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[Fredrik]

As a slightly older gamer this video absolutely shocked me:




87% of classic games games are commercially unavailable.

1% of all games since 1980 has been reissued.

Let that sink in.

While we will probably always have access to the Marios and Final Fantasys and other huge IP series there are thousands of games that will forever be erased from video game history once the physical copies and hardwares don’t work anymore.

There has been some attempts to do something.
There was the Virtual Console on Wii. I could even play Commodore 64 legally there. Was gimped on WiiU. Not available on Switch.
Xbox had some arcade classics on Xbox Live Arcade. Not available anymore.
Sony have some classic games on PS+ Premium. Bad PAL conversions.

Meanwhile the used games market has become like a new form of stock market with people trading games at insane prices mainly to make money.

For the most part the retro scene is currently on life support through emulators, which in many cases is frowned upon by the industry since many use pirated ROM files, and if they want to resell an old game they’ll quickly close those doors.
And even if talking about downloaded rom packs here and on other social spaces would be okay it’s still not a solution for the masses since emulation can be complicated.

So what is the industry planning to do here?
Is it possible to do something for the less known games and platforms? Or will they just slowly wither away and all we’re left with is looking at playthroughs on Youtube?


As for myself I bought a KryoFlux floppy ripper some years ago to at least preserve my own Commodore youth. And I have multiple backup C64s and Amigas when my old ones break apart. Multiple joysticks too. And I have the Classic with a small number of included games. Not sure what else I can do. I realize all this will eventually just be memories or even less and boxes with junk on some attic.

Do you try to preserve any of your old stuff?

 

[AV]

For one, there's simply a lot of games that aren't worth saving. Save them for the sake of history, sure, but not because anyone actually wants to play them.

Beyond that, the issue isn't that games aren't being preserved. They are. The guy in your thumbnail bought the entire 3DS eShop before it shut down. The issue is that they aren't commercially distributed. Thing is, anyone who wants to play these games doesn't really need to look far. The internet archive (as well as plenty of other sources) are chock full and the MiSTer is doing an incredible job of making these games playable as close as humanly possible to their original form without relying on greying, decaying old hardware that won't be around forever. Resident VGEsoterica does great videos on that posted regularly here.

The whole thing's a bit of an overreaction. I'm all for preservation but if publishers don't want to let us pay to access classics, screw 'em, they're available.

 

[vaibhavpisal]

Go digital with good backwards compatibility.

It won't be perfect but wouldn't render 87% of the games unplayable.

 

[kanjobazooie]

To us, these games are works that are worthy of preserving. To companies, they're just forgotten assets and products.

There are financial and legal hurdles to re-release these games and some companies just don't want to deal with them. Not to mention the matter of demand; no one cares about a random NES game that had its 15 minutes of fame when Angry Nerd made a video about it more than a decade ago.

 

[deriks]

Official emulation is a thing, and they're already doing that - even Sony with just a few. But money is also a thing, so don't expect much more that we already have

 

[Hudo]

Ideally, source code should be given over to archives/museums after 10 years or so. But that will never happen.

 

[MrA]

Anything commercially released with greater than 0 distribution has been archived, i wrote a bunch of text only rpgs for the c64, they're all lost now, nobody should care because they're trash
I made a physical copy of a 2600 game a student wrote , and that's been lost, but was anything of value lost, hmm no
Tell me which games haven't been archived and emulated and if he find anything interesting try to find that

 

[HL3.exe]

I'm all for preservation. We should invest more in stuff like archive.org for easy rom accessibility, i'm totally for that. Source code laws should be better in check so that stuff can end up in sites like that after 10 or 20 years.

But can we not pretend that the video games industry is a 'industry', so in that 87% there is a lot of garbage shovelware, dumped out just to make a quick buck, not really worth saving or building a expensive infrastructure around just to keep it around.

