Is game preservation a losing battle?
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Tuesday 5th July 2022
The field of game preservation has grown considerably in recent years, but it hasn't been keeping pace with the growth of gaming itself.
"We need more people," says Andrew Borman, digital games curator at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. "We need more support in terms of money and time to be able to do things. Just as an industry, we will always need more. As more and more games are being created, we're going to require more people and time to preserve those things."
Borman has been working at The Strong for almost five years now, but has been doing preservation work in games for nearly two decades. At The Strong he handles a collection of about 65,000 game-related objects, with hundreds of thousands of magazines, books, trade catalogs, and other printed material on top of that.
He is well-versed in the challenges associated with game preservation to this point, and quick to note that preservation efforts in some areas have been quite successful.
A glimpse of gaming history preserved at The Strong. (Image courtesy The Strong, Rochester, New York)
"When you look at [preservation around] retail games in the pre-Xbox One/PS4 era, they're in pretty good shape," Borman says. "There are plenty of people out there buying things, plenty of people backing things up. There are exceptions to those rules being that there were exclusive digital titles, but for the most part, a lot of retail games will be preserved, and I don't think that many will be missing."
But as the industry has increasingly moved beyond boxed products and embraced digital distribution, Borman says things get a lot trickier.
"Nowadays physical copies -- as great as it is they exist -- they either
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
