The Future of Gaming Past @ IGN

IGN takes a look at the fragility of game media and the difficulties involved in the preservation of old games in this article based on the International Game Developers Association report entitled "Before It's Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper."

The IGDA argues that digital media has a shockingly short lifespan and, because of its fragile nature, requires the preservation efforts of professionals. For example, digital media created as recently as the past decade must deal with all kinds of threats to their longevity, such as "bit rot", which is the gradual and natural decay of digital storage devices. Storage media that were once used to hold our games and digital data – like floppy disks – face losing their magnetic properties over time, thus rendering the disks unusable. Optical discs can be physically damaged and, as anyone who has ever used a CD or DVD before would know, it doesn't take much to scratch the surface of a disc and affect the content on board. Then there are ROM cartridges, which can be affected by moisture and battery acid, and a plethora of other storage devices that can be easily damaged and not so easily replaced or repaired.

The article goes on to look at some of the ways games and gaming history are being preserved:

Dr. Swalwell says that there are several approaches to games preservation that have been adopted by cultural institutions internationally. For instance, the US project "Preserving Virtual Worlds" focuses on preserving virtual worlds, while others focus on emulation – making older games playable on newer systems so that they remain accessible, even when the hardware becomes obsolete – and others still focus on maintaining a historic record of game documentation.

While repositories like Stanford University, the University of Texas Videogame Archive, and the Berlin Computerspiele Museum are doing their part to preserve digital history, the lack of a local games preservation scene is a cause for concern. Many games that were produced and consumed locally in the 1970s and 1980s have not been documented by overseas preservation groups, and what we do have documented mostly lies in the hands of private collectors who have taken matters into their own hands.