you know about them. And we are out of time. I hope this was enjoyable. Yes. Okay, clapping. Only one minute over, terrific. Enjoy your packs on the way out. If you grab one of these flyers, then it'll be easy to remember us, but it's 2023, type the word Geeknives into whatever box appears on whatever device you have and you'll find our stuff. I promise you. And you should not take photos of random QR codes because they're not to be trusted, but I promise this one is to be trusted. Ha, ha, ha!