Love/Hate
Obsessive Fans Are Saving Dead Games From Oblivion
Inside the fight to keep abandoned digital worlds alive
In 1997, George Lucas decided that Return of the Jedi was missing something. The conclusion to the original Star Wars trilogy, once forced to rely on puppets and miniatures, was therefore updated to include an agonizing CGI dance number featuring a saliva-flinging Yuzzum, among other changes. While the film’s “Special Edition” endures to this day, there’s no destroying the home video releases of the 1983 original, and so the original remains safely archived, if not easily accessible.
Not so with the digital media you consume. YouTube videos can vanish at a whim, books can be deleted from your Kindle and films yanked from iTunes. Filmstruck, a beloved movie streaming service, died last month after two years on this planet, taking with it access to rare and art house films. And the problem may be at its worst in the world of online-only video games, which inevitably kill their servers as their player base declines, as any Evolve player could tell you.
Some gamers dedicated to life in a galaxy far, far away won’t accept the end of Star Wars Galaxies, a long-running online role-playing game that…
