Bofferbrauer2 said:
Some very influential games have been lost over time, especially those from the 1980's and early 1990's. Also many MMOs are lost forever now, even some who ran for quite some time and were pretty influential. |
We are on a digital era. The only way to lose a game nowadays is if the publisher absolutely wants to destroy it. Every person who have downloaded a game is preserving it.
That's said, some games are impossible to be fully preserved. How will we play League of Legends once the servers are shut down? The answer is, we simply won't and there is absolutely no reason to freak out about it
Think about other forms of arts that degrade with time, like architecture. Older buildings, they degrade with time and is simply impossible to keep every single one of them identical to what they used to be. What is reasonable is to select a few of them and... I don't know the word in English, in Portuguese is "tombar" which means acknowledge the historical, artistic and cultural relevance of some piece or property and turn them into a public property, which gave the state responsibility over its maintenance
In cultural areas of cities some buildings frontage can't be remodeled because of laws.
Thats exactly what should happen with games. We need to select a few of them and turn them public property when recognized their historical and cultural value
This, however, is so far ahead in future that is totally pointless to even discuss right now. It's something to think about in maybe 100 years, not now. Games that are likely to become public property are the ones that are popular enough to have several copies and backups distributed, preserving those will be a non issue. That's not counting the possibility of some IPs being to successful that still no reason for them to become public, have any of early Disney movies disappeared so far?
