Piracy Is Saving Video-Game History

The games industry won’t keep old games in circulation — so it’s all up to the pirates

Photo by Mike Von on Unsplash

Video games are one of the most significant cultural forms of the last 50 years — but they’re vanishing.

Commercially, anyway. Let’s say you wanted to buy a game from a few decades ago. Some fun or intriguing title you’ve heard about on a forum!

Almost nine times out of ten, you’re out of luck. A new study released this month — you can read a copy here — sampled games that were originally released for the PlayStation 2, the Game Boy, and the Commodore 64. They found that only 13% of classic video games are still in release. (The older the platform, the worse it is: Only 3% of Commodore 64 games are currently in release.)

One the one hand, you could argue that well — duh — of course really old games aren’t readily available to purchase. They’re old, right? The systems they’re played on are becoming extinct, physically.

But video games seem to be aging faster than other media. The study found that games were vanishing commercially at a pace comparable to silent film or old radio programs, despite those forms being over 100 years old, and many of these video games being only a few decades old.

For scholarship and academic study, it’s a huge problem. If game historians can’t get their mitts on these original games, they can’t document their cultural impact. (It’s the same problem scholars of comic books faced decades ago; when comic books first came out, librarians thought they were nonsense and didn’t bother to buy and preserve any. Just like games!)

But it’s a problem even for everyday fans of games. Many would love to be able to buy older games. When the game company Digital Eclipse released “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection” — a compilation of 13 games — it sold more than a million copies in a year. Back when the arcade hit Robotron arrived on the Xbox, I played that until my thumbs damn near fell off.

Granted, it isn’t easy for game companies to keep old games in release. Sometimes the challenges are technical; it can be expensive to port a game to modern hardware. Sometimes they’re legal: Who owns the rights can be…