According to a new 50-page study, almost nine out of ten video games are in danger of being lost to time. The Video Game History Foundation has partnered with the Software Preservation Network to release a report on the disappearance of classic video games.
And if you want to feel old, classic games have been defined as all games released before 2010. In the duel study, The Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network discovered that roughly 87 per cent of classic games are critically endangered due to their widespread unavailability.
An example in the study was 2006’s Yakuza, released on the PlayStation 2. The study acknowledges that the game was remade in 2016 but specified that a complete remake from the ground up should be considered a separate title, not a replacement of the original game for preservation purposes.
Kelsey Lewin, the co-director of The Video Game History Foundation, had this to say in the study:
“For accessing nearly 9 in 10 classic games, there are few options: Seek out and maintain vintage collectable games and hardware, travel across the country to visit a library, or… piracy.
None of those options are desirable, which means most video games are inaccessible to all but the most diehard and dedicated fans. That’s pretty grim!
Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it.
And what if no library, not even the Library of Congress, could do any better—they could keep and digitize that VHS of Titanic, but you’d have to go all the way there to watch it. It sounds crazy, but that’s the reality we live in with games, a $180 billion industry, while the games and their history disappear.”
Even considering libraries, it’s still not looking great for video games. Currently, only 13 per cent of game history is archived in libraries.
A big hurdle in archiving video games is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prevents people and entities from making and distributing copies of any DRM-protected digital work.
And while the U.S. Copyright Office has issued exemptions to those rules so that libraries and researchers can archive digital material, video games are explicitly left out, making it almost impossible for anyone to study game history effectively.
The study also brought up the recent closure of the Nintendo eShop and how video games can just disappear.
“When the eShop shut down the availability of the Game Boy library, the number of available Game Boy games went from something like 11 per cent to 4.5 per cent.
The company wiped out half of the availability of the library of Game Boy games just by shutting down the Nintendo eShop. And that’s not even a slight against Nintendo. There just shouldn’t be one point of failure for that many games. You know, it’s wild that doing something like shutting down the shop can take that many games out of release entirely.”
And if you’re reading this and think that video games should just be added to the exemption lists so that libraries and other institutions can preserve them – it’s not that simple.
According to the study, The Entertainment Software Association has consistently lobbied against game preservation efforts such as copyright permissions and allowing the rental of digital video games.
“The ESA has basically opposed all of these new proposed exemptions. They’ve just been like, ‘No, that will hurt our bottom line,’ or, ‘That will hurt the industry’s bottom line.’ The ESA also says the industry is doing plenty to keep classic games in release, pointing to this thriving reissue market. And that’s true; there is a thriving reissue market. It’s just that it only covers 13 per cent of video games, and that’s not likely to get any better any time soon.”
The study will be used in a 2024 copyright hearing to request game exemptions. If you want to read the complete study, follow the link here.