Piracy Is Saving Video-Game History
The games industry won’t keep old games in circulation — so it’s all up to the pirates
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.
