GAMES OVER

Study finds 87% of games unplayable without piracy, scavenger hunts, or archives

- Harvey Randall

The Video Game History Foundation, a "non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of videogames", has published a study that it says shows most older games are now beyond the reach of players, unless they're willing to in most cases pirate them.

"87% of classic videogames released in the United States are critically endangered. Just 13% of videogame history is being represented in the current marketplace. In fact, no period of videogame history defined in this study even cracked 20% representation."

The methodology used a randomised sample of 1,500 games released before 2010, "Roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off." They also collected targeted data on different consoles, so in total over 4,000 games were included in the study.