Video games aren't like films. We lost a lot of work from the silent movie era, and even after which I feel is way more of a shame. Independent works and the birth of cinematic style and structures are simply lost due to physical media rot.

Edit: reading up on it, this is a good initiative. It creates a way to access these works that are held up by firms without any meaningful financial gains planned. Even unreleased stuff like Star Craft Ghost and Prey 2 could see a legal way to be accessed for preservation reasons after a certain amount of time. This is great for the creators evolved with these projects, but without any say in the matter. Only changes in the DMCA protocol pushed corporation like Microsoft and Sony could change these rules for the better.

 

[calistan]

Gaming is an ephemeral pastime, and almost everything worth saving has already been saved.

It's like in that recent thread from the guy who played every Amiga game and came up with a list of 300 he still rated. Even from that heavily curated list I'd say that less than a dozen are still worthwhile in 2023. If only 1% of retro games have been reissued that's probably a fair reflection of the signal to noise ratio in the industry.

Most works of art are long gone. There are countless books that will never be read again, authors who have been forgotten, movies that have no surviving prints let alone an audience that would want to watch them. Great musicians who were never recorded.

It's just the way of things - you can't save everything, nor should you try to. You enjoy it at the time, you bore the kids with tales of the good old days, and then all but the brightest stars fade away.

 

[M1chl]

Ideally, source code should be given over to archives/museums after 10 years or so. But that will never happen.

 

[Fredrik]

For one, there's simply a lot of games that aren't worth saving. Save them for the sake of history, sure, but not because anyone actually wants to play them.

It’s all in the eye of the beholder, I still play and very much enjoy games on the Amiga, games that would never be reissued because the creators and owners aren’t around anymore. I definitely think it’s worth saving those games, but a proper and legal resurrection would be difficult there. Who do you ask for permission? Can one of the big platform holders use existing emulators and rom files?

Also, it will be a lot more difficult for modern games to survive because of all the servers and patches. So this isn’t just about 80s games, it’ll soon be a much bigger problem for newer games.

Ideally, source code should be given over to archives/museums after 10 years or so. But that will never happen.

Yeah, free for all to use as long as they don’t use them to make money.
There is still a need for a bigger industry push, can’t expect everyone to start compiling source code. I’m thinking there should be an ever growing multiplatform museum type of Retro platform, all legal, that anyone can use. Not some crappy online thing with latency but where games run natively.

 

[LazyParrot]

But can we not pretend that the video games industry is a 'industry', so in that 87% there is a lot of garbage shovelware, dumped out just to make a quick buck, not really worth saving or building a expensive infrastructure around just to keep it around.

Video games aren't like films. We lost a lot of work from the silent movie era, and even after which I feel is way more of a shame. Independent works and the birth of cinematic style and structures are simply lost due to physical media rot.

I don't really see the difference tbh. The vast majority of early films aren't innovative masterpieces that pushed the medium forward, even during the silent era. By the mid 1910s the American film industry alone was pumping out close to 1,000 feature films per year, and to say that 87% (to use your figure) of those were crap would almost certainly be lowballing it.

 

[Mythoclast]

As much as I like physical and still today buy physical when I can, I think it’s time to start embracing the all digital future. Happened to movies, happened to music, it’s gonna happen to games too. And it will ensure permanent game preservation of every game going forward. The DRM/ownership issue is another thing, but I think it’s time to accept that we live in a society where we are expected to have Internet 100% of the time.

 

[ArtHands]

Instead of waiting for companies to do something, I take the matter into my own hands and download the rom packs online. If they are not accessible legally or feasibly I have no problem pirating. If classic games are re-released I’ll buy them.

I’ll leave the physical preservation route to you guys. Personally not going the route of paying hundreds of bucks for some rare copy of games and play on long discontinued hardware on life support, without modern QOL and low graphical fidelity. I’ll just drag and drop some game rom into retroarch or some emulator, and play them at 4K or whatever

 

[Fredrik]

almost everything worth saving has already been saved.

