The Critical Importance of Video Game Preservation

As cartridges deteriorate, disks become unreadable, and consoles cease to function, we face an unprecedented cultural crisis: vital pieces of our technological and cultural history risk being lost forever.

The video game industry, now valued at over $180 billion, surpasses many traditional entertainment sectors in both size and influence. It has shaped global culture profoundly through iconic games like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy, which introduced groundbreaking exploration, puzzle-solving, and narrative depth. Yet, these pioneering works face significant preservation challenges, unlike books, films, or music, which benefit from established preservation methods.

Consider innovations like the Zapper or the Power Glove from the original NES—these weren’t merely accessories but pivotal in shaping gameplay. Preserving these technologies is essential, as losing them means future generations cannot fully appreciate or understand these gameplay mechanics.

With the rapid obsolescence of gaming hardware and the industry’s shift towards digital distribution, even digital platforms are impermanent; online stores can shut down, leaving numerous games without any means for purchase or play.

Our preservation efforts are thus critical not only for keeping old games accessible but also for maintaining a continuum of our cultural heritage, ensuring that the innovations and narratives that have shaped interactive entertainment continue to inspire and educate.

Why Video Games Need Preservation

Video games are not just entertainment; they are complex technological artifacts that integrate art, technology, and narrative in ways that uniquely impact culture, education, and history. Preserving them is crucial for multiple reasons:

• Cultural Significance: Video games are a distinct blend of art and technology, offering interactive experiences that have significantly influenced global culture. Classics like Space Invaders and Pac-Man illustrate the early days of human-computer interaction, while titles such as Mortal Kombat parked significant discussions on media violence and SimCity introduced new ways of thinking about complex systems. The evolution from simple arcade stories to complex narratives in games like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid established new forms of interactive storytelling, pushing the boundaries of how stories can be told through player interaction. These games are cultural milestones that highlight society’s evolving relationship with technology and demonstrate how games have matured into a sophisticated artistic medium.
• Historical Documentation: The history of video games mirrors the advancement of interactive entertainment, from the simplicity of early arcade games to the detailed narrative worlds of modern titles. Each generation of games, from the pioneering Doom to the groundbreaking Nintendo Entertainment System, provides insight into changing market dynamics, player preferences, and technological advancements. Understanding these shifts is crucial for appreciating how the medium has evolved and influenced other forms of media.
• Educational Value: Video games are dynamic educational tools that teach through engagement. They encourage problem-solving, critical thinking, and adaptability to technological interfaces. Educational games, ranging from historical simulations to complex scientific models, offer interactive learning environments that traditional educational methods cannot replicate. Preserving these games ensures ongoing access to innovative teaching resources.
• Artistic Value: The artistic aspects of video games, from pixel art to music composition, were often born from the necessity to work within technological limits, leading to unique styles and creative solutions that have left lasting impacts on the art world. These artistic innovations are not only important in their own right but also serve as inspiration for modern artists and game designers.
• Technical and Development Insight: Video games also serve as records of technological innovation. Early developers navigated significant hardware limitations to create experiences that were technologically groundbreaking at the time, such as the memory management techniques used in the Pokemon series or the development of smooth scrolling in Super Mario Bros. These historical innovations are valuable learning tools for both current and future technologists.
• Legacy and Nostalgia: Beyond technology and art, video games foster community and connectivity. From the local multiplayer sessions of the 1980s to today’s vast online networks, games have built and sustained communities, influencing countless lives and fostering a shared cultural heritage. Preserving these games allows future generations to share in these communal experiences and understand their impact.
• Legal and Scholarly Research: Video games provide rich material for legal and cultural studies, offering insights into the development of intellectual property law, the impact of digital media on copyright frameworks, and the cultural implications of technological advancements. The emergence of game design studies as a distinct academic field has led to valuable research on player behavior, interactive design principles, and social dynamics in virtual spaces. As legal and cultural documents, games are invaluable for academic research and societal understanding, spanning disciplines from psychology to computer science.
• The Growing Threat of Loss: The rapid pace of technological change threatens to erase significant portions of gaming history. Hardware becomes obsolete as older systems break down and replacement parts become scarce. Physical media like cartridges and disks naturally degrade over time, while digital-only games can vanish entirely when online stores shut down. Games tied to defunct online services become unplayable, and crucial development materials like source code and design documents are often lost or discarded. Recent examples include the closure of the Wii Shop Channel, making hundreds of digital titles inaccessible, and the shutdown of PlayStation Mobile, which rendered many games unplayable. Even more concerning is the growing number of mobile and digital-only games that become permanently inaccessible due to platform changes and store closures, demonstrating how quickly gaming history can disappear without proper preservation efforts.

