Spec Ops, Tie Xi Qu, and the Unnecessary Problem of Lost Media
The digital age should have made lost media obsolete. Instead, the rate at which we're losing access to our culture may be accelerating.
On January 29, 2024, video game publisher 2K began removing Spec Ops: The Line from digital storefronts like Steam.
A groundbreaking work, Spec Ops is heralded not so much for its gameplay, but rather for its story. The game transposes the narrative of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness into video game form — in other words, Spec Ops was a playable version of Apocalypse Now, with the brutality appropriately scaled up for the 21st century.
The outcry to the game’s removal was immediate, as even the game’s designer and director Cory Davis was unaware that his game would be de-listed, writing that he was dismayed because he believes the themes of Spec Ops are more relevant now than ever. I’m inclined to agree, as the experience I had playing through the game is unparalleled by anything in my video game history. As your protagonist grapples with the morality of his mission, Spec Ops repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, forcing you as the protagonist’s master to reckon with the mundane nature of video game warfare in mega-franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield.
If that description made you want to try the game for yourself, too bad! Unless you happen to have a physical copy of the disc, you’re out of luck, as publisher 2K later confirmed that new sales have ended indefinitely due expiring “partnership licenses.”. And while 2K didn’t elaborate further, Spec Ops features songs from major artists like Jimi Hendrix and Björk, so it’s safe to assume music rights are the cause of the game being pulled from the internet.
Of course, 2K isn’t Thanos. The company can’t snap the disc companies of Spec Ops out of existence. But now that digital sales have ended, resellers have jacked the cost up on sites like eBay to the point that Spec Ops, an Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game from 2012, sells for more than Tears of the Kingdom, the 2023 Nintendo Switch Game of the Year.
And while both Sony and Microsoft have committed to maintaining backwards compatibility, meaning the current-generation PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles can still play PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 discs, both consoles offer popular versions without a disc drive. Modern video games are often more than 100 GB in total, surpassing the limits of even 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray discs and steadily pushing gaming toward an all-digital future. Baldur’s Gate 3, widely regarded as the best game released last year, never received a physical release in the United States.
Digital downloads have their benefits. New releases are available immediately upon launch. Rural gamers and those with limited transit don’t have to pay shipping fees to enjoy their hobby. It’s impossible for your younger brother to move your Xbox 360 while your copy of Skyrim is inside, laser burning the disc, if your version of Skyrim is instead a digital download.
But, as Spec Ops shows us, with digital downloads, you’re merely licensing the game, rather than owning it. If you download Spec Ops through Steam and later lose access to your Steam account, you’re out of luck, whereas if you own the disc, you can install and play on as many consoles as you would like.
Some games take dubious ownership even further and are always online, which means they require a constant internet connection to play. If their publisher goes bankrupt or decides to take down the servers to cut costs, as with Ubisoft’s The Crew, your always online game is dead for good whether you own a digital or physical copy.
When an item is no longer for sale through legal avenues but remains available through unofficial third-party channels, like eBay, or illegal means, like torrenting, it is known as a gray market item. StockX, the apparel site best known for its sneaker market, is one of the most prominent gray markets in action today.
Due to online-only releases and the special hardware required to play non-disc releases from consoles like the Nintendo 64, video games are the most common types of gray market media. The Video Game History Foundation estimates that 87 percent of all video games released in the United States before 2010 are either gray market or lost games.
A lost game is one that is wholly unavailable, even on game piracy websites. A subset of the larger phenomenon of lost media, video games are by no means the only work of culture prone to disappearing. For decades, the analog nature of film and sound recordings meant that movies, songs, and television broadcasts regularly vanished, such that the Library of Congress estimates that 70 percent of all silent films are lost movies.
Between streaming services, library collections, and the fact that illegal movie repositories like The Pirate Bay have been around for more than two decades, it is hard to understand how a movie can disappear. While video games were often made for irregular formats, like cartridges or mini-discs, or special hardware, like the Wii’s motion controls or the Nintendo DS stylus, movies have generally been released in one or two widely accepted formats.
Furthermore, the DVD and the MP4 file have been in widespread use since the late 1990s, meaning all movies made since then should in theory be digitally archived in addition to any physical release the title received. But when I recently tried to watch the documentary Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, I learned that we remain at risk of continuing to lose films — even those released in the digital age — just as we are with video games.
Tie Xi Qu is a 2002 epic from acclaimed Chinese director Wang Bing. Shot from 1999-2001, the film tells the story of China’s transition from a centrally planned socialist economy to a free market capitalist economy, using the heavily industrial urban region of Shenyang as a lens through which to examine China at-large. And while the documentary’s footage and subjects are critical to understanding the economic transformation of the world’s largest nation, the work is also important as a piece of cinematic history, as Tie Xi Qu is widely regarded as one of the ten best documentaries of all time.
Seeking to better my knowledge of both China and the world of film, I planned to make time to watch Tie Xi Qu over the holidays. I had plenty of days off from work and two cross-country flights to fill.1
After discovering that the documentary was not on any paid streaming services,2 I turned to my library. In California, the majority of city and county library systems participate in a service called Link+, which allows users of any library to request items from any other branch’s catalog, meaning I had access to most library systems for the largest state in the country. And yet not a single branch had a copy of Tie Xi Qu.3
There was a result on Link+ for a streamable version of the documentary through an educational streaming service called Kanopy, but unlike with physical media, access was restricted to Santa Clara County patrons. Once again, physical media proved to be more reliable than digital in terms of preserving access, for if Santa Clara’s library had a physical copy of the DVD, they would have mailed it to an Oakland library for my viewing pleasure.
