How emulation helped save two video game rarities

The game industry at large usually demonizes emulation and the ability to archive and copy software as inadvisable at best and an existential threat to the business at worst. A couple of recent public releases from the annals of game history, however, highlight just how important these emulation capabilities are to preserving and popularizing the history of a young but quickly aging medium.

The first is the discovery and release of Millennium Racer: Y2K Fighters, a previously completely unknown 2001 Dreamcast port of a 1999 PC racing game. The title was recently discovered intact on a Dreamcast development kit, altered a bit to get it into a playable state, and then released as both an emulatable ROM and a burnable disc image that will work in actual Dreamcast hardware.

The game itself is a generic futuristic racer in the style of Wipeout or F-Zero X, and it was largely ignored in its original PC incarnation. Still, the newly accessible Dreamcast port shows what Sega's last piece of hardware would have been capable of near the end of its life, much like the recent release of a lost Dreamcast Ecco the Dolphin sequel (the Dreamcast's easy-to-break copy protection also deserves some big props here).

Millennium Racers itself is also an interesting curio that provides a case study in the over-the-top, Tron-inspired retro-futurism that was so prevalent in games at the turn of the millennium. Remember when Y2K was such a big deal that you could put it in a game's title unironically?

The second emulation-fueled release making the rounds recently is Primal Rage 2, the unreleased sequel to the popular prehistoric-themed, stop-motion arcade fighting game of the mid '90s. Only two prototype cabinets for the cancelled sequel are known to exist, and one of them has been playable at Illinois' sprawling Galloping Ghost arcade complex since 2014.

That's not exactly a convenient trip for most fans of the game or for historians and students of '90s fighting games. So it's a boon that the game is now also playable via MAME4RAGE2, a fork of the popular Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator designed specifically to play this one unique title. While there are still some bugs in the emulation (and in the incomplete game itself), the game is still quite playable on a decent PC, as you can see in this video.

As actual arcade cabinets and boards become harder and harder to find in the wild, MAME has become an invaluable tool for chronicling and archiving an entire epoch of video game history in a way that's accessible for modern players. Yet there are still quite a few important arcade games that haven't been emulated for one reason or another.

While both of these games were technically accessible on their original hardware when they were discovered, it's only the ability to copy and emulate the software on other hardware (often with crucial software tweaks) that has made sure they'll be preserved and playable going forward. That kind of preservation doesn't just happen, either; remember that an estimated three-quarters of all silent films ever made have been lost to history. Thanks to emulation and a committed community of video game preservationists, that situation seems less likely to happen as the video game medium grows out of its youth.