1575: Crowdarchival

Since I finished both Steins;Gate and Saya no Uta recently (the latter was a whole lot shorter) I was pondering what visual novel I should read next this evening, and my thoughts were drawn to a disc I picked up from JAST a while back called the JAST Memorial Collection. This disc included several old JAST titles updated to run on modern machines, plus two additional games called May Club and Nocturnal Illusion. I recalled that a friend of mine had said that Nocturnal Illusion was particularly interesting and worth playing, so I decided I’d check it out.

Except it fell at the first hurdle. Being a super-old game, it does not like modern operating systems. It particularly doesn’t like 64-bit Windows 7 and outright refused to start up at all.

It’s been a while since I’ve encountered something that simply doesn’t run at all, but my reaction to it is the same as it was back in the days of MS-DOS and EMM386.EXE: the insatiable feeling of “I MUST GET THIS GAME WORKING NOW IF IT IS THE LAST THING I DO.” It doesn’t matter if it ends up being crap; the fact that my computer is actively preventing me from exploring something flips a switch in my brain and causes me to go into full-on research mode.

In attempting to determine whether there was any way of getting Nocturnal Illusion to run under 64-bit Windows 7, I came across a project designed to do just that, known as ViLE. This seemingly abandoned project was designed to be a “virtual machine” for older visual novel titles, and specifically supports Nocturnal Illusion and May Club as well as a third title called Dividead. A bit of tinkering around and ensuring various pieces of game content were in the right place, and I eventually had Nocturnal Illusion up and running on my TV; not only that, but with the enhanced graphics of the untranslated Japanese remake, too. Neat!

I can’t speak much to the content of Nocturnal Illusion as yet as I only gave it a cursory look to see if it was actually working. What I did think was interesting, though, was how the community on the Internet is a lot more willing to archive the past of video games — even obscure, incredibly niche titles like Nocturnal Illusion — than the big companies who, you’d think, would have the resources to be able to do so.

And this is great, because as an art form, video games are, to a certain degree, more difficult to archive than other forms of media. They’re a lot more tied to technology than other art forms; a piece of music is timeless regardless of the media it’s stored on, whereas a video game is inherently tied to a piece of hardware. You can’t cram a Mario Kart cartridge into a Wii, for example.

And this is where the archivists of the medium come in. In many cases continuing to (illegally) redistribute games long after they’ve gone out of print, the archivists of the Internet are dedicated to ensuring that even modern audiences can enjoy titles that are theoretically completely incompatible with modern systems, be it through emulators or clever pieces of software trickery like ViLE.

I hope this never changes. While the legality of a lot of it is somewhat questionable, in some cases delving into the seedy underbelly of the Internet is the only way to be able to rediscover (or perhaps even discover) certain titles, even with the best efforts of high-profile retro specialists like GOG.com and Night Dive Studios. I don’t see companies like GOG rushing to bring titles like Nocturnal Illusion up to date to run on modern machines — largely because of their adult content — and thus it is up to these amateur archivists, these heroes of digital preservation, to ensure that we can always celebrate the history of this rich and diverse medium of artistic expression — and of play.