Robert Zacny has an interesting piece on the issues and challenges of videogames preservation over at The Escapist. There’s a lot on the work of The National Videogame Archive in the piece as well as the Good Old Games project.

On a personal and professional level, one section really resonated with me:

The game room meant more to me than I knew at the time, and so I didn’t protest when my parents cleaned it out. I couldn’t articulate why I wanted to hang onto the boxes for all my old videogames, including ones I hated.

As a gamer, my house (and loft) is full of games (all in pristine condition, being something of an obsessive) and while a good number of those games are things I truly love, some of them I cannot – and never could – bear. Bringing me nothing but frustration, annoyance and a sense of wasted time and money, they are nonetheless as treasured a part of my collection as the films I don’t like and the clothes I never wore. On a professional level, it does raise an important point about the ‘canon’ of videogames. Iain and I thought long and hard about including ‘bad’ games as well as ‘good’ in the 100 Videogames book (where good and bad are hugely subjective terms once you remove issues like crashing and buggy code). We want to find ways to carry forward the idea of a balanced canon into The NVA. This is not a collection of ‘the usual suspects’ and you can often learn an awful lot from flawed design (and lot of awful). Our imperative is to tell the stories that represent the past, not to sugar-coat it or write a revisionist history where only Super Mario Bros., SFII and The Legend of Zelda speak for our cultural heritage.