Author: Justin Pot / Source: howtogeek.com
Super Mario Bros will never die. Nintendo always gets around to re-releasing the 1985 classic on every new console it makes, and people always buy millions of copies.
But what about games that aren’t beloved? Will they survive?
Nothing is certain, but one thing makes preserving our history a lot easier: emulation.
Getting old Atari, Nintendo, and Sega games working on your computer, while legally complicated, helps ensure that even the most obscure titles stay alive in some form.Collections Aren’t Enough
If not for emulation, how would games be preserved? Well, there are collectors. People who obsessively scan eBay for obscure games, then buy and preserve them, go a long way to making sure no games disappear forever.
One such person, Nate Duke, sold his collection for $25,000 after years of making acquisitions. Collectors like that, who purchase even the least-loved games, create a market for obscure titles that helps ensure they survive.
But even that has limits. Cartridges eventually break down, CDs stop working, and in theory that could mean entire games disappearing from the world forever. And we know exactly what losing work looks like, because it’s happened throughout history.
When Media Goes Missing
Scrolling through Wikipedia’s page of lost works is downright depressing. So many writings by great minds have disappeared forever, and we only know about them because of references in other documents. Some of this happened because people lost interest, some of it happened because of fires, and some weren’t kept around basically because no one saw value in doing so.
It sounds like a problem for the ancients, but we’re not much better off in the modern world, in part because we’re not good at knowing…
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