Video Games Day

What the day is

Video Games Day is observed on September 12. The medium is now old enough to have a preservation problem, and it is a severe one.

Origin and background

A study of game availability in the United States found that the overwhelming majority of titles released before 2010 are not sold in any form today, whether as a download, a reissue or a subscription. The comparison usually drawn is with silent film, where a comparable share of the output is simply gone, and the parallel is uncomfortably close.

The causes are mostly legal and commercial rather than technical. A game is a bundle of rights: code, music, fonts, likenesses, brands. Licenses expire, and a game containing licensed music or real athletes may become impossible to sell once those agreements lapse, regardless of whether anyone wants it. Studios close and their assets scatter. Source code is frequently lost outright, because for most of the industry's history nobody regarded it as worth archiving.

Online games are the harder case. A game whose logic lives on a company's servers ends when those servers are switched off, and what remains is unplayable in a way a cartridge never is. Several substantial worlds have gone that way, surviving only as recordings and private reimplementations of the server.

Libraries and archives sit in an awkward position, since preserving software often requires copying it and circumventing the protections on it, which is restricted in many jurisdictions even for institutions whose job is preservation.

Emulation is what has actually saved the back catalogue, and much of the work has been done by enthusiasts with no legal standing at all.

How to take part

• Play something old, and notice how much design came out of hardware limits.
• Buy from services that sell older titles rather than only new ones.
• Support a game preservation archive.
• Keep your physical copies and the hardware that reads them.
• Remember that an online-only game is borrowed rather than owned.