The Surprising and Important Emergence of Live A Live

So quietly a revolutionary event in gaming is occurring, and it’s an excellent benchmark in the battle for video game preservation. Even better is how Nintendo got involved, spent the money to ensure a global release, and even marketed the hell out of it despite it coming within striking distance of another high-profile release on the Switch.

We’re talking about the release of Live A Live, a daring innovative JRPG that never saw the light of day outside of Japan (officially) until Square and Nintendo revived it from obscurity and remastered it with enhanced graphics and an orchestrated soundtrack. Deciding to ignore the trends of lessening the budget and keeping it digital-only, Nintendo and Square gave Live A Live the full treatment complete with collector’s editions, a special CD commemorating the soundtrack, and a worldwide physical release. To most outside the gaming circle this isn’t a big deal, and even some of those within who have decided to go the purely-digital route in all their gaming needs may ignore the severity of this release, but the ever-growing movement behind preserving the past is celebrating this occasion immensely.

Unlike what we’ve seen in music and (especially) film, the history of video games has constantly been hampered by cutthroat competition, the constant shifting of IP copyrights, the dozens of talented studios, publishers, and developers that has gone extinct, the advanced technology that has put less emphasis on accessibility with past content, and worst of all a seemingly lack of desire of the gaming giants to actually preserve the previous generations of gaming. Literally thousands of video games released last century and even during the early parts of the 2000s have disappeared unless you can find the remaining copies and have the previous hardware.

Even more frustrating is how certain games are stuck in the past because the IPs are owned by conglomerates that will complicate bringing said games to modern-day. Disney has complicated the history of Marvel vs. Capcom, EA has complicated efforts for past Maddens and even other NFL-related games to get the re-release treatment, and of course Nintendo’s history of never looking back while (bizarrely) hating the modding community has forced gamers to sit and wait and beg for them to bring back forgotten IPs from their past---to extremely mixed results. The underground modding/reproduction communities are the ones keeping the past alive, even going as far as creating custom servers like the Wiimfi, keeping alive the DS and Wii online servers.

The gaming industry’s slow push towards being fully digital is an ongoing battle that has produced all the doom and gloom we had been predicting all this time, with controversies like Nintendo discontinuing its digital stores on the 3DS and WiiU resulting in all those digital-exclusive titles at threat of being eradicated completely, incidents like Sony’s Gran Turismo 7 being unplayable unless you are online, and even worse scenarios like Ubisoft trying to disconnect people from playing certain games--------even video games the consumers literally purchased! This is all beyond anti-consumer, its also anti-art as we’re seeing tens of thousands of hours of hard work made by talented people straight-up disappearing officially while remaining at the mercy of the companies that own them for a new chance at life. This is why mods remain more popular than ever, especially among younger gaming enthusiasts trying to play games from the past, games made generations before they were even born.

Live A Live’s success is silently crucial because it would be an example of the gaming customers opening their wallets and proving the importance of going back to the past and bringing past games---whether with a fresh coat of paint or how they were originally designed---or a mix of both. Live A Live wasn’t some massive hit back in the past that warranted re-releases, sequels, and remakes like a Final Fantasy 7. It was a creative game made by a talented crew that never made it out of its native Japan. This game being remastered would be the equivalent of Disney remaking the 1979 movie The Black Hole or seeing a remastering of Fats Weller’s 1926 album If You Ain’t Got to Ask, You Ain’t Got It; basically, Live A Live was a game doomed to remain stuck in oblivion but yet here it is today, even trending on Gaming Twitter.

And even wilder is that its coming from Nintendo, yes, Nintendo, the company notorious for never looking in the past unless they need to cushion the modern-day lineup of software output.

Nintendo’s business model of always trying to avoid repetition in their software and hardware has allowed for them to survive, allowed for them to expand their creativity to levels that the competitors could only ever dream of achieving. Even their notoriously-basic New Super Mario Bros. series introduced new and revolutionary ideas with each installment, whether its simultaneous four-player platforming (New Super Mario Bros. Wii) or having a FIFTH player choosing to whether help or obstruct the quest (New Super Mario Bros. U). This mindset has Nintendo just never really wanting to go back to preserve what they’ve made, and this has been consistent since all the way back in the early 1990s when they decided -not- to make the Super Nintendo backwards-compatible (one of the more underrated poor decisions made by them). So to see them behind this revival project is a great sign of what we might witness in the future.

The Video Game Preservation movement has been growing steadily, and we’re even seeing politicians in Japan looking at how they can apply legal immunity to those trying to preserve the past through MODs as well as seeking ways to legally bind gaming publishers and developers into the responsibility of offering full access to every product they make. This group never wants to see a game get lost in time and get lost within the digital atmosphere. Within the next year, the WiiU and 3DS stores are going to cease to exist, forever locking many many games until Nintendo and third-party companies decide to revive them. Soon after that, we’ll be seeing more and more Microsoft and Sony games of their past disappear, despite the abilities of these companies to preserve them. So the consequences of not pressuring the publishers and gaming giants is already producing some ugly results and controversies.

If there isn’t a louder resistance against the extinction of these digital and long-forgotten games, we’re going to see a world of gaming where certain experiences will be reduced to just memories or technically-illegal practices. It would be the equivalent of modern-day audiences having limited access to lesser-known Kurosawa and Hitchcock films of the mid-20th century, just an unfathomable consequence that exists only in video games.

The Live A Live return to the market however has become this nice moment of hope as we’re seeing the impossible becoming possible with an expanded budget, actual coordinated efforts from multiple companies notorious for defending their IPs while ignoring their past games, and best of all opportunities to own it physically. I am hoping this game is successful enough to open doors for more games of the past, for more emphasis on preserving the games lost in time and technology that nonetheless have qualities within that could translate to modern-day gaming and resonate with modern-day gamers.

Time will tell, but I am optimistic in the potential, I am optimistic that more gaming companies will see the importance and the consumer demand for more glimpses into the past and more of these kinds of remasters. Live A Live is more than just a beautiful-looking remaster of a mostly-unknown game, it’s a crossroads in the video game preservation fight where its success and feedback from the consumers and the publishers determines the future of where the movement is headed.