ΤΗΕ PRESERVATIONISTS

Digging through the archives with the people striving to safeguard videogame history

- LEWIS PACKWOOD

The good news is that all is not lost. Far from it. Thanks to dedicated enthusiasts, collectors and professionals all over the world, the vast majority of works from the first few decades of videogaming history still exist in some form. It’s a marked contrast to the parlous state of film preservation, for which a 2013 study found that 75 per cent of American movies made before 1929 are lost or survive only in part.

But there’s little room for complacency. Unlike with books, say, there are no national institutions or libraries dutifully collecting a copy of every single published game, so it’s up to museums, societies, companies and individuals to preserve videogaming’s early history. Faced with constraints involving storage space and funding, it’s impossible for them to collect everything (although that hasn’t stopped some from trying, as we’ll see later). Instead, they tend to focus on specific niches of gaming, such as certain platforms, eras or themes. The result is a hotchpotch of collections scattered across the world, each maintained by groups with differing priorities and philosophies regarding how videogame history should be preserved.

In talking to a number of groups representing preservation efforts in the US, Europe and Japan, we can take a snapshot of the scene as it exists today, and survey the range of approaches being used to safeguard the legacy of gaming’s earliest pioneers.