87% of classic video games are ‘critically endangered.’ As a millennial, I’m worried it means a huge chunk of my childhood will disappear.::Games don’t stay on store shelves forever and are constantly falling out of commercial distribution.
87% of classic video games are no longer available commercially.
I’ll just keep emulating them like I always have.
But, but, but…
The nice creators won’t be getting their money… Oh wait, you have to buy from resellers…
The nice scalpers won’t be able to get their money!
I’d really love to know what the percentage is that is or is at risk of truly being lost - this article just completely ignores that piracy exists. Maybe you can’t buy game boy games or Metal Gear or Unreal Tournament anymore but the idea that they are inaccessible is just plainly wrong. I guess you probably can’t advertise that in business insider (if only to prevent some ridiculous lawsuit from Nintendo) but it changes this number drastically.
I actually do remember stuff from the 90s and 2000s that’s truly lost, and it’s a damn shame, but the black flag will always provide.
I haven’t researched this at all but I feel like a lot of the flash content like from Newgrounds is the most in danger of being lost.
ROMs get preserved by virtue of being part of a numbered collection.
I do remember that one Accursed Farms channel on youtube that would sometimes try very very hard to find various “full versions” of old floppy-disk shareware demo games. Either by contacting the developers or going on these huuuge rabbithole searches to compile stuff together
Emulation?
That’s the reason emulators are great: games that would otherwise die with the hardware they run on can live forever.
If you lived in the ancient times, some of the stories that you were told as a child would never be told again, because the storyteller died and nobody else remembered that particular story. Only some stories would be preserved, and be considered to be cultural lore that must be retold to every generation.
A lot of the games made in the 1980s were pretty crap, really. Many were highly derivative of other games. Whole families of games are mostly remembered for their single best entry: for instance, the entire Galaxian series is best remembered for its second entry, Galaga — but Centipede is better remembered than its sequel Millipede, partly because the former shipped for many more platforms.
Weird, I have an analogue pocket and classic video games seem perfectly alive to me.
The Completionist does a decent job of summing it all up https://youtu.be/UyhsZE6QIJ4
Sounds like we just need to start a federated network of classic games sharing. Can’t sue a protocol, right?
( I know nothing of how any of that would work)
It’s called Bittorrent.
