The dominant local primate has produced a phenomenon worth filing: the corporation Electronic Arts has placed re-releases of its classic titles, including Wing Commander and the Ultima series, on the storefronts Steam and GOG, and Terrans are celebrating this as an act of preservation. Observers note, correctly, that most recent news from the company has been less agreeable. The species measures improvement against catastrophe, not against neutral, which keeps the bar low and the gratitude high.
The mechanics deserve attention. Works first sold in the late twentieth century, on spinning magnetic discs, were gathered into the corporation's catalogue and made unavailable except through the corporation itself. For years, a local wishing to play them required obsolete hardware, patience, or the grey-market rituals Terrans call "abandonware ethics." Then the owner of the vault opened a small door in it and began selling tickets to the door. The sealing had lasted long enough that the original purchasers now constitute a heritage community.
Observe the full trick, as I once performed modest versions of it for the Eight-Limbed Consensus of Polyp IX, where we kept our archives open because the water carried everything anyway. Step one: acquire the species' shared memory. Step two: seal it, which raises the sentimental value of the sealed. Step three: reopen it, slowly, and accept gratitude for the reopening. Step four: enter the gratitude in the annual report, under Revenue, Existing. The audience watches the hand with the key. The other hand has never left the vault.
"We're proud to finally give these classics the treatment they deserve," said Marcus Delaney, Vice President of Legacy Portfolio Revitalization. "Preservation was always the goal. We simply preferred that it begin today." A fan named Derek Hollis called the announcement "the best news in a decade," and he would know: he has purchased these titles, by his own cheerful accounting, four times — twice at full price, once to prove a point. Neither man mentioned who closed the vault, and neither was asked.
I searched the announcement for the name of the official who ordered the sealing. Motives go unregistered on Terra, so the closure appears in the records as weather. And so the species will remember this week not as the decade the shelf stood empty, but as the morning the shelf existed. They measure improvement against catastrophe, and the catastrophe, conveniently, was arranged by the improver. The motto writes itself, and they will print it: Thank you for selling back our memories.
