Grim news heralded in a report published this week by the Video Game History Foundation, which claims that 87% of video games released before 2010 are no longer commercially available. This equates to a lacuna of tens of thousands of works, many of which represent key moments in the medium’s evolution. It’s an excruciating loss of source material for the people who worked on these games, as well as for historians and archivists, for gem-hunters and for any younger player who might wish to enjoy interactive works created in different socio-political circumstances, against different technological constraints and fashions or within different market conditions.
The void is not unique to video games – there are books that are no longer published even in digital form, some films can only be watched on defunct formats, others disappear from streaming services mere months after release – but the scale of the video game void is unmatched in other media. According to the report, less than 5% of games from the Commodore 64 are still available today. The 13% availability rate of classic video games is one percentage point less than that of American silent films. As the foundation’s co-director Frank Cifaldi tweeted: “Nine out of 10 classic video games are no longer available to consumers, and that number is unlikely to get any better. It’s practically guaranteed that something you grew up with is gone, for ever.”
