Old Games Becoming Unplayable

Thoughts on the ephemeral nature of games and the loss of these works as art

For years people have been telling me that if I liked Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect that I would probably like the Dragon Age series. When they came on sale I took the opportunity to get all three (Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition). Steam tells me I played 9.3 hours, but I suspect about 4 hours of that was cursing under my breath and trying to get it to work. The problem seems to be simple: my computer is just too damn new for that old game to know how to even talk to my computer. It’s Chaucer trying to communicate with Machine Gun Kelly. The game would just glitch to a black screen. I did everything I could including installing the proprietary launcher for my graphics card in order to install updates to the driver seamlessly.

Fortunately, the stories of Origins, II, and Inquisition are distinct with a shared world. Unlike Mass Effect 1-3 which follows our hero, Shepard, where you couldn’t really play 2 or 3 by themselves and get the full story. From what I can tell, II is a complete story that shares a universe with Origins but doesn’t rely on you having played the first game. This saved the game for me. If it had been any other way, I would have felt like I had wasted my time and money on the games. The problem is that Origins is not the only game this is happening to.

In listening to the podcast A More Civilized Age, I’ve been replaying Knights of the Old Republic to follow along with the hosts as they work their way through the game. Unfortunately, I encountered a bug similar to the one with Origins. This bug is fairly common for old games, but the frustrating part is that it only happened then and again. The game is on the cusp on becoming unplayable entirely. I reached a point where I couldn’t reliably get it to load and just decided I would have to forgo replaying the game in its entirety. There are some games that can be cheesed into working such as running Jedi Knights: Dark Forces II on a virtual machine simulating Windows 95 or 98, but the results can be temperamental. And yet, Origins is a game from 2009 and Knights of the Old Republic was from 2003. These games are barely 20 years old and becoming increasingly more difficult, if not impossible, to play.