The race is on to preserve classic video games before it’s too late

With console gaming entering its ninth generation, the digital storefronts from the previous generations are slowly disappearing, taking with them thousands of digital-only video games.

Ash Parrish for The Verge:

Combined with the decline of physical media in favor of subscription services and digital distribution, it’s getting harder for people to play older games and harder still for the games of the present to be preserved for the future.

As games age and as companies continue to remove the means to properly purchase and download them, people are looking at other, less than legitimate options to continue to play the games they enjoy. It’s created tension between players and companies. While it’s unrealistic to expect publishers to maintain their prolific libraries in perpetuity, it’s also not ideal that large swathes of games can, at any time, just disappear on the whims of the store operator.

So how can we ensure that older games can be enjoyed by future generations without the expense of maintaining aging digital infrastructure or violating existing copyright laws? Video game preservationists are doing the work at the intersection between these two points.

MacDailyNews Take: Video game history should be preserved and, if the companies themselves won’t do it, some institution should be empowered to preserve old games and allow them to be played.

Fin out more about The Video Game History Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games, here.

MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework. Its purpose is to preserve decades of software history. More info here.

Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!

Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.