It’s 2012. The family laptop, which we traded in our old desktop computer for, is burning my legs as its fans try to wheeze in all the air they can. My hands are on the trackpad, wearing grooves into it and tearing away at the rubber-coated mouse buttons. I’m 10 years old, and I’m about to beat my fourth island in the free-to-play browser game “Poptropica.” I have 15 minutes of parent-mandated screen time left, and life is good.
Suddenly, my character freezes mid-jump. Mozilla Firefox pops up an error message, letting me know that the laptop has finally reached its computational limit. Just like that, the last 10 minutes of progress I’d made, the parkour jumps that I’d finally mastered (playing without a mouse was hard!) and all the backtracking I had done was gone. As was five minutes of my screen time as I waited for Firefox to relaunch itself.
For those of you who are now entering your early 20s, this scene might sound a bit familiar to you. A mid-range computer struggling to run a Flash game, with middling DSL internet connections and load times that felt like an eternity — but the computers were still faster than the previous generation of technology. Maybe you had a console of some sort, and played online matches in games like “Call of Duty” or “Halo.” Or maybe you had a computer that could handle running “Minecraft,” and you spent your time playing games such as “Hunger Games” or “Bedwars” on a server.
Many of our childhoods were heavily influenced by these online experiences, and yet they’re only getting harder to return to. Sure, it’s good and normal to outgrow parts of our childhood, but in a culture so dominated by nostalgia, it can be nice to go back and visit some of these formidable digital playscapes. It’s like going back to your elementary school playground: remembering old games of tag, friends that you’ve lost track of, times you laughed and times you cried.
But what if that playground got bulldozed over, or started charging you (Man, what a failure of public school funding that would be) to visit it? Those memories would still be with you, but dragging them out of your subconscious would be much harder without that physical reminder. Remembering is one of the things I value most in life, and thinking about losing the ability to do that really freaks me out.
This is where ’80s kids have it good — and also bad. The ’80s and early ’90s were a time of physical media, such as game cartridges, records, VHS tapes and some totally tubular toys. Growing up in the early 2000s, I had most of these technologies as well, but they were beginning to give way to more and more online content. In recent years, the prices of many of these items — especially video games — have spiked, as Gen X and older millennials have scrambled to get their hands on bits of their childhood.
As for the “Fortnite” kids — I have no clue what your nostalgia will look like. When (or if) the “Fortnite” servers eventually shut down, that will be the end of it. Maybe there’ll be a “Fortnite 2,” or something similar, but people will never be able to return to the original as a point of nostalgia. The same goes for other online games like “Apex Legends” or “Call of Duty: Warzone.” Once their online components are shut down, they will cease to exist. Memories wiped away forever.
Some games have tried to combat this, either through remakes or fan-lead preservation. The popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game “RuneScape” has survived for the past two decades thanks in part to the 2013 release of “Old School RuneScape,” which reverts the game back to its state as of 2007. Although more modern versions of “RuneScape” have been released in the past decade, a majority of players still wanted to be able to keep playing the game they were familiar with. Updates are also based on user polls, giving players a sort of control over the nostalgia they want to live. It’s an interesting method of preservation, an example of something where returning to “the good old days” actually worked.
On a larger scale, the death of Adobe’s Flash software and its accompanying browser plugin was something that struck fear into the heart of anyone who spent their time in the high school computer lab playing browser games from websites called something like “studyhallfungametoplay.com.” Sites like Newgrounds and CoolMathGames found themselves facing the possibility of all of their content becoming unplayable. Thousands of animators would have their work swept away, their thumbnails left like fossils that future generations could only speculate about.
Thankfully, this apocalypse has been headed off with the development of the Ruffle emulator. Those previously mentioned sites, along with the Internet Archive, have utilized the emulator to keep their content running without a hitch. On a larger scale, BlueMaxima’s “Flashpoint” platform has created a downloadable archive of more than 150,000 games and 25,000 animations. These efforts have kept an entire genre of content alive, thanks to the efforts of some people who truly cared about preserving them for others to enjoy.
Even the game that I started this article talking about, “Poptropica,” has seen efforts to preserve itself. Although the main website moved from Flash to HTML-5, that transfer resulted in the loss of many of the game worlds I had played as a kid. Luckily, they have since released a standalone offline version of the game on Steam with the lost content — although it does now come with a hefty $20 price tag.
All of these examples are positive examples of how the internet has found ways to preserve itself. And yet, I find myself still worrying that someday I’ll lose it all. Especially as the internet transitions from a treasure trove of individual creation to a collection of conglomerates and copyright, I fear we may reach a point where preservation becomes nearly impossible. The game company EA recently announced that they would not only be shutting down the servers for two of their Battlefield games, but completely delisting them from storefronts. This means they will disappear forever unless EA decides to bring them back (which I seriously doubt will happen). Sure, physical copies of the games do exist, but as more and more consoles drop their disk drives, they will become harder and harder to play — and the prices of these older consoles and games will undoubtedly follow the pricing trends of other retro games media.
I don’t have many strong ties to Battlefield, but I know that it’s only a matter of time until some of the older games I do love suffer from the same fate. I feel a need to hold onto these games, especially the online ones, to record my memories and hope that the end isn’t near. There are significant monetary reasons behind the majority of these closures. Keeping servers running that only a few hundred people log into monthly isn’t very cost-effective. Making sure that your game stays up to date and able to run on modern platforms and operating systems can also be a hefty task that developers might not feel is worth their time and money — especially when they can get people to buy the newest version instead.
The overwhelming focus on nostalgia in modern culture is undoubtedly a factor behind my fears. Remembering your toys is cool, and buying new versions of them is even cooler. That movie you watched over and over again as a kid? They’re remaking it — but in live action! It’s easier than ever to hold onto the things that you grew up with, or at least the shell of those things. I think this is where the root of my fears comes from. In a culture where so much media is being recycled and reused and rebooted, it feels wrong when something isn’t — or when the original is lost in favor of a newer, cash-grabbing version. (My original VHS copies of Star Wars are very dear to me for this very reason.)
Maybe letting go of our playthings is a part of growing up — but what if I still want to be a kid? What if I still want to experience things as they were, to keep my memories fresh and preserve? Several fellow writers on the Digital Culture section have written about returning to a digital touchstone of their childhood this semester, and I think that is a testament to how important these things are to us. The subject of each article had different fates — the beloved Flipnote Studio in Katelyn’s article has been shut down, while the Pixie Hollow website in Hannah’s article is being revived by caring fans. We tend to hold on to the things that made us who we are today. But it’s getting harder and harder to do that in the digital age.
Senior Arts Editor Hunter Bishop can be reached at hdbishop@umich.edu.