A new way to think about your favorite game?s code

And, at least when it comes to the older material, is rapidly dying,” says Cifaldi, pointing out that most game companies don’t have source code archives. “But from our perspective, it’s like, if you haven’t been doing anything with this game for 10, 20 years, why — why the lockdown?” he says.It’s a great question, one that makes me think a lot about the traditional stories of video game archiving — rather, I should say, one story in particular, the one about E.T. and the landfill. “But what is realistic is normalizing that someone could actually study this, just for historical purposes, that they should be able to look at this and learn things from it and tell the stories that they find within it,” Lewin says.The Secret of Monkey Island is a seminal game, not least for Cifaldi, who cites it as “maybe my favorite game, depending on which day you ask me.” He says it taught him what games could be — like that they could have funny, memorable worlds and characters. “They understand that fans really enjoy this behind-the-scenes material, and that it directly benefits them if people are talking about it.” This month, the Video Game History Foundation plans to reveal what it’s learned about The Secret of Monkey Island, to fans, historians, and everyone else who might be interested in the hidden corners of a 30-year-old video game. “I think a really interesting thing to come out of this conversation with Ron is being able to sort of show that when we find this unused character in the source code, it’s not, like, this was a character with a fleshed-out biography,” Cifaldi says. “If you’re able to access raw source code for a game, bare minimum, you can understand how the systems work and talk to each other and things like that,” he says.