This link isn’t strictly about Cosmo Wright’s Ocarina of Time speedrun – which, by the way, is incredible to watch. Make sure to read Computer and Video Games’ feature on it as well.
Rather, I’d like to point out these two tweets by Sonny Fazio in response to Peter Hajas, who originally shared the link to Cosmo Wright’s speedrun last night:
@peterhajas Great read. Makes you wonder if this will still be possible with how easy it is now for devs to ship bug fixes.
— Sonny Fazio (@sonnyfazio) August 8, 2013
@peterhajas it seems like most of those tricks were more or less bugs that never got patched. Once the game shipped, that was it for fixes.
— Sonny Fazio (@sonnyfazio) August 8, 2013
This is an interesting side effect of the App Store that I didn’t think about. Speedruns are an extremely fun-to-watch, but niche use case that, as Fazio notes, are generally facilitated by glitches and bugs in the source code of games. This goes beyond the App Store and extends to games sold on online platforms like Steam and PlayStation Network as well. Because of updates and patches, will it become increasingly difficult – if not impossible – for speedrunners to analyze and play through games in their original form decades from now?
In the video I linked above, for instance, Cosmo explains that a major glitch in Ocarina of Time took 13 years to be discovered and used. That was only possible thanks to the fact that a) Nintendo 64 cartridges are still physically available today and b) Nintendo’s conversion for the Wii’s Virtual Console is a 1:1 port of the original – bugs and glitches included. Can you imagine someone still playing an iOS game in 13 years?
Twenty or thirty years from now, will we see speedruns for iOS, PS3, or Xbox 360 games? Sadly, I think that a mix of retrocompatibility issues, OS and app updates, and lack of physical access to games will hinder speedrunning. Not to mention Apple’s current state of affairs with games and the gaming community.
Overall, Digital preservation is the bigger topic we should be discussing.