I don’t think that is true at all, at least not saved by the industry. Only a small fraction of games from the 80s has been sold again in some way or form on the latest platforms.
On the Amiga 500 we have Turrican released, there was Battle Squadron too playable on mobile, there are some PC versions of games I played on the Amiga on GOG too, Sierra’s Quest games for example, and there is the Amiga 500 mini with a couple included games. Not sure what else there is.
And this platform alone hold thousands of games.

Things aren’t much better on consoles, just the biggest and most popular games are on retro game collections.

And same thing with arcade games.

And then when we finally get a nice solution to have retro games on a modern platform, like using emulators on Xbox Series console in retail mode, then there is some big company that curbstomp it as soon as it become too popular. Sigh.

 

[HL3.exe]

I don't really see the difference tbh. The vast majority of early films aren't innovative masterpieces that pushed the medium forward, even during the silent era. By the mid 1910s the American film industry alone was pumping out close to 1,000 feature films per year, and to say that 87% (to use your figure) of those were crap would almost certainly be lowballing it.

True. also I updated my post and stance after digging into the initiative.

 

[01011001]

the anser is, "who the fuck cares? Pirate that shit!"
It's not my loss if they refuse to sell their games I can get them literally within 30 seconds... all of them... and play them on 20 devices that I own, at least...

if Sammy/Sega don't want to rerelease Vice Project Doom, why would I be affected by that? it's literally available to me and ready to be played, right now, on my PC, Phone, Tablet, PSP, 3DS and og Xbox...
I would buy it in a heartbeat if they released it in a really well packaged way... but they don't want to so

 

[SF Kosmo]

The conversation isn't about what the industry needs to do, it's about the destructive nature of copyright creep, and the need to restore the public domain.

We have to pass legislation that says copyright expires after a reasonable amount of time unless the copyright holder explicitly renews it, and otherwise it lapses into the public domain. This solves for abandoned IP and ambiguous copyright ownership (the latter of which is an ever increasing problem with more and more mergers and conglomerates as well as complicated licensing deals).

I suppose the "industry" could start voluntarily releasing dead IP to the public domain but there's just no incentive for them to do that. It happens occasionally very rarely but we can't expect it on a large scale.

 

[xrnzaaas]

The percentage is clickbaity, tons of older games were crap (in many cases because of technology limitations) or they simply wouldn't be attractive anymore in their original form. It's not like everything was good back then. Besides playing the old games is easy assuming you don't want to actually own a copy. Pretty much all of the platforms have emulators and I don't see a problem with finding roms on the net if the game isn't available for purchase or isn't a part of any retro collections.

 

[Three]

Because less than 1% of games are big enough commercially to reissue and get a return. The 87% that aren’t commercially available anymore are still preserved though, whether that's second hand or roms.

Sometimes it's just worth getting rid of something commercially if there are costs for continued support. Look at the recent twitter spat between a steam game dev and a customer. A 6yr old $1 indie game that the dev probably isn't getting much money from not working on new hardware and both the dev and user acting like dicks to eachother for nothing. Wouldn't be surprised if most devs just choose to delist instead.

 

[Fredrik]

the anser is, "who the fuck cares? Pirate that shit!"
It's not my loss if they refuse to sell their games I can get them literally within 30 seconds... all of them... and play them on 20 devices that I own, at least...

if Sammy/Sega don't want to rerelease Vice Project Doom, why would I be affected by that? it's literally available to me and ready to be played, right now, on my PC, Phone, Tablet, PSP, 3DS and og Xbox...
I would buy it in a heartbeat if they released it in a really well packaged way... but they don't want to so

Piracy has existed as long as I’ve been around but if convenient solutions to use emulators isn’t available and if downloading rom files is frowned upon then it’s not a solution good enough as I see it.

