Preservation and Access to Video Games

14 Apr, 2026

i.

With the closure of Myrient¹, the gaming community loses one of its most robust and open public archives. Of course, this has caused a stir, some even going so far as to back-up the entire website elsewhere² - an admirable effort. Myrient's catalogue of the niche and obscure, at risk of fading further, has been preserved, across a number of Internet Archive pages and the like. This is great news. Sadly, we're losing something of no lesser import - access to the quality service Myrient provided.

ii.

I feel most of us are really more concerned with access rather than preservation when it comes to video games. I keep a small personalised archive, but I have no means of storing something of Myrient's scale - few do, it seems. Much better to have a reliable, efficient, and extensive library to 'borrow' from when you wish. The loss of this weighs heavier of me. It's emblematic of larger issues in the video game world that are making it harder to access games, risking damned obscurity for many.

And yet, we're living in a time when, in theory, it's never been easier to play older games. We are awash with remasters, remakes, reboots, re-releases, collections, compilations, all bringing the classics to new generations like never before. The online services of PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo each have a library of retro titles available (on the right subscription tier, of course), and boutique companies such as Analogue and Evercade are offering enthusiasts ever new ways to play. It begs a question - why the uproar when sites like Myrient disappear?

In 2023, the Video Game History Foundation published a study³ demonstrating that "Only 13 percent of classic video games published in the United States are currently in release" - the figure is astounding: 87% of commercially released games are just flat out not available to buy. Of course, the data here is restricted to the United States, but given the size of their market⁴ it's safe to say it represents a pretty sordid state of affairs across the world. It may be more popular than ever to re-release games, yet it is only a slice of the glacial surface. So much is in limbo, whether locked in the vaults of its publisher, or lost in the labyrinth of intellectual property rights, effectively abandonware from all sides. Even those that make it through can disappear again - it's a sad truth, in an era of digital distribution, that licenses can expire⁵, or companies can simply choose to stop making games available.⁶

In any case, with so much unavailable to them, it leaves players in quite a pickle.

iii.

I'm quite fond of Snatcher, a cyberpunk adventure from Kojima and his team at Konami, the latter of whom retains the rights. As far as I can tell, Snatcher has only been available on and off in the last few decades in Japan, briefly appearing on the PC Engine Mini⁷ a few years back; its only English language release remains on the Sega CD, now more than thirty years old.

My options for playing Snatcher are frankly quite limited. The Sega CD version is clearly the go to here, yet in order to play it I'll need several things: a Sega Mega Drive and CD attachment, primarily. I should probably use a CRT television as well, as modern flatscreens don't jive too well with crunchy 240p signal. As a fan of retro games, I am lucky enough to have these already. Someone encountering this all in 2026 should expect to pay a few hundred just for the essentials to play Snatcher.

A cursory glance on eBay suggests I'd need to pay several times the price of the console and CD add-on purely for the Snatcher disc itself; a nice boxed copy to display runs well into four figures. I've never owned Snatcher, nor do I expect to - it far outstrips the price range any sensible person should pay for a single game, hovering in the realm inhabited by collectors.

Piracy becomes the only reasonable resort. In a lucky turn, the Sega CD has no form of copy protection, released in an era before rewriters were affordable for the public. In the 2010s, it was easy enough for me to burn a copy of the game to a CD and play it. Even had I not owned any hardware, playing it via emulation is the other, more viable, alternative. The majority of gamers are simply not weirdos like me who hang on to thirty year old antiquated technology.

iv.

It leaves player in a difficult spot. On the one hand, pay sometimes extortionate prices on the second hand market, already requiring an investment on hardware, or, turn to digital piracy. The latter option is, of course, far more appealing on a financial level, and if the game is effectively abandonware, who is it really hurting?

Emulation can equally be more appealing for a number of technical reasons: improved performance, graphical quality, customisable controls, and much more. Or, one step further; port the game to other systems, rebuilding it natively to take full advantage of modern hardware - the decompilation/recompilation movement has been a boon⁸, particularly for N64 games which have always struggled to emulate well. These fan ports sometimes sport a far higher level of polish and customisation that it could be argued an official release can never quite match, for a number of reasons. I'd far rather play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time through Ship of Harkinian than Nintendo Switch Online, primarily so I can adjust the game to suit my tastes. It might be said that this path, modifying the game experience so heavily, goes beyond the original intentions of the artists and developers - even then, the game has been modified by Nintendo itself numerous times, from Master Quest to the rumoured Switch 2 remake⁹ and more. Certainly, Nintendo has a mandate to protect their creative property, something that is very much their source of income, which is why I can understand their campaign against Switch emulation¹⁰. For the most part they leave alone projects that don't directly threaten their bottom line - either way, Nintendo seems to understand that policing the breadth of the internet for any and all infringing activity is nigh impossible. A fair trade for all parties, I think.

Subscription services are little salve to aid the problem. For one, access is predicated upon continuous payment, and ownership becomes lost. Secondly, the library of a paid subscription must hold a certain level of value in the eyes of the company and the consumer, and so there are inherent limitations on the kind of games you're going to have access to. License holders can restrict their games being added to a service for any number of reasons, if the owner of the rights can be found at all, and so we could not possibly see a full spectrum of what a particular platform has to offer. Of over fifteen hundred Game Boy Advance games¹¹, less than a hundred are currently available on Switch Online¹². It's a tragic figure, and not uncommon among retro consoles, handhelds, and computers.

v.

A publicly accessible archive not driven by profit is essential for true preservation of video games - as is the case with all art and knowledge. It's a tricky business, ultimately. Where does one draw the line? I don't think it's wrong for Nintendo to continue to charge money to play Super Mario Bros., but I do think it wrong to prevent access¹³ to Snatcher when there is no other reasonable recourse for playing the fucking game. An answer lies somewhere in the reforming of copyright law, a murky topic I am not currently equipped to unravel, to seek public archiving of art and prevent it entering legal limbo.

There's good work being done out there: the Video Game History Foundation, Hidden Palace, The Cutting Room Floor, Gaming Alexandria, and many more are documenting a history that is young but rich. Within five minutes, you could open your browser and choose from thousands of games to play from any number of platforms, many of which have not been available any other way for decades and seem likely to remain so.

A huge number of games like Snatcher are imprisoned on ageing gadgets that are inaccessible to most. And many of them will stay that way, unless repositories like Myrient are allowed to flourish. If legal structures governing copyright are unable to solve the problem of when art is left in limbo, absent any capital value for the corporations to extract, but full of cultural richness and creativity, they must be reevaluated and written anew.

#essay #preservation #video games