The Issues Around Video Game Preservation

The issues surrounding video game preservation span multiple dimensions, from technical hurdles and legal barriers to economic challenges and cultural obstacles.

• Technical Challenges:
  • Hardware Obsolescence: Many games are designed for specific hardware platforms that are no longer in production. The Nintendo Entertainment System‘s 72-pin connector commonly fails, making cartridges unreadable. Modern televisions lack support for older video standards, making it increasingly difficult to play original hardware without expensive converters or modifications.
  • Media Degradation: Physical media deteriorates over time. Early Pokemon cartridges lose their save functionality as internal batteries die. CDs and DVDs suffer from “disc rot,” rendering them unreadable, while magnetic media like floppy disks become corrupted over time.
  • Digital Decay: Digital-only games face extinction when distribution platforms shut down. The closure of the Wii Shop Channel made hundreds of digital titles inaccessible, while games requiring defunct online servers become unplayable regardless of physical copies.
  • Software Compatibility: As operating systems evolve, older games often cease to function. Early DOS games struggle to run on modern Windows systems, requiring complex emulation or virtual machines to operate.
• Documentation Challenges:
  • Beyond Code: Preserving a game requires more than software. World of Warcraft‘s evolving meta-game strategies, community discoveries, and player interactions represent crucial gaming history that’s challenging to document and preserve.
  • Online Worlds: When early MMORPGs shut down, like Ultima Online shut down. They take with them years of player interactions, community developments, and unique events that can never be fully recreated.
  • Development History: Game design documents, art assets, and source code are often lost when studios close or storage systems become obsolete.
  • Cultural Context: The context of how games were played and received often vanishes. Speedrunning strategies, competitive techniques, and community modifications represent important gaming history that’s difficult to preserve.
• Legal and Copyright Issues:
  • Copyright Laws: Many games are entangled in complex licensing. GoldenEye 007 remains difficult to re-release due to multiple license holders, including the James Bond franchise and actor likenesses. Games featuring licensed music or sports teams face similar challenges.
  • DRM and Anti-Piracy Measures: Games using SecuROM protection have become unplayable on modern systems. Always-online DRM can render games unplayable when authentication servers shut down.
  • Lack of Clear Legal Frameworks: There is often a legal grey area regarding the emulation and preservation of video games, which can deter academic and institutional efforts due to fear of litigation.
  • Rights Complexity: The original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game exemplifies how multiple rights holders can complicate preservation efforts, requiring agreements between franchise owners, publishers, and developers.
  • Incentives for Piracy: When legal access to games becomes too expensive or altogether impossible due to availability, it can drive individuals towards illegal downloading or emulation as the only feasible way to access certain titles. This not only has legal implications but also does not support the original creators or their rights holders.
• Economic and Business Interests:
  • Market Dynamics: Game publishers and developers may have little economic incentive to preserve older games, especially if there is not a perceived market for them. Furthermore, companies may deliberately avoid re-releasing older games to boost the market for newer titles.
  • Control Over Distribution: Companies might resist efforts that could lead to broader access to their intellectual property without direct profit, such as through archives or museums.
  • Economic Accessibility: As original copies of older games become rarer, prices on secondary markets such as eBay, vintage stores, or specialized online retailers can skyrocket. For example, Clay Fighter: Sculptor’s Cut for the Nintendo 64, originally a Blockbuster rental exclusive, now sells for thousands of dollars despite not being among the most popular games of its era. This creates a barrier for both individual collectors and preservation organizations, making it financially prohibitive to acquire titles for archival or personal use.
  • Preservation Inequality: High market prices mean that only well-funded institutions or affluent individuals can afford to buy and preserve rare games. This results in a skewed preservation effort where only selected titles are preserved while others may be lost to time, leading to an incomplete historical record.
• Cultural and Societal Underestimation:
  • Institutional Recognition: While the Library of Congress preserves films and music, video games rarely receive similar institutional support. This lack of recognition threatens gaming history.
  • Perception of Video Games: Video games are sometimes not seen as cultural artifacts worth preserving compared to books, films, and music. This cultural underestimation can lead to a lack of funding and institutional support for preservation efforts.
  • Global Phenomenon: Despite gaming’s worldwide impact, preservation efforts remain fragmented. The Internet Archive’s efforts to preserve classic games demonstrate the potential for organized preservation, but such initiatives are rare.
  • Loss of Cultural Heritage: High secondary market prices can lead to games being treated more as investment pieces rather than as cultural artifacts meant for wider appreciation and study. This can hinder public access and educational use, limiting the understanding and appreciation of video game history and its impact on society.
  • Historical Documentation: Without proper preservation, we risk losing understanding of how video games influenced technology, storytelling, and social interaction throughout their history.
• Logistical Issues:
  • Scale of the Task: The sheer volume of video games released, spanning dozens of platforms and decades, makes comprehensive preservation a daunting task.
  • Lack of Standardization: There is no standard practice or widespread agreement on how best to preserve different types of video games, from arcade cabinets to console games to mobile games.