As someone said above games could become free for all to use after a certain time. It’s not like the creator of The Faery Tale Adventure is going to be pissed if someone would start talking about how bizarrely big that RPG was for it’s time, he would probably just think it’s cool that anyone remembers it.
I’m not sure how it us when the developers are still around. Is System 3 going to be pissed if someone download and play The Last Ninja? Maybe they are. Or maybe they just think it’s cool that people haven’t completely forgot about them?

 

[nkarafo]

It's better to not rely on the commercial industry for this kind of thing. They don't care about preservation except for when it's profitable.

The hombrew community has this covered.

 

[metareferential]

The industry actively fights any legitimate attempt at conservation.

Fighting piracy (real piracy) and corporate greed contribute to the problem.

And then there's the tech side of it: books can always be read (as long as the book itself is still intact); software can become an issue in and by itself.

 

[Sub_Level]

“Frowned upon” lol fuck them. Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it immoral. Pirating a NES game in 2023 hurts exactly nobody.

 

[BbMajor7th]

I dare say there are similar statistics for books and music - it's impossible to archive everything. Heck, 99% of all life forms that ever lived on Earth are already extinct. It's natural: things come and go, some endure longer than others, but 99.9% of everything will vanish in time.

 

[mopspear]

If they don't sell it anymore, I can't see why I can't download it. Is it my job to support game resellers?

 

[MasterDerico]

Yeah i have a huge collection of games and consoles, and the video is 100% accurate.

You can't access or find majority of old games if was not emulation.
I don't use emulators, sometimes like a demo, if i like the game i try to find and buy it.

Like the girl said "a library does not sell less books".
And she is right. Games should be a source of discovery, study and fun, and be legally available to everyone.

In addition to conventional games, I have an extensive list of obscure games, Doujinshi fighting games, all genres. I collect since it was free on vector site, and some even deeper.
I've seen companies like Arksys release games for free as a portfolio, I've seen them grow...As many other Japanese companies.

Of course I have the new games, but my collection is also very focused on discoveries, obscure games that could be enjoyed by everyone, and i end up spending a lot of money on these games.

It's strange for me to say this, but what saves the preservation of games are emulators, roms, romsets and isos.
If it's for the sake of preservation, so be it.

And imbeciles try to overthrow the only historical source of games we have, which are the roms pages.

Like I said, I don't use roms or isos, but for the sake of preservation, there's no other way for the future of old games.

 

[SmokedMeat]

This is why Nintendo and Sony need to put their classic catalogs on their own storefront on PC.

 

[Clear]

This is so fucking dumb.

How much computing/gaming *hardware* released since 1980 is still commercially available?

How many publishers have shut down since 1980 ?

How many devs have retired or died since 1980 ?

It boggles my mind that so many people seem to willingly ignore how disorganized and amateurish the industry was for many years. Things that are considered basic these days like source control/tracking were unknown in the industry until the mid/late 90's.

Things weren't always as large scale and corporate as they are today. The biggest irony being that the stuff least endangered by the passage of time are things that were products of the bigger and more corporate producers of their day. An Atari VCS or NES cart has a pretty good chance of still being good 40+ years from manufacture, but what about all the titles distributed on tape or floppy-disk?

 

[TGO]

If only there was some people who actually owned a hardcopy of those games and it was made mandatory that any device bearing the name/logo had to be compatible with software that also bear it
Imagine that

 

[kvltus lvlzvs]

All things dissipate with time. We are all going to die and our bodies are slowly breaking down. Our children will die. Our lives will be forgotten within a generation.

Of course mediocre games will be lost.

Even a had drive full of roms of all of these games will rot someday.

But of you want to play them now, emulation is your best and only feasible bet lmao

 

[metareferential]

I dare say there are similar statistics for books and music - it's impossible to archive everything. Heck, 99% of all life forms that ever lived on Earth are already extinct. It's natural: things come and go, some endure longer than others, but 99.9% of everything will vanish in time.

Culture is easier to preserve than life (outside of our own's).

