Paloma Ruiz-Tanaka grew up above her parents' electronics repair shop in Monterrey, surrounded by broken consoles and televisions waiting to be revived. Today she directs the Institute for Playable Heritage, a nonprofit archive in Montreal that holds more than forty thousand games, several hundred arcade cabinets and a climate-controlled vault of original source code. We spoke in its reading room, where visitors can request any title in the collection and play it on its original hardware.
I began by asking why games need saving at all, given how many are sold. Ruiz-Tanaka explained that the problem is more acute than most people imagine. A large proportion of games released before the turn of the century are no longer commercially available in any form. Many modern games depend on online servers that are switched off when they stop being profitable, at which point the game simply ceases to exist. Nobody, she said, would accept this happening to cinema.
What does preservation actually involve? It is threefold, she told me. First, the Institute keeps original machines and cartridges working, which means an ever-growing workshop of spare parts and elderly capacitors. Second, it creates faithful software emulations so that games can outlive their hardware. Third, and most delicately, it negotiates with developers and publishers to obtain source code, design documents and the permissions required to make any of this legal.
Play as evidence
I asked whether playing really matters, or whether it is enough to document games in writing and video. Ruiz-Tanaka was firm on this point. A game, she argued, is not a story you watch but a system you inhabit, and its meaning lives in how it responds to your hands. A recording of someone else playing is like a photograph of a meal. Researchers, designers and curious visitors must be able to pick up the controller themselves.
A game you cannot play is like a piece of music you can only read about. The notes are there, but the thing itself is gone. — Paloma Ruiz-Tanaka
Which games does she most worry about losing? Surprisingly, not the famous ones, which tend to be well protected by their owners and fans. Her concern lies with the small, strange and local: educational games made for a single school district, experimental titles by artists, mobile games from the early smartphone era that vanished from app stores overnight. These, she said, are often the richest evidence of how ordinary people actually lived with computers.
The Institute survives on grants, donations and a modest fee from its popular evening arcade, where Montrealers queue on Fridays to play cabinets from the 1980s in a darkened hall. Ruiz-Tanaka sees no conflict between scholarship and pleasure. The arcade, she said, is the best advertisement for preservation she could imagine. Nobody walks out of that room thinking games are disposable. They leave remembering who they were when they first played them.
As we finished, she led me through to the arcade, not yet open for the evening, where rows of cabinets glowed in the half-light. She switched one on, a spaceship game made in Osaka in 1983, and handed me the joystick. I lost almost immediately. She laughed, then took over and played for a few minutes with extraordinary grace. This, she said, gesturing at the screen, is a document. And it is still alive.
