How Emulators Make History Tangible
I was first exposed to video game emulators in high school when one of my friends installed a PlayStation 2 emulator on his laptop to play some of his favorite childhood video games. Since then, I’ve used an emulator on my own a few times, mostly to play the original Animal Crossing GameCube game, so I am at least somewhat familiar with them.
Normally, you would have to download an emulator’s software, and search out and install the files for whatever game(s) you are looking for. The Internet Archive’s Console Living Room takes these steps out of the process, though, giving you pretty much immediate access to a library of almost 7,000 games. I was impressed by how easy this was to navigate and use compared to my experience with emulators in the past, and I especially had a lot of fun playing the Rugrats: Totally Angelica game.
Aside from having fun, emulators are a great way to experience the past because they give you a chance to play games on old systems that may be hard to find. Even if you aren’t super interested in video games, emulators provide you with a great interactive time capsule, and isn’t that really what the internet is?
Most of the time, I feel like learning about history can feel abstract. It seems distant and intangible. But with access to internet archives and technology like emulators, history can really come alive because we can see it or touch it. History becomes really interactive and tangible, and I think this can be a very valuable, unique, and exciting experience that wasn’t really an option pre-digital age.
Another example of this that comes to mind is the Wayback Machine, where people can essentially take a screenshot of a webpage and upload it to the Wayback Machine’s database, and you can browse through the history of the internet, to an extent. However, this also brings attention to a downside of internet archives.
This is what came up when I went back to the earliest date that YouTube was captured on the WayBack Machine.
Adobe Flash Player was a widely used tool that allowed media like videos and games to be viewed online. However, Adobe decided to retire Flash Player at the end of 2020, so media that used it is no longer supported.
The thing about the internet is that it is constantly being updated. This means that as new systems and technologies are developed, older ones will stop receiving updates, be unsupported, and eventually fall to the way side.
But do these digital relics really just fall to history? I think I’d argue that, no, they don’t. For example, I was able to find that people are developing workarounds for media that previously ran with Flash Player, including a Flash Player emulator which allows you access Flash media. What this really shows me is that the ability to interact with history helps us appreciate and understand it, inspiring us to take that knowledge forward to inform our decisions for the future.
