Here at Maybe Towers, one of the saddest things is trying to maintain a relatively clutter-free living space, to avoid years of kipple from taking the place over, particularly gaming stuff which is EVERYWHERE at home (despite my wife's best efforts to make me junk it all, which as I get older becomes more and more tempting).
I bought my Steam Deck back in 2023. My daughter was just about to start Rock Climbing classes, so I figured it'd be a handy thing to have for a bit of portable gaming while I sat in the car park waiting for her to finish shimmying up climbing walls. Sitting there with a flask of strong coffee to one side, and this thing cradled in my lap, I could play a ton of excellent games that I'd owned for years (I think I joined Steam all the way back in the era of Half Life 2, and it was one of the first games where an internet connection was pretty much mandatory).
The Deck (as it's lovingly referred to by all fans of the thing) has a surprising amount of power considering its age and size and for years I was happily ignorant to its possibilities for emulation. I stumbled across an article talking about Emudeck and Retroarch (stuff I'd fiddled around with on a really underpowered little Raspberry Pi 2) and wondered whether my meagre skills would let me start pulling in some of my old games, currently stashed in "The Cupboard of Doom" and give them an airing once again.
A bit of a history lesson. I used to be a contributor (read: "Pain in the ass who mouthed off too much") to a gaming forum in the early noughties, and I think a lot of the games I bought back then were largely off the back of recommendations from other "Forumites" who would extol their virtues. Around about the same time, Play.com was a cheap place to buy games, and I think work were getting mighty sick of my parcels arriving at stores for me to go and pick up. "Another play.com one for you, Peej!" they'd merrily sing, mockingly accusing me of having absolutely no life and living it all inside games consoles. Well, that wasn't strictly true...still!
I'm going about this in a roundabout way so I'll get to the point. My backlog is frightening. Truly frightening. Not just the stuff I've purchased on steam, but all those physical games for old consoles that are arranged in teetering tottering piles in the cupboard of doom. A lot of them I did play, and did finish but a lot of them got a meagre bit of attention before the next shiny thing came along. I'd probably (generously) estimate that amongst the Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox 1, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii, I only completed about half of the games I purchased for those platforms. Some just didn't gel, some were too difficult, and some were just too time consuming. Other stuff got in the way and though it sounds like I'm bleating pathetic excuses, I always dreamed that one day I'd have the physical space and the spare time to drag out all my old consoles, connect them up somehow, and get back to playing through that backlog.
The Steam Deck allows you to download and play a lot of your old games, but what I didn't realise was how successful it is at also allowing you to play stuff from those aforementioned consoles. To a certain degree at least, and I have a strict "No piracy" policy where I attempt to emulate stuff I own. I figure that I paid for my copy, so I should own the rights to play that game again, right? (I'm fairly sure publishers are a bit sketchy on that justification but tbh, they do practically bugger all to digitally preserve their own titles anyway, and the lucky games that get remade or rebooted are often hideous over-dressed shadows of their former selves).
On the deck, certain consoles are emulated perfectly. All the 8 and 16 bit era stuff? No problem at all. 32 bit? Well, depends on what you're trying to emulate. The N64 and PS1? Yeah they're cool, and work nicely. Even the PS2 emulation scene feels like it's well rounded enough that just about everything works on the deck (and the games that don't probably aren't worth breaking a sweat over). The Dreamcast, likewise - and I've already blogged here about the joys of finishing off Metropolis Street Racer, largely thanks to it working absolutely perfectly on the Steam Deck and Dreamcast emulators.
Owning a ton of physical copies of games also allowed me to do something I hadn't anticipated. I could take old PC and DOS games (which I have a fair few of) and convert my physical disks into assets that Retrodeck could access. In some cases, native Windows 9.x games work on the deck with a bit of Proton in the mix, and though it's not always easy to get the damned control systems sussed out, a lot of games just plain work. I've rediscovered the delights of Dungeon Keeper, Dungeon Master, Midtown Madness 1 & 2 and Need for Speed III via this method, and there's a fair few other disks I've dug out to try the same trick with.
The games industry is in a difficult place at the moment, largely due to publishers and the "Big Three" touting digital-only purchases, or worse still, streaming as the future of videogaming and that's a future where they get to dictate to you how long you'll get to play the games you've purchased for, and you will only be able to purchase them through their closed-loop storefronts.
Now, in my collection, I've got games that are fast approaching 50 years old (yep, I still have a stack of Atari VCS cartridges, and yep they still work as does the Atari itself, in all its faux-wooden-laminated glory). But I'm painfully aware that owning a physical backlog of games is somewhat unusual, and the likes of Sony and Microsoft (and to be fair, Nintendo will probably follow suit) don't want that kind of thing happening any more, so will you be able to play your 'digital only' copy of GTA 6 in 50 years time? Maybe, maybe not but the chances are fairly heavy that you will have to resort to nefarious means to do so, if at all.
Recent leaks (or should I say "Leeks") of the aforementioned game have been publicised as being carried out in the name of digital preservation, as a bloody nose for a publisher who would not baulk at chopping off your access to their games if they saw fit, on a console that is very much becoming the last console Sony will produce that will allow you to play your physical purchases (which is a bit of a joke really, because most disks you get for the PS5 now are merely 'unlock keys' for downloading the whole bloody thing from a server anyway).
The issue I have with all of this, and the reason I love the Steam Deck so much, is that it feels like you're better off working out how to do your own bit of digital preservation for stuff you do own, but also supporting the rich and vibrant ecosystem of independent games development that the deck is also great for. The Steam Store might be filled with weird Hentai Rhythm Action games, or "Clean your house" simulators, but there's also a lot of genuinely good stuff in there too. And heck, if none of that floats your boat, you can load up a beautifully remastered and community-led version of an old game like Oids or The Simpsons: Hit and Run - games given a new lease of life by folk who want nothing more than to see those games reach a new and appreciative audience now their publishers no longer give a fig about them.
If anything, the Steam Deck is like the arch-curator for a digital museum (or at least mine is). It's stuffed to the gills with games I own from yesteryear, stuff I wouldn't be able to play again if it wasn't for the emulation scene. So for the time being I'll keep on hoping this lovely bit of kit lasts the distance (and as much as I think the Steam Cube is overpriced, I could definitely get my money's worth out of the thing as an ongoing emulation box, when I consider how much money I've spent on consoles over the years, it actually doesn't feel that expensive to be able to cram the last 50 years of gaming into a diminutive single-unit rather than trying to work out where the fuck I put my Xbox scart cable!)
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