Hobbyists Once Again Do Preservation: Every ‘Nintendo Power’ Mag Digitized Online
from the power-to-the-people dept
One of the wonders of a digital world is that art preservation in many forms suddenly gets much, much easier. For all kinds of art, be it video games, music, drawings/paintings, etc., at the very least an uploaded digital simulacrum of the art means that it can’t be easily lost due to the pernicious lack of care by the creators of the art itself.
I’ve spent quite a bit of ink and time discussing how this applies to video games. And, beyond just the games themselves, which are obviously digital in nature, the peripheral art and culture that surrounds those games, such as game manuals. The truly frustrating part of those otherwise very cool stories is that it really shouldn’t be left to fans and hobbyists to do this kind of preservation and archiving. Why don’t gaming companies want to preserve their own cultural output somewhere? Publishers? Developers? It’s almost never them that does the hard work. That is typically done by a small number of fans in the public, who then risk being slapped around over intellectual property concerns by those whose job they’re doing.
That certainly would be the case if I were going to upload every Nintendo Power magazine to the internet, as was done recently.
Uploaded to Archive.org today by Gumball, all 285 issues of Nintendo Power are now unofficially available in .cbr format. At just over 40 gigabytes for the whole shebang, the vast majority of the collection comes courtesy of Retromags, a community-run project dedicated to archiving classic video game magazines. A couple of remaining issues were sourced via Reddit by Gumball. Scanned in full color, the collection is a wonderful way to browse through gaming and media history.
The escalating Reddit post is gaining a lot of attention and appreciation from gamers who have either been looking to complete their own collections or to find the couple of missing issues that weren’t in the Retromags collection. “I just wanted to get every issue in one place,” Gumball says in another Reddit reply. “The ones that I could not find were issues 208 and 285. Retromags did not have them [but] a dude over in the r/DHexchange happened to have both of these [and] allowed me to complete the set.
If you’re a gamer of a certain age, Nintendo Power magazines were the absolute best. And even if you aren’t, or if you happen to think that the magazine is pointless trash, that doesn’t really matter. Those magazines are still cultural output that are absolutely worth preserving. I plan to go through them myself and just drink in the nostalgia, thinking back to when I was a child diving into these magazines.
But this is Nintendo we’re talking about. And Nintendo has never been shy about attacking anyone who remotely comes close to stepping on their IP, even if, as in this case, the company can’t be bothered to do any of this archiving or preservation itself.
Unfortunately, Nintendo’s history with these sorts of efforts isn’t exactly comforting. But as physical media, especially printed manuals and magazines like Nintendo Power, become harder to find, having access to archives like this is an essential way to preserve this history.
Hopefully Nintendo can manage to see that as well. Somehow, though, I suspect the lawyers already have pen to paper.
Filed Under: archiving, nintendo power, retro mags, video games
Companies: internet archive, nintendo
Comments on “Hobbyists Once Again Do Preservation: Every ‘Nintendo Power’ Mag Digitized Online”
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNDDDDD it's gone.
Nintendo work quick these days, it seems.
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Techdirt tends to be a bit slow. The Reddit post was from 6 days ago.
Because they want it to disappear rather than let it enter the public domain. Only what they are selling now has any value for them.
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Which ironically means that ultimately they want cultural irrelevance.
To be enduringly culturally relevant, their works would have to be preserved. Instead they want a moment of fame, and then people to forget about them (until they do the next thing).
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No, they want to be enduringly culturally relevant—but on their terms. That usually means never re-releasing older games until there’s a trend of doing so, at which point they can charge us upwards of $60 for a collection of games that shouldn’t cost more than $20 at most, special features be damned. Hell, look at how Nintendo dripfeeds people with the classic console games on the Switch.
Their idea of relevance is akin to the Disney Vault: Put it away for years, make people want it bad enough that they beg for it, then maybe release it from the vault for a limited time before shoving it back in. That shit worked before the Internet became the widespread utility it is today. But now people can go pirate all that stuff and play it without having to go through the corporate bullshit, legalities be damned. The only upside for gaming companies is that a lot of people really don’t have the patience to set up emulators.
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I really don’t think Nintendo cares about cultural relevance. They just want the kind of relevance where people give them lots of money.
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Nintendo wouldn’t have all that merchandise, that theme park, and that animated movie starring Crisp Rat if it didn’t care about cultural relevance. Sure, those things make/will make money, but they wouldn’t be able to make money without people giving a shit about Mario. Nintendo wants cultural relevance—on its terms. That’s why fan games get wrecked and archival efforts like this one get destroyed: Nintendo doesn’t want fans to have any say in its cultural relevance unless they’re paying Nintendo first.
The real mystery is how anyone thought that this would last more than a few hours online.
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How many copies of the archive were downloaded in the time it was up? Posting it to The Internet Archive gave many people a chance to grab a copy before it was taken down.
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I guarantee that the NP archive will live on if even one person nabbed it. I mean, I’d bet money that a torrent for this collection is being seeded as I post this comment.
How is their preservation efforts different from piracy?
While I support the goal of preservation activity, and their community seems to be the only entities that are willing to spend the time to contact the original authors for a permission, when handling with nintendo’s material, are you saying that they actually asked nintendo if it’s ok to do the preservation (and further republish) activities?
Basically the more popular the material is, the less preservation activity is needed, since the market still have users with that material widely available. Thus large publishing operations are likely to reject the permission requests, since they do not see the need for preservation activity at this time.
Original authors might have exclusive contracts with the publishers that prevent them from further licensing of the material. Thus preservation folks are in a pin, either they trust the author that it’s “all ok” to do the preservation activity, or they trust the publishers that “their contracts with the authors prevent further dissemination of the material”. If they get conflicting messages from the market, it’s no wonder asking for permission is careful balancing act.
This kind of issues are present for people who are actually asking for permissions.
But many of the preservation people got popularity for their sites by publishing (without license) the popular works like nintendo’s material. I obviously need to support the folks that are doing preservation via asking for permission, given that permission requests are such gems where publisher addresses and contact points are widely shared among participants. But the same publisher address sharing is not happening with people who pirated the material.
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No one cares what you say, you hack.