In July 2023 the Video Game History Foundation published a count of how many old games you could still buy. Its researchers took a random sample of 1,500 games released in the United States before 2010 and looked for each one on sale in any form. Only 13 per cent were. That is about the same as the survival rate of American silent films, which the foundation put at 14 per cent. For the Commodore 64 the figure was 4.5 per cent, and almost all of those games were available through one streaming service, Antstream Arcade. Had that service closed, the figure would have fallen to 0.75 per cent.
Everything else survives, if it survives at all, because somebody copied it. Game preservation is the work of copying games, recording what they are and how the machines that ran them worked, and keeping the magazines, manuals, sketches and source code that explain them. Most of that work was started by volunteers, long before museums took an interest. In May 1997 Edge argued that the emulators they were writing mattered more than nostalgia: “emulation isn’t (mostly) actually about nostalgia at all. It’s about history.”
How games disappear
Some of the loss is physical. Tapes and floppy disks degrade, which Wireframe called “a particular problem for titles originally issued on disk and tape”. Much of it happened because nobody thought the games were worth keeping. When the National Videogame Archive went looking for some games, it found that they “had long been wiped or lost because past publishers didn’t believe their commercial life would extend much past a year or so”. Design documents and early sketches went in the bin along with the master tapes and disks.
Newer formats are not safer. When Capcom asked the preservationist Frank Cifaldi to put together a timeline of Street Fighter, he found that a sizeable number of the series’ games, mostly releases for mobile phones, were essentially lost. So are the phone games that the Spectrum programmer Jonathan Smith wrote later in his career, among them Airlock. A game tied to an online shop or server goes when the shop or server does. Iain Simons, co-founder of the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield, did not blame the people who make those decisions: “Their mandate is to run servers profitably, not to preserve old stuff.”
Who owns it?
Even when a copy survives, sharing it needs the permission of whoever owns the rights, and that can be hard to establish. The National Videogame Archive wanted to archive Manic Miner. It tracked down the game’s author, Matthew Smith, to ask permission, and found that he did not hold the rights.
Elite shows the same problem from the other side. Ian Bell, one of its two authors, wanted the game to be freely available and offered it on his website. His co-author, David Braben, objected. The row became public in 1999, lawsuits were filed and Bell’s site was closed following legal action. It was later restored, and Braben said publicly that he had no problem with the game being made available, while pointing out that the rights still belonged to the two of them.
The archive World of Spectrum dealt with the problem by asking. It sought permission from the publishers and authors of Spectrum games to distribute them, and removed the games whose owners said no. Many sites did not ask. Retro Gamer dated the first abandonware sites, which offered games no longer on sale, to around 1996–97. When some began offering games that were still sold and supported, “the lines between abandonware and warez were blurred”, and many were closed down.
The volunteers
The largest collections were built by volunteers, usually one system or one kind of software at a time:
| Project | Began | What it keeps |
|---|---|---|
| World of Spectrum | 1995 | Spectrum software, documents and magazine scans |
| HVSC | 1996 | Commodore 64 music, ripped, fixed and credited |
| MAME | 1997 | arcade machines, and later computers and consoles, described in working code |
| GameBase64 | 1998 | a catalogue of every Commodore 64 game, with credits and screenshots |
| TOSEC | 2000 | a catalogue of software images for hundreds of computers and consoles |
| ScummVM | 2001 | new interpreters for old adventure games |
| No-Intro | — | a catalogue of verified dumps of cartridge games |
Catalogues such as TOSEC and No-Intro do not hand out games. They publish lists, called DAT files, of the known good copies of each piece of software, which ROM-management programs use to check the files in a collection against them. TOSEC, “The Old School Emulation Center”, was founded on 18 January 2000 by a Dutch enthusiast who went by the name Grendel. After its release of March 2025, its catalogue listed more than a million sets of files in about 4,250 DAT files. No-Intro describes itself as cataloguing “the best available copies of ROMs and digital games”, and says plainly that it does not help anyone obtain them.
MAME states its aim in the same terms. Its developers call its main purpose “to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated machines”, “in order to prevent historical software from disappearing forever once the hardware it runs on stops working”. ScummVM takes a different route. Instead of emulating a computer, it replaces the interpreter that ran LucasArts’ SCUMM adventures, and later many other games, and runs them from the original data files. For the wider story of emulators, see emulation.
Libraries and museums
The Internet Archive, a non-profit library in San Francisco, became the best-known public library of old software. In 2006 it won the renewal of an exemption from the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that lets libraries and archives break the copy protection on obsolete software in order to preserve it. From 2013 it ran old computers, consoles and arcade machines inside the web browser, and it hosts TOSEC’s catalogue alongside scanned magazines and manuals.
In Britain, the National Videogame Archive was set up in 2008 as a partnership between Nottingham Trent University and what was then the National Media Museum in Bradford. It collected more than games: “prototypes, early sketches, box art, advertising, and even mods and fan art”. A few years later its funding went. Simons told Wireframe in 2021:
After the coalition government came to power, there was a massive bloodbath and loads of people involved in that project lost their jobs. The collection still exists, but there was no capacity within the museum to continue actively collecting. It was paused – although not formally – because there were simply no resources.
