Game preservation has been a hot topic over the last few years, and has recently come to the forefront again with the abrupt closure of the gaming magazine / website Game Informer, which left fans and former employees scrambling to save decades' worth of interviews, features, and news articles from being erased.
So, in the wake of this, two of the industry's biggest names, the Doom co-creator John Romero and the Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, have recently got together with the independent media outlet Minnmax to take part in a new conversation about the importance of preservation.
The conversation is over an hour long and is also hosted by the Minnmax founder and former Game Informer employee Ben Hanson as well as the former Video Game History Foundation co-director Kelsey Lewin. It covers a range of preservation-related topics and issues, such as why Mechner was personally disappointed to see the Game Informer archive get pulled offline, why the two developers are so keen to preserve their past work, and what needs to be done to convince more developers and institutions to start actively documenting the history that they've been a part of.
Following the release of Jordan Mechner's Karateka, a young John Romero actually sent a fan letter to the developer, which is one of the fascinating materials belonging to Mechner that has since been preserved.
It's a fascinating conversation and we can't really imagine a better qualified group of people to talk about the subject. Especially as Mechner and Romero have recently published memoirs giving their account of their careers — in the form of Doom Guy Life in First Person and Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family — and have also previously submitted materials to institutions like the Internet Archive and the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York to show their commitment to the effort in the past.
If you have an hour spare, we wholeheartedly recommend listening in, even if it's just for the group's amazement of Mechner managing to archive a costume beard from the shooting of The Last Express (3:49) or Romero's incredible anecdote about the Apple II programmer Larry Miller (28:18) who reportedly had the assembly code to one of his games in his head and would dictate this to a secretary while smoking a pipe, who would then type it in.
