Signal Boost: Preserving Classic Video Games with RetroRGB
Have you ever thought about how we experience media?
A book is a book is a book, surely. Reading is reading, no matter what device or medium you do it on. And yet, you’ll still hear people say the experience of reading on a computer, phone or e-reader isn’t the same as holding a physical book forged from dead tress in their hands. Many people still prefer the sound of vinyl records to digital music. Watching a play live is a manifestly different experience than watching a recording of the performance or reading a script (just ask Jack about Shakespeare sometime). And once you move into more thoroughly modern forms of creative expression, movies, television and video games, medium becomes even more important to consider.
Ever since the dawn of television, movie studios have played with unconventional and experimental aspect rations (or 3D film) to provide an experience than can only be had in theatres. For one TV example that should be familiar to many of you, I have previously, somewhat infamously, raised cane about what I consider the “proper” way to experience and judge Star Trek: The Next Generation. To briefly summarise that old chestnut, Star Trek: The Next Generation was *recorded* on film, but *composited* on VHS, meaning the show was edited and all the special effects shots were added in on magnetic tape after the fact, so the final episode lost a startling amount of visual detail, clarity and information between filming and being sent out to TV stations. This was fine in 1987 when consumer CRTs at the time couldn’t process that information anyway and the show could play to the strengths of that technology, but this provides a problem for anyone trying to enjoy the show any way other than broadcast TV in 1987.
Star Trek: The Next Generation did not handle the transition to digital video easily or cleanly, and from the first DVD releases in the early 2000s there has been scepticism about the show’s art direction, lighting, cinematography and general aesthetics. But this was because the DVD “transfer” was an Nth generation lossy VHS composite copied over to DVD and run through some editing software to artificially “clean it up” post facto. That transfer was then used in online streaming and cable reruns, and was all we had until 2012 when the Blu-ray “remaster” (a hopelessly inaccurate term I wish PR people would stop using) went back to the original film negatives and recomposited the entire show in high definition, offering digital natives and immigrants a glimpse at what the show was really meant to look like for the first time. Happily, this new transfer can be seen not only on the Blu-rays, but on all digital streaming services today.
With video games, this sort of problem becomes even more pronounced. If you think about a game console, it’s essentially a custom, specialized hardware configuration specifically tailored for playing video games. Games were created with these specific hardware configurations in mind, and were designed especially to take advantage of their strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies.
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I was watching TV the other night when a commercial caught my eye. It’s the exceptional ad that does this, since I usually have commercials muted so I can focus on constructive things instead. In this case, I immediately recognised, entirely against my will, the iconography of planet Pandora from James Cameron’s Avatar, a movie I never saw. I was wondering if this meant we were getting an imminent Avatar sequel and was just beginning to ponder the ramifications of that before the true purpose of the commercial became clear: Opening in May of this year in the Animal Kingdom park of Walt Disney World Resort will be Pandora: The World of Avatar, an entirely new land attraction that seeks to create the world of the beloved film in physical form.