Having exhausted all authorized channels, I was forced to turn to the gray market. A bootleg of the documentary has been uploaded to YouTube. But after a hilarious experience with an authorized stream of Parasite in college where, if it weren’t for my Korean-speaking roommates, I never would have known that the subtitles were wildly inaccurate, I was hesitant to trust the YouTube captions for Wang’s work. Also, watching a multipart documentary hunched over my laptop watching YouTube for hours sounded like a miserable experience.
After discovering that other, even grayer sources did not have Tie Xi Qu, I was forced to turn to eBay. Normally, I am a big proponent of the site, but my experience trying to buy a copy of Tie Xi Que reminded me why straightforward, licensed access to media is always preferable.
After finally receiving a notification that there was a copy of Tie Xi Qu available for purchase, I forked over $39.99 plus shipping to the storefront Your Global Mall. I quickly learned that Your Global Mall did not actually own a copy, as they blew through the delivery deadline, evidently struggling to source a copy of their own. It was not until I filed a claim for an undelivered item with eBay a month after my purchase that Your Global Mall sent me my documentary.
Alas, poor reader, my saga continued, for while Your Global Mall had advertised their copy of Tie Xi Qu as region-free,4 the box I received in the mail was clearly labeled as PAL, which meant my Xbox couldn’t play the discs.5
At this point, I was starting to forget my original goal, much like Captain Walker in Spec Ops. I had initially sought to watch an informative and highly regarded documentary, not complete a minor in Archival Studies. Now, I found myself downloading multiple pieces of software and returning to eBay for the scond time to order an external disc reader for my MacBook.
I was so tired. Where was this type of project when I was unemployed?
After six weeks, $89 in eBay orders, and one panicked moment where I mistakenly believed my copy only included Dutch subtitles, I could finally watch Tie Xi Qu. The documentary might not qualify as lost media, but it’s accessible in the same way refusing to answer any questions at a traffic stop is legal: Technically doable, realistically not viable for the overwhelming majority of the population.
What I kept coming back to as I read social media posts of people dismayed they can’t recommend Spec Ops and suffered through the inhumane experience of plugging in a disc reader to my MacBook in the year 2024 is that things don’t have to be this way. No media produced after the advent of the internet and digital archives should ever be lost again.
An easy place to start would be drastically reducing the length of copyright protections. Thanks to Sonny Bono and Mickey Mouse, in much of the world, including the United States, most media does not enter the public domain until 95 years after it was created. Returning to the 56-year maximum from the prior Copyright Act would be more than enough to protect the revenue of artists while balancing the need to preserve culture for future generations.
In the meantime, copyright protections stifle media preservation efforts. Perhaps archivists should claim to be a Large Language Model instead, in which case they would be granted carte blanche to use everyone’s work for free.
Updating copyright and consumer protections for the digital age would help as well. Most copyright law stems from two laws enacted in 1998, the aforementioned term extension and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Fewer than 200 million people worldwide had internet access at the time, and Sega still made video game consoles.
The right to repair movement, which has gained some traction in recent years by uniting tech enthusiasts and farmers, is a one example of adapting the law to be more in line with the current state of technology. Ross Scott’s Stop Killing Games campaign, which aims to push regulators to take action against video game publishers that shut down live down games with no recourse for their owners, is another good idea.
To avoid another burning of the Library of Alexandria, buy physical media when possible and archive your personal collections, regardless of the letter of the law, to the extent that you feel comfortable. For while today we’re worried about preserving an Xbox 360 game and a niche documentary, ultimately, the cultural heritage of the human race is at risk of becoming lost media.
Things I Recommend This Week
“We’ve Become Addicted to Explosions” The IDF Unit Responsible for Demolishing Homes Across Gaza | Bellingcat
Heat Death of the Internet | Takahē
Elliott Abrams and the Contradictions of U.S. Human-Rights Policy | The New Yorker
Death on the Savage Mountain | Business Insider
The Vice President’s Men | London Review of Books
Real IBT Heads might be intrigued to learn that my hometown of Manlius is still fighting the state of New York for its right to have mute swans in the village park. One has to wonder if there are any other uses of Manlius’ public funds that could better use such intensive scrutiny.
The same die-hard fans, of which there are many, might have also noticed a slight change to the collection of five links I share at the end of each post. That is because it felt wrong to keep saying I enjoyed the things I shared when so many of the articles and videos and stories were about abhorrent events.
Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!
The movie’s runtime is more than nine hours. It is broken up into three titled segments across four discs. If it were released today, it would probably be treated as a docuseries, like Planet Earth, rather than a singular piece of media.
Which remains true as of the time of publication.
Which remains true as of the time of publication.
One major downside of physical media is region locking. Although this is far less common now, in the DVD era, discs were often artificially restricted to one of six world regions as a form of digital rights management (DRM). There is also the NTSC/PAL split, which is a difference in standard formatting between certain global markets that essentially functioned as region locking. And to be fair, digital media has plenty of DRM of its own.
There is conflicting information about whether the Xbox One adheres to PAL region locking. I didn’t want to risk ruining my disc, so I didn’t try playing it in my console once I discovered my copy was PAL.