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Almost 90% of classic video games are “critically endangered” and it’s only getting worse, preservation study warns“It’s bad, folks. It’s really bad.”
“It’s bad, folks. It’s really bad.”
Image credit:stock.adobe.com/Victor
Image credit:stock.adobe.com/Victor
A recent study into the availability ofclassic video gamesappears to confirm what we all suspected: the vast majority of video games more than a decade old are pretty much impossible to find in their original forms, due to a mixture of technical challenges, licensing and commercial factors.
Can you name these eight classic PC games from just one screenshot?Watch on YouTube
Can you name these eight classic PC games from just one screenshot?
The study comprehensively lays out what it considers “in print” to mean, specifying that remakes and remasters with “substantial” differences - such asYakuza Kiwami, compared to the originalYakuza- aren’t the same as playing the original games. The study also makes clear that games needed to be “as simple as possible for an average user to play” to be classified as available - meaning that raw source code doesn’t count, nor less, uh, legitimate methods, with the researchers admitting that “it’s true that piracy is often the easiest way - or the only way! - to play many classic games”.
“We’re lucky that these games aren’t entirely lost to time yet, but we need to do better than that,” they added. “We shouldn’t accept that we have to forfeit video game history entirely to the realm of legally murky websites and secret torrents known only to the most diehard of fans.”
As you’d suspect, things get more and more dire the further back you go, with games released before 1985 seeing a notable drop in availability to well below 10%, and the 1960s and ‘70s barely above zero. The worst platform studied was the Commodore 64, with just 4.5% of games still available (and most of those are through a single platform, Antstream Arcade - without which the result would’ve been 0.75%), while even the juggernaut console of the PlayStation 2 only struggled to 12%.
The researchers compared the lamentable state of game preservation to that of pre-World War II audio recordings and American silent films, which have comparably low rates of preservation - despite dating from half a century or so earlier than video games.
“The era before the 1983–1984 video game industry crash is like the silent film era for video games, a period when the rules and vocabulary of games were first being established,” they explained of the importance of preserving early games. “The problem is that video game history is more than just the bestsellers. If we want to understand and appreciate the history of video games, we need more than a curated list of the games that publishers decide have commercial value.”
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The study ends with a call for the game industry to work with libraries and archivists to take on the task of preserving video game history, insisting that publishers and developers can’t do the job alone - especially when some game companies actively work to hamper the efforts of preservationists.
“This is the moment to sound the alarms for both the video game industry and the preservation world,” said Video Game History Foundation co-director Kelsey Lewin. “The study proves that it’s worse than it looks - for every Mario game that’s available, there’s hundreds of less popular games that are critically endangered.
