The Scale of Loss
A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation found that 87% of games released before 2010 were out of print and commercially unavailable — significantly higher than the preservation rates of film (approximately 70-75% of pre-1950 films are lost) or recorded music (which has achieved better archival rates through the music industry's active back-catalogue business). The proportion of games that exist in no preserved form at all — not in any archive, not on any collector's hard drive, not in any accessible format — is harder to quantify but is understood to include thousands of titles that have entirely disappeared.
The mechanisms of loss are multiple. Magnetic storage media — floppy disks, DAT tapes, hard drives — deteriorate with age, sometimes catastrophically. Optical media (CD-ROMs, DVDs) suffers from "disc rot," a chemical process that destroys the reflective layer essential for data reading. Proprietary formats designed for specific hardware become unreadable when the hardware is no longer manufactured. Source code — the human-readable programs from which software is compiled — is often lost even when the compiled game survives, making maintenance, porting, and modification impossible. The games industry has not treated preservation as an institutional priority, and the results of this neglect are becoming irreversible.
Copyright Law and the Archival Problem
The primary legal obstacle to video game preservation is copyright law. Unlike books and films, for which specific exceptions exist in American copyright law (the first sale doctrine, library lending rights, the 108(h) exception for preservation of deteriorating materials), video games occupy an ambiguous position that makes institutional archival difficult. A library that purchases a physical copy of a book can lend it indefinitely; a library that purchases a digital game cannot reproduce it for archival purposes without potentially violating copyright, and many games are delivered through digital marketplaces with terms of service that complicate ownership claims.
The Video Game History Foundation's advocacy for copyright reform has achieved some progress: in 2018, the US Copyright Office granted a limited exemption to the DMCA allowing libraries and archives to circumvent copy protection on games for preservation purposes, provided the games are not commercially available and the institution owns a copy. This exemption is narrow — it does not allow online access, requires physical presence at the archive, and is subject to triennial review — but it represents the first legal acknowledgement that game preservation is a legitimate institutional activity rather than an infringement justification. Expanding this exemption to cover online access remains a legislative priority for preservation advocates.
Emulation, the Internet Archive, and the Grey Area
Emulation — software that replicates the behaviour of one computer system on a different computer system — is the practical foundation of game preservation. Emulators for virtually every gaming platform exist, maintained by developers who have reverse-engineered hardware specifications from documentation and observation. The legality of emulation itself is generally settled in American law: creating software that emulates hardware functionality does not infringe copyright. The legality of distributing games (ROMs, disk images, CD images) for use with emulators is not settled; copyright holders have claimed infringement, and the issue has not been definitively adjudicated in a case whose facts mirror typical preservation practice.
The Internet Archive, a non-profit library based in San Francisco, has made thousands of games playable through browser-based emulation under the argument that making games accessible for educational and research purposes constitutes fair use. The Archive has faced legal challenges from publishers and industry organisations, and its legal status has fluctuated with court decisions. Despite legal uncertainty, the Internet Archive hosts the most extensive publicly accessible collection of historically significant games anywhere, serving millions of users who have no other means of accessing gaming history. The organisation's approach — act on the principle that preservation is culturally valuable and defend that position legally — is the de facto model for institutional preservation in the absence of clear legal frameworks.
Who Is Saving the Games
The organisations actively working on game preservation include the Video Game History Foundation (research and advocacy), the Strong National Museum of Play (physical collection), the Computer History Museum (software collection), the Internet Archive (digital access), and numerous academic digital humanities programs. Individual collectors — people who have spent decades acquiring hardware, software, and documentation — hold collections that supplement and sometimes exceed institutional holdings in specific areas. The source code for multiple historically significant games has been released by companies (id Software's Quake engine source code, Microsoft releasing Flight Simulator source code) or recovered from old development computers and donated to archives.
The commercial industry's engagement with its own history has been inconsistent. Nintendo's Virtual Console and Nintendo Switch Online services have made a curated selection of NES, SNES, N64, and Game Boy Advance games commercially available — a form of preservation-by-revenue that keeps some games accessible without addressing the broader archival problem. Sega's efforts through platforms like Steam, Antstream Arcade, and the Mega Drive Mini have similarly preserved selected titles. But neither company has made its full catalogue available, and neither has engaged with the archival community on the broader issue of preservation for games that lack commercial viability. The gap between what has been preserved and what existed is widening as magnetic media degrades and the people who can read proprietary formats grow older. The preservation crisis is not a future problem; it is a present-tense emergency whose window for action is narrowing.