Antstream looks to build a future by preserving the past

gamesindustry.biz:

In playing around with the retro game streaming subscription service Antstream Arcade recently, a thought occurred to us.

It is possible to use an Android gaming device to remotely power up an Xbox Series X console on another continent (where it has been left in the power-consuming rest mode), at which point you can then open up the Antstream app and have it connect to remote servers to play an emulated version of Atari 2600's Combat, a game that fits on a 2KB cartridge and could be distributed in its entirety for an infinitesimal fraction of the bandwidth and energy such a streaming set-up would require.

It's a web of interoperability and convenience as impressive as it is wasteful, so we set up a chat with Antstream CEO Steve Cottam to find out a bit more about the service and why things are the way they are.

"I get asked this a lot," Cottam says. "Why are we streaming these tiny games? It's really about accessibility."

He notes two things. First, he says Antstream has an Android native app so that layer of the chain could be omitted entirely (even though Xbox subscribers would need to start a new account and pay for a separate subscription for non-Xbox platforms). Second, he says that while Antstream does have games from systems like the 2600, Commodore 64 and Spectrum that could be downloaded in their entirety as fast as they could be streamed, its collection of 1,500 games for on-demand streaming includes titles up to the PlayStation era, which can take up about 1GB of data.

"We wanted to create a system that's future proof and one where it's consistent," Cottam says. "So it doesn't matter if you're playing a 2600 game or a PlayStation game; you click it and you're in straight away. You haven't got to worry