And no one's stopping us from preserving anything we like, including life forms (maybe even past ones, in the future).

We're the only ones, for now, who are actually able to witness beauty. Might as well try to save it, while we're here.

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

The "90% of that is crap not worthy of preserving anyway" argument is stupid.
Plenty of works have been deemed not worthy of preservation by official authorities throughout history and left to die in time, if not actively destroyed. Problem is, it's not authorities and copyright holders who decide a work's worth. Many rulers in history obviously wanted their enemies' works erased from existence and memory, this doesn't mean those works were worthless. If we are against modern cancel culture - which really is the equivalent of that - we should be in favor of preserving even the worst mobile crap ever, even if nobody will ever want to play it again.

So a random user on an internet forum would save 300 games out of thousands? Well guess what, in their very thread about this people disagree about this and that game. Imagine if that user was charged with deleting every copy of the games they deemed not worthy of preserving for the future, and had the power to do it. No single person and no group of people gets to decide what others should read, play, or listen to - that's the definition of cancel culture. Custer's Revenge is shit, doesn't mean we should go out of our way to delete every existing ROM of it and pretend it was never a thing.

If old games can't be recovered by no means that's one thing. But if there's a way to preserve them, even unofficially, well, there's no valid argument against it, and personal taste isn't even a valid argument. Great essays and books about old games have been written only because those games were preserved. Even if you'll never played them, knowing about them is interesting. Hell, we're lucky at least 1% of software is currently officially available, otherwise zoomers who think their favorite game from the 2020s is revolutionary would have free reign to spew their bs unchecked. Some old, very obscure games had shit that goes beyond what most of us here would even dare think putting in a game today.

 

[tr1p1ex]

That's like 600k gaming hours that we'll never get back.

 

[tr1p1ex]

Also only 1% of games are reissued because only 1% are worth reissuing.

Case in point: The Switch has 4519 games.

 

[calistan]

The "90% of that is crap not worthy of preserving anyway" argument is stupid.
Plenty of works have been deemed not worthy of preservation by official authorities throughout history and left to die in time, if not actively destroyed. Problem is, it's not authorities and copyright holders who decide a work's worth. Many rulers in history obviously wanted their enemies' works erased from existence and memory, this doesn't mean those works were worthless. If we are against modern cancel culture - which really is the equivalent of that - we should be in favor of preserving even the worst mobile crap ever, even if nobody will ever want to play it again.

So a random user on an internet forum would save 300 games out of thousands? Well guess what, in their very thread about this people disagree about this and that game. Imagine if that user was charged with deleting every copy of the games they deemed not worthy of preserving for the future, and had the power to do it. No single person and no group of people gets to decide what others should read, play, or listen to - that's the definition of cancel culture. Custer's Revenge is shit, doesn't mean we should go out of our way to delete every existing ROM of it and pretend it was never a thing.

If old games can't be recovered by no means that's one thing. But if there's a way to preserve them, even unofficially, well, there's no valid argument against it, and personal taste isn't even a valid argument. Great essays and books about old games have been written only because those games were preserved. Even if you'll never played them, knowing about them is interesting. Hell, we're lucky at least 1% of software is currently officially available, otherwise zoomers who think their favorite game from the 2020s is revolutionary would have free reign to spew their bs unchecked. Some old, very obscure games had shit that goes beyond what most of us here would even dare think putting in a game today.

Nobody is talking about actively destroying these things. All of these games, no matter how terrible, have already been preserved by enthusiasts, and anyone can download the entire library of any old games machine to see for themselves.

Isn't the OP about commercial exploitation of retro games? There's just no market for this stuff. The only people who care that much already have access to it, and even they surely know that life is too short to waste playing them all. I've got tens of thousands of retro ROMs with a big fat zero in the playcount column, I just look for the ones I remembered and soon find out that they mostly suck balls nowadays.

 

[cireza]

Fuck Nintendo for the move from Wii U to Switch.

