This past weekend at the completionist.com complex we welcomed a new console to our ever-growing family. The Odyssey 2, lovingly developed by Magnavox, and originally released in 1978. As we sat down for a rousing round of K.C. Munchkin (don’t get munched out!), I started thinking about what kind of shape my PS2, or 360 games will be in 30 years from now.

I realize that making cartridges isn’t as cheap as making CDs, but as a collector, I fear that CDs don’t have the same longevity that a cartridge does. I remember being pretty disapointed when I heard that Nintendo was moving to mini-cds for the Gamecube. In a battle between a solid circuit board, and a thinner-than-paper sheet of aluminum, the winner seems obvious. I can go to a garage sale, and pick up an old, dusty, battered copy of Altered Beast for the Genesis, and it’ll work fine. If I even consider buying second hand Playstation Games (which happens seldom to never), it’s not without first holding them up the light, and looking for dents or scratches. Even if I don’t see something, it still might not work.

Of course, besides being expensive, cartridges have their drawbacks. The contacts get dirty, and some games have nickel cell batteries that die, but either of those problems can be solved with some tools, and a little determination. If your disc-based games get scratched, you’re basically out of luck. Or, if you’re certifiably stupid, you can go buy a disk doctor, or some other piece of crap that promises to fix your games. Then you’ll have a broken game, a plastic piece of garbage, and you’ll be out $20. There are places that you can get disks resurfaced, but that only works with very shallow scratches, and you can only do it once, maybe twice per disc, because essentially those machines just sand down to below the scratch, and then polish the surface back to normal.

I take very good care of my games (just ask Chris what happens if he puts a disc down anywhere but in a system or in its case). But even if you buy your games brand new, and take excellent care of them, (don’t leave them in the sun, use them as ninja stars, etc), they will still degenerate over time. Probably they’ll still be usable 50 years from now, but that’s not a guarantee. What if I’m 80 years old and really need to play State of Emergency? Will I be able to? Assuming I can find both my copy of the game, and my PS2, after sifting through what by that time will likely be 23 plastic drum sets, and an assortment of guitars, guns, 3D immersion helmets, etc.

I know that you can use emulators for older games, but playing the actual game on the actual system just feels better somehow. With either storage format, the games eventually won’t work anymore, but I bet the older ones will last longer. Plus, even if both storage formats last forever, the motors that spin the discs won’t.  It hasn’t even been 10 years, and I doubt there are many launch-day PS2s out there that still work.

Julie seems pretty worked up about this.  Perhaps a little more than she should be, maybe, but she’s actually talking about a very real problem for more mediums than just games.  How do you properly preserve these pieces of history?  Old Hollywood movies are crumbling, musician’s master tracks seem to disappear after years on the shelf, audio cassette just ain’t what they used to be, etc.

To be fair, CDs have come a long way.  Anyone who remembers loading them into carts before inserting them into CD drives knows what I’m talking about.  I also remember a time where the tiniest scratch would render a CD unreadable.  Back then I also thought you could demagnetize a CD, something I tried to do to my friend’s copy of Mad Dog McCree, but that’s another story altogether.  The first burnable CDs were no picnic either, as my graveyard of now decrepit and unusable blue-bottomed discs can attest.

The reality is that eventually there will be no discs.  There will be no cartridges either.  I’m sure all the major publishers would love to see the day when every game is delivered to your PC or console directly from the cloud that is the internet.  Save it on your hard drive, maybe back it up to some flash memory if you’re so inclined.  Retailers may have something to say about the idea, however, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be on their side.  Sure I moan about not having enough space to keep all this junk but I’ll be sad when the day comes where I can no longer head out to a local store and actually physically pick up a game.  Maybe that’s just me, maybe I’m just nostalgic or dumb.