Video Game Preservation: Why Gaming's History Is Disappearing [2026]

I care about gaming history in the same way I care about film history. And I've become increasingly alarmed about how much of that history is actively disappearing — not through neglect exactly, but through business models that were never designed with preservation in mind.

The Scale of the Problem

A 2023 study found that approximately 87% of classic video games are out of print and unavailable through legal commercial channels. This isn't primarily a console gaming problem — PC gaming has its own crisis around DRM servers being shut down, making previously purchased games unplayable. When a digital storefront closes or a multiplayer server goes offline, the games associated with it can become legally inaccessible even for people who paid for them. Nintendo's closure of the Wii U and 3DS eShops was a recent prominent example.

Why It's Harder Than Film

Film has a preservation infrastructure — archives, institutions, legal frameworks — developed over a century of understanding that the medium is culturally significant. Gaming is 50 years old and has no equivalent infrastructure. The Video Game History Foundation and Internet Archive do important work but lack the resources and legal protections that film preservation institutions have. The DMCA's limitations on circumventing access controls creates legal barriers to preserving games even for non-commercial archival purposes.

What's Being Done

The Video Game History Foundation has been effective at advocacy — their research on preservation gaps has influenced policy discussions. Some publishers have made preservation-minded decisions: Nintendo's NSO retro library, Sega's Genesis collection, Capcom's consistent re-releases of their catalog. The emulation community, despite operating in legal grey areas, has preserved a significant portion of gaming history that would otherwise be completely inaccessible.

What Individuals Can Do

Support organizations doing preservation work. Advocate for changes to DMCA library exemptions that prevent legitimate archival work. Make purchasing decisions that reward publishers who make their catalogs accessible. And honestly — emulation of genuinely out-of-print, legally inaccessible games is a preservation act, not theft, even if the legal framework doesn't fully recognize it yet. I recognize this is contested ground, but I believe it.

My honest take: Future generations may not be able to play most games made before 2000. That's worth caring about now.