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Video game preservation, which falls in the broader category of media preservation, is the act of ensuring the accessibility and playability of older video games for the future. There are many reasons why this practice is necessary.
Reasonings
Live-service killing
Live-service games are very difficult to preserve due to their reliance on the parent company's will to keep the service online. However, in some cases communities create private servers in order to make the game completely playable.
Rarely some companies adapt the game to be completely playable offline with all the available features that used to exist when the game was a live-service.
Death of a technology
For example, when Flash stopped being supported in browsers, many people made effort in preserving flash video games by porting them to html5. Flash emulators like Ruffle allow to run flash games and content on web browsers. Flashpoint Archive is a community project dedicated to preserve content that runs on Flash. It counts with downloadable applications that allow to download and run Flash content from the device.
Few numbers of physical copies
Some video games only exist in physical copies and these copies are in a limited quantity. Also the amount of playable copies could be reduced because of the possibility that copies could deteriorate over time. Digitalization makes easier to copy, adapt and create backups of the original video game, making it more available to public as well.
Efforts
Publishing source code
On 18 February 2025, Valve released an update to the Source SDK, which added all the Team Fortress 2 client and server game code. With the source code content creators are allowed to build new games based off TF2.[1][2]
In February 2025, Electronic Arts (EA) made an announcement that the source code of older titles from the Command & Conquer video game franchise were recovered, and made public under the GPLv3 license.[3] To help the community further, the Steam Workshop has also been integrated into these titles to add additional community content.[3]
Preservation groups and organizations
- Video Game History Foundation non-profit organization dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games.
- Game Preservation Society non-profit archive organization that collect, preserve, research, digitize and share materials of Japan’s video game culture.
- European Federation of Game Archives Museums and Preservation Projects preservation of digital games and other interactive experiences with focus on ensuring that the overall European legal framework is compatible with the needs of digital preservation.
- Vintage Video Game Association non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion, preservation, and licensing of vintage video games.
- Hit Save! non-profit dedicated to the preservation of video games, their history, and related physical and digital materials.
- Videogame Heritage Society Subject Specialist Network (SSN) for digital game preservation.
- Internet Archive large-scale digital archive containing playable retro games and software collections.
- The Strong National Museum of Play highly interactive, collections-based museum devoted to the history and exploration of play.
- MAME multi-purpose emulation framework which purpose is to preserve decades of software history.
- Flashpoint Archive a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.
- GOG Preservation Program ensures classic games remain playable on modern systems, even after their developers stopped supporting them.
Further reading
References
- ↑ "The TF2 SDK has arrived!". Team Fortress. 18 Feb 2025. Archived from the original on 18 Feb 2025. Retrieved 10 Mar 2025.
- ↑ "Valve Releases Team Fortress 2 Source Code, Now open to Modders". BitSkins. 21 Feb 2025. Archived from the original on 10 Mar 2025. Retrieved 10 Mar 2025.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Vessella, Jim (27 Feb 2025). "C&C Steam Workshop Support & Source Code". Archived from the original on 26 Jun 2025. Retrieved 9 Mar 2025 – via Reddit.