New Study Compares Classic Games to Silent Movies, Says Just 13 Percent Are Commercially Available
Spy shooter No One Lives Forever was critically-acclaimed when it released back in 2000, earning multiple awards nods and a sequel. We called it one of the best shooters of the year in our original review. If you want to play it in 2023, though, you'll have to turn to one of the handful of digital archives available on the internet, because neither No One Lives Forever nor its sequel are commercially available on Steam nor anyone else.
No One Lives Forever is one example of a market where just 13 percent of games made before 2010 are commercially available, a new study conducted by the Video Game History Foundation revealed. For every remastered update of Metroid Prime, thousands of games are difficult or even possible to obtain legitimately, including games on popular platforms like the Game Boy.
"Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it," the Video Game History Foundation's Kelsey Lewin wrote in a blog explaining the study. "And what if no library, not even the Library of Congress, could do any better — they could keep and digitize that VHS of Titanic, but you’d have to go all the way there to watch it."
That's roughly the situation the video game industry finds itself in, says the new study, which compares the commercial availability of classic video games to the survival rate of silent movies (14 percent) and pre-World War II audio recordings (10 percent or less).
The new study, which the Video Game History Foundation describes as the first of its kind, examined more than 4000 video games released in the United States before 2010, with a special focus on the Commodore 64, Game Boy, and the PlayStation 2. The Commodore
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