87% of classic games are not available for purchase today

[Dark Jaguar]

This is a staggering number and way worse than even my pessimism thought.  This is entirely unlike movies, music, and books.

[A Black Falcon]

I mean, wouldn't it be pretty shocking if it WASN'T a number that high?  Games are made for specific platforms, they aren't something on a universal medium like printed words or music.  It's not like you can just release a game made for one system on another one without putting in a lot of work either porting it or getting an emulator working.  That's one of the things that makes gaming special, designing games which make use of the limited hardware they were programmed for...

[Dark Jaguar]

I mean, wouldn't it be pretty shocking if it WASN'T a number that high?  Games are made for specific platforms, they aren't something on a universal medium like printed words or music.  It's not like you can just release a game made for one system on another one without putting in a lot of work either porting it or getting an emulator working.  That's one of the things that makes gaming special, designing games which make use of the limited hardware they were programmed for...

You really should watch the video first.  This is addressed.

[Weltall]

I'd bet that you can go to Amazon right now and purchase perhaps a tiny fraction of all books that have ever been published.

Also, I don't care about legal availability, you can emulate just about anything, virtually every game ever made is out there, and companies can eat my butt if they don't like it.

[Dark Jaguar]

I'd bet that you can go to Amazon right now and purchase perhaps a tiny fraction of all books that have ever been published.

Also, I don't care about legal availability, you can emulate just about anything, virtually every game ever made is out there, and companies can eat my butt if they don't like it.

You can go to the library of congress and read all of them, all we have historical records of since the library was formed at least.  We have massive preservation efforts etched into law for books we don't have for games.

There's also one other grim reality.  Emulation doesn't capture the full context of a game, like specific quirks of the controls and medium in general.

"Check the back of the box for her code Snake".

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, the games we really should care about the most are games which, once shut down, become actually impossible to play -- online games with servers that once turned off cannot be replicated, phone apps that nobody backed up, etc.  We have already lost a great many games this way and those numbers are going to exponentially increase over time considering how many games use remote servers now.  Anything with a physical disk or cart or disc or what have you is fine, they're almost all backed up either legally or otherwise.  Those games, including most older games (other than lost computer games which had few copies made and nobody saved)  are not lost.  It's modern games we should be more concerned about...

Emulation certainly is not as good as the real thing, I love my real older hardware collection, but that stuff won't work forever.  In the future we will have to rely on emulation or FPGA recreation for many formats.