The Embracer Group has quickly become a juggernaut with their latest acquisitions being Square Enix’s North American studios, Eidos Montreal, and Crystal Dynamics. Thankfully the company is already thinking about video game perseveration and has created a special game preservation initiative called the Embracer Games Archive. PC Gamer reports that the Embracer Group has acquired “50,000 games, consoles, and accessories” in its vault in Karlstad, Sweden and they have a special team which consists of a CEO, archivist, assistant, technical engineer, and supply manager.
PC Gamer notes that “Currently, the collection is not accessible to the public or researchers, but the initiative has stated it plans on building out a database of its collection and making it available as a resource to academics, researchers, and, at least to some degree, the general public.” So by acquiring a variety of prestigious video games companies the Embracer Group is already looking towards preserving the classics, which is great news. The company has also said that it plans to create an array of new games and remasters based on the legendary franchises it has acquired including Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and Legacy of Kain etc.
Wow, this is great news. Wish more companies cared to preserve gaming history. Hope this becomes fully available to the public at some point not just meet us half way.
Yeah, it’s certainly good to see a company do this. Hopefully more follow suit.
Not enough companies care because not enough customers care. If you follow any retro enthusiast scene, you inevitably run into waves of people, even in that context, who think its a waste of time to bother getting things more accurate than free emulators do. Spending money on projects most customers won’t spend any money on at all is a tough pitch in a board room.
No one thinks it is a waste of time to preserve games. You are talking about one aspect than what the article is even about. As far as that goes though the switch has proven your comment false with more than 30 million subscribers to its switch online which is right behind gamepass so that is impressive.
Game preservation is about saving the actual game not emulating it or selling it even but saving part of history.
If anyone’s interested in this kind of thing, I suggest looking up the UK project to preserve laserdiscs. A lot of content there, in particular government produced content, is only existent anywhere in laserdisc form. It is slowly being lost to time and disc rot. They’ve reversed engineered a laserdisc reader than dumps the content in full uncompressed data.
When you think of game history you think of classic donkey Kong, not Lara Croft 3.0
This is a good thing they are doing, more gaming companies all over the world should try this.
Yes you generally think of older arcade games. Though I think a bunch of early swings at 3D games will be worth highlighting for history sake. Tomb Raider was one of the first 3D platformers to be critic and commercial success along with Mario 64. Earlier pc games sure but for home console that was one of the first good ones.