Current Preservation Efforts

• Industry-Led Initiatives:
  • Digital Collections and Re-releases: Many game companies are actively re-releasing classic games on modern platforms to preserve them and capitalize on nostalgia. For instance, Nintendo Switch Online provides access to classic NES, SNES, and Game Boy titles, while PlayStation Now and Xbox’s backward compatibility allow for older games on current hardware. Additionally, Nintendo’s NES and SNES Classic mini-consoles preserved seminal games like The Legend of Zelda and Super Metroid in their original form.
  • Publisher Archives: Publishers like Square Enix not only maintain extensive archives but also re-release older titles in digital formats. For example, Final Fantasy VIII was remastered and re-released, showing a commitment to preserving and making classic RPGs available to new audiences.
  • Source Code Preservation: Companies such as id Software have taken significant steps by releasing the source code for games like Doom, enabling both preservation and community engagement around these classic titles.
• Academic and Museum Projects:
  • University Archives: Institutions such as the University of Michigan and The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester house collections dedicated to video games. The Strong Museum, for instance, includes rare prototypes and design documents that chronicle the development of video gaming.
  • Exhibitions and Public Engagement: Museums globally now acknowledge video games as crucial cultural artifacts. Notable exhibitions like “The Art of Video Games” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum have showcased the evolution and impact of video games, enhancing their status as a subject worthy of preservation and scholarly study.
• Community Contributions:
  • Emulation and Open Source Projects: The emulation community, through projects like MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator), plays a vital role in preserving video games, especially those that are no longer commercially available. These efforts ensure that games for obsolete systems remain playable.
  • Modding and Fan Preservation: Modding communities extend the lifespan of games, as seen with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, where mods continue to add content and update the game for new operating systems and hardware.
  • ROM Preservation Communities: ROM preservation communities work to archive games that are no longer commercially available, though their efforts often intersect with complex copyright issues.
• Technological Innovations:
  • Preservation Software: Emerging software solutions, such as the Digital Game Preservation Framework (DGPF), aid archivists in managing and storing large collections of digital games, although this technology requires further explanation to be accessible to the general public.
  • Hardware and Software Emulation: Projects like MiSTer, an FPGA-based system, replicate the experience of original consoles with high fidelity, ensuring that even games requiring specific hardware characteristics are preserved accurately.
• Legal and Advocacy Efforts
  • Copyright Reform and Advocacy: The Video Game History Foundation is actively advocating for changes in copyright law to facilitate easier preservation and study of video games. Their efforts include pushing for DMCA exemptions that would permit the preservation of online games and software requiring server authentication.
  • Successful Preservation Cases: Highlighting successful cases where DMCA exemptions have enabled legal preservation efforts can provide concrete examples of advocacy in action, demonstrating the positive impact of these legal allowances on the preservation community.

