What if certain games go extinct

[Don]

I'm downloading some torrent for some fringe strategy games on the PC. The one that's released in 2008 is at 70% done after 1 week, while the 2001 version is at 2.5%. In fact if you look up obscure game you usually only find a bunch of links and half of them would be busted and the torrent is almost never seeded. It seems to me it'd possible if say 10 years later you hear some major ROM site getting busted and the last confirmed copy of Sonic the Hedgehog or whatever is gone along with the site. Even if you're something on Steam, there's no reason to believe Steam would last forever, but if you're not on that, would anyone even know your game existed after 10 years assuming the game is not good enough to be mainstream?

Maybe they need to preserve copies of old games like they do with endangered animals or how certain diseases are only available in laboratory (because they can't be sure if it wiping it out completely is a good thing). Well there's obviously going to be piracy issues, but there's definitely a lot of games where people wouldn't even bother pirating that can literally just disappear forever.

[Zeus]

Have you tried Abandonware sites?

[Shrinweck]

You may be interested in this week's Extra Credits since it's on this topic. The technological barriers to entry is the key problem for preserving past games for me. Preserving the code is one thing but the head aches involved for getting old stuff up and running on OSs and hardware that's constantly moving forward makes proper preservation seem like a pipe dream to me. I expect a lot of the stuff that deserves to get preserved will, since that's the nature of a hobby that nerds are a part of.

[Don]

Yeah that video pretty much covered what I was thinking. Sure you probably don't have to worry about Chrono Trigger going extinct but what about say Secret of Evermore? I remember having problem running Master of Magic because it uses expanded memory and certainly haven't bothered to figure out how to get it working but it's probably one of the best civilization-type PC games out there. I mean right now we sort of have Youtube that works as a repository for game knowledge but it's just not the same thing watching a Youtube video (with generally an annoying narrator) compared to playing it yourself. Even if copyright is no issue, it'd still be hard to get a game like Master of Magic working anywhere, and of course copyright is always an issue. If Steam goes bankrupt we could potentially never see a whole mess of games ever again.

I didn't think about the MMORPGs, but that's another good example. The original EverQuest doesn't even exist anymore since the modernized version does not really resemble the original. I think some guys are running an 'old school' server but what happens when the guys running the server stops paying for it?

[SineSwiper]

All console games won't be a problem. There are emulators for everything. And I mean EVERYTHING. Also, Pleasuredome has every game known to man. (Save for Nintendo stuff because that's not what they deal in, but there are other sites for that.)

[Julius Seeker]

There's also this potential situation:



But in this case, our problems would be slightly larger than videogame extinction =P