Digital Eclipse has been championing the archival approach to game preservation for a lot longer than the last few years, ...since the early 2000s? No, actually, since the mid-90s. Digital Eclipse was founded in 1982 and put out Williams arcade classics [Joust, Robotron and Defender] in 1994 and those were the first commercial products to use emulation, which was a big deal. Even in the late 90s, there was an Atari package for the PlayStation 1 that had interviews with Nolan Bushnell and low quality scans of flyers and stuff like that. So really, the idea has always been about how we present these games as works of art and with more respect. We’re just continuing that work.


historically, but when it came to the people holding the purse strings, it’s kind of like, ‘That sounds expensive. That sounds like it’s gonna take a long time. We don’t really know if players are going to want that.’ What they were thinking was, ‘You just get this game running again in emulation, right, we get it out there and that’s that.’ And I think that


there has just been a growing need to celebrate our history and you just have more gaming history nerds who enjoy reading about gaming history and learning about these sorts of things. Whereas maybe in the past, people may have been a little too focused on the future. I mean, certainly something that I observed 20 years


But those early efforts were not well received, whereas Atari 50, The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story have been. What’s changed? Certainly we have a really great team now, on all levels. I’m very proud of the work the editorial team is doing. The engineers and the art team that we have are phenomenal, and really everybody is on board with this idea of not only interactive documentaries, but just always presenting something that feels like a historical document, versus ‘we got these games running again, here you go, play them’. I think that publishers have come around to the


benefits of doing it this way. For many years, people have had these ideas of how we can present games


ago when Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door came out, were reviews that were 6 out of 10 because there was that mentality that only something that was fully 3D with mature themes got 9s and 10s. Now that game is considered a legendary classic and when Nintendo said they were redoing it for the Switch, people lost their minds, I think that now there is much more appreciation for


the wide variety of expression in the interactive medium. Anything has the chance to be rated highly if it strikes a nerve with the right person, and you don’t have that sense of ‘Well, this isn’t the sort of game that we can give a ten to.’ So, we’re blown away by the reviews of Atari 50 and Cowabunga and Making of Karateka, and we feel


“Everybody is on board with this idea of always presenting something that feels like a historical document, versus ‘we got these games running again, here you go, play them’.” Chris Kohler, editorial director at Digital Eclipse


August/September 2024 MCV/DEVELOP | 43


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