MONITOR
Study finds 87% of games unplayable without piracy, scavenger hunts, or archives
The Video Game History Foundation, a “non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of videogames”, has published a study that it says shows most older games are now beyond the reach of players, unless they’re willing to in most cases pirate them.
“87% of classic videogames released in the United States are critically endangered. Just 13% of videogame history is being represented in the current marketplace. In fact, no period of videogame history defined in this study even cracked 20% representation.”
The methodology used a randomised sample of 1,500 games released before 2010, “Roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off.” They also collected targeted data on different consoles, so in total over 4,000 games were included in the study.
Whether a re-released game counted as “accessible” was based on how much of the original had been preserved. For example, the foundation considered the remaster of 1987’s Jinxster to qualify for still being “available”, while Yakuza Kiwami, a remake of Sega’s 2005 action classic Yakuza, was considered too different to qualify the original as being “in print”.
ON YOUR BIKE
This comes in the environment of increasingly complex arguments over copyright laws and game preservation, in a medium where the platforms themselves vanish along with their titles. The US Copyright Office’s remote-access exemptions for archived works “explicitly leave out videogames”. Even videogame researchers and historians have to travel just to play games that are otherwise impossible to buy.
