Even silent films are more accessible than old video games: study

A new study from the Video Game History Foundation has added weight to what many have been saying for quite some time: the video game industry has a huge preservation problem.

According to the findings, 87 percent of games from before 2010 are not available on modern consoles in the U.S. (Given that games generally release across North America, it can be assumed that data for Canada would be quite comparable.)

For context, the study notes that American silent films — i.e. the old-school media that was popular in the 1920s — have one percentage point higher availability rate than games that are many decades more recent. It’s also only slightly above the 10 percent availability of pre-WWII recordings.

Digging deeper into the numbers, the Video Game History Foundation found that “results were consistently low across every time period and platform we studied.” The Commodore 64, for example, had only a 4.5 percent availability rate, while only 12 percent of PS2 games are available on modern systems. “No five-year period examined by this study rose above 20 percent availability,” notes the study.

“I hope this study wakes people up. For years, we’ve known that the availability of classic video games in a legal, safe way has been dire, but no one has ever put a number to that,” wrote Frank Cifaldi, co-director of the Video Game History Foundation. “The results are worse than probably any other medium.”

“This is the moment to sound the alarms for both the video game industry and the preservation world. The study proves that it’s worse than it looks – for every Mario game that’s available, there’s hundreds of less popular games that are critically endangered,” added co-director Kelsey Lewin. “Our goal is that by exposing just how dire the state of game availability is, we can drive changes to our copyright laws that will make video game preservation stronger, and able to take on the challenges of the future.

Indeed, old movies, TV shows, songs, and books are readily available through a variety of physical and digital platforms. Video game hardware, however, often lacks the support for backward compatibility to play older titles. New systems generally operate under different tech standards and, therefore, companies don’t take the extra steps needed to get older games up and running on them.

For instance, Sony’s popular PlayStation 5 console can play all of the last-gen PS4 games (released from 2013 onward), but its ability to run titles from the PS3 era and earlier is quite limited. Often, only a small selection of titles are available digitally for purchase or through a subscription service like PlayStation Plus.

Likewise, the Xbox Series X/S can play all of the Xbox One titles but only a selection of the most popular 360 and original Xbox games. The situation in Xbox’s ecosystem is a bit better, at least, in that the Series X can play older games using actual discs, while digital classic titles can be purchased for both that console and the disc-less Series S.

But Nintendo, the company with the biggest retro games catalogue, is the worst offender. Many of its older titles, such as those from the NES and SNES eras, are either inaccessible or locked behind Nintendo Switch Online memberships with spotty emulation. In other cases, the company has re-released older games, like the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection, and bafflingly made them available for only a few months. Earlier this year, Nintendo also shut down its Wii U and 3DS stores, which had a treasure trove of hundreds of retro games available for purchase.

There are some third-party options, like the retro-focused streaming service Antstream Arcade, but overall, there are few options outside of emulation in the PC space to play many of these older titles. And even then, the study found that most Commodore 64 games are only available through Antstream, and the availability rate for these titles would drop to 0.75 percent if the service were to shut down.

In conclusion, the Video Game History Foundation called on policymakers, companies and fellow preservation groups to work together to improve these availability rates.

More information can be found in the study.