The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is the “largest non-profit membership organization serving individuals that create video games.” And they have all things videogame related at heart. One of these is the preservation of older games, and the Game Preservation Special Interest Group of the IGDA has released a new article named “Before It’s Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper.”

Before you laugh and stop reading, this is actually a real concern. The industry can lose many of the games that helped shaped it into its current form within a few decades. “If we fail to address the problems of game preservation, the digital games of today will disappear, perhaps within a few decades. We will lose access to the history and culture of contemporary games and find it impossible to trace their influence on other forms of play, leisure, entertainment, communication, learning, and work,” the article claims.

Two major problems face the preservation of games, the first of which is digital decay or bit rot. Floppy discs have a life of between 10 and 30 years, which means most of the games released on floppy disc are already dead or rapidly heading that way. Looking to the future, CD’s and DVD’s also have a limited lifespan, and that is not taking into account physical damage like scratches and oxidation. Even older console cartridges are far from immune to bit rot, although they do tend to last much longer.

Secondly, obselescence plays a huge part as well. A lot of the equipment required to read older media are simply not manufactured anymore. Even if the media the game is released on will last 100 years, the equipment to read them will simply not be around. Blu-ray is backwards compatible to DVD, which is backwards compatible to CD, but in a few years the whole optical disc and drive system might not be around at all. Right now it might not seem like a problem, but look at how hard it has become to watch a movie on VHS tape: if you manage to find a VHS player, chances are the tape will be ruined.

The IGDA sees co-operation within the industry as a solution to game preservation, going beyond the limitations of physical media and copyright protection to archive games for future generations.

The 47 page document is available here, and makes for some very interesting reading.

Source: www.industrygamers.com