As Many as 87% of Retro Games Have Been Lost
For many years, the game industry has faced the problem of perpetuating its own heritage. Sad conclusions about the current state of affairs are presented in a report by the Video Game History Foundation.
A comprehensive report on the availability of vintage games, recently published by the Video Game History Foundation, leads to surprising and disturbing conclusions. For it turns out that as many as 87% of classic titles are "critically endangered".
This and other stats clearly show how poorly the systems for preserving the history of the digital entertainment medium are doing.
Detailed research
The study conducted by the foundation focused on games released before 2010 in the US market. The statistical sample included more than 4,000 randomly selected titles from a wide range of years and hardware platforms.
Here are some of the most interesting stats presented in the report:
- just 12% of games released on PlayStation 2 are readily and generally available today;
- the analogous stat for the Game Boy portable console is just less than 6%;
- the closure of the 3DS digital store and the Wii U in recent years has led to the loss of some 1,000 unique items.
Bad stats, however, are only part of the problem. The study's authors point out the inconvenience associated with institutional archives such as, for example, libraries, which are only capable of storing selected artifacts of the gaming culture, but cannot provide access to them publicly. Researchers blame this state of affairs on lobbying groups representing industry interests.
And while legislation on works such as books and movies clearly defines the rules for their storage and distribution, the gaming medium has so far struggled with the lack of similar laws and conventions.
In a word of conclusion, the authors of the report suggest further avenues for the development of research on video game archiving, and explicitly call for appropriate measures to alleviate the problem.
An abbreviated presentation of the report can be found on the foundation's official website. For those interested in the topic the entire document of 51 pages is available for free download here.
