The Game Availability Study published in partnership by the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network found that 87% of video games released in the US before 2010[…]simply aren’t in print anymore.
Thank the heavens for people who dump ROMs and share them online. Seriously. When people think emulators they think piracy, but it’s vital to conservation too.
Whether ethical or unethical future generations will be able to have better chance at having access to historical digital archives that would have just disappeared thanks to pirates.
Much like how if a pirate from the past was copying down literature despite not being given permission to. Then a fire burns down and the official archives are lost except for the ancient pirate’s copies. Wonder if there has been cases like that where illicit copying led to being the backup.
That’s pretty much how ancient texts survived. People would write to each other at the time, asking “hey, do you know that guy who has a copy of Epictetus’s Enchiridion? Could you have him send it to me, I’ll make a copy and send his back”. There are many ancient works that we know existed in this way because we have the letters asking for them, but the actual text of the work didn’t survive.
You just summed up how all knowlledge of everything has ever and will ever manage to exist does.
This has gotten me thinking about legal deposit requirements, such as those that have existed for centuries in certain countries where published works must have a copy submitted to a national library for conservation purposes. Does anyone know if there are initiatives like this for video games? How are they going?
The ESA lobbies the fuck against video game preservation.
Yes judge it’s an archive of classic games. Well yes, I have to play them so I can archive save files as well. It’s an archive, not a rom library. 🙂
