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Kakadu18 on 29 April 2022
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Bofferbrauer2 said:
IcaroRibeiro said:

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? 

They don't need to want to destroy a game, it suffices that they don't care.

Here are 2 lists of lost video games. If you look closely, there are many that were made after 2000, and even quite a few after 2010.

https://lostmediawiki.com/Category:Lost_video_games

https://lostmediaarchive.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Lost_Video_Games

This is why video game preservation is important, every year there are more that could be added to the list. And there will potentially be an onslaught of them when Apple makes it's threat true that it will remove every single game that hasn't been updated in 2 years.

Another question is, that even if the game still exists, can it still be run? Try running a 16-bit windows game (or one with a 16-bit installer) on a modern 64-bit OS and hardware for instance. It's impossible to do without virtualization or emulation (if a 3D accelerator (GPU) is needed, then only emulation is a possibility). Some 80's arcade games were so matched to the tech of the arcade hardware that they still run like shit or not at all on high-end PCs to this day despite technically being billion times faster.

If there hadn't be a large abandonware community in the late 90's through today, then many pre-internet games would have been lost forever by now. And their master tapes (which allow to access and edit the code - if the engine still exists, that is) are for the most part really lost, so you can't update them to run on modern hardware without trickery.

Most of the games on these lists had been cancelled and were never released, are tech demos or even only certain versions of not lost games like a PC port that is mentioned.

Last edited by Kakadu18 - on 29 April 2022