Of all the entertainment industries, video games is the only sector that shows little respect for its past. Dickens' books aren't discontinued just because newer authors are published, and Shakespeare's plays aren't abandoned owing to the language being outdated (although his comedies aren't funny at all). Yet games disappear from sale all the time.
Often, games slip out of the market due to no fault of the people who made them. Consoles go out of production, licenses expire without being renewed, companies that own the rights go bust or are bought out, and then – whoomf – the game disappears in a puff of capitalism. Nonetheless, it's a disheartening fact that very few publishers make any sort of effort to keep anything but the most profitable entries in their catalogs available. Name any game that was released just 20 years ago, and there's a chance that there are only two ways to play it today: either dust off an old gaming machine and pray it works, or dip your gaming toes into the murky world of unofficial emulation.
