Hello readers of Cosmia’s blog, it’s me again, Spartan with another article that some of you might find fascinating. Since their creation back in the 80s, video games have come in various forms over the years, most being limited to arcades before gradually moving on to home consoles and making them readily available to the average household. But as the years pass, certain games fall into obscurity and are locked to their specific consoles as technology improves. Granted, there are some older games that have been salvaged through online stores on modern consoles (virtual console on the Nintendo Wii anyone?) but it’s not a guarantee that all games will be ported into the online stores. And that’s one of the main problems being a gamer in general: keeping up with the trends requires stronger hardware, and said stronger hardware isn’t going to come with all of the bells and whistles that the previous generation of consoles had.

One of the main things that’s making preservation so difficult is the materials used for cartridges and disks. I can’t tell you how many times I’d go into my local game exchange store and get a used PlayStation game, only for the disc to not work BECAUSE of how old it is. Most of what I wanted from that store were movie licensed games (before you scoff at my tastes, I’ll have you know some of them aren’t that bad) and games that aren’t ported to modern hardware, and the antiquity of 10+ year old materials made playing them harder than it had any right to be. And that’s not even mentioning the games I wanted to play but couldn’t find in there, or if I did they’d be upwards of 60+ dollars because of how uncommon of a game it is. But at the end of the day that place was my only option besides shelling out money on Amazon or Ebay for used cartridges that might not work at all. Case in point back in 2012 I wanted to get a cartridge of Pokemon Emerald (I started with Heartgold version, and wanted a GBA cartridge to try out some features in Diamond and Pearl). I ordered one on Ebay, it arrived but guess what? the internal battery ran dry and that meant I couldn’t save the game at all. 20 dollars for a game that if I want to beat I need to do it all in one sitting, that’s great.

So then, if I couldn’t buy the games on a modern device at a fair price (didn’t mean to rhyme that sentence, oh well) and I couldn’t find copies that actually worked because of scummy internet salesmen (you know who you are) What else could I do?

Emulation…

What?

EMULATION!

Yeah…. that. Personally I don’t like emulation because it feels like stealing (and to an extent, it is). But there are some games that are so rare and hardly available that I don’t really have a choice in the matter. I’m not going to emulate Super Mario 64 when it’s on the Nintendo Switch and the Wii’s virtual console, that’s a very popular, readily available game that I can find at a fair price compared to an original cartridge for a system that I don’t even own! But then there are games like EVO: Search for Eden

Initially released in Japan in 1992, it was eventually released over in the US in 1993. Published by Enix (a company that would eventually become Square Enix, responsible for the creation of Kingdom Hearts, a series Mr. Cosmia is very familiar with). You control an organism that starts out as a fish during the Cambrian period (when most of the earth was covered in ocean, and oxygen on land just wasn’t a thing, if you went back in time to that period you’d either drown or suffocate) and gradually evolve into various species over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, becoming an amphibian, a dinosaur, early mammal, and so on. It’s kind of like Spore, but if Spore was released in 1992, was a side scrolling platformer and was limited to specific creature parts from real world prehistoric fauna (not that that’s a bad thing in my opinion). For a budding paleontologist or someone interested in evolution, this game would be right up their alley, and while it is largely outdated (the scientific inaccuracies in this game alone are too many to count, even ignoring the crazy plot) I think it’s at least worth checking out.

However, it’s not an easy game to get your hands on, listed on Ebay are used copies going for 210 USD and some rising to FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS. Even though I love this game’s concept and execution, do I really want to spend half a thosand smackeroos to play it?

The answer is no, it should always be no.

E.V.O is a game that emulation’s really the only solution to play it on in my opinion, and I hate that. If it were rereleased on the PSstore or something for 9.99, then I’d say just get it at that price or on sale, but that’s not the world we live in. Some developers hate it when consumers emulate their creations, and rightfully so. But I personally think restricting it to older hardware and not porting it/remastering or remaking it only encourages that behavior, not stop it.

E.V.O is just one example of many hidden gems that met this fate. There’s no shortage of stories like this, and that frustrates me. Is it so difficult to port games to newer hardware? Nintendo’s Wii Eshop seemed to pump them out pretty quick back in it’s day. But what do I know? I’m just a general biologist. There will come a day where everything will be digitized. No disks, cartridges or chips to be inserted into devices. But the question remains: will we still be able to enjoy the retro games of yesteryear, when that day comes?