Britain has no legal deposit for games, as it has for books, so no institution is sent a copy of each new release. “I could release a game today and no official structure would ever know about it,” Simons said. His answer was the Videogame Heritage Society, a network led by the National Videogame Museum, which brings together museums, libraries and private collectors instead of trying to hold everything in one place. “Video game preservation can only succeed in the long term as a really large group effort,” he said. “Some issues are technical; some are legal.”
In the United States, the Video Game History Foundation was founded in Oakland, California, by Cifaldi, whose own interest in preservation had started with the file-sharing websites that traded old games. Its 2023 study, written by its library director Phil Salvador with the Software Preservation Network, was meant to support a request to the US Copyright Office. Libraries and archives were allowed to preserve games but could show them only on their own premises. The request asked that researchers be allowed to use preserved games remotely, as they already could with books, films and recordings. The Entertainment Software Association opposed it, and on 25 October 2024 the Copyright Office turned it down. It was concerned that remote access could become a free “online arcade” that would harm sales of reissued games.
Source code
A game’s source code shows how it was made in a way the finished program cannot. Some has been published by the people who own it, and some recovered from old disks:
- id Software released the source code of Doom in 1997 and put it under the GNU General Public License in 1999.
- Electronic Arts released the code of the original SimCity in 2008 for the One Laptop per Child project; the public version is called Micropolis.
- In 2012 Jordan Mechner’s father, spring cleaning, found the disks holding the Apple II source of Prince of Persia. Jason Scott of the Internet Archive and the Apple II collector Tony Diaz read them, and Mechner published the code on GitHub.
- The 6809 source of Williams’ Defender appeared on GitHub in January 2021, published by the historicalsource archive.
- In November 2025 Microsoft and Activision released the source of Zork I, II and III under the MIT licence, and in December 2025 Mike Austin began publishing the archive of Level 9, read from about 500 of its surviving floppy disks.
Sources
- Phil Salvador, Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States (Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network, July 2023), announced as “87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games”, 10 July 2023, with “The Game Availability Study, Explained”, 10 July 2023 (web, secondary): the sample of 1,500 games from before 2010, the 13 per cent figure, the Commodore 64 and Antstream figures, the comparison with silent films, and on-premises access. https://gamehistory.org/87percent/ and https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/
- Vincent Acovino, “These are the classic video games you can no longer play (Spoiler: It’s most of them)”, NPR, All Things Considered, 21 July 2023 (web, secondary): the study, its author Phil Salvador, and the 13 and 87 per cent figures. https://www.npr.org/2023/07/21/1189450157/the-classic-video-games-you-cant-play-spoiler-its-most-of-them
- Video Game History Foundation, “Statement on the DMCA 2024 triennial review ruling”, 25 October 2024 (web, secondary): the request for remote access and the Entertainment Software Association’s opposition. https://gamehistory.org/dmca-2024-statement/
- infoDOCKET (Library Journal), “U.S. Copyright Office Rejects DMCA Exemption to Support Game Preservation”, 25 October 2024 (web, secondary): the decision and the “online arcade” reasoning. https://www.infodocket.com/2024/10/25/u-s-copyright-office-rejects-dmca-exemption-to-support-game-preservation/
- Retro Gamer issue 15, 2005, Aaron Birch, “Abandonware: Gone but not Forgotten”: the first abandonware sites, the closures, and the Elite dispute.
- Edge issue 45, May 1997, “The forgotten history of the videogames industry”, part 1: “It’s about history.”
- “The future of game preservation?”, Wireframe issue 55, September 2021, pp. 74–77: Iain Simons on legal deposit, the National Videogame Archive (its founding in 2008, its partners, its collecting and the loss of funding), Manic Miner, games wiped by their publishers, the Videogame Heritage Society, server shutdowns, and degradation of disk and tape.
- “Video Game Preservation”, Wireframe issue 14, May 2019, pp. 44–48: Frank Cifaldi and the Video Game History Foundation in Oakland, the lost Street Fighter games, Jonathan Smith’s phone games, and Cifaldi’s view of ROM sites.
- TOSEC, “Project History” and home page, release of 13 March 2025 (web, secondary): the founding date, Grendel, and the size of the catalogue. https://www.tosecdev.org/the-project/project-history
- Internet Archive, TOSEC collection page (web, secondary): the full name, The Old School Emulation Center, and its aim “to catalog and audit various kinds of software and firmware images”. https://archive.org/details/tosec
- No-Intro, home page (web, secondary): its description of its work. https://no-intro.org/
- MAMEdev, “About MAME” (web, secondary): the statement of purpose. https://www.mamedev.org/about.html
- Jordan Mechner, “Prince of Persia Apple II” repository README, GitHub, first published April 2012 (web, secondary), and Eric Caoili, “Prince of Persia’s once-lost source code released”, Gamasutra, 17 April 2012 (web, secondary): the disks found by Mechner’s father and the recovery with Jason Scott and Tony Diaz. https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II and https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-em-prince-of-persia-em-s-once-lost-source-code-released
- The other source releases are cited in the Vault’s entries on Doom, SimCity, Defender, Infocom and Level 9; the Elite dispute in the entry on Ian Bell; and World of Spectrum’s permissions policy in its own entry.