Piracy Is Saving Video-Game History
<p>Video games are one of the most significant cultural forms of the last 50 years — but they’re vanishing.</p>
<p>Commercially, anyway. Let’s say you wanted to buy a game from a few decades ago. Some fun or intriguing title you’ve heard about on a forum!</p>
<p>Almost nine times out of ten, you’re out of luck. A new study released this month — <a href="https://zenodo.org/record/7996492" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">you can read a copy here</a> — sampled games that were originally released for the PlayStation 2, the Game Boy, and the Commodore 64. They found that only 13% of classic video games are still in release. (The older the platform, the worse it is: Only 3% of Commodore 64 games are currently in release.)</p>
<p>One the one hand, you could argue that well — duh — <em>of course</em> really old games aren’t readily available to purchase. They’re old, right? The systems they’re played on are becoming extinct, physically.</p>
<p>But video games seem to be aging faster than other media. The study found that games were vanishing commercially at a pace comparable to silent film or old radio programs, despite those forms being over 100 years old, and many of these video games being only a few decades old.</p>
<p><a href="https://clivethompson.medium.com/piracy-is-saving-video-game-history-a83d5b3700ff"><strong>Read More</strong></a></p>