The Old World (Part Two)

You can read the first part of this conversation, in which Rob and Patrick mull their own personal niche obsessions with different forms of physical media, right over here—or dig through your email!

In any case, here we go...

Patrick: Maybe console games are, eventually, headed this way. 

But look at how much people will spend on products from Analogue. A built-for-the-modern-age Nintendo 64 costs nearly $300 and I gotta admit, looks cool as hell. You can fall down the same aesthetic rabbit holes of vinyl/CD/MP3 that you mentioned earlier when you start talking about things like CRT filters, but if most people were honest with themselves, the true answer to why you might spend hundreds of dollars on an N64 with an HDMI port is because it’s romantic, it helps establish a physical connection between a media of media that’s likely also nostalgic.

Why do we look at old photos? Why do we listen to old music? Why do we visit old restaurants? Maybe you still enjoy all those things, but in a way, you’re just trying to capture an old feeling. It’s impossible to really capture old feelings, but if you can tap into 50% of it, that’s powerful!

A few years back, I invested in a nice 4K/Blu-ray disc player that was modded to allow region free play. This was motivated by the release of a particularly excellent re-release of one of my favorite horror movies, The Blair Witch Project. You can’t really do a 4K version of that movie, but you can find better source material. It’s basically the definitive version of the 1999 classic.

That was, again, a few years ago. While moving around some cables this past week, I accidentally bumped into that same disc player. Do you know what disc was in there? One of the Blair Witch discs. That player has otherwise gone basically unused since I bought it.

When I want to flip something on, it’s probably on a streaming platform somewhere, and these days, I pay extra for the 4K memberships on most. Or it’s on a friend’s Plex server in a quality that is almost certainly no higher than 720p, but the movie will start playing instantly and regardless, isn’t it more likely that I’m just going to fall asleep watching it on the couch, anyway?

And yet, I don’t regret either purchase. It’s a reminder that I need to watch that updated version of a favorite movie. I’ll still be buying a dozen or so horror discs when the sales hit around Halloween. In theory, this house will get updated with more storage and display options in the coming years, and my joy will be derived from other people looking at them and wondering “what’s that?” And then I get to yap their ear off about some particularly gnarly kill in a movie.

Physical media, often, can be a conversation piece. I will often take a movie down, hand it to a friend, and it’s delightful to watch them open it up, examining the art and reading the back text.

Could they read a Wikipedia entry? Sure. It’s fine. But I like it better this way.

“But I like it better this way,” is probably more honest! And I don’t think there’s any shame in it!

Rob: The "I'm not giving up my CDs" woman is basically the most vindicated person on the planet. Because there's no real substitute for browsing a physical collection, revisiting old memories or just stirring an impulse to revisit something you haven't thought about in ages. Hell, Criterion has launched a wildly successful viral series purely on the appeal of watching people we know browse a closet full of movies. Plus, discs on film also exert a similar pressure to a vinyl album: this isn't something you're just casually streaming, it's time to lock-in and enjoy this shit.

But the emotional component is, I think, something that the games industry has often missed because ultimately its culture grows out of software. It never viewed physical media as an opportunity and obsessed over it as a threat vector for piracy. The reason PC gamers let go of physical media with barely a backward glance is because CD copy protection was unbelievably lousy and invasive. It's hard to explain today how much people hated SecuROM and genuinely feared StarForce DRM systems back in the 2000s. Buying games on disc became worse than buying games digitally and pirating them.

Except games aren't just software, they're not really something we license. We're magpies. We like poring over our treasures and the more time that goes on, I don't think it's entirely coincidental that the industry's crisis follows years of concerted focus on treating success as a question of "user acquisition" rather than "copies sold."