 

[BbMajor7th]

Culture is easier to preserve than life (outside of our own's).

And no one's stopping us from preserving anything we like, including life forms (maybe even past ones, in the future).

We're the only ones, for now, who are actually able to witness beauty. Might as well try to save it, while we're here.

No, and that wasn't to discourage people from acts of conservation where it matters to them - if you're passionate about something and want to preserve some part of it, either for posterity, pleasure or the benefit of generations to come, then all power. I just wouldn't worry that we can't preserve everything, and learn to accept that transience is a natural state of being. We take the things with us that we can't do without and let go of things we can.

 

[Rudius]

At least Nintendo is doing their very best to fuck up emulators, so when original hardware inevitebly fails the works of thousands of game developers will be obliterated.

 

[Fredrik]

“Frowned upon” lol fuck them. Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it immoral. Pirating a NES game in 2023 hurts exactly nobody.

Them? It’s everywhere, social media, boards, here too:
TOS

D. Emulation/Piracy

[snip]

Linking to pirate download sites, directions on how to get pirated software to work, reviews or impressions of pirated software, and livestreams of pirated software play are all strictly prohibited.

So you can’t talk about how to get your NES games to run on whatever hardware you have and you can’t post any impressions about it once you’re playing them. If you’re going strictly by the rules that is, maybe there is some leeway here. Either way not exactly a welcoming scenario.

But here we all rip our games of course! Soo this isn’t worth talking about, I’m mostly interested in if the industry is doing anything about this. Like where did Virtual Console go? That was fantastic, I really loved that, so many platforms, was cool with some 60hz NTSC imports in PAL land as well. Wii to WiiU removed almost everything, you could access them from Wii mode though, and with Switch it all just went poof

 

[Mr.Phoenix]

This is really a non-issue. First off nothing everything deserves or is worth saving simply because it was made.

And those that are, there will be millions of hard drives in the world that has them, and servers or sites...etc. And after enough time, everything would be able to be emulated on some future platform.

 

[HTK]

Game History is not on my priority of things in this life.

 

[Fredrik]

The "90% of that is crap not worthy of preserving anyway" argument is stupid.
Plenty of works have been deemed not worthy of preservation by official authorities throughout history and left to die in time, if not actively destroyed. Problem is, it's not authorities and copyright holders who decide a work's worth. Many rulers in history obviously wanted their enemies' works erased from existence and memory, this doesn't mean those works were worthless. If we are against modern cancel culture - which really is the equivalent of that - we should be in favor of preserving even the worst mobile crap ever, even if nobody will ever want to play it again.

So a random user on an internet forum would save 300 games out of thousands? Well guess what, in their very thread about this people disagree about this and that game. Imagine if that user was charged with deleting every copy of the games they deemed not worthy of preserving for the future, and had the power to do it. No single person and no group of people gets to decide what others should read, play, or listen to - that's the definition of cancel culture. Custer's Revenge is shit, doesn't mean we should go out of our way to delete every existing ROM of it and pretend it was never a thing.

If old games can't be recovered by no means that's one thing. But if there's a way to preserve them, even unofficially, well, there's no valid argument against it, and personal taste isn't even a valid argument. Great essays and books about old games have been written only because those games were preserved. Even if you'll never played them, knowing about them is interesting. Hell, we're lucky at least 1% of software is currently officially available, otherwise zoomers who think their favorite game from the 2020s is revolutionary would have free reign to spew their bs unchecked. Some old, very obscure games had shit that goes beyond what most of us here would even dare think putting in a game today.

Thank you, you understand

I’m even preserving my own crappy stuff, made a game in AMOS on the Amiga when I was a teenager, absolutely horrible to play but it’s still on plenty of adf files on multiple harddrives, even have a playthrough on Youtube (no it’s not worth watching).

Imagine if there was no preservation through the emulator scene for the real stuff. If killer games like Cadillacs and Dinosaurs was just a text line on Wikipedia in a history segment about Capcom’s past once the few arcade machines with it are broken.

