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Comment by mysterydip | Hacker News Reader

I think part of the reason is we put effot into preserving valuable art, architecture, etc. Creation effort does not equate to value (of course everyone values things differently but there is a level of majority consensus on certain things).

Modern creations have a much lower barrier to entry so more gets made, which is great, but also makes preservation more difficult. There's hundreds of new games on the App store each week (don't recall the exact numbers). Preserving each one, especially the history of development (art assets, source code, design docs and discussions) would take more time than any organization has and also not be very useful to the public.

Yet there are good, worthwhile, interesting, and historically significant games in that haystack somewhere. How do we filter the noise before the stuff worth preserving is lost?

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It's a good point / thought. I feel like the same question could be asked of any preserved art form or valuable cultural item.

I think it's ultimately just up to people and their feelings / how significant they feel a game is/was to put the resources in to preserve it. I also feel like some games are clearly more notable than others that a consensus would agree with.

Mario Bros 3, Zelda, WoW, Skyrim... I could go on for hours I'm sure, but certainly some games have a much larger impact and are more historically notable than others. Maybe it's partially subjective, and I'm not sure what the solution is. Do we legislate these things must be preserved?

That seems pretty extreme. Do we ask nicely? It seems most companies won't listen if there's no profit there. I'd be interested in hearing other people's ideas on that and how to make it happen. I think it'd be a real shame if in 20 years, given all our technology, these things were lost to history somehow still.

How do we filter the noise before the stuff worth preserving is lost?

Storage is extremely cheap now, so filtering might not be needed at all. HDDs are around $30/TB, and 1TB in the context of game sizes is already quite a lot. Historical games tend to be smaller anyway, as the storage available at the time was much smaller too.

Preservation in this case isn't about storage. It's about cracking. It's no use preserving the bits if you can't run them without a server which no longer exists, or an obsolete DRM tied to an obsolete disk format.

How much of the historically significant art, architecture, etc. that we have from the past is merely what survived, rather than the majority consensus on what was worth preserving at the time?

I think the future will be in a much better position to judge what is valuable and historically significant.

Not only that, many films that were flops both in the box office and critically have come to be considered cult films or even classics in modern times. Time changes how things are reappraised and what might be considered important. (for example many literature that was censored back then was likely considered to be offensive garbage but today we would see these works as the first attempts at subverting a culture.)

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