Eventually the ugly thing will raise its head once again in the night. Prompted by strange thoughts that come from somewhere in the center of the spine. It’s a midnight feeling, at first. Places we live and work in, cluttered with little photographs and ephemera purchased at comic-conventions or on etsy or god forbid our own local planet of commerce, Amazon dot com. I’ve been saved the punishment of having to work in one of its grueling factories but I cannot imagine a life eking out survival making sure everyone else gets their fetish objects in time to let them collect dust.

Once, I had an office job: without that office job, there might not be a “deep-hell.com” because like anyone who’s smart enough to know, I tried to spent the majority of my time on the corporate dime fucking around in Microsoft Word save for all else, my work computer could hardly run Dwarf Fortress. One of the rules was that we weren’t allowed to display any mark of personality on our desks. A little corner office that in a year of working, I must’ve gained and lost coworkers at a rate of about one a month.

I’m surrounded by stuff that I have accrued through the years. Little bits and pieces, here and there. Plastic and cardboard, maybe -small spots on walls reserved for dried plants and paintings friends have gifted me. Am I doing anything other than hoarding ephemera for a potential retirement that may never come? I don’t know – it’s good to appreciate a well made toy, sometimes.

It’s an ugly though. Am I me, or am I the stuff around me. Why do I own Konami’s Big Boss in an 8″ tall sculpture that mostly exists to be posed around my house. The answer, the gravest thing I can imagine is that it was on sale at one point, and I guess I do love Metal Gear Solid. I had that thought crawling into bed a night battle royale violence stretched too much into the morning.

The skins of Fortnite look like little plastic models – perfectly smooth where they need to be and always too shiny. Action figures thrown into a model island, little bits of plastic thrown against each other. When you can’t get them in the game, you can find them in real life. It’s not just the toys though: collector editions of every videogame abound now. Chock full of latex and rubber goodies just waiting to be opened. Cardboard sleeves that perfectly represent the way manuals and card inserts were printed.

You can buy one right now if you want. Do you want Grim Fangando for 99$? Nothing I can write here can stop someone from getting it – not even knowing we’re all broke enough that something called Sezzle is offering me the product for 4 interest-free payments of 25.00.

And then you’re trying to sleep, and the thought comes back again: what will the neighborhood I can’t walk out of that i die in look like? when the suburbs eventually kill me, will it be because I was trying hard for it or does it all look like a slow unraveling death. One of those movies where I conspire with my lovely wife who has a beautiful pink gamer chair to make sure the guy across the street doesn’t upstage me when it’s time for the annual Christmas Decoration season.

Will videogame preservation ever mean my dead body, hands gripping tightly around a controller while I pilot a mining drone through non euclidean halls and conserve ammunition as a teenager, eager to put down a mining rebellion. Videogame Preservation seems like it should have one, obvious and plain solution. Put it all in a room somewhere, backed up on a drive. Put our feet on the table and let the next generation have it. Reality dictates we want to make a buck on it wile we can, and at least the country I live in has a history telling me someone is out there planning on making a buck on it in ways I can’t even imagine yet.

What does the inside of the house that owns every copy of the atari 50th anniversary look like? Vaulted ceiling and glass, mostly plastic drapes. A lawn, a car port. It’s got to be middle America, the parts that aren’t yet mouldering in the heat of the sun. Even worse: Atari wants to put it all in one building and let people live there. Imagine a world where anyone could be anyone, for 599$ a night on the Las Vegas strip.

Bathrooms tend to be a great place where the freaks I know load up their weird horny art, and I haven’t seen a good picture of Heather Mason pointing her pistol at somebodies dick on the toilet in years, let alone any good videogame memorabilia in one that calls for it. Instead, I have seen too many glass-display cases lined with LED’s and filled with Anime characters as centerpieces in bedrooms dominated by white walls, stucco and plush carpeting. Everyone’s adult bedroom turns into the one they wish they had as a kid.

If I didn’t already have, on this website, one of my favorite jokes I’ve ever made about letting a vampire into your house buried somewhere, I’d bring it back here. Solving videogame preservation drips down in the steam of my brain like a worse joke: how’re we gonna solve it if we can’t solve boyhood? If someone can’t be Luke Skywalker or Deadpool, how many ways can they get him into their house?

Over a decade ago the capital I internet lost a treasure trope of Videogame Content called snesorama.us. Boasting a downloads section that wasn’t just strong and supported, but was packed with translations that are now gone, beta and demo software, it was also a type of museum ran for and by the public. Those people, companies and their lords of the market always forget are primarily the ones who play videogames. There had always been a fear in the ever deepening fog of subcultures and data pirates, that it would be lost forever and some of it is.

Our big houses – that’s where the museum is, at least it feels like with the way we’ve turned “you should be able to buy a physical copy of a videogame” into something stressing the physical, product aspects of the videogame. More cardboard, more collectors editions, but I’m getting off topic and we covered all of that up there. If the future gets bad enough, I at least hope the people who crack open my suburban living environment when I’m long dead find that my copies of Parasite Eve I & II still work.

Videogames aren’t worth losing or taking a life over, maybe. Ask Nintendo what it thinks of the man sold up river for running an emulation website – a trip that’s going to cost him 2.1 million dollars in garnished wages. Always remember that for most people wanting to run a con like charging faster download speeds, it’s mostly only illegal if you aren’t already crazy fucking rich. Nobody should be allowed to get rich on one.

If it gets hard enough to find games in the first place – what’s 20$ for the Castlevania Collection? Will it really be worth going out of your way to experience a rare part of history if all of the hits are up on the Nintendo Switch service? If we can’t archive it and sell it, are we just selling videogames as products forever?

My beloved, the sparking queen, cdromance.com holds the only tether to the world of videogames i even care about some days. every other tether is in plastic, or boxed collections, or more shit to fill the two story high hotel california i’m going to die in that doesn’t even need a satellite dish, they can just get it all sent to my phone.

It was written about in 2015, it will be written about now, today, and then again in the future as the scorched world of software preservation burns down more and more. Looking out of friends garages filled with ephemera. Seeing racks and racks of plastic and vinyl toys at comic conventions. For most people: it is simply easier, right now, to go to https://etsy.com and search “legacy of kain” than it is for most people who play videogames casually to find and play these titles without dropping money on them, like the kind of money that requires buying a console first.

Videogames, like data and skin, degrade over time. All of the musty rooms filled with plastic cartridges will eventually fall to rust and plague. Coughing moisture and pollution wafting in through the drapes and coming to claim the hide of your perfect gray Nintendo Entertainment System. The kids won’t have room for this shit, unless they’re psycho about Mario, and who wouldn’t be these days? The history of videogames is often the history of us, right there in the moment. Soft little moments like thinking if a videogame character can have a ponytail, well, so can I – it doesn’t have to mean I’m a woman or anything. Little moments make up history, and museums often make a point of trying to capture that, too.

What’s the allure of personal histories, though, if all we’re supposed to remember about something is that it was fun to play and it’s gone now. Maybe it’ll come around on Playstation Network or the Nintendo Switch subscription service. If the history of art is so personal and can’t really be sold – maybe it’s better to just sue people into oblivion. That’s a good, solid option that doesn’t get messy like having to talk about who made what, why they made it and how it effected the people who played it.

The market provides alternate options to history, don’t you know? Why do you need to play anything when the most important part of capitalism is proving we love things enough to buy little diorama of them for our house. I can’t be Luke Skywalker, but I can show people how much I love him. I can’t play Soul Reaver the way the law wants me to without making the CD appear for money. But right now, on etsy.com…

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