Physical media and hardware is dying. And the industry needs to stop just thinking about the money. Factor 5 still have Turrican backups free to download on their website even after there has been a new release. That’s the way to do it. Devs need to embrace that there is interest in their old stuff. Eventually nobody will care, especially if there are hurdles to get them to run and if you have to be dodgy about that you’re even playing them unless you prove that you own the originals.

 

[Guerilla Munch]

bro you can buy a PolyStation 5 preloaded with every gaem ever made for $40 on aliexpress. i get ads for it all the time

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

At least Nintendo is doing their very best to fuck up emulators, so when original hardware inevitebly fails the works of thousands of game developers will be obliterated.

The hell are you on about? Let me guess, you had emulators set up on your Xbox? (I did too, btw)
Nintendo just doesn’t want people to emulate their games in open air, especially on some machines. Emulators for Nintendo consoles have been out for more than 20 years. I don‘t know about a single one that Nintendo wanted legally terminated. If Nintendo really did their best, you couldn’t download Retroarch on your PC like any other free software around. I mean, Nintendo must be aware that AGDQ openly plays modified Mario ROMs for runs and that they use emulators for TASes. Nintendo choose their targets. The emulators you have on your PC/phone and your private collection of ROMs you didn‘t pay for are safe.

Devs need to embrace that there is interest in their old stuff. Eventually nobody will care, especially if there are hurdles to get them to run and if you have to be dodgy about that you’re even playing them unless you prove that you own the originals.

Oftentimes it’s not the devs’ fault. Game studios are ephemeral entities, and rights issues can be a nightmare. What Factor 5 does is something 99% of devs simply couldn’t do even if they wanted. Meanwhile, the current rights holders have lots of good financial reasons to not invest even the smallest amount of money to republish old stuff that very, very few people would buy legit anyway.

 

[tr1p1ex]

If swtich has 4500 games imagine how many games have been released the past 50 years of gaming platforms and arcades?

There might be 50k games out there. If you played 10 of those a day for 10 years you would only be 2/3rds of the way through them.

 

[Killer8]

The industry (and seemingly most gamers) just don't care about preservation in the same way that other industries like film and music do. The physical degradation of hardware, like old consoles dying, cartridge batteries/contacts failing, and now disc rot, also puts a shelf-life on the medium's history.

Once you move beyond worrying about what is 'commercially available', the world of emulation and ROM archival is in a very good place. We have very high compatibility emulators and almost complete ROM sets for most of the consoles released since the 80s. At some point, you have to stop being concerned about whether you can give these companies (who do not care about you or their history) any more money.

 

[radewagon]

The current solution is really.....

Which is a shame. There needs to be a reevaluation of how copyright is applied to software. What I would like to see is a situation where, if the rights holders refuse to monetize a specific game, then the game becomes part of the public domain at an accelerated rate (10 years) and then can only be exited from public domain status if the game is rereleased in such a way as it is playable on current gen technology.

This should also be in play regardless of how many different stake holders are involved. If Marvel and Capcom can't figure it out, sucks for them, the game is free because they can't be arsed to figure out how to monetize an already complete product. As a fan of retro games, licensed titles are the ones most often lost and forgotten because they can't just be as easily put into retro compilations by the dev/publisher.

Look, I don't expect anyone to someday take the time to port Sega Saturn's Scud the Disposable Assassin so it should be freely available to play via other means. That said, the second it gets ported, I will pre-order it without haste.

Really, at the end of the day, whose investments are even being protected here? It's not like people pirating this abandonware are hurting anyone's bottom line. They aren't stealing so much as picking up an abandoned couch on the side of the road.

 

[dezzy8]

Emulation gives us access to all of the classic games. I don’t get the problem.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

I did not have "game preservation is a real issue" on my gamer bingo card. This is such a strange issue bubbling up and it's apparently getting clicks.