Microsoft today unveiled 'Muse', the company's latest attempt to try to convince the world--and the video games industry in particular--that generative AI has a use case beyond burning the planet, perpetuating Silicon Valley's ruinous stranglehold on the global economy and putting millions of people out of work.
Among highlighting Muse’s potential uses in making games, testing games and creating some absolutely dogshit gameplay videos, one thing I found particularly interesting is what Phil Spencer had to say about it and games preservation:
Microsoft is now exploring how Muse could help improve classic games and bring them to modern hardware. “You could imagine a world where from gameplay data and video that a model could learn old games and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run,” says Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer. “We’ve talked about game preservation as an activity for us, and these models and their ability to learn completely how a game plays without the necessity of the original engine running on the original hardware opens up a ton of opportunity.”
Look, games preservation can come in all shapes, sizes and scales. An old magazine with a single screenshot of a cancelled project is video game preservation. A dusty Sega Mega Drive sitting in storage alongside a copy of Sonic 2 and Jungle Strike is video game preservation. A dodgy arcade cabinet with 1000 classic arcade games on it, all of them running their original code via emulation, is video game preservation.
A Frankenstein's monster of AI-generated slop, guessing and filling in holes to try to run a game without its "original engine", is not games preservation, and I'm frankly astonished to see such an important figure in the video games industry go on record saying it is.
But it simply wouldn't be an AI hype exercise if it wasn't built entirely on speculative horseshit and the vaguest of assertions, all in the service of trying to find someone, anyone out there beyond investors and tech company executives who will think any of this is worth what it's costing, both in dollar terms and its environmental impact.
If you're reading this and are interested in supporting actual video game preservation, please donate to the Video Game History Foundation.
