Nearly 9 out of 10 classic video games are out of print. Some people are trying to save them from permadeath | CBC Radio

If you enjoyed playing video games years ago in the basement of your childhood home, you may want to go back and dust off those old machines — because a new study says there likely won’t be any other way to relive those digital memories.

A study released Monday by the Seattle-based Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) says that nearly nine out of 10 classic video games are “critically endangered” and unavailable in the modern gaming market.

Phil Salvador, the foundation’s library director and author of the study, says the numbers are stark, but not surprising.

“The vast majority of video games are no longer widely available to the public,” he said. “There’s a real possibility these titles are going to be completely inaccessible to a broad public audience.”

The Video Game History Foundation, started in 2017 as a non-profit organization in the U.S., collects copies of video games and related media — from magazines to promotional posters to unreleased source code and art — to preserve the history of the medium that might otherwise be lost.

The foundation says it wants the findings of the study to help push libraries and archives to do more to collect and preserve older video games, in the same way they do with classic literature, music and film. Especially because they say publishers aren’t doing enough to make games available on modern digital storefronts.

Searching for classic games

The VGHF recruited volunteers from their own community and partnered with the University of Washington Information School to scour information on more than 4,000 video games released in the U.S. before 2010.

That includes games on long-obsolete platforms like the Commodore 64 personal computer, to more recent consoles like the Sony PlayStation 2.

They wanted to figure out how many old games were commercially available in an easy-to-buy way — for example, on modern versions of older consoles, like the PlayStation 5’s subscription service.

Today, only 4.5 per cent of Commodore 64 games are readily available; games from PlayStation 2 clocked in at 12 per cent. No systems boasted 20 per cent or more of commercially available titles.

“It’s an enormous part of our culture and a part of our history that we’re basically losing the roots of,” VGHF co-director Kelsey Lewin told Day 6 guest host Nana aba Duncan. “We’re finding it harder and harder to get access to and explore and dig into our past.”

Compared to other media, Lewin said the availability of classic games is only slightly better than the availability of American silent films, or audio recorded before the Second World War. 

If you’re interested in vintage video games, you’ll likely need to find original copies in used or retro game stores, along with the original hardware needed to play them.

“Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it,” Lewin said in a blog post.

And if you go that route, be prepared to pay high prices for vintage game hardware, cartridges and joysticks on the retro market.

The other common solution is to find pirated copies of games online and run computer programs that simulate the original machines. Experts say this is, at best, a legal grey area.

Salvador noted that many people who upload copies of games online have done so at least partially in the interest of preserving old games and allowing people to play them when there are no other options. The older a game is, he said, the more likely it is that it’s already been lost entirely.

“We’d like to make it so that you don’t have to do this kind of stuff necessarily at your own legal risk,” Lewin said, “and we don’t have to sort of rely on this very grey area of the law to build the entire foundation of game preservation on.”

If you can’t buy games, do they even exist?

Many all-time great games from the 1990s and later are available through online subscription programs such as the one available for Nintendo Switch, where owners can pay a monthly fee to get access to classic games like Super Mario Bros., or The Legend of Zelda.

Smaller operations, including Digital Eclipse, have issued re-releases of classic games, including a recent collection of over 100 Atari games — like Centipede and Missile Command — to mark the American company’s 50th anniversary.

But these are “a drop in the bucket” compared to the thousands of games that have lined store shelves over the past 50 years, says Salvador — and it’s not getting better.

“The reality is there’s just not going to be a commercial market for everything that a historian needs,” said Lewin.

One stark example is currently under the care of the Syd Bolton collection, an archive of more than 14,000 video games and computers at the University of Toronto Mississauga Library.

It originally belonged to Bolton, an Ontario collector who died in 2018. His family donated it to the university to ensure the collection was properly maintained and accessible to the public.

The collection includes three copies of Extra Terrestrials, one of the rarest games known to exist. Developed by a Burlington, Ont., studio and released just before the video game crash of 1983, it’s believed there were only around 100 copies sold.

Games like these risk being erased from gaming history without proper archival efforts, said Christopher Young, curator for the collection.

Commercial interest in old games often isn’t enough, either. Last spring, Nintendo closed the online store for its portable 3DS handheld. It was the last legal marketplace for hundreds of games, including dozens of reissues from the classic Game Boy.

That cut the number of commercially available games for the diminutive Nintendo handheld by about half — from 12 per cent to six per cent of its entire library. 

“For them, it’s a business decision. But for us that’s an extinction event,” said Salvador.

WATCH | New video game collection a big win for U of T Mississauga: 

Massive video game collection at U of T Mississauga a gamechanger for research, education

Educators say a massive collection now at the University of Toronto Mississauga will take video game research to the next level. The Syd Bolton collection includes tens of thousands of titles; from Space Invaders to Super Mario.

Why video game history matters

The race to preserve the legacy of video games is a recent development compared to film, music and literature. But Lewin argues that doesn’t mean it’s any less worthy of attention.

“If we acknowledge that this is a very big part of our culture, then we should also be acknowledging that it’s something whose history we should care about,” she said.

The industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide. In Canada, it contributes $5.5 billion to the GDP, according to the Entertainment Software Association of Canada.

Young says that for the medium to grow, we need to remember the stories behind the games, whether it’s Super Mario Bros., or an obscure footnote like Extra Terrestrials.

“If we’re to understand … historically why games were important 50 years ago and why they are so ubiquitous in our everyday lives, we need to have access to that to be able to, you know, talk about how these games were made,” he said.

Without a historic record of the industry, Young says questions like how Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo became the three main competitors in the space, what happened to other companies that once existed alongside them and what caused the rise and fall of certain genres from side-scrolling adventures to first-person shooters, will go unanswered. 

“Unless we preserve that history, we can’t tell that story.”