Almost 90% of classic video games are “critically endangered” and it’s only getting worse, preservation study warns

rockpapershotgun.com:

A recent study into the availability of classic video games appears 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.

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 - the report’s benchmark for “classic”, which just caused me to crumble into dust - simply aren’t in print anymore.

The study comprehensively lays out what it considers “in print” to mean, specifying that remakes and remasters with “substantial” differences - such as Yakuza Kiwami, compared to the original Yakuza - 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.”

The outcome is summarised by the study’s authors: “It’s bad, folks. It’s really bad.” Of the more than 4,000 games looked at, 9 in 10 are considered “critically endangered”. That’s averaged across everything from 1960 to 2009, with the period of 2005 to 2009