History in regard to video games is actually a rather popular subject right now. Why? That would be because the preservation of video games is something many believe in, and yet, there are basically efforts to prevent that from happening due to a focus on digital gaming and other questionable decisions by developers and publishers. As such, there are efforts from gamers and certain gamer communities to try and preserve what is out there so that it isn’t lost forever. Even Roblox is a part of this in its own way. For example, the game has been around since 2006, which means there’s plenty to preserve…if you know where to look.
In the case of one Reddit user, he was looking at his mother’s PC at one point and realized that there were some programs from the 2013 version of Roblox that were still active on the computer. For some, that might seem like a rather small find, but it’s indeed a piece of history, as these launchers haven’t been updated since 2013. When a picture of this was posted to the official Reddit thread, commenters immediately noted to the poster that they shouldn’t do anything with them outside of ZIP file them and preserve them. Some even offered to take the files and preserve them in their own community archive.
No matter what happens next with the files, it is cool to see that players have such a reverence for these files and want to see them preserved for whatever happens down the line. Why does preservation matter to so many gamers? That’s because video games have been around for decades now. For many people, it’s not just a “fad” that they’ve been a part of; it’s been their whole lives in some ways! Whether you came into gaming during the OG era, the arcade boom, the resurgence era via the rise of Nintendo, or even just recent console generations with Sony and Microsoft, people have been playing video games for a long time, and they want to see these pieces of work honored.
Every game, regardless of sales and quality, deserves to be respected and examined in various ways. By ensuring that copies of games, and even older copies of evolved programs, are preserved, we don’t lose the history that helped get us this far, and we can remember the steps taken to get us to where we are now.
So keep this in mind the next time someone refers to games as ‘trash’ or ‘not worth preserving.’ They absolutely are.