How Video Game Companies Actively Work Against Preservation

Video game companies, particularly industry giants, actively oppose preservation efforts to maintain control over their intellectual property and maximize profits through re-releases and remasters. Their actions directly conflict with preserving video games as cultural and historical artifacts.

• Emphasis on Control and Profit: Video game companies, especially those like Nintendo, prioritize control over both the distribution and accessibility of their games. This control extends to limiting the availability of older titles to encourage consumption of new releases or remastered editions.
• Aggressive Legal Action: Nintendo, for example, is notorious for its legal actions against ROM sites and fan projects, even targeting games that are no longer commercially available. An instance is the cease-and-desist orders against the fan remake, AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake), despite its potential to revive interest in an older franchise.
• Deliberate Obsolescence: Companies employ multiple strategies to force obsolescence. They create artificial scarcity through limited-time releases, as seen with Nintendo’s Super Mario 3D All-Stars which was only available until March 2021. New console generations often drop backward compatibility, forcing consumers to either maintain old hardware or repurchase games for newer systems. The closure of digital stores like the Wii Shop Channel and 3DS eShop further demonstrates how companies deliberately cut off access to legally purchased digital games, effectively erasing them from legitimate distribution channels.
• Digital Rights Management (DRM): DRM tools are used to control how games are accessed and used, leading to situations where games become inaccessible once the DRM servers are discontinued or when the technology becomes outdated.
• Opposition to Legal Protection: Video game companies frequently lobby against legislative changes that would allow for better preservation conditions, such as exemptions under the DMCA for archiving and educational use. They argue that these changes would negatively impact their revenue streams, despite the cultural importance of these games.
• Legal Barriers to Personal Use: Under current DMCA provisions, even personal backup or format-shifting of legally purchased games can be considered a violation of copyright if it involves circumventing copy protections. This severely restricts users’ ability to preserve games for personal use.

Why Emulation is Essential for Video Game Preservation

Just as the film industry actively transfers content to new formats to ensure longevity, emulation serves a similar vital role for video games. Film preservation has long relied on format shifting to survive; likewise, video games require emulation to remain accessible as original hardware becomes obsolete. Here are several key reasons why emulation is crucial:

• Decoupling from Original Hardware: Emulation liberates video games from their physical confines, much like how movies transitioned from VHS tapes to digital files, allowing them to be preserved and played without the original, often obsolete, hardware.
• Hardware Mortality: Original gaming systems are prone to failure as components degrade over time. Emulation replicates the functionality of this hardware in software, ensuring that games remain playable, preserving them for future generations.
• Access and Availability: Emulation democratizes access to gaming history, making it possible for a broader audience to study and experience classic games without the need for rare or expensive physical hardware.
• Accuracy and Documentation: Emulators can provide an accurate record of how original systems operated, offering an invaluable tool for technical documentation and preserving the intricacies of game design and hardware functionality.
• Adaptability: Like watching vintage films on modern devices, emulation allows classic games to be played on contemporary systems, adapting to new display technologies and control methods while maintaining the core experience.
• Digital Backup: As physical media deteriorate—whether from failing batteries in cartridges or disc rot—emulation paired with ROM dumps preserves the actual game data, ensuring it remains accessible beyond the lifespan of its original medium.
• Research and Study: Emulation facilitates detailed academic research, such as frame-by-frame analysis and code behavior studies, which are impractical or impossible on aging hardware.
• Error Correction: Advanced emulators not only preserve but can enhance games by correcting bugs or timing issues in the original hardware while still offering the option to replicate the original gameplay experience.
• Cost-Effective Preservation: Maintaining and repairing vintage gaming hardware is often prohibitively expensive for institutions. Emulation provides a sustainable, cost-effective method for libraries, museums, and archives to preserve and